To see some of the realities here you don't have to go very far. I was taken to a hospital in January and held against my will in one of the worst areas of the city. I had to pay to get out. I hesitate to say I was kidnapped but I can think of no other word for it. I did need treatment but I lived over 60 blocks away. And there was a hospital four blocks from my apartment. But instead the ambulance took me La L - also called the Bronx. And once there I was held against my will under armed guard in a place comparable to hell. The hospital is called Santa Clara.

La L lies barely ten blocks from the touristic centre of Bogotá, La Candelaria, which is home to most of the backpackers. Despite the proximity, it is a scary place. I was only held there for 24 hours before paying whatever I needed to get out.

La L is home to drug traffickers and drug addicts and truly reflects a scene from Dante's Inferno. I will forever be haunted by the things I saw there. I have seen how low humanity can sink. Half naked women who had no awareness of where they were or even who they were, so strung out were they. Men with their eyes half punched out. Others with a crazed look in their eyes - you have to see that look in the flesh to understand. It terrified me. These were people trapped by poverty, drugs and circumstance. I didn't care what I had to pay. And I will never forget what I saw.

I was traumatized for weeks after, sometimes bursting into tears in the street. It was a hard time. It left me with no illusions and it brought to the surface many of the things I had been through since arriving here. In the three years I have been in Colombia, I have had friends murdered, I have been threatened with death, I have had my girlfriend threatened with death. I lived in a village in a conflict zone for a year. The region is called El Meta. It is a zone with a reputation for drug barons and paramilitaries. The police chief of the village was the foremost trafficker of cocaine. He also sold girls from the local schools for sex.