Valle del Cauca

Cali's salsa is not the Cuban or New York style adapted; it is its own thing. The music is played faster, and the dancing responds with rapid, precise footwork close to the floor — small steps at high speed, the upper body relatively still, and far less of the elaborate turn patterns that define the styles most foreigners have learned. It developed here from the mid-twentieth century when Caribbean records arrived through the Pacific port and the city took them up wholesale, and it is now deep enough in local life that children learn it in neighbourhood academies and the city produces a steady stream of world champions. What this means for a visitor is that the dancing you will see is genuinely, sometimes intimidatingly, good — and that the response is to take a class rather than to watch.

Schools are everywhere and priced for locals rather than tourists, and a handful of one-hour private lessons will change your evening entirely. Beyond that, the etiquette is straightforward and worth knowing: dance halls run from big touristed venues with live orchestras to small neighbourhood places where everyone knows everyone, and the small ones are better and entirely welcoming provided you are there to dance rather than to photograph. It is normal to ask a stranger to dance and normal to decline; a decline is about that song rather than about you. Evenings start very late by most visitors' standards, the good ones run past three, and Thursday through Saturday is when the city is at full volume. Some of the most famous places sit outside the centre in the neighbourhoods where the style actually grew, and going with someone local is both easier and better.

Outside the city the department is flat, green and given over almost entirely to sugarcane, cut and burned on a rolling cycle that gives the valley its particular smell and its distant columns of smoke. Several of the old estate houses have been preserved and opened, and they are the readiest way to see how the valley worked before mechanisation — long low buildings, shaded courtyards, and the mills that processed the crop on site. North of the city, a large reservoir sits in a gap in the hills that funnels wind almost every afternoon with unusual reliability, which has made it Colombia's centre for sailing, windsurfing and kitesurfing, with schools on the shore and a cool climate that makes a pleasant break from the valley heat.

West of Cali the road climbs into the western range and comes down in rainforest, and this department is the main overland access to Colombia's Pacific coast — a region with very few roads, reached mostly by boat or light aircraft from the port at the end of this route. The coast itself is dense jungle meeting black sand, with Afro-Colombian fishing communities, enormous rainfall, and a bay where humpback whales come to calve between roughly July and October, close enough inshore to be watched from small boats. It is a demanding, rewarding, distinctly un-touristed part of the country. On the way, a village in the forest is reached by a local invention: flat trolleys running on the old railway, pushed by motorbikes clamped to the rails, which carry passengers along the line through the trees because no road goes there. Where the Pacific fits into a wider Colombian route is covered on the itinerary guide.