AUGUST 2008 | EDITION #2

My Columbian Death
Matt Thompson

ISBN: 9780330423922

Matt Thompson is every woman's nightmare. A writer for the Fairfax group, Matt was married with his first baby when he decided to de-camp to Columbia to actively seek out risk.

"I wanted to see if my instincts worked - if my natural instinct for survival and judging people and situations would carry me through. I wanted to know if I was alive or not", he said recently in an interview with the ABC's Geraldine Doogue.

Well, Matt's instincts did work, and he is alive, but only just. Apart from jumping into the bull ring with groups of other men all under the influence of one substance or another, the incident of the title refers to a particularly scarifying hallucinogenic experience with an infamous Amazonian sharman whose brew included two of the world's most powerful mind-altering plants. In fact, Matt stayed in Columbia, known locally as "the mad country", breaking all the rules for well over six months before returning home (to the curiously prosaic Dungog in the Upper Hunter Valley of New South Wales) to pen the immensely readable My Columbian Death.

Listen to Matt Thompson speak and you hear a man of great passion. He clearly is in the enthrall of Columbia, a country of whose character is a schizophrenic mix of vitality and paranoia, a country which exists in an altered state, whose destiny seems to be equally shaped by music, vibrant street life, drugs and extremist politics. Does he love Columbia? By all means. Does he recommend people behave there as he did? Not at all.

This is one trip best experienced on the page.