The Amazing Race 36, Episode 4

Guatapé (Colombia) - Medellín (Colombia)

Colombia was an apt destination to include in this season of The Amazing Race. It’s one of the destinations (along with Mexico, which the reality-TV show visited earlier in this season) that most increased its share of international visitors even during and after the COVID-19 pandemic, when international tourism was greatly reduced.

How could that be? The key to this apparent paradox is that Colombia in general, and Medellín in particular, has become one of the most popular destinations in the Americas — again, after Mexico — for a category of international visitors who are neither traditional tourists nor traditional expatriates: “digital nomads” or remote workers who are living in the country for extended periods, but not permanently or with any commitments, while working for employers or clients in higher-wage countries elsewhere.

In the first edition of The Practical Nomad: How to Travel Around the World, published in 1997, I recommended that would-be world travellers without jobs lined up abroad in advance save up enough before their departure to cover the expected cost of their trip, rather than planning to make any significant amount of money along the way. Countries that are inexpensive to travel in tend to be ones where wages for locally-available jobs are low, and the competition for those jobs is high.

I still think that was good advice at that time. It wasn’t until much more recently that sufficiently fast, reliable, and inexpensive Internet connectivity became available in even big cities in many parts of the world. I remember the frustration of trying to e-mail large files and confer with my editor in the USA on first-generation voice-over-Internet phone calls over unreliable slow Internet connections — the best available in the wealthiest and best-connected neighborhood of the national capital — from cybercafes in Quito, Ecuador, in 2000.

Remote work was technically feasible by 2020, the last time “The Amazing Race” visited Colombia, but it wasn’t yet an option most employers would consider. That season was filmed just before the start of the COVID-19 pandemic but broadcast at the pandemic’s peak. It wasn’t until employers were forced to send all their office workers home that they recognized the possibility of remote work as we now know it, or became willing to hire remote workers for most “office” jobs.

It’s important to keep in mind that remote work still isn’t possible for everyone. Office work has, for the most part, gone remote, but fortunately the world isn’t just one big office. (Insert the “office work takes over the world” dystopia of your choice here.) Billions of people around the world do work in agriculture, forestry, mining, manufacturing, production, processing, distribution, and — last but far from least —- services that has to be done on site or close by. A change of careers to one that allows for location-independent employment isn’t feasible for some people, and would entail a dramatic reduction in income for others. Freelance work, even on site, tends to give less income security than a salaried job as an employee, a risk not everyone can afford to take, especially in countries without much social safety net. Assuming that anyone who isn’t living a nomadic lifestyle as a remote worker is staying settled by choice, or could become “location independent” if they wanted to or if they tried, is naive.

But if remote work isn’t the answer for everyone who can’t afford to travel without earning some money along the way, employers’ openness to remote work for office-type jobs has made it an option for a large class of (mostly already relatively elite) workers.

How does this play out in the places like Medellín where digital nomads have become a visible presence? Local reactions to foreigners without local roots or connections who pass through or hang around for weeks or months as remote workers for foreign employers or clients, while deliberately not trying to put down roots, are decidedly mixed.

Most local people are pleased that people who could choose to live (almost) anywhere in the world are choosing to live in their city or town, and are choosing to stay longer than typical tourists (if it’s even a place that attracts tourists, which Medellín for the most part isn’t). Staying longer in each place than tourists gives digital nomads more of a chance to engage with, learn about, and learn from local people, if they want to. Some of that is inevitable if you are living in a rented apartment, even in a neighborhood with many other foreigners, rather than staying in a hotel or hostel. Like tourists, digital nomads buy some local products and support some local jobs, mainly in service industries, although these aren’t necessarily good jobs.

Some, although not all, traditional expatriates — foreigners who are doing work for local employers or in the local operations of foreign companies, rather than “location independent” work for employers or clients elsewhere — live in formally or informally segregated expat neighborhoods or gated compounds. But except for those in the most fortified and isolated enclaves (such as some military bases and oil, gas, and mining sites), their work tends to give them some connection to local co-workers. Some digital nomads, on the other hand, spend all their work time in Zoom meetings in English with colleagues back “home”, and don’t necessarily have any opening to interact with local people as peers, only as service workers.

Digital nomads may feel that they have “gone local” and immersed themselves in the place where they are (temporarily) living, but local people may see them as living lives detached from local reality except as consumers of attractively inexpensive (because local wages are low) services. Their very identity as location-independent workers and “nomads” can come across, even if unintentionally, as a deliberate renunciation of interest in learning about where they are and the people who are settled there and will still be there after they move on, or even as deliberate indifference to their impact on local people who don’t have the option to leave.

The privilege of working remotely around the world is available primarily to those already privileged in many other ways, including the privileges of first-world citizenship (passports that allow month-long stays without visas) and white-collar occupations. That’s part of the reason that the influx of digital nomads has provoked a backlash of resentment in some of the places where they have converged. The apartments they are renting are mostly ones in preferred neighborhoods and types of buildings that only a minority of local people, even those with comparable training and skills, could afford. Digital nomads who are willing to pay more for short-term rentals help drive prices out of reach for even upper-middle-class locals who might have aspired to live in these places.

Colombia isn’t a major destination for tourists from the USA or elsewhere in the global North. There are no globally-known marquee attractions in Colombia. (Quick: Can you name some place or thing you would go to Colombia, rather than anywhere else in the world, to see or do? I didn’t think so.) Colombia is a cheaper country in which to travel or live than the USA, but not as cheap as many other countries.

As a “middle-income” country, however, Colombia is in the sweet spot for digital nomads. It has sufficiently “first-world” infrastructure, connectivity, and creature comforts, at substantially less than first-world prices.

It’s indicative of the current patterns of travel to Colombia that my fellow travel writer Tim Leffel omits Colombia from his current short list of the world’s cheapest destinations for tourists, but rates it among the top places to live abroad for less than the cost of living in the USA.

Buenos Aires, the South American city most popular with digital nomads, is cheaper (depending on the vagaries of inflation and exchange rates) for comparable comfort, and generally safer than Medellín despite being a much bigger city. There are probably more North American and European remote workers in Buenos Aires than anywhere else in the Americas south of Mexico. But because Buenos Aires is so much larger than Medellín, and has many other foreigners — both tourists and permanent and semi-permanent expatriates — digital nomads are a smaller proportion of foreigners or of the total population. In Medellín, a smaller city with relatively few gringo tourists, digital nomads have become a visible presence that for many locals defines the image of the “typical” foreigner.

Colombia has the advantage for remote workers or those who need to come back home from time to time of being only half as far away from the USA as Buenos Aires, and in one of the same time zones as the USA (Central or Eastern time depending on the time of year, since Colombia doesn’t use daylight savings time). Medellín has big-city infrastructure and amenities, high-rise urban living in some neighborhoods, and non-stop flights to Miami and New York, but for foreigners considering where in Colombia to go for a few weeks or months, Medellín probably seems less overwhelming and intimidating than mega-city Bogotá.

These are issues whether or not we travel, of course. The difference is that digital nomads and residents of their host countries are more likely to confront them face to face and not just see them on TV. The comforts of our lives in the USA are made possible by the difference between our incomes and those who are paid less because they live in countries where wages are lower, and can’t get permission to move to places where wages or higher, or who are paid less even in the USA because they came here without permission. Rarely do we need permission to visit their countries. The holders of U.S. passports are the world’s greatest beneficiaries of non-reciprocal visa and entry rules.

Digital nomads are arbitraging disparities in wages, costs of living, and passport privileges that would be largely leveled if people could move across borders as freely and goods and capital. That doesn’t mean that I think they are doing anything wrong. I’m one of them, and I was a “digital nomad” before this phenomenon had a name. I’ve worked remotely from abroad, from Buenos Aires and elsewhere, never establishing residency outside the USA. I had unusually enlightened employers who allowed this long before COVID-19. I’ve lived and travelled in a way I couldn’t have afforded on a local salary. But it’s important to recognize what enables this lifestyle. I’ve devoted most of the last twenty years to the struggle for recognition of freedom of movement as a human right. Sadly, it remains a privilege limited to those who hold passports from wealthy countries.