Dancing, blue turtles and disreputable backstreets ... a powerful writer journeys down Colombia’s great river
The Magdalena is the great arterial river of Colombia. Rising in the rugged moorlands of the Andean páramo 12,000ft above sea level, it flows northwards for nearly a thousand miles, carving its way through gorges fringed with cloud forest, skirting the mysterious megaliths of San Agustín, growing fat and turbid in its lower reaches, and finally debouching into the Caribbean at the Bocas de Ceniza (the “ashen mouths”), where its tonnage of silt turns the sea grey.
Few know its moods and secrets better than the Canadian author, photographer and anthropologist Wade Davis, whose many distinctions include the impressive post of “explorer in residence” at the National Geographic Society. He first visited Colombia in 1968, on a school trip. He was 14 years old. “Several of the older Canadian students longed for home,” he recalls. “I felt as if I had finally found it.” In 2018 he was granted honorary Colombian citizenship.
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