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.

death to the rich kids

It´s been a long time since I wrote, and there´s no excuse really, other than the fact that I have uneasy relationship with computers since my laptop was stolen. I can´t help but be annoyed by the ones that I use in internet cafes; all big and shiney and not nicked.

We had the film crew in the palace the other weekend. They´d agreed to pay us about seventy quid for using the palace, which we thought was a splendid reward for having a few people in the house waving camcorders around. Then the day of the shoot dawned and the doorbell went at about six in the morning.

Outside were about twenty people with two trucks full of equipment. There was a generator, a traintrack for lighting, various bits of scaffolding, a portable editing suite and lots of other things I don´t know the name of.

The film was about an eight-year-old boy who is dying of cancer. One night in his bedroom (which was Dave´s room repainted in a sombre blue) death appears to take him away. Somehow the boy ends up playing scrabble with death for his life.

Carl, the Swedish chap who has moved into the Billiards Room was quite outraged. "But that is just a copy of a very great Swedish film," he said. "Ingrid Bergman, the Seventh Seal. Playing chess with death." He got a bit more annoyed when I suggested that the Bergman film was plagarised from Bill and Ted´s Bogus Journey, where they played twister with death. "You are a very silly person," he said.

I had another taste of tear gas on May Day. Jess, Little Dave and I had walked down to the centre to see what was going on. We´d obviously missed the main riot, as Septima was already trashed. Shop windows were smashed, graffiti was daubed on every wall and troops of riot police were on every corner relaxing and eating their sandwiches.

Just as we thought everything was calm the robocops finished their packed lunches and decided to clear the centre of town. The first we knew was when the gas hit us. This must have been a new recipe, because it was so much more powerful than any I have ever experienced. It´s impossible to resist it or even giggle, as soon as it reaches your nose you have to run. Strangely, it didn´t seem to affect Bruno, who was quite relaxed by the whole thing.

As the lines of police began pushing the public away from the central square the anarchists and lefty warriors returned and started throwing rocks at them. It all seemed like a bit of a game. They´d turn up, make some noise, brandish sticks, throw a few cobbles and then run as the police surged forward. Each confrontation would end with the punks being replaced by the crowds of families who would reappear and start wandering around eating ice creams in the bank holiday sun.

Watching the clashes really brought home to me what a topsy-turvy world we live in. All the ´revolutionaries´ were clearly middle-class university students who are probably scions of very rich families. After all, imported Sex Pistols t-shirts and Doc Marten boots don´t come cheap here. The riot police, on the other hand, are all from the poorest families. National service can be avoided here if you can scrape together a few hundred dollars to buy your way out. They obviously couldn´t.

So there it was - rich kids throwing stones at poor boys in the name of international socialism. Something, surely, has gone wrong somewhere.

English rose

I've just heard the sad news that my dear friend Jenny has died. She passed away peacefully in her sleep on Friday, in her own bed and surrounded by friends.

After discovering a few weeks ago that her pneumonia was actually inoperable cancer and leukemia, she took the brave and somewhat old-fashioned decision to 'take to her bed' and await the end. She told me when I phoned her a few days ago that any treatment at her stage would be nothing more than a form of torture.

Reflecting on that phone call now reminds me of everything so wonderful about Jenny. Despite what she was going through, it seemed to be her who was comforting me. "Goodbye, George my love, take care of yourself," she said as we made our final farewells.

Or maybe those farewells weren't so final. On Saturday morning I woke up with the distinct impression of her laughter. Apparently she found it funny that I've overcome the problem of having too large a bedroom by putting a tent up in it. Perhaps it's just coincidence, but I know that she would have found it funny. Jenny always enjoyed my oddness, and camping in your own bedroom is, on reflection, an odd thing to do.

But there was a sensible reason for the tent. Over the past week or so the house has started to spew water (often out of the sewerage system) from the most unexpected places. It all started with complaints from Jess that there was a smell of poo coming from her en-suite bathroom. Obviously, living with a bunch of blokes, she didn't get much sympathy or active assistance, just giggling mockery and insinuation. Then the source of the smell became apparent, as foul water began to bubble through the drain in the middle of the room. Then the ceiling of the room underneath her at the back of the palace opened up, and a filthy brown torrent began splashing down onto the concrete floor. We called the landlord's odd-job man and he came round with the plumber. I think they've fixed it now, I'm not sure how - but it involved pulling down seemingly random sections of ceiling and smashing holes in the basketball court.

Despite its diminished circumstances, the house continues to act as a magnet for the great and good of Bogota. We've had a film crew in asking if they can hire a room for a few days and we've been offered about a hundred quid to host a charity party. We didn't have to think about the latter offer too long; the charity is run by a group of socially-concerned lingerie models.

I've been meeting a fair few models recently. On Wednesday we were all invited to the 20th anniversary bash of Latin America's fourth largest agency. My goodness, but some of those girls are tall.

Anyway, today is St George's day, and I feel the need to go and raise a few glasses to Jenny; who embodied all the finest qualities of the English, none of the bad ones and a whole host of others besides.

resurrection

I've just enjoyed the laziest and quietest easter I can remember. The palace was more-or-less empty, with Dave in the coffee region, Jess on the Rio Magdalena and Chappy at the Caribbean coast. This left just Chris and myself, along with one key for a broken front door, that could only be opened from the inside. In the spirit of messianic sacrifice I agreed to sequester myself in the palace for three days, starting, like Jesus in his tomb, on Good Friday.

The door was out of order because of the landlord's botched attempts at improving the security of the palace. The thieves got in last week through the garage door, which he had left secured by a single external padlock, saying he wanted his own access to the front courtyard. Since the break-in he has festooned the front of the house with a baffling array of locks, which would take a Hindu diety to open, if indeed they worked.

So it was that I spent easter as a prisoner in the palace, like the Man in the Iron Mask, but without the mask, and wearing pyjamas.

Despite not leaving the house I still got to join in the easter celebrations, with the neighbourhood procession passing right in front of the palace on Sunday night. This was led by a marching band, playing a bizarre medley of music including, I think, Colonel Bogey and the Damnbusters' March. Behind the musicians came a long line of hooded men - exactly like the Ku Klux Klan but in colour-coded robes - carrying statues of Jesus, Mary and various saints. These seemed to sway drunkenly on their flower-laden biers as they were carried up the hill. There were also chaps dressed as Roman centurians, which added a surreal aspect to an already odd event.

Following up behind was a large crowd of local people, all wearing looks of grave piety. I got a feeling of hostility from them as they passed me, Chris, Sam and Bruno standing in our doorway, and I wondered if this was because Chris was taking pictures. On the other hand it could have been because we were the only people not crossing ourselves furiously as the garish plaster icons staggered past us.

Semana Santa

I´m Back in Bogota now. I wasn´t having much fun down in the jungle because of the bad news I had about my friend. I also discovered that in my absence the palace had been broken into and my laptop stolen. So I was angry as well. I had a mental image of myself floating down the Amazon in a foul temper, glowering on a boat, cursing the dolphins and the anacondas. I think it defeats the point of messing about on the river if you´re trapped in a muttering rage and annoyed by trees and monkeys.

Thankfully, I got what I went for, which was a free three-month tourist visa. The man from the DAS (department of security administration) seemed a bit suspicious of me and asked lots of questions, to which I replied "what? sorry? I don´t understand." It seemed to do the trick, as he gave up asking me what I was doing in Bogota and gave me the maximum amount of time - out of sympathy, I think.

So now a quiet Easter week in Bogota beckons. The city is beginning to clear out at the moment, so it will be a nice relaxing place to be for a few days.

Rainy day

I´ve just had some terrible news from home. A very dear friend of mine has discovered that what she thought was pneumonia is in fact a lung tumour, with a dose of leukaemia thrown in for good measure. Suddenly, being by myself in a jungle border town feels lonely. That may seem like a selfish response to another person´s tragedy; but sometimes I suspect the essence of loneliness rests in not being able to help those you care about.

The rain began to fall today. Within minutes the streets were flooded, and soon the electricity supply was cut throughout the town. Some enterprising businesses turned on clunking generators, and I had to run back to the guesthouse to bring in the laundry I´d spent all day trying to wash in a museum-piece machine.

The downpour made a pleasant change to the scorching weather of yesterday, which left me terribly sunburnt after several trips to the Brazilian immigration office. I first got there shortly after noon to find a sign announcing that the office was shut from 12-2. With nothing else to be done I walked back over the frontier to Leticia, had lunch and wrote my last entry.

I walked back up after two and found a friendly chap behind the counter ready to help me. (Again, he spoke good English, which still amazes me about this place.) He took my passport and asked for my yellow fever vaccination form. I knew I needed it to get into Brazil, but in a fit of absent-mindedness I´d left it at the guesthouse. So it was another walk to and fro until I arrived, bright red and sweating, with every piece of paper I had in my possession.

He then asked me how long I needed the visa for. I could´ve just said "two weeks please, squire" but instead I poked my return plane ticket through the glass. He held it with his fingertips and regarded it with a look of perplexity. It was then I realised, or remembered, that it had "GOOD CRACK" scrawled across it in capital letters. As the immigration office was in the reception area of the federal police station, I didn´t fancy having to explain this message, which must have seemed to him like a very simple but highly illegal shopping list. He already knew that I was absent-minded, so he could well have assumed somebody had seen fit to remind me of what I needed to collect or something.

As it was he stamped my passport and I didn´t need to explain. I´m not sure if he would´ve understood or believed me if I´d tried: "Well, you see, er, last week we bumped into these Norwegan disk jockeys in the street, in Bogota, and invited them and their large female entourage back to our palace for a drink. One of them, the girls, used to live in the states and had a very annoying whining accent (that made her sound like a six-year-old asking to stop for a wee on a car journey) so myself and a friend from Middlesborough, yes, that´s right, the smog-bound industrial town in the north of England, decided to teach her some British turns of phrase. Including ´crack´, as in ´to have a good crack´. No, really, that´s why it´s written there. Please don´t do that to me with your truncheon . . ."

After finally getting all my paper in order, and officially being in Brazil at last, I headed back over the border to my guesthouse. I asked the lad there if he knew of anywhere to go for a drink. He said he was going out with his girlfriend and some other mates, and that I´d be welcome to join them. That sounded ok, so we went to call for his missus. When we got to her house we found ourselves in the middle of her ten-year-old sister´s birthday party. There was a huge cake on the coffee table and plastic cups full of alarmingly-coloured fizzy pop. (This stuff is actually made in the town, and carries the boast that it is "Leticialicious".) Despite my unexpected arrival I was suddenly designated as the guest of honour and given the first slice of cake. The mother underlined this hospitality by carefully retrieving one of the decorative sugar flowers and, using her little finger, poking it back onto the icing of my slice as she passed it to me.

The cake was soon demolished, and then it struck me that for the first time I was in the company of a family of fat Colombians. It was like a Botero painting. They were all cheerfully plump, except for the father who was as thin as a whip. Then I noticed that there were about a dozen sisters, and goodness knows how many cousins, and that he was the only one who didn´t have any cake. Perhaps the others trough their way through birthday treats on an almost daily basis.

After taking our leave with profuse thanks I was left on the corner smoking a tactful cigarette while the lad from the guesthouse had a whispered chat with his girlfriend. Later he told me that she was pregnant. "I am in such trouble. So much trouble. Her father is going to kill me. He´ll kill me!" There was nothing I could say to console him on that front. Her father did look like one of those wirey blokes with a penchant for sadism, and (judging by the collection of religious books and videos) was a bit of a bible-basher with high moral standards. Indeed, the first thing he said to me, as he handed me a cup of the bright pink Leticialicious stuff, was: "We don´t have strong drink in this house, except at Christmas." The poor lad is doomed - and all for a fat lass.

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.