Leticia

As I write this near the banks of the river Amazon I am not officially in any country. I have been stamped out of Colombia at the tiny airport here, and haven´t yet made it to the police station over the frontier in Brazil. This isn´t a problem because the Colombian town of Leticia and the Brazilian town of Tabatinga merge into each other and it takes a trained eye to spot where they join. Movement across the border is entirely free, and all the shops here perform the mathematical miracle of taking payment in two currencies, often at the same time.

My main reason for being here is to leave Colombia for a few days and then re-enter the country as a tourist. The alternative would have been to spend a fortune sorting out a student visa in Bogota. I had to fly here as nobody has ever been foolish enough to attempt to drive a road through the miles and miles of jungle that surround the place. Apart from flying the mighty Amazon is still the main means of getting in and out of here. In the town itself everybody drives motorbikes or scooters. I suppose it´s hardly worth having a car when you only ever zip to the shops and back. It strikes me as quite a charming town, and surprisingly clean and orderly for an outpost in the middle of the jungle. The roads are broad and well-maintained with brightly painted shops and businesses along either side. I´ve also been struck by the amount of people who speak good English here - seemingly more than in Bogota. This could be because they all have to grow up speaking two languages - Spanish and Portugese - and so retain an aptitude for language learning. On the other hand I get the impression that they have long recognised that tourism is their main hope for the future here. This is also obvious from the amount of tour agencies and souvenir shops on every street. All they are missing are the tourists - but I think they are due to arrive in Easter, when Bogota and the other big cities empty out for the week.

I´m already being stalked by a tour guide who introduced himself as Mowglie when I arrived at the airport. I took his card out of politeness and asked the chap at my guest house if he would recommend him. ¨Well, he is a friend of mine, but I would not advise you to go with him. Last year he lost a German in the jungle. His parents came and stayed here to look for him, but nobody knows what happened to him. I think there are better companies to go with.¨

The last weekend in Bogota was, as usual, hectic. We ended up being invited to some sort of art show by a friend of a friend who is a famous soap opera star here. He´s obviously some sort of larger-than-life comedy actor in the shows, telenovelas as they´re called, and must be recognised a lot because he is constantly in character. This was a little wearing, as it was like spending the evening with a latino Frank Carson preparing for a season as Widow Twanky in the Birmingham Hippodrome pantomime. At the exhibition (which was in a pub near where I used to live) he was rather embarrassing. But I suppose because everybody else knew him from the telly they didn´t being roared at and crushed in giant unbidden bearhugs.