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.

I loved Greene’s descriptive power, his capacity to transport you to so vivid a place, yet one you had never seen for yourself. His reporting was vivid, his powers of observation acute. I loved his Catholicism, his guilt. I felt I met Greene on my very first trip to Latin America, to El Salvador in the immediate aftermath of the murder of Archbishop Oscar Romero, gunned down at his own high altar as he celebrated mass.

A shocking enough event even by Greene’s standards. There was a civil war in progress between the “muchachos” leftist guerrillas and the government (supported by Ronald Reagan’s America) and army, closely allied to right-wing death squads.

After the fall of Nicaragua to the revolutionary Sandinistas next door, El Salvador was Reagan’s line in the sand against the spread of communism. I found myself in the frontline town of Suchitoto. We had not been certain who held it. The red bandanas at the road block told us it was the muchachos.

We paid out “road tax” and ventured very slowly in on foot. That was my first encounter with a Graham Greene white stucco church. The hammer and bell would fly right out of the tower before clanging within the purple-shadowed interior of the belfry.

On the square below, the coffins of 14 guerrillas waiting to be buried, their bodies and heads so smashed that the traditional coffin, open from the waist up, had been eschewed. The coffins lay on worn green trestles in a straight line. Relatives wept and howled with grief.

In Colombia these days they are still burying the victims of violence. The spirit of Greene is still very much alive. I just have to work out how it affected my reporting life, by tonight. But I know I still have a deep affinity with him. I’ve just re-read The Quiet American, set in Vietnam and all about Iraq. If he had but known it.

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?

My plane connection gives me four hours on the ground to spend with my new best friend, Paolo, Italian ship broker extraordinaire – I shall not embarrass him with his real name. Tall, two-day-old very dark growth, he speaks brilliant English with an entirely Italian grammatical construction, very fast.

I had met him five days earlier on the flight out, on his way to deal with a tanker. I tell him that my expert journalistic eye has spotted a lie in the current portrayal of world trade. Why, I exclaim, ships are groaning with cargo are queuing to get through the Panama canal. “Groaning?” he cries. “Groaning? The only groaning out there is the groaning of ship owners moving empty vessels to the scrapyard.” He adds, with his own rather more expert eye: “For every six ships you saw down there laden, 30 are empty.”

Then he tells me the most shocking statistic of all. Paolo is the CEO of a significant ship brokerage company with offices all over the world. He tells me profits in the global shipbroking business have collapsed from a July peak by a staggering 95 per cent. Nothing is moving. “Raw materials?” he says. “Nobody wants anything. Nobody’s making anything. It has seized up.”

He doesn’t own ships, he charters them. And once you reach zero profits, you don’t charter. And if you own them, you mothball or you scrap – and that’s what’s happening. “Once there’s no profit,” he said, “we take no risk.”

All this has been evident in Lloyd’s Register. You and I probably don’t read it, but this is the physical manifestation of the mental stuff we know about the recession, the banks and credit.

One other economic indicator. My hosts in Cartagena arranged for the very rare privilege of business class all the way. On the plane out, in business, Air France was more than half empty. Economy was fairly full. Business class Iberia would have been empty on the way home had not five of us diverted from Air France: 40 empty business seats.

Airlines make their profit in business. There was no profit in any of the six flights I’ve been on board in the past five days.

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.

Our flight is an optimistic two and a half hours late. Time needed to change terminals in Bogota (a shambles of wheelbarrow, scaffolding and old boxes): 20 minutes. Time available to make Air France connection to London via Paris: five minutes. We are not going to make it.

The “we” here are a motley crew. A Russian seaman who speaks not a word of any other language, who appears to believe he has met his saviour when I loose off a “Spasibo bolshhoi”, a “da”, and a “dobry”, thereby exhausting what I believe to be my Russian vocabulary; a pretty German backpacker from Leipzig who seems to have the whole thing under control; Benjamin Zephaniah, who is far more muscular and temporal than his veganism, his Lincolnshire roots, poetry and his four-foot dreadlocks suggest; the jazz singer Sarah Jane Morris and her handsome Argentine acoustic guitarist, who normally plays with Sting (gosh!); and an Italian shipbroker.

The Avianca superviser Louis springs into life. It seems having given up on his day job as an on-time plane dispatcher, Louis is made for the encyclopaedic process of ticket rewriting.

We, the Russian, the German, the three English (one a Rasta) and the Italian are already resigned to an overnight in a Bogota transit camp. But not Louis. He conjures up a flight with the Panamanian airline Copa to Panama City. Then a four-hour wait for an overnight Iberia flight to Madrid, a 45-minute turnaround and into London a mere 26 hrs after we started.

Except the Copa flight departs before Louis can actually issue my tickets. I only have the hieroglyphics by which he manages to work the thing out. It will be the Italian shipbroker who later comes to the rescue and translates it into a ticket on the ground in Panama.

What have I learned? It is all but impossible to get reliably to or from Colombia, or more or less anywhere else in Latin America, inside 24 hours. This disconnect robs us of one of the most exotic and optimistic cacophonies of sound, poverty, wealth, sunshine and colour anywhere I have ever been, though we have – Europe and Latin America – far, far more in common then divides us.

But, oh dear, Heathrow has been shut, there’s 10 inches of snow, there are no trains. Is this another 26 hours I see before me? This feels like the wrong sort of snow, which is a bit how I’m beginning to feel.

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.

I chaired a discussion last night with Martin Amis on Updike. Amis has an impressive capacity to retrieve actual quotes from Updike’s work and himself to deliver cascades of flawless prose as he talks about him. It was a great event.

My own lecture, on Living with the Gringos, from San Salvador to Baghdad, completely surprised me. I had feared that my ramble through US foreign policy that I had intersected with over the past 30 years would positively alienate my mainly Lain American audience.

It is a dangerous enterprise to attempt to talk conceptually with a culture with whom you have never intersected. Amazingly, they were absorbed and engaged, and asked better questions than an equivalent audience at the Hay on Wye festival of which this event is a cousin.

For the rest, this is an amazingly safe and beautiful walled city, sumptuously restored. I have walked the whole place. Tomorrow I’m going to projects out in the barrios where Colombia’s majority, the poorer citizens, live.

Benjamin Zephaniah has been rapping their socks off – save that they start bare footed anyway. They can’t understand the words, but his cadences and his mannerisms communicate enough. Many of his audience are the descendants of slaves from Africa. The beach he’s close to is on the Caribbean – a world away from Brixton, Liverpool or Birmingham – and the weather is hot and steamy.

This afternoon I’m on a round table with Matt Frei of the BBC, a guy from El Pais, and a vast audience. The media and the meltdown – that conceptual engagement again. Back to the snowy wastes tomorrow. Blog services will resume Monday.

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.

Damn Colombia for her domination of the cocaine trade: well over half of the world’s supply. It’s easy. But damn us in the west for our vast superstructure of abuse, cash, crime, rooted in this trade. Ha, that’s easy!

So here we are amid one of the most undiscussed crises in the world: the vast global trade in drugs. And let’s chuck Afghanistan in for good measure. In whose interests is it for this trade to continue? Certainly not just the little coca farmers of Colombia. Theirs is a subsistence life. Blame the harvesters and industrial manufacturers, yes. But who is running the thing in our own countries? Who is compromised?

That’s why coming to Colombia is worth it. Sure, it’s a thrill to meet Jaime, the brother of Garcia Marquez. But the real thing is to seep inside the woodwork of Colombian thinking. For them, too, this drug thing is beyond massive.

OK. That’s off my chest. I shall return to it, no doubt. I’m off for some politics and literature. I’ll be blogging again later.

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.

This morning I did a journalism workshop with 60 teenaged Colombians whose command of English was so good they could think in it. Every one of them was on Facebook. None of them reads a paper or watches television news. They have a disconnected view of the world. Gaza is a small issue to them. Obama a bigger phenomenon. And the guerrilla Farc force an even bigger issue.

But the discussion was fascinating. They were very concerned to know how Colombia is seen in the UK. Not at all, I had to venture, and if it is, it’s about coffee and drugs – although the successful release of Ms Betancourt from years of confinement by the Farc has changed perceptions a bit, I ventured.

Salman Rushdie arrived today. He’s done some online interviews before coming here. He was asked by one Colombian journalist whether any of his writings about Islam had ever got him into a bit of bother. Well, he replied, only a little: a 10-year death fatwa from Iran.

You realize we are very removed from each other, we Brits and Colombians. Tomorrow I have to do a talk and chair a late fixture, a round table about Updike, with Martin Amis and a Latin American writer.

Off down the cobbled streets to an artist I know who’s having a dinner for Amis, his wife, and some Colombian writers. A good chance to try to peer inside the community here.

Benjamin Zephaniah has been doing poetry in a poor barrio today. The Spanish translator told the impoverished people in the crowd that someone had written to Mr Z to tell him that she had committed suicide after reading his poems. Talk about “lost in translation”. What the translation should have said was that she had been saved from suicide after reading his poems! Everyone seems to have taken it in their stride.

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)

Looking down over the vast open spaces below, one imagines the Farc still farcing around down there – new leadership but a badly battered guerrilla force. You find that there’s been a sort of civil war here for the best part of 300 years.

This is a country of incredible individual wealth in a very few hands and pretty widespread poverty. I guess that explains the fighting. When you land here you realize how little touch we have with Latin America. Fabulous fabrics, jewellery and music.

Still, an airport lounge ain’t the most prepossessing place to blog. I shall have more later today when I reach Cartagena – among other things, how the big wide world looks from down here.