Lily Taylor writes about her four-day adventure down the Amazon. Her starting point was Leticia - the town where Columbia, Peru and Brazil come together.

This fantastic trip starts off with a nerve-jangling rattletrap flight to Leticia, the most southerly town in Columbia and a major port on the Amazon River.

A town where people open their front porches to passers-by as makeshift restaurants, Leticia is dominated by the Amazon - arguably the world's mightiest river. From here I embarked on an adventure down the river that I'll certainly never forget. More...

The Columbian identity is a work in progress, with the nation's population unsure of how they should be perceived by the wider world.

This is according to Short Walks from Bogota: Journeys in the New Columbia author Tom Feiling, who delivered a talk at Stanfords on his recent trip to the South American country; the inspiration behind his latest work.

"There's an idea that no-one in Colombia wants to be Colombian," he told the audience, with the nation's middle classes looking towards the United States and its poorer population yearning "to be Mexican".

"Colombians still aren't fully aware of how to pitch themselves, particularly in relation to what their strengths are vis-a-vis the rest of the world." More...

Why do you want to go to Colombia?", asked everybody incredulously. Apart from the fact that I want to go everywhere which is reason enough for me ("because it's there", as they say), there are more than enough reasons to single out Colombia. Great coffee is a rather convincing one. Vast jungle, beautiful palm-lined beaches with beautiful snow-capped peaks visible in the distance, some of South America's most beautiful Spanish colonial towns and very lively, interesting and very beautiful people are a few other reasons that come to mind. And no, not every Colombian is a drug baron. In fact, I did not meet a single one.

On my first day in Colombia I did meet thousands of pilgrims, however, at Las Lajas where the Virgin Mary had been sighted in the past and a spectacular church was built across the deep canyon to mark the spot. I seem to be quite good at running into public holidays without knowing about them as I arrived fresh from an Ecuadorian election into Colombian Independence Day celebrations with flags flying, men marching and pilgrims flocking. This means all the hotels are full, yet magically I always find the last vacant room in town eventually. More...