How did we end up living in Popayan?

We decided to start this blog to share with friends and family our experiences as we get started on our latest project of building an ´off-the-grid´ house, outside of Popayan in Southern Colombia. First things first though, we´d better answer that question that we answer about a hundred times every day, the one that we get everytime we meet a new person in the queue at the bank, or every time a new guest checks into our hostel, or whenever we´re introduced to the friend of a friend....
How did we end up living in Popayan?

Both of us have spent time travelling on and off pretty much since we left secondary school and we have met a lot of interesting people and seen and heard about many interesting projects along the way which I suppose has inspired us to try and live our lives in a way that we find interesting and fulfilling. We are by no stretch of the imagination the hard core, extreme green, hippy types and we enjoy a certain level of comfort in our lifestyle but we do our best to waste little, be respectful of our surroundings and we look forward to the challange of more sustainable living.

In 2006 we decided to launch our own online network for travellers in Latin America and left Scotland with a laptop, camera, some clothes and an idea to connect local hostels and tourism businesses together on the internet. Allowing the local businesses to benefit from online publicity, allowing the travellers access to new and up to date information and allowing us to explore places we might otherwise never have seen, it seemed like a perfect all round scenario!

After nine months on the road we found Popayan, a lovely Colonial town surrounded by mountains and decided to scrape together the money we had left and set up a backpacker hostel to allow us to stick around and watch the tourism develop in this forgotten part of the country. It´s been a great experience learning about a new culture, a language, making new friends and at the same time having a constant flow of interesting, and at times eccentric, personalities from all different nationalities and background passing through our doors. Although running a hostel is a great job, after four years of answering ´how did you end up living in Popayan?´ or ´how often do buses run to San Agustin?´ or ´where´s the nearest ATM?´ about a million times a day, we´re looking forward to breaking the routine a little, reclaiming a bit of our own lives outside of the ´territorio internacional´ of the hostel and throwing ourselves into the building of our first home in the Colombian countryside.