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Cocaine Train – Tracing my Bloodline through Colombia

Stephen Smith`s Cocaine Train is an extremely personal piece of travel writing that takes place in one of the most violent countries on earth, where the cause of death is regularly `massacre`, drink drivers play chicken and kidnap stories pass for dinner party conversation; nine times more dangerous than the United States, Colombia is no place for the nervous traveller.So it is much against his better judgement that, in the summer of 1998, coinciding with a World Cup and a general election, journalist Stephen Smith finds himself boarding the Cocaine Train out of Cali, home of Colombia`s infamous drugs cartel. Its passengers prey to thieves, extortionists and a dozen different varieties of paramilitary, the Cocaine Train is one of the last remnants of a once great railway system, and Smith is riding in it in search of a grandfather he barely knew: Fred Leslie Frost, pioneering railway man, upright citizen and diplomat, with a Colombian mistress and an illegitimate son.As remote from his suburban British origins as it is possible to imagine, the Colombia Smith uncovers on his extraordinary journey is surreally beautiful, unfathomably savage, seedily glamorous and mercilessly corroded by the trade in drugs.

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