Author: |Posted: 11:16 am on 04/02/09
Category: Snowblog
Curiously, my brief sojourn in Colombia has fuelled me up, for Cartagena is straight out of Greene. Black-hatted priests bent against the wind, striding two abreast beneath the sharp shadows of the un-sunny side of the street. Large tolling bells. A white stucco church, pantiled houses beyond with assorted ochres, yellows, and reds. Somewhere beneath it all, some unfathomable other.
In Cartagena it was the large black community, descended from slaves, living in shanty shacks beyond the well kempt stone city walls beside the sea.
Author: |Posted: 9:16 pm on 02/02/09
Category: Snowblog
I am looking down on the Pacific waters at the mouth of the Panama canal. Below, evening sun splashes silver across the sea, silhouetting the shipping waiting to enter. I count 50 vessels: container ships, bulk carriers, cruise liners, each momentarily detailed as our plane descends to land at the airfield nearby.
I haven’t been to Panama since 1983, and the then sprinkling of tower blocks at the water’s edge has become a forest. Who on earth is inside them? Bankers? Dealers? British surburban death fakers?
Author: |Posted: 4:47 pm on 02/02/09
Category: Snowblog
Once in a while the gods deal you an unexpected hand. I am attempting the apparently Latin-American impossible: Colombia to London inside 24 hrs. The signs are not good.
An hour and a half to go to take-off, and no-one is at check-in either side of the desk. Then I see why. The previous flight is being seen off more than three hours late. Oh crumbs. Is this the same plane to Bogota that has to come back to get us?
It is.
Author: |Posted: 6:33 pm on 01/02/09
Category: Snowblog
A great cloud of dust, a whoosh of excitable policemen, and a motorcade comes to a gravel-scattering halt outside my hotel here in Cartagena, in Colombia. The most awaited guest is arrived. Salman Rushdie ain’t pleased. The one condition on which he had come here was: no security, no motorcades.
He was fuming as he made his way to hotel reception. Trouble is, no one loves an armed motorcade like the Colombians like an armed motorcade. The drug cartels, the mafia, the FARC and Uncle Tom Cobley have seen to that. No-one of consequence moves without one.
Author: |Posted: 4:30 pm on 30/01/09
Category: Snowblog
I am in the south looking north, in Latin America, in Colombia. The disconnect is acute. The biggest event of the day? The appearance of the Mexican and Colombian presidents at Davos.
No, don’t think Davos rocks here in the Andean foothills, on the rolling desert along the coast. But Latino presidents on the world stage, that’s a rarity – and the people here know it. Not that the north will notice these guys. Yet these presidents are at the heart of the most devastating economic and physical war, centred on drugs.
Author: |Posted: 10:28 am on 30/01/09
Category: Snowblog
It’s hot, humid and yet a sea breeze blows down the narrow streets to flutter the table cloths of the pavement cafes. Cartagena is on the Caribbean coast of Colombia. Yellow, pink, white, blue houses compete for a ringside seat in this packed town. It’s a natural enough place to have a book festival. There are many writers with houses here, not least Garcia Marquez.
Author: |Posted: 9:12 am on 29/01/09
Category: Snowblog
It’s rare for me these days to visit a completely new country. I’m beginning to run out of mainstream options. I think I’ve visited around 104, though I have never been to China (other than Hong Kong) or Brazil.
Today I’m next door, in Colombia – a country twice the size of France with a population of over 40 million. I’m stranded at Bogota. Air France was deliciously, Frenchly, late from Paris (the best way to get here). So I missed my connection to the Hay Festival in Cartagena.
Bogota is cloudy, but it was clear coming here from the Atlantic. 11 hours from Europe. We wouldn’t have wanted a Hudson river job in the middle of that! (See my news on that)
