After a long layover in Miami to get through the work day, we landed in Bogota this evening and arrived at our hotel, where we were upgraded to a junior suite. Because of Chris’s status, they not only upgraded our room, but they even welcomed us with a massive platter of local fruit to wish us well for our stay.

Fruit is one of the number one reasons I was excited to come to Colombia, as Colombia is known for its expansive selection of local fruit varieties that would be completely foreign and unknown in the U.S., or really any other part of the world. While all of South America is known for its exotic fruit, many are native and grown only in Colombia, so even within this continent, I’ve read about people from neighboring countries doing “fruit tourism” and going to Colombia just to eat its fruit!

Of the exotic fruits on the platter that we are not normally accustomed to eating, we found granadilla, which is like the yellow-colored, sweeter cousin of the passion fruit/maracuya. It is round with thick, slippery smooth skins, and when you cut it open, it has grey flesh that oozes with crunchy seeds, and is extremely sweet without even a hint of the tartness you expect from a regular passion fruit. Then, we had pitahaya, or a yellow variety of dragonfruit. This was extremely sweet, not bland and tasteless like the pink varieties we see in Southeast Asia. Chris was very pleasantly surprised by this one. Lastly, we had zapote, which is an oblong-shaped fruit with brown skin that has the texture of sandpaper, while the inside is orange-hued and creamy.

This has already started out as a delicious and flavor-discovering trip.