Let’s have an adventure

Colombian jungle

The first day I was in Bogota I saw a big yellow bus speeding by, full of old-aged pensioners dancing Salsa. I knew I was going to like Colombia. They say there’s a jungle plant here called burundanga. If somebody spikes your drink with burundanga you lose all free will. You hand over your wallet, car keys and do what you are told, however absurd the order. I avoided the plant poison but I have been seduced by this place.

I love the forests. I like the beer. The people are incredibly charming. They tend to drink chocolate rather than coffee and they do not smoke cigarettes much. I like Roman Catholicism. I like the women’s fertility goddess figures — achieved, I hear, by the ‘starch bomb’ effect of the maize pancakes they consume for breakfast and the world’s largest silicon breast implant industry. I like the fact that wherever I go here I can eat a large steak with a tiger prawn on top. If not a prawn, a fried egg — because there are more eggs in Colombia than anywhere. Colombians eat buckets of eggs.

When I arrived I looked forward to getting out into the jungle where we could go hiking while shooting a serious TV documentary. I am here with a producer called Katie and our Colombian fixer, Juan Pablo, who makes me laugh. On a visit to the indigenous Awa people, I packed my hammock, a poncho and packets of German dried food. I assumed the Awa would be exotic and tribal and that we would go hunting monkeys with blowpipes. Instead the Awa wore baseball caps and Dolce & Gabbana T-shirts. They made us sleep on the floor in a school classroom.