She just keeps rollin’ along: Colombia’s Magdalena River

As Colombia comes out of 50 years of civil war and into a still precarious peace, with some 220,000 dead, this timely book explores one of the few dividends to emerge from such a terrible conflict.

Large areas of the country were isolated by the war, and so spared the ravages of modern development. Unlike neighbouring Ecuador, where oil and gas exploration has done its worst, Colombia still has an essentially roadless expanse of pristine forest nearly the size of France.

When I travelled in the mountains near Cali last year, I was struck by how depopulated the rural areas were. The peasant farmers, the campesinos, were only slowly returning from their exile in the comparatively safer cities. Many Colombians, weary of the ideologies of left and right that did so much to perpetuate the conflict, have turned instead to the Schumacher ethos of ‘small is beautiful’ — working in local community groups to reclaim the land and start up farmers’ markets. Much of the country is still best travelled by the same mule tracks the conquistadors used to transport their goods, with small way stations providing welcome doses of aguapanela, the hot bowl of raw cane sugar and lemon which is the energy drink of the Colombian interior.

Wade Davis is well placed to write what he describes as a love letter to Colombia. He first came here as a teenager almost 50 years ago and has been returning ever since, often working with botanists, such as the legendary Richard Evans Schultes, the subject of the film Embrace of the Serpent. When Davis tells you about yopo, the seeds of a forest tree that contain one of the most powerful hallucinogenic agents known to man, a tryptamine ‘that does not distort reality as much as dissolve it’, you know he speaks with authority.

He decides to follow the entire length of the Magdalena River for 1,000 miles, right through Colombia from the Andes to the Caribbean.