Quito

I´m writing this in old city of Quito, the capital of Equador, where I arrived last night.

Like Bogota it is high up in the Andes mountains and has a very pleasant climate. Unlike Bogota it has an imposing colonial centre, large three and four-storey buildings festooned in exuberant carving and painted in bright but harmonious colours. There are also more squares, shaded avenues and churches. Bogota´s colonial centre, the Candelaria, where I have been living, seems to have happened by accident when forgotten pioneers all chose to live on the side of the same hill. Because of this it is on a much more modest scale with no sense of ever having been planned or designed. As well as dictating the climate, the Andes, I think, also affect the nature of the people. Like in Bogota they seem conservative, reserved and generally polite. I often heard while traveling around Colombia that there is such a thing as an Andean personality, marked by a certain melancholy, which gets more pronounced the higher you go. I generally heard this spoken of as a bad thing by people who lived at sea level and spent most of their time swinging in hammocks and swapping fish for mangos.

Anyway, so much for Quito - I won´t really have much time to explore it as I have to find a flight from Madrid (where I arrive on Thursday) back home. Anyone who knows me will understand the difficulty of this - computers were put on this earth to taunt and frustrate me and I hate relying on them to get stuff done. I´d rather break my toes with a small toffee hammer than search through budget flight websites. Just when I think I´ve got it sorted I´m told my card number is wrong, or that I haven´t specified my reason for travel or that I haven´t correctly entered my inside leg measurement.

In case I haven´t mentioned it I´m heading back to Blighty for the summer, in particular for the wedding of my cousin Andy and Ellie on Friday afternoon. The question of whether to return has been simmering away for quite some time, and the constant lingering indecision helped my last month in Bogota fly by as though it was a long weekend.

We had another film crew in the palace the other day, which again earned us a few pesos to cover the rent. Their production was a story of two old sisters who rent rooms in their ancestral home. Two of the lodgers turn out to be thieves, and after lots of running around on the front terrace they are shot by the police. Then it turns out that the money was originally stolen by the one of the old ladies from her sister, who she then kills. A simple tale of everyday life in Bogota I suppose. Us, the tenants, ended up crowded round a table on the back patio, trying our best to be quiet - which, of course, set us all off giggling throughout the afternoon. Some Colombian friends of ours arrived and were gobsmacked - apparently all the actors, and the two old ladies in particular, are very famous here. It would be like walking into somebody´s house and finding Mollie Sugden and Patricia Routledge rolling around on the front room carpet.

Actually, it was probably the same sensation I had when I saw an English friend of mine towering over a skyscraper like King Kong. The lad, known as Fotty, was injured out of a football career a few years ago but was sensible enough to have invested his money wisely along the way. He is now spending a while in Bogota with his girlfriend, a model, who sorted him out with a very lucrative day´s work advertising beer. Perhaps better than the money was the chance to spend the day with the legendary Aguilar girls. These are the official faces of Aguilar beer, which is brewed in Barranquilla, Shakira´s hometown. Every year they find the four most beautiful girls in the city, and, for twelve months, they are the nation´s sweethearts. It is arm in arm with these lovelies that Fotty looms over the city in all his plywood glory. He´s plastered over all the bus stops as well, which has put him off using public transport because of all the double takes he gets from fellow passengers.

After the crew had finished we headed out to a party at a friend´s art centre for the release of a new music video. We arrived hopelessly late and just caught the end of the band´s live performance. My first instinct was to hide - it was the same band Chappy and I had gone to a party with hundreds of miles to the south in San Augustine. That evening had ended under quite a cloud of hostility after they had started prancing around the room wibbling incomprehensible Spanish that was designed to confuse us. We both bridled at this and responded by flicked peanuts at them. Fortunately they didn´t notice me skulking around in the shadows and so couldn´t denounce me from the stage.

The next morning a Colombian friend of ours, Alejandra, turned up to take me, Little Dave and Janey (a friend from New Orleans) to her parent´s home in Villavicencia for the weekend. This is a little town two hours straight down the side of the Andes from Bogota, which makes it pleasantly tropical.

Soon after we arrived it was time to head out to the town´s famous club, I can´t remember the name, but it´s named after the local version of maracas made out of hollowed and dried bull testicles. It was an enormous place, like Mangos in Medellin but without the fighting dwarfs. They had a lot of the typical music of the region, called Llanera. This is performed by four or five chaps dressed as cowboys and is based around the sound of a giant harp, the sort more usually played by medieval Irish princesses than gunslingers. The dancing that accompanies this style is known as Joropa, after a local river. This is a cross between salsa and frantic tap dancing, quite an impressive effect. It brings to mind the odd ´paso fino´ gait that is unique to Colombian horses, and so in turn conjours images of Tina Turner.

The next evening Ali´s dad took us out for a game of tejo, another thing only found in Colombia. It dates back to a game played by indian tribes and involves throwing heavy metal discs (about the size and shape of mince pies) at slanting boards covered in soft clay. The right throw will see the discs sticking into the clay with a satisfying thud. More satisfying is hitting the small packets of explosives stuck to the clay, which explode with a giant crack and puff of smoke when struck. It´s a bit like the game called ranas, in which players try to throw smaller discs into the mouths of metal frogs. You need to see it I think.

As it was a bank holiday we headed back to Bogota on Monday, eager to discover what had happened to Jess, who had lost patience with waiting for everyone to get organised for the trip to Alejandra´s and so had headed out by herself.

Her story didn´t disappoint. Soon after arriving in a town a few hours past Villavicencio she had gone for a walk to find the river in the town. As she wandered blondely through the streets she was approached by an army captain. "What are you looking for? Do you need any help?"

"Yes," she said, "I´m looking for a canoe." And so did a romance begin. Later that day she was taken to his barracks to meet his men and his coronel and to have a sit in all the helicopters. Then he asked if Jess would accompany him to the medical centre, because he needed his daily injection. "I saw him get injected in the bottom," Jess said later, "the needle was huge." She asked him if the injection, which apparently also contained drugs to keep him awake and alert, were dangerous. "Oh no," he assured her. "They´re not dangerous, but next week I have to exchange one-and-a-half litres of blood with my grandmother."

The next day he asked if she wanted to go out into the jungle with him to drop off a sniffer dog with a unit of special forces out on operations in the red zone. Apparently the unit did have a dog with them, but it was the wrong one. Apparently they´d taken a biter rather than a sniffer by mistake. So off they went into the war zone on a dangerous dog-swapping mission. After the handover the dog they had brought was taken off by helicopter, the soldiers melted into the jungle and they were left to find their own way home. It was then that Jess discovered just how difficult it is to hitchhike in a war zone, particularly when accompanied by a uniformed soldier and a dog bred and trained to be particularly vicious.

As Jess was recounting her adventures she got a call from her captain with some troubling news. Apparently his first job after waving her goodbye was to guard a large consignment of hand grenades and top-secret army documents. "I only turned my back for a moment," he explained, "and when I got back they´d been stolen by the rebels."

This lent a certain paranoia to the house for a few weeks. Naturally, we assumed, the captain would soon find himself strapped to a chair and encouraged with lengths of hosepipe to give a full and frank account of everything he´d been up to recently. It couldn´t go unremarked that he´d been in the company of a mysterious western woman who´d been wandering around the area with some cock-and-bull story about looking for canoes. I for one was convinced that the palace would soon be visited by the military police.

As it turned out the knock never came, but the captain did come and visit for dinner a few weeks later. It was quite interesting to find out about his life in the Colombian army´s special forces. He said how his tours in the jungle were six months, a long way from his home in Medellin and usually chest deep in water. This is water, it must be remembered, that contains some of the world´s most ferocious and unpleasant creatures. He also gave some insight into just how dirty the war is out there. "It is always difficult to shoot rebels, particularly if they are pregnant women or children - but they are the most ruthless and would kill you without hesitation," he explained between mouthfuls of Paxo sage and onion stuffing.

But despite all these very real worries in his working life, he reserved his deepest fear for much less tangible things. "Witches!" he said. "That is the worst thing about being in the jungle. You can be wading across a river and they will be there right behind your shoulder. Then, suddenly, they can be miles away, and then somewhere else." He even imitated their cry, a cross between a scream of hatred and a wail of anguish.

Later he explained how the rivers were the natural dumping ground for casualties of the war, and how bereaved wives and mothers would gather on the bank to grieve as their loved ones floated away down various tributaries towards the Amazon, making, no doubt, very similar sounds to the witches. Somehow he´d never linked these two things together, but he did say that many witches turned to the devil in the first place to get revenge on those who had bereaved them. I know his belief in witches was sincere; at one point Jess told him she´d had a nightmare. "Witches!" he said. "You must mix mustard, honey and coriander leaves and leave it on your windowsill tonight, that´ll stop them giving you bad dreams." That struck me as a very good idea, because even if the witches could get past it you´d be left with a lovely marinade for chicken.

Anyway, the sun is starting to set on Quito, so it´s about time I started to look into the possibility of finding a pleasant spot for a beer.