What does it mean to travel?

In many ways, the rise of social media has reshaped the meaning of movement across borders. The practice of travel has been transformed into a practice of consumption, where the value lies less in being present and more in what can be displayed afterward. The “other” becomes not a subject to engage with, but an object to be captured, curated. Anything that can be flattened into a commodity. This shift shows how travel has been subsumed into economies of visibility. To travel is to add another line to the LinkedIn profile, another square on the Instagram feed, proof that one’s time is being maximized and one’s life is worthy of attention. In this logic, travel risks becoming less about transformation and more about accumulation. However, if travel becomes only about showing where we have been, do we lose the ability to ask what it means to be somewhere? To be accountable to the histories of the places we enter, to the lives of those who inhabit them, to the power relations that shape our presence? True travel asks us to confront our own position as both guest and intruder, to resist the temptation to “eat” more of a place, and instead to let the place impress itself upon us, to change us in ways that cannot be easily quantified.

Although I had lived in Colombia for almost a year a few years ago, this new experience made me reflect more deeply on what it truly means to travel. Seeing life through the eyes of many in Colombia reminded me that travel is never neutral. One of the biggest challenges I faced was learning to understand what is considered “normal” in Medellín, and realizing that living there requires not judgment but a degree of respect and acceptance of those norms.

This realization felt especially stark when I contrasted it with how Medellín is portrayed globally. In doing some SEO research, I noticed that many of the top searches about the city focus on sex tourism, relocation from North America, cost of living, or travel guides. For many foreigners, Medellín is imagined as a paradise: the “City of Eternal Spring,” known for its natural beauty, affordable lifestyle, and the warmth of the Paisa culture. This narrative reinforces the idea of Medellín as a kind of heaven, but only if you’re lucky enough to be on the right side of its contrasts, because Medellín is also a city of shadow,s as the legacy of Pablo Escobar still lingers with thousands of homicides continuing to occur each year. Authorities are still uncovering bodies from rivers and forests every day. Sex tourism, including the exploitation of minors, remains a pressing issue. Stories circulate of both foreigners and locals being drugged, sometimes in cafés or restaurants. Escobar’s influence persists in subtler ways too: taxis, once symbols of just mobility, are still feared as tools criminals use to hide. And in many neighbourhoods, shootouts still erupt in broad daylight.

To travel in Medellín, then, is to hold these contradictions together: a city celebrated as paradise and feared for its dangers; a place where beauty and violence coexist in ways that outsiders often choose not to see. For me, it meant seeing Medellín not only as a postcard destination but as a lived reality. Specifically, witnessing the crime in Medellín was one of the most shocking parts of my experience. During my last stay in 2021, I lived in an affluent neighbourhood. While I knew some of my friends had been robbed there a few years back, I hadn’t realized how drastically crime rates had increased in just the past year. That same neighbourhood is now a hotspot for robberies, where gang raids usually occur in restaurants and cafés. On top of that, seeing people openly using hard drugs on the streets, even along the highways, while many locals just walk around or over them.

When I was robbed, the police told me that I should consider myself lucky that they didn’t shoot. I called my friends who are locals or have been living in Medellin for several years, and they all said that they’re shocked it only happened to me once. That for them, robbery at knife or gun point has occurred several times.  Although Medellín is considered relatively safer today compared to the era of Pablo Escobar, many residents continue to live with fear, as both academics and locals argue that the situation has, in some ways, worsened. 

To better understand the city’s past and present, I decided to visit the Casa de la Memoria (Memory House Museum) in Medellín. After the robbery incident, I began relying on Uber for transportation, believing it would be safer. But even then, I quickly realized how present danger was in everyday life. Just two blocks from my house, around 4:15 in the afternoon, I suddenly heard screams from the street. Looking to my left, I saw a man holding a woman at gunpoint, pressing the pistol against her neck at the intersection where people were waiting to cross. He shouted at her to hand over her bag.  My Uber driver glanced over, then laughed, saying, “Another robbery is just another day in Medellín.” In that moment, the man fired a shot into the air, causing the woman to flinch. When she froze in fear, he grabbed her purse and ran. We were still sitting at the traffic light as she screamed, “Robber! Robber! Help! Help!” Out of instinct, I told my driver to run the man down. He was right in front of us but the driver refused. “No,” he said firmly. “You don’t know if this is real or staged. If it’s a setup, we could both end up dead.”

I found it quite ironic that I saw another gunpoint robbery going to Casa de la Memoria but this time I heard similar responses to the police, but with a local.

When I got to the museum, I saw that it is dedicated to preserving the memory of Colombia’s armed conflict, a space where the stories of victims are acknowledged and where the city confronts its own history of violence. Walking through its exhibits, I was struck by how the museum presents memory not as something static, but as contested terrain. This sense of struggle over memory felt both metaphorical and literal. Medellín itself was built on what was once jungle terrain, and even today the city seems to echo a kind of food-chain hierarchy, where power and survival are dictated by those at the top and endured by those below. Here, I was able to witness what happens when the state historically fails to establish authority, and how alternative forms of power step in to impose their own forms of control. In Medellín, this has meant that armed groups, whether paramilitaries, guerrillas, or gangs, have filled the vacuum, reshaping not only the governance of territory but also the memory of violence itself. As scholars like Arias (2006) note, when the state retreats, violence becomes embedded in the everyday; it is not experienced as rupture, but as structure. 

Coming from Toronto and Vietnam, both places that feel relatively safe. Living in Medellín forced me to adapt and stay constantly alert. It taught me not to take safety for granted and, at times, not to trust too easily. Although I was given the option to leave immediately, I had already made a promise to myself to give back to the Venezuelan migrant community. Colombia is home to the largest number of Venezuelan migrants in the world, and that responsibility grounded me, reminding me why I chose to stay. Travel always comes with risks, and every country has its own challenges. Not every place is the paradise often shown in postcards or on social media. The truth of a place only becomes visible when you see it through the eyes of those who live there.

To travel, in this sense, is to learn how to hold contradictions. It means resisting the urge to consume a place as spectacle and instead allowing yourself to be unsettled by it, to let the place alter how you see, think, and act.  This brought up another lesson. As I chatted with another foreigner who was living short-term in Colombia, he kept repeating the comment that “Colombians have no literacy rates.” I did not appreciate this remark; it was degrading and revealed how quickly foreigners can flatten a society into a stereotype. What he saw as “lack of literacy” was in fact a failure to understand the deeper structures at play. Just like what Casa de la Memoria mentioned, the inequalities of access to education, the generational effects of displacement, and the long shadows of armed conflict all play together. His statement reflected the kind of consumption I was trying to resist when staying in Medellin: the tendency to pass judgment on a place without engaging with its complexities. When travel becomes about quick observations and surface-level judgments, it produces narratives that flatten entire populations into stereotypes. Such statements may sound factual, but they function to position the speaker as superior, as someone who “knows” the place while disregarding its depth. In Medellín, where narratives of violence and poverty already dominate, repeating these judgments only strengthens the stigmas that locals work hard to resist.

Although challenging dominant narratives in Medellín can be risky, sometimes even unsafe., I learned to build empathy by seeing through the eyes of locals, to understand their realities not from the outside but from within. I came to see that these problems are systemic, and that the only way people find the strength to move forward is through hope and love. What this taught me is that resilience is something lived daily in the smallest acts. From the parents who continue to send their children to school despite threats, youth who still dream of futures beyond the limits of their comunas, neighbours who look out for one another when formal institutions fail. It also taught me that empathy requires more than sympathy... it requires patience. On a personal level, it also showed me how to recalibrate my own idea of leadership. I realized that leadership in contexts like Medellín is about walking alongside others, recognizing their knowledge, and affirming their dignity. It taught me that love, in this sense, is is political. It is the decision to care for one another, to hold space for voice, and to imagine a future that does not yet exist. What it means to travel, then, is to be changed. Not by the accumulation of sights, but by the recognition of lives that resist simplification, and by the demand that I consider what my presence means within them.