I once had the opportunity to meet my all-time favorite food writer and restaurant critic in person and asked him what the best meal was he’d ever eaten. This is a man who’s had the corner table at the best restaurants in the world, the freshest caviar in Russia, smoothest wines in Chile, and biggest truffles in France. Among all his favorite and widely-publicized foodventures, what was his favorite meal? A hamburger in a Jamaican beach ghetto.

“You had to wander through streets of filth and back alleyways to get there,” he told me, "to find this secluded little spot of white-sand waterfront where cold beers and hamburgers cost only a few dollars. Maybe its because no one dares go there that makes this hamburger joint so great,” he said, “I don’t know.”

For explorers, there always exists an allure in the unfamiliar. The Playboy magazine when you’re a kid, the possibility of life on other planets. It is in this sense that country of Colombia arrives at a time when world travel seems to be at its peak. A new generation has begun to turn into adults: the generation that studied abroad and made friends with people half a world away via the web, the generation that’s grown to despise the sterile walls of hotel chains and the generic confines of a tour bus. World travel has taken a new beat, venturing off the beaten path and into the rough and the unknown. Colombia, as it stands today, is poised to capture this evolving demographic by storm.

Dr. Stanley Plog, a researcher of psychographics, came to some really interesting conclusions in his work entitled Why Destination Areas Rise and Fall in Popularity, published in Cornel Hotel and Restaurant Quarterly, among them, the fact that all travel destinations fall somewhere on a bell curve of adventure and popularity. While a rustic African safari or a rafting trip down a Class-5 river might fall into the super adventurous (and thus least popular) category, Plog suggests examples of less adventurous (yet extremely popular) places such as Paris and London as the peak of his curve.

In the end, he shows how the addition of homely comforts (such as brand name hotels, familiar language, and familiar food), over time, makes a place so overwhelmingly popular, that it eventually loses all its charm and falls back down the bell curve to being unpopular again. Anyone been to Coney Island?

“Most destinations follow a predictable, but uncontrolled development pattern from birth to maturity and finally to old age and decline,” he says. All destinations, at any given point in time, sit somewhere along this curve. And Colombia, today, in the eyes of the world traveler/investor, sits at the very base.

Now, for some people, a destination like this would be a terrifying place to vacation. No one speaks your language, guidebooks don’t provide sufficient information, there are no friends from which to glean first-hand accounts. In the example of Colombia, the stigmatic vision of drug lords and rebel guerillas wouldn’t make for the best honeymoon or winter break.

For other travelers, “venturers” as Plog calls them, Colombia is prime stomping ground for exploration. Personality-wise, venturers continually seek new experiences, recognize that life involves risks (regardless of the choices made) and learn to live with those choices. They prefer a day filled with varying activities and challenges, rather than routine tasks, and they eagerly venture out to investigate what might be new and interesting to learn more about the latest technologies, or explore exciting concepts and ideas with others. Venturers are those who have begun to traverse Colombia’s beaches, jungles, cities and intimate rural countrysides.

Notwithstanding the fleet of cruise ships occasionally making, venturers visit Colombia because they live to seek out new things (the forgotten, the undiscovered, the passed-over). They require few support services (mainstream hotels, restaurants, tour guides, or “things to do”) and whether a Colombia city or town is primitive or refined does not matter to them: quite simply because they’re looking for a new experience. They don’t harp on customer service (albeit, the customer service in Colombia is pretty damn good), nor do they accept rumors at face value, instead doing research on things like safety on their own to build a more accurate picture. They embrace culture easily and they interpret people with open minds.

This is at least how I first discovered Colombia. As a destination evolves, lots of these things change. Venturers go home and tell their less-adventurous friends who visit and tell their less-adventurous friends and so on. Until, a destination is filled with the familiarities of home for those least likely to explore outside their comfort bubble (ie. Cancun). With the help of the Tourism Ministry, Colombia has a terrific opportunity to grasp these dynamics, control progress along this curve and thus maintain ideal positioning. There is of course the option to go mainstream but, as my food critic pointed out, some of the best travel experiences are off that beaten path. While all-inclusive resorts in San Andres or swim-with-dolphins shows in Islas del Rosario may not represent the most unique or authentic Colombia experience, the rest of this large and undiscovered country seems open...for the venturing.