The Dervish Hordes of Omdurman

The drums beat louder and louder, the intoxicating rhythmn quickening. The setting sun casts a golden light across the scene, and the unmistakable aroma of marijuana drifts through the dusk air. A brightly-dressed man in yellow robes marches gaily around the edge of the circle wafting clouds of incense from a brazier swinging aily by his side. Hundreds of voices cry out in unison, singing the first line of the shahada, the Muslim declaration of faith, "la illaha ila-llah, la illaha ila-llah, la illaha ila-llah, la illaha ila-llah". There is no god but Allah, there is no god but Allah. Everyone dances wildly, limbs flailing, heads thrown back, dreadlocks swinging. The chanting continues incessantly, "la illaha ila-llah, la illaha ila-llah". Even my feet are twitching now, as everyone in the crowd begins to sway in time to the music. A man breaks out of the circle and dances into the centre. Suddenly he is up on one leg, spinning manically, all the while chanting. "la illaha ila-llah, la illaha ila-llah". All around me, other dervishes break out of the circle and begin to spin around, chanting, always chanting, lost on their personal path to God.

This is about as far away from most people's image of Islam as it's possible to get, more Woodstock than Wahabi, in many ways closer to an ecstasy-fuelled Shoreditch rave than a veneration of Allah in one of the world's most strictly Muslim countries. Yet Islam it is, and hardly could there be a better example of Sudan's perplexingly contradictory attitude to religion than the Whirling Dervishes.

As has become well-known in the West, and particularly in the UK, in the last few days, Sudan is officially an Islamic republic, with Islamic Sharia - "street" - Law in operation, at least in the Arab north of the country. Indeed, prior to his now infamous sojurn in Taliban-controlled Afganistan, a certain well-known Saudi construction magnate and outspoken religious cleric spent five years resident in Sudan in the mid-1990s, departing only after intense American pressure forced the Khartoum government to expel him. From what I can discern, Sheikh bin Laden is a hero to the majority of Sudanese, as much for his unpublicised (in the West) philanthropy as his better known slaying of infidels. Most of the tarmac highways in Sudan (of which there are not many) were financed and built by Osama and his construction firm, as was the Port Sudan International Airport.

Yet perversely, bin Laden's strict Saudi Wahabi interpretation of Islam would be anathema to the Sudanese, who tend towards the much more laidback, mystical, Sufi strain of the religion, and incorporate many traditional tribal beliefs and practises into their faith. Such "un-Islamic" ideas as witchdoctors, exorcisms, and saints are apparently common in Sudanese Islam, while women openly converse or shake hands with unknown men (including strange white men with backpacks) without apparent fear of reprisal. Amazingly many Sudanese love having their picture taken, and unsolicited offers of pictures to unwary travellers are common. Local children in particular are often openly enraged at polite refusals - unable to believe that a khawaja (an affectionate term roughly equivalent to the Spanish "gringo" or the Thai "farang") could possibly ever venture outside without a camera. Most perversely of all, at least in the eyes of orthodox Islam, the Sudanese are apparently rather partial to alcohol, and despite the strict ban on the importation and sale of booze, homemade moonshine is apparently a big hit with locals, particularly in rural areas. (Suffice to say I have not tried it myself - a Spanish traveller I met who had, assured me that he was lucky to escape with his life. He was talking about the hangover, but the consequences of being caught don't really bare thinking about. Being arrested once in Sudan was careless, twice would surely be foolish.)

But as the unfortunate Gillian Gibbons and her teddy bear "Mo Mo" have found out this week, despite all the eccentricities of Sudanese Islam, it is after all a very important part of life here. Perhaps more so than any other Muslim country I have visited, Islam is a very public facet of Sudanese society. Walk along any street or sit in any hotel at one of the five allotted prayer times each day and there are countless hundreds of Sudanese, uniformly clad in their mostly immaculate white robes and skullcaps, kneeling on a mat or carpet in supplication to Allah, quietly muttering the shahada to themselves. This can pose a few logistical problems for the unbeliever, as it is supposedly considered very bad form to walk in front of a praying Muslim. No problem when said devotee is kneeling on the pavement of a wide street, but it is a different story when he is blocking the door of your hotel room, from which you need to exit at some speed in order to reach the bathroom down the corridor to deal with what you fear may in fact be a new and virulent strain of cholera. Allah apparently took pity on my pathetic state and has, as yet, neglected to smite me for the rather ungainly manner in which I hurdled two of his faithful on my way to the disgusting hole in the ground which doubles for a bathroom in the "Namarg" Hotel in Wad Medani earlier this week. Happily his mercy has also extended to granting me a reprieve from the more unpleasant symptoms of my mysterious stomach ailment. Allahu Akbar!

As I watched the dervishes twirling and whirling, my thoughts drifted back through time, and came to rest in roughly the same location a century or so earlier, with the brave men of the British Army who faced down a force of some forty thousand "dervish" devotees of the Sudanese Caliphate at the infamous Battle of Omdurman in 1898. Despite their vastly superior numbers, and their absolutely fervent belief in the power of Allah to bring victory, the dervish army were massacred in their thousands by the well-trained and crucially well-equipped forces. The Sudanese were a formidable foe: 15 years previously their fearless infantry charges had defeated the British and allowed the Mahdi - the self-appointed Islamic Messiah - to expel the anglo-Egyptian rulers of Sudan and famously to murder the Governor General, Charles "Chinese" Gordon in Khartoum. So impressed was Rudyard Kipling by the heroism of the Sudanese warrior-mystics, he eulogised them in his poem "Fuzzie Wuzzy". His admiring description, "You're a pore benighted 'eathen but a first-class fightin' man" might appear grimly familiar to modern British soldiers fighting Muslim foes in Afghanistan and Iraq.

After the performance had finished, I was approached by an array of curious locals, with whom I sat and drank tea. Some were Arab Muslims, some were not (the ethnically African south of Sudan is overwhelmingly Christian and/or Animist in its beliefs), but inevitably given our surroundings, the conversation eventually turned to religion. While the majority were simply curious about "Christian" ways (like most westerners in Muslim countries, when asked I pretend to be Christian, the concept of atheism not being well understood or well-regarded), it soon became apparent that one had a more sinister agenda, and he quickly began trying to back me into a corner. Despite my attempts at evasive diplomacy, the questions were relentless.

"What do you think of Islam?"

"Do you know that if you convert to Islam you will go to Paradise - if you don't you'll go to hell?"

"Why do Christians not believe in the Prophet Mohammed, Allah praise him?"

"Why do Christians allow their women to whore themselves?"

"Why do Christians...?

And so on and so forth. At this point I was getting a little flustered. Luckily, my audience shared my discomfort, and rounded on the interrogator angrily. Such was the vehemence with which he was condemned, my would be saviour slunk off into the night. The remaining Sudanese were appalled at this extremism, and clearly ashamed at the implied insults to a visitor in their country, and what's more to what Muslims call "people of the Book" - Christians and Jews. The apologies were sincere and profuse, and typical of the relaxed attitude to religion I have overwhelmingly found in Sudan. I finish with a quote from the Bradt Guide to Sudan, by Paul Clammer:

"More than just a religion, Islam is a social code that presents a specific way in which society should be run. As such, visitors have a particular responsibility to behave in a manner that's sensitive to local traditions, although the Sudanese are very tolerant and foreigners are usually forgiven for minor cultural gaffes."

Just be careful what you call your teddy bear.

Feast, Famine, and Men Who Hold Hands

As the sun slips behind the dusty brown mountains to the West, Damascus is bathed in a beautiful golden light. As the muezzins tune up for their hauntingly beautiful renditions of the call to evening prayer, the usual noise of rush hour traffic falls eerily silent as this bustling city of five million people quickly becomes a ghost town. As the dusk twilight fades into darkness, shutters come down and the last few stragglers hurry home, leaving the Syrian capital devoid of any outward signs of life. Yet behind the closed doors of countless houses, apartments and mosques in this, the fourth holiest site in Islam, friends and family sit down to celebrate.

For this is the holy month of Ramadan, a time of introspection, observance, and self-denial. All across the Islamic world the faithful eschew the pleasures of the flesh: eating, drinking, smoking, and sex, fasting during daylight hours and feasting in darkness. For one month of the year, Muslims remind themselves of their devotion to Allah, studying the Qu'ran, praying more often and with more focus than usual, and strengthening their communal ties by sharing the hardships of the holy month. Come sunset, hungry eyes turn to the home, where the traditional meal of Iftar ("breakfast") is served.

The feast begins with a bowl of dates, passed from (right) hand to (right) hand, and copious cups of "shai", the ubiquitous sweet black tea on which the Arab world appears to run. (My dentist should be in for a bumper payday come January) My own flat's Iftar has a particularly African feel: my landlord Djbril hails from Chad, and as far as I can tell runs an open house for every Chadian in the Levant. The boundless hospitality and generosity of the Chadians ensures I am invited to join their Iftar, despite my less than monastic adherence to the rigours of Ramadan. Although I am not, nor ever will be, a Muslim, I began the month with the noblest intentions - "when in Rome" and all. Yet ideals of cultural assimilation tend to fall by the wayside when the mercury is pushing 40 degrees Centigrade and you're struggling with the peculiarities of a language whose speech patterns often resemble the last desperate breaths of a strangled kitten and whose written form neglects to mark any vowels. Not eating is one thing, but not drinking is simply impossible. Still, while I may not share the parched throats of my fellow diners, I'm certainly hungry.

After the dates, we settle down to a huge feast of chicken, rice, potatoes, salad, and bread. Simple, yet delicious, African food served with a hearty helping of laughter, affection, and community spirit. While I can barely understand 5% of the rapid-fire Chadian "9aamiya" - dialect- in which Djbril and his compatriots usually communicate, when I understand the odd word they're kind enough to slip into "foussa" - the Modern Standard Arabic with which I'm struggling - for my benefit. Conversation quickly turns to politics and history; like almost all the Arabs I've ever met the Chadians' grasp of world affairs is simply mind-boggling. These are by no means educated people, yet as well as the obvious topics of Palestine and Iraq, beloved of all Arabs, they talk about such diverse and esoteric subjects as the American political system, the IRA (it took a while to work out, but "Adam Gerry" is their endearingly erroneous rendering of the bearded Sinn Fein leader's name) and demand to know if I am named after James I of England/James VI of Scotland, James Bond, or former American Secretary of State James Baker. The depth and breadth of their knowledge is staggering; even more appealing to me is their apparent inability to take any of these weighty matters seriously. As a Brit I'm gently taunted about the occupation of Iraq; one of my tormentors points out the sad state in which the British Empire finds itself in 2007, reduced to the Falkland Islands and Basra Airport.

After dinner we drink yet more tooth-rotting tea and retire to watch television: a four part dramatisation of the overthrow of Egypt's King Farouq by General Nasser in 1952. This provokes jokes about Britain's very own Egyptian would-be usurper, Mohammed al Fayad, and his son's near miss with the throne. Like many a Daily Express reader, the Chadians are in no doubt that Dodi and "Dina" were killed by the all-powerful British secret service. The question of quite where the omniscient and omnipotent SIS' powers went when it came to finding WMDs in Iraq is politely ignored.

The Chadians are typically Arab in many ways. This is a masculine society, where intimate physical contact between members of the same sex is totally normal. As in innumerable cities across the Arab and Muslim world, it's perfectly normal for men to hold hands in the street, to kiss each other's cheeks in greeting, and to share personal space in a way unthinkable in the West. Although I won't be attempting to verify this assertion myself, I imagine that in some ways life for homosexuals here must be much easier than in the West, despite Islam's virulent hatred of gays. (Interestingly there is apparently no non-pejorative term for "homosexual" in the Arabic language: "deviant" is about the least offensive word). Is it a coincidence that many of the greatest Western "Arabists" - Lawrence and Thesiger, to name but two - were perpetual residents of the closet?

Regardless of the inherently homoerotic nature of much of Islamic and Arab culture, life for heterosexuals here is certainly difficult. The schizophrenic attitude to procreation is perhaps best evidenced by the numerous Arabic equivalents of MTV. Pop music is ubiquitous here, most of it emanating from Lebanon and Egypt. While the music is mostly appalling, the videos are quite incredible. Impossibly good-looking young women cavort onscreen in outfits that would make even Britney, Christina, or Shakira blush, thrusting their crotches in a most provocative manner and titillating the viewers with lingering closeups of cavernous cleavage and tanned thighs. It's enough to send even hardened (pardon the pun) Westerners running for a cold shower; Allah only knows what it does to frustrated young Arabs.

Yet in amongst the nubile nymphets and their soft porn shoots are pop videos aimed at a wholly different audience. Saudi artists, all male, croon saccharine ballads with lyrics like (forgive my woeful Arabic here) "I love God, God is my love, my life is all for God". Meanwhile, their faith in Allah and their submission to the dictates of the supposedly austere Wahabist Islamic creed of their homeland are rewarded onscreen with shiny watches, gleaming droptop Mercedes, and of course a couple of "pimping hoes". Unlike Fifty Cent or P Diddy, however, the Saudi stars' bitches are covered from head to toe, and sport wedding rings. All three of them. The message is clear: love God and a harem of devoted (though virginal) women will be yours. Inshallah you'll get a German sports car to drive them around in too.

As the shahada rings out across the now darkened city, a couple of middle aged men hurry past me, arms linked gaily. On the other side of the street, a young man and his stylishly dressed girlfriend walk side by side, a couple of feet apart. And in houses across the country, across the region, across the world, self-starved Muslims desperately gorge themselves in a feast of gluttony before tomorrow's resumption of the fasting, praying, and abstention of the holy month. Allah-uh akbar!

Syria: Souqs and Surprises

It's said that of all the senses, smell is most closely linked to memory. Certainly the odour of the souq is unforgettable: a heady cocktail of charcoal smoke and exhaust fumes, grilled meat, blood, raw fish, sweat, the perfumed aromas of cardamom, coriander and cinammon, mint, coffee, tea, and apple tobacco, baklava, leather. Yet all the senses are overwhelmed by the onslaught of the bazaar. The clamourous noise of feet on cobbled stones, vendors calling out their wares to the masses: "yallah yallah yallah", engines and horns advertising the improbable progress of cars and vans through the slender passageways of the market, the racket as tea sellers clash their pots and pans like cimbals, the Arabic pop music that blares from innumerable tinny stereo speakers, the hammering of cobblers, sparks flying from their stone wheels. Charcoal smoke drifts across the narrow cobbled alleyway from the kebab stalls on either side, dappling the late afternoon sunlight as it seeps in through the leaking roof, illuminating the colours of cloth, spices, fruits in a beautiful orange glow.

All manner of humanity mingles together in the teeming crowds: Iraqi refugees, the women in their conservative black chadors and the men in their white robes and distinctive red and white keffiyehs, fashionably dressed Syrian teenagers, an occasional Western tourist, small boys in European football shirts boasting the names of all the usual suspects: Beckham, Zidane, Ronaldo (x2), and a few more prosaic ones besides: Mido, Haji, and the various stars of the recent Asian Cup-winning Iraqi side.

If Istanbul's famed Grand Bazaar was something of a disappointment, a Disneyfied, Westernised perversion of the Oriental souq of romantic myth and legend, Aleppo's vast medieval marketplace lives up to every expectation. Stepping through the ancient wooden gate from Bab Antakya street is like taking a time machine back to the 15th Century. While outside is a congested, polluted, 21st century city, in here the only concessions to the modern world are the babbled conversations into mobile phones and the occasional transit van struggling through the throngs of shoppers. In many other respects little has changed here since the Ottomans held sway over this western outpost of the Silk Road. Aleppo vies with its more famous neighbour to the south, Damascus, for the title of 'oldest city in Syria'; both compete with Jericho, just across the Green Line in the Occupied West Bank, for the honour of being the world's oldest metropolis. Wandering the glorious covered souqs, it's not hard to believe the claims of "Haleb", as it's known to locals, to be the oldest surviving outpost of human civilisation.

Yet it would do Syria's second city, and the country as a whole, a grave disservice to dwell too much on ancient history. Much to the surprise of many I suppose, I can confirm that Syria is a booming modern nation far removed from the nightmarish Islamist stereotypes of Western governments and media. Rather than the monolithic mass of Muslim extremists, baying for Western blood, religion (and politics) seem as nuanced here as in the West. Different sects, interpretations, and branches of Islam provide a huge diversity of appearance, behaviour, and belief. Somewhat surprisingly off-licences and bars aboundhere, as do scantily clad teenage girls, for many there seems no contradiction in wearing tight jeans, plunging necklines and layers of makeup with a (jauntily-angled of course) Islamic headscarf. Mobile phones, and irritating ringtones, are as ubiquitous here as anywhere else, while camera phones enable every moment, no matter how banal, to be preserved for posterity.

But old habits die hard. The famous Arab hospitality survives here as well as anywhere. If I had a pound, even a worthless Syrian pound, for every time I'd heard "Ahlan wa Sahlan" ("hello and welcome") since I arrived here, I'd be a rich man. It's a tough call, but I think Syrians might be even friendlier than Egyptians. There's certainly no hint of hostility towards Westerners here, not that I expected there would be, but I'm sure some did. I've had my picture taken with three or four random locals, had dozens of conversations in halting English, French, and Arabic with passing Syrians, and even chatted with a couple of delightful Muslim girls, students at Aleppo University, who despite wearing the hijab, seemed totally oblivious to any perceived negative implications of flirting with strange Western men like myself. I even had a brief exchange with a charming Iraqi gentleman, one of the 2 million refugees who have swelled Syria's population by more than 10% since the disastrous "liberation" of their homeland in 2003. Admirably Mahmoud bore no discernible malice to me personally, realising, like most in this part of the world, the difference between individuals and governments.

The friendliness, tolerance, and hospitality of the Syrian people is staggering, especially when compared to the negative stereotypes propogated so often in the West. This is a modern, economically developed, surprisingly liberal country, And yet, for all its modern accoutrements, the hospitality and generosity speak of an older, more gentle age, while the physical reminders of the past are all around; nowhere more so than in the incredible souq. Turkey is well-known for its east-west, ancient-modern, secular-Islamic contradictions, perhaps Syria should be too?

Turkish Delight

"Allahu akbar, Allahu akbar
Ashadu an la Ilah ila Allah
Ashadu an Mohammed rasul Allah
Haya ala as-sala
Haya ala as-sala"

The afternoon call to prayer echoes from the minarets of Istanbul's countless mosques. As on previous visits to Egypt and Morocco, I find it an unforgettable, visceral, heart-wrenchingly evocative soundtrack to the Middle East. Yet it seems the locals don't share my reverence. I'm sitting in a bar in a quaint covered alleyway just off Istanbul's main shopping street, Istiklal Caddesi, drinking a pint of Efes Pilsner, and watching the Turks getting tipsy. On the table to my right, a pair of raucous middle-aged Turkish men whoop and holler as their friend attempts to throw peanuts across the room into a pint. (Why is this funny? I have no idea. It just is. It's hilarious. It's like building giant snakes out of empty pint glasses at the cricket - brilliant!) Behind them, oblivious, another customer intently studies what seems to be Turkey's answer to The Racing Post, looking up occasionally to chart the progress of his fillies on a plasma screen showing live racing from who-knows-where. A couple of the waiters break off from their serving duties to glance at the other plasma screen, where a 24 hour Turkish News station offers confirmation that the country has a new President: the "Islamist" former Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul.

To say Istanbul is a little confusing is an understatement. Am I in Europe? Am I in the Middle East? I'm in neither. Or both. I'm not sure. It's about as cliched as can be to say that Turkey, and in particular Istanbul, is at the crossroads of East and West, yet it's so overwhelmingly true that it's difficult to resist stating the obvious.

I woke with a start as the bus from Sabiha Grokcen Airport turned onto a bridge, O2 choosing that exact moment to inform me via text message that I could call home by adding "+44" to my numbers. Safe in the knowledge that I could now go ahead and quickly accumulate a phone bill roughly equivalent to the GDP of Chad, I turned to contemplate the staggering views. We were crossing the Bosphorus, the mighty stretch of water that separates western Istanbul from eastern Istanbul, Thrace from Anatolia, Europe from Asia, Occident from Orient. Yet both sides of this channel are Turkey, both sides are Istanbul. I can't think of many other cities in the world that physically straddle two continents - perhaps the cities on the banks of the two great Canals, Panama and Suez - there surely can't be any city in the world that metaphorically straddles two cultures like Istanbul.

At first glance, it's as European as Amsterdam, Paris or Berlin. Impeccably well-dressed men stroll hand in hand with their scantily-clad girlfriends down wide, tree-lined boulevards, stopping to sip lattes in roadside cafes. Shoppers throng the streets, clutching bags from Benetton, Nike, or Body Shop and stopping to refuel at KFC, McDonalds, or the ubiquitous Starbucks. Distant skyscrapers loom over the financial district, as important-looking suits hurry from meeting to meeting in their chauffeur-driven BMWs and Mercedes. Yet the shining glass and steel towers do not quite have the skyline to themselves. Hundreds of identical minarets and domes, the telltale characteristics of innumerable mosques, leap skyward out of Istanbul's lowrise suburbs, and, five times a day, intone their haunting invocation to prayer.

In truth, I expected a little more of "the Orient" and a little less of the European. The Grand Bazaar, loftily described by Lonely Planet as "mindblowing", "labyrinthine" and "medieval" seemed more Bluewater than Byzantium to me. Endless glass-fronted shops selling international designer goods strike an incongruous note among the seemingly anachronistic carpet sellers and hookah-vendors; even the usual slick sales pitch appears to have been toned down here - I didn't once hear the immortal "good price for you my friend!". Perhaps last year's days spent wandering the great Khan-al-Khalili Souq in Cairo have inured me to the charms of other, lesser Oriental markets, or perhaps I'm being pedantic or idealistic in finding the presence of Armani and Calvin Klein a little more boutique than bazaar, but I was slightly disappointed.

Yet Istanbul's other main sights have not disappointed, despite the indescribably large crowds of fellow tourists I meet everywhere. The Topkapi Palace contains opulent riches to match anything in the world, my own personal favourites being the gold and jewel-encased arm and skull of (allegedly) John The Baptist, and an eighty-six (I repeat, eighty-six) carat diamond found in a rubbish heap in the 16th Century, before being sold for the princely sum of three spoons. I wonder what David Dickenson would make of that. The Blue Mosque is like a fairytale of the Orient, what every mosque should look like, while the Aya Sofia, to my mind not as aesthetically appealing as its azure neighbour, more than makes up for any worn around the edges feel with its long and incredible history. From 527AD until the Ottoman Conquest of what was then Constantinople, the Aya Sofia was undisputedly the finest Church in Christendom. The Sultans, not wishing to let religion get in the way of architectural splendour, promptly covered the Christian images, tacked on a couple of minarets, and converted it to a Mosque. When Turkey underwent its most recent religious conversion, from Islam to secularism, under Ataturk in the 1930s, the edifice was declared a museum. Today the features of the two religions are intertwined in the decoration of the building: crescents and Arabic inscriptions sitting side-by-side with crosses and craven images of Christ and the Virgin Mary.

If the Aya Sofia is a fitting summary of Istanbul's religious schizophrenia, events outside the building on the day of my visit neatly emphasise the contrast between modernity and antiquity. A cobalt blue BMW M3 is being towed away for parking illegally, in an area designated solely for horse drawn carts. The screech of the alarm drowns out the muezzins' haunting cries from the minarets. No-one seems to notice.

The Starbucks Express

The small bus stopped suddenly. My heart froze. Half or dozen or so men in exceedingly dirty clothes and muddy wellington boots, carrying foot-long machetes, were boarding. The first one, his face moustachioed and weather-beaten, and his hands calloused from heavy labour (burying bodies? I mused to myself), paused slightly when he saw me. Then a smile lit up his face as he greeted me: "Buenas tardes señor, ¿como está?".

Someone in Bogota told me that the way to spot FARC members is their penchant for wearing wellies at all times, even in towns on sunny days. If this is correct, Colombia's woes are much greater than I realised, for in the coffee region everyone wears wellies. I only hope the army can hold out against the rampant hordes of welly-wearing Marxists until the weekend when I say "adios" to Colombia. Happily for my bus journey, I think this means of identifying the rebels may lack something in the way of accuracy, as these particular rubber boot aficionados seemed to be employed by the coffee industry rather than the militant revolutionary forces of the international proletariat. Coffee is big business here, and it's taken very seriously indeed by the Colombians, nowhere more so than at the Parque Nacional de Cafe, Colombia's answer to Disneyland. Actually, that's not quite true; no-one could really describe a theme park devoted to coffee beans as serious. Regardless of the tone, it's a very informative place, which teaches the visitor all he or she might want to know (and a good deal more besides) about the whole bean to cup process.

Yet aside from the coffee itself, the main reason to visit the so-called "Zona Cafeteria" is the scenery. Set in lush mountains to the west of Bogotá, quaint little towns and spectacular fincas dot the verdant hillsides. I spent the Independence Day weekend in one such pueblo, Salento, hiking in the countryside during the day and joining in the local July 20th festivities by night. These festivities mostly seemed to consist of eating trout (a local delicacy), drinking aguardiente, and high speed synchronised dancing. One fellow traveller (from Belfast I believe, though I didn't meet him myself) apparently over-indulged in the local culture to such an extent that he was taken into protective custody by the police, who feared the consequences of the local menfolk catching up with the paralytic Ulsterman who had been touching their women. After a 1am call from the cops, the owner of the local traveller's hostal, an affable British chap called Tim, headed down to the station to interpret. After much violence and swearing, it was decided to allow the Irish miscreant to remain in a cell for the rest of the evening; upon his release the next morning, the police insisted he sign a statement affirming he had not been mistreated. Something tells me a Colombian in a similar position in UK might not have been granted such hospitality. What's the Spanish for "fell down the stairs"?

Unlike the unfortunate Ulsterman, however, I managed to restrain myself for once, having to rise early for a trek. Six hours of hiking through a nature reserve in the cloud forest certainly seemed preferrable to a hangover and a story about a Colombian police cell, especially when it afforded the opportunity to see the unique wax palm trees that dot the area. Though certainly aesthetically-pleasing, the wax palm (see photos below) is seemingly a particularly pointless species, growing a ludicrously long thin trunk before sprouting normal palm leaves about 60 feet up in the air. Any time you meet an evangelical Christians who attempts to debunk the theory of evolution with reference to so-called "intelligent design", please direct him to the Valle de Cocora in central Colombia, where a cursory inspection of the Peter Crouch of palm trees will provide him with ample evidence that "intelligent design" is a totally fallacious concept. But more about God later.

After beginning my weekend with a flight to Cali, I planned to return to Bogotá via road, both on grounds of expense (because of the distances involved internal flights in Colombia are not overly cheap) and because I dimly recalled reading some strikingly congratulatory comments about the spectacular scenery on that road in Paul Theroux's "The Old Patagonian Express". Indeed, after travelling by train and bus from Boston to Bogotá, Theroux was keen to suggest this particular road passed through some of the most spectacular scenery in the whole of the Americas. Of course when reading such glowing tributes from the comfort of one's armchair, sipping a mug of cocoa, the true implications of words such as "spectacular" are often hidden. Five years ago I crossed the Andes on a bus, in Peru, and after a 20 hour journey so nerve-shatteringly awful I almost turned to religion, I vowed never to do it again. 18 hours of figuratively shitting myself as we barely negotiated hairpin bends on narrow pot-holed roads with vertiginous drops just inches from the outside wheels of the bus were followed by two hours of actually shitting myself after consuming some toxic corn-based snack at a roadside truck stop. "NEVER AGAIN" I promised myself.

In light of this experience, quite how I found myself sitting in the front seat ("for best views" the driver told me in Spanish, without a trace of irony) of a 17 seater minibus snaking its way at high speed around cliff top roads in thick cloud and pouring rain, I'm not sure. Unlike Peruvians, however, Colombians seem to take a slightly more positive view of the concept of road safety, and do therefore have such measures as seatbelts and paved highways in place. Not that a seatbelt would be a great deal of use were the bus to plunge 7,000 feet over the side of a cliff, but I guess it's the thought that counts. In fact, so seriously do the bus companies take the issue of safety, that each of their ticket booths features a highly tasteful scorecard of crashes, injuries and deaths on each route in the last 6 months. I didn't enquire about the stats for a longer timescale; some things are better left unsaid.

In addition to all these admirable measures, it seems Colombian buses are also equipped with a giant digital speedometer, allowing everyone on board to monitor velocity at all times. Should the driver get a little too carried away and exceed the 80km per hour legal limit for his rattling jalopy, a noxious alarm sounds until the speed is reduced. While surely well-intentioned, I found this invention to be totally and utterly terrifying. Who really needs to know that the bus is approaching a 90 degree switchback on the wrong side of the road at 72kph? If you ask me it merely panders to the vanity of the driver's constant Juan Pablo Montoya impressions. And while we're on the subject of Colombia's number one racing driver, I don't ever recall him finding himself confronted with a 15 ton articulated lorry as he takes the racing line through the apex of a blind bend, as happened to our noble chauffeur innumerable times on Sunday. Nor does Señor Montoya have to juggle mobile phones, two-way radios, gear sticks, steering wheels and cholesterol-rich snacks as he tears around the streets of The Principality in his state of the art racing machine.

Yet in truth, none of this really mattered, for we had God on our side all along. As we pulled out of the Terminal de Autobuses in Armenia, just before donning his imaginary flame retardant suit, leather driving gloves and crash helmet, our intrepid driver solemnly crossed himself and offered a couple of silent prayers to the big man upstairs. Many of the passengers followed suit. An hour later, as we deftly avoided the still-smoking scene of a (very) recent head-on collision between a Renault Twingo and a twenty ton truck by sneering at the oncoming traffic and veering casually into the opposite lane at 63kph, I too was on my knees, offering myself in supplication to God, Jahweh, Allah, Buddha, Robbie Fowler, and any other deity I could think of.

Still, on the plus side, our journey to Ibagué was completed in half the official four hour allotment; not an outcome that would be repeated on the second leg of the trip back to Bogotá. In fact, at times on that hellish six hour drive, I was almost overcome with nostalgia for the suicidal tendencies of the earlier driver, particularly when the giant neon speedo dipped below 10kph for the umpteenth time. Night buses in Colombia hold their own particular terrors; Lonely Planet is particularly vehement in its advice to avoid them, and legion are the tales of unwary travellers who lose all their belongings when a nice man with a gun flags down and boards their bus at 2am. Yet such were the crowds of revellers heading home after the Independence Day weekend that waiting for a journey in darkness was the only option. "Still, at least you can't see the cliffs at night", I thought to myself as we waited to depart; fervently hoping for a driver without the quivering moustache and devilish glint in the eye that so often signifies lunacy in South America. I needn't have worried; regardless of the psychiatric state of the driver, our bus' engine was so weak that speed was an impossible dream, and the Colombian army had so many units on highway security patrol over the weekend it was difficult to go 50 yards without seeing a listless pimply youth with a machine gun. What good these soldiers of boredom would actually be in the event of an actual firefight with the FARC or some would-be bandits I'm not sure, but I suppose they act as a deterrent.

Yet there were other horrors to contend with, not least the driver's grim obsession with the spirit-crushingly irritating Vallenato music omnipresent in much of Colombia. There are many ways to kill a man with his own accordion, and I thought of them all as the terrible folk tunes played grimly on and on. At one stage the radio station was briefly changed; my relief was short-lived, however, as a Spanish language version of Robbie Williams cigarette-lighters-in-the-air anthem "Angels" replaced the incessant whining of the accordions. "Angeles" (sample lyric: "voy a amar a los ángeles...") was even more awful in reality than you could ever possibly imagine, and was very nearly the final straw. Yet somehow I survived, finally rolling into Bogotá at 2am, over twelve hours after leaving Salento. For what it's worth, the scenery on the road WAS incredible, at least the small sections I could see through my fingers, and unlike in Peru I managed not to soil myself at any point of the journey, which was a distinct bonus as I'm sure my fellow passengers would agree.

One more week of class in Bogotá, then it's off to the Amazon on Saturday. Sadly I won't be taking the bus - being 500 miles from the nearest road, Leticia is inaccessible by any means except boat or plane - though a couple of weeks from now I will be facing the delightful prospect of a 16 hour journey on Brazil's Trans-Amazonian highway. While there are no mountains to contend with there, I'm sure ample excitement will be provided by the unavoidable traverse of the Yanomami Indigenous Reserve. In case you're not aware, many anthropologists regard the Yanomami as the most violent people on the planet (yes, they're even more violent than Glaswegians). When the road was built in the early 90s, the Brazilian army had to massacre hundreds of Yanomamis irate at the intrusion of the white (well, light brown) man into their territory. Armed only with poison arrows and blow darts, the locals stood little chance of victory, though they did cause a substantial number of deaths. In the circumstances it's probably best not to run into them on the road; to be on the safe side the highway is closed between dusk and dawn and all stoppages are expressly prohibited. I'm not sure what happens in the event of a breakdown...

A rare Colombian Wax Palm Tree

Liverpool and England striker Peter Crouch

Ludicrously tall Wax Palms in the Valle de Cocora

Hummingbird silhouetted against the cloud forest

Hummingbird on a sugar feeder. Mmmm....sugar...

Coffee!

While I understood most of the coffee-making process, I still can't work out where these peanuts come into the equation. What's that? They're beans? What kind of beans?

In Latin America this sign means "don't catch the birds". In Spain, however, it's a more serious offence. Quite how you'd fuck a parrot I don't know...