I'm sitting here in London writing this at the end of January. The temperature outside has dropped below freezing, it's dark, and the city is bracing for the first significant snowfall this winter. It's a month since we got back from South America, and our trip already seems like a

"I remember seeing dead people, bodies in the streets. Sometimes, the bodies were booby-trapped. So when the police went to pick the body up, a grenade went off in their face." We were gathered on the patio of a simple brick house, listening to our guide, Laura, speak about her

As the sun faded and darkness fell, the streets of Salento began to flicker into life. Fairy lights were twinkling overhead, neon palm trees began to glow, and the locals started placing little lanterns along the pavement outside their homes. We had arrived in Salento on the día de las

Colombia was the eighth and final country on our whistlestop tour of South America, and a place that I'd wanted to visit for a very long time. Tell most people you're going to Colombia, however, and their first question is normally: "Is it safe?" Decades of guerrilla warfare, political instability