Having torn ourselves from Colombia's idyllic Caribbean coastline, it is time to explore what the interior of the country has to offer. As mentioned in a previous entry, Colombia's geography is dominated by three parallel chains of mountains, northern extensions of the Andes. The valleys formed by these chains channel the waters of Colombia's two longest rivers - the Magdalena and the Cauca - all the way to the Atlantic Ocean. Being so high and so close to the Equator, the climate in this part of the country is cool and wet. Not the hot, tropical place you might assume Colombia to be. Happily, this climate makes for an awful lot of green: the upper slopes of the cordilleras are blanketed in vast tracts of weird and wonderful tropical cloud forest which are particularly looking forward ... read more

The journey from Peru to Colombia was not exactly the most comfortable we've made so far on this trip. We chose to enter Colombia through Medellín, the country's second largest city and until relatively recently one of the most violent cities in the world - if not the most violent. For many years from the late eighties Medellín found itself in the grip of a horrifically violent urban war pitching one drug cartel against another. Pablo Escobar? A Medellín boy, him. Shot dead in 1993 while trying to evade the police across the rooftops of the city.How very encouraging! We are reliably informed, however, that things have very much changed in Medellín. Which is just as well, really. The only vaguely affordable ticket from Arequipa to Medellín is a rather indirect one via Lima and Bogotá, ... read more

The road from Punta Arenas to Arica has taken us the entire length of Chile, and now it really is time to leave. A scant few miles to the north of Arica lies the Peruvian border, and beyond that a vast new country to explore. However, we're only going to be spending a few days in Peru - this time around, at least. While in San Pedro de Atacama, we booked flights to Colombia, at the very top of the continent. We then plan to swing southwards in a rough "C" shape, passing through Ecuador, and to visit Peru properly from around July. The reasons behind the rather odd itinerary are purely climatic - July and August will be a better time to do some hiking in the Peruvian Andes, which after the wonders of Patagonia ... read more

Valuable metals aren't the only thing to come out of northern Chile's barren ground. For a few short decades between the 1870s and the 1920s, this part of the world played a crucial role in world development as well as Chile's economic fortunes. The reason? Plants need nitrogen to grow - but they can't extract it from air which is, in fact, full of it. Cultivating crops successfully requires the addition of nitrogen to the soil, and since the appearance of agriculture this has generally been achieved using manure or compost. As far as producing large yields, however, these methods aren't very efficient. Work by European chemists in the 18th and 19th centuries paved the way for the use of far more effective chemical fertilisers. Inland Tarapacá, the region now surrounding Iquique, was quickly discovered to ... read more

An hour or so northwest of San Pedro de Atacama lies Calama - a god-forsaken place in the middle of the desert which tends to attract singularly unflattering descriptions, more often than not scatological. "Calama is a shithole", warns one guidebook. And we're looking forward to spending our afternoon there. Calama certainly is a hole. A great big hole. Perhaps one of the biggest holes on Earth. And although few would ever dream of going there, every Chilean owes an awful lot to dusty, tatty Calama. Just north of town is the Chuquicamata copper mine, the most massive open-pit mine in the world. Over 4 kilometres long and a kilometre deep, this hole - along with a few others strung along Chile's northern regions - keeps the nation's coffers full. Red gold, as they sometimes call ... read more