A quick glance at Matthew Thompson’s activities over the past few years is enough to leave the most audacious of us gaping. Described by press as the new gonzo, and by himself as a maniac, before his trip to Colombia Thompson spent several holidays (repeat, holidays) navigating Muslim insurgencies in the Philippines. Yet the man himself betrays nothing of this penchant for adventure at first glance. Quietly spoken, relaxed, lean, the 38-year-old displays neither outward exuberance nor remote reticence. It’s oddly reassuring.

This is probably a good skill to have in a country like Colombia, where foreigners are kidnapped and ransomed, targeted by thieves, hassled, hustled, and generally messed around. Thompson toured through the slums with gangsters, boxed with paramilitaries in a locked, one-exit liquor store, and attempted to pay two shady characters to take him into the mountains with a bag on his head. This is an act that Thompson now says could have been worthy of a Darwin award. “I think I would have disappeared,” says Thompson, looking back on the incident. At the time Thompson had been attempting to meet with members of the paramilitary movement when he discovered he had to buy cocaine from the two men in order for them to trust him. What then followed was a series of increasingly tense meetings, Thompson not knowing if they were conning him, planning a kidnap or genuinely trying to arrange a meeting for him with paramilitaries in the mountains.

Eventually Thompson manages to interview Mancuso, Colombia’s “blood-stained warlord”. Yet Thompson finds Mancuso’s manner unexpected: “casual, playful but aloof”, a far cry from the acts of terror for which he is responsible: bombings, massacres, and the old paramilitary favorite, assassinations. “Men on motorbikes will pull up outside [a person’s] house or where they work and just shoot them…they do a lot of assassinations of left-wing or progressive people…they want to keep wages very low across the whole area because they’re the ones who own the plantations.”

Despite this, Thompson speaks with enthusiasm about the vitality he found “even in really down and out places… You could let off steam and be reminded that even in terrible circumstances there are some glorious, glorious moments.”

“Colombians can be very cheeky, irreverent people,” says Thompson, describing an incident in which one local's offer of a cure for gastro turned out to be a three-litre tower of beer and an afternoon listening to Argentinean death metal. “Then they start joking about how I fuck donkeys…all coastal men fuck donkeys, [they told me]”. One of the blander incidents of Thompson’s six-month adventure, even this is a far cry from his old life as a reporter at the Sydney Morning Herald, where he became frustrated by the concerns for seniority, insurance problems and red-tape that led his editors to reject dispatches he sent them from the Philippines.

“They said ‘we won’t touch what you write because you’re not the South-East Asia correspondent…if you do this [again] you’re going to have to find a new employer….I started to think ‘what kind of press is this? What else is being offered that they’re not running?’”

“I don’t think it’s some kind of political conspiracy,” says Thompson, “it’s just corporate caution.”

It’s a far cry from the world Thompson discovered in Colombia, where risk-taking has become a part of everyday life, to the extent to which getting in a ring with enraged bulls and throwing discus at explosive charges (a game called tejo) are done for recreation and to keep the blood pumping. “I do think we can learn a lot from [Colombians]…realise there’s more to life than avoiding pain…humiliation and embarrassment…people should find the strength in themselves to get hurt sometimes, if they believe in what they’re doing.”

“But I wouldn’t want the circumstances that led them to be like that to be repeated,” says Thompson, of the toughness and courage of the Colombians he met during his six-month visit. Ravaged by forty years of civil war, drug-trafficking, bombings, assassinations and kidnappings, Colombia has three million internal refugees, a thriving paramilitary and, though their strength has waned in recent years, a formidable guerilla movement.

The toll this internal strife has taken on the country the locals name ‘Locombia’, the mad country, is one of the most confronting aspects of Thompson’s book. “There are horribly sad things at times,” he says, telling the story of one seven-year-old beggar who, shrugged off again and again by passers-by, walked out into the traffic to lie down in front of the cars. At another point Thompson encounters a brothel housing “kiddie prostitutes”, undefended by police in a city controlled by organised crime.

Considering returning to Colombia, one of the things Thompson hopes to organise is sponsorship to help relieve the extreme poverty many Colombians still experience. His plans for return center, however, around making a documentary on the effects of yage, a hallucinogenic potion prepared by native shamans to journey into the spirit world. Described as extremely unpleasant, yage also produces vomiting, “poisoning feelings” and disturbing visions. And that’s a best-case scenario, as Thompson discovered when he took the potion and became convinced it had killed him, describing abject terror, a stilling heartbeat and the feeling of his soul as separate from his body.

But what sounds like a really nasty trip really did have the potential to kill him. “It’s apparently almost suicidal to have any cocaine before you have yage but this guy…took me to a crack-house the night before [the ceremony].”

Despite this experience, a week later Thompson took the potion for a second time, and says he doesn’t rule out experimenting with it again in the future. “I’m kind of curious to see if I can get more comfortable with the places I’ve seen [whilst taking yage] and go to some more…I’m not a born again believer in Indian mythology, but it’s bizarrely fascinating to me that some of the things [I saw] were repeated.” But he’s not going to be doing it on camera, leaving that particular experience to the participants of his documentary, which Thompson hopes will be a variety of men and women including a psychologist and an anthropologist.

In the meantime Thompson is content with life back home, completing a doctorate of creative arts, teaching journalism at UWS and trying to make life easier for his wife. “I have to dig more ditches around the house,” he says, “suffer and give her a break” after his six-month journey.

“I hadn’t written a book before and when I started it was like someone had said ‘well, you’ve driven cars before, go and build one’.” Surprisingly, Thompson says that he finds boxing a useful skill when it comes to book-writing. “You learn to keep moving… don’t let things get too settled or you get whacked. Throw feints, don’t over-commit too soon to heavy punches...build up a [rhythm that’s] unsettling to the other person [and]…gradually build up to big heavy hits." It’s an analogy Thompson came up with after writing, but an accurate description of his book.

Photo courtesy of Pan MacMillan Publishing