Poet Francesca Beard doesn’t speak Spanish, had heard some pretty scary stories about Colombia and stayed in the noisiest hotel in Medellín. But in spite of her fears, she discovered a new world of potatoes, figured out the complexities of translating poetry and had a life-changing experience at the International Poetry Festival.

My name is Francesca Beard. I am a performance poet. Back in December 2002, I met Jonathan Barker from the Literature Department of the British Council in London. He told me about the International Poetry Festival of Medellín. It takes place in Colombia, a potentially dangerous country to visit. But the festival was unique – poets from all over the world, performing to huge crowds, to promote peace. ‘Sounds mind-blowing, I’d love to go’, I declared.

I don’t speak Spanish. Fortunately, Hannah Henderson, from the British Council Literature Department does. It was arranged for her to fly out to Bogotá and Medellín for consultancies at the same time as I was to be at the Festival. I would have a friend and interpreter.

This made the trip much less daunting, especially since, as soon as I mentioned Colombia, people looked at me as if I’d just told them I had an illness the prognosis of which was not good. ‘Have you seen "Clear and Present Danger"?’ they’d ask. I began to feel quite brave, heroic even. ‘I’m going to Medellín, murder capital of the world’, I’d say, possibly inaccurately, but with an air of steely moral conviction.

I flew out of London on Friday 13 June and was delayed in Madrid for the night. It didn’t feel that unlucky; I spent the evening by the side of a five-star pool, listening to traveller's tales, but I was impatient to join Hannah.

The next night, after I’d caught up with Hannah and Maria Clemencia from the British Council in Colombia, we sat on a balcony, overlooking a square, where a wedding was taking place by torchlight. Maria Clemencia introduced us to Ajiaco – Bogotá’s traditional soup, a celebration of up to 17 different potato varieties. Ingredients include chicken, garlic, corn, avocado, capers and a herb called guascas, but really, it’s all about the potato. Apparently, you can get it in Harrods Food Hall, but it’s just not the same.

At noon the following day, we were taken to the airport where we got on a small plane that flew northwest to Antioqua, along the Andean range, to Colombia’s second largest city, the fashion capital of that nation, birth and death place of drug lord Pablo Escobar, 45,000 murders taking place in the city during the last decade and home of the XIII International Poetry Festival. Over the next week, 77 poetry readings would take place in Medellín, and 18 more cities. 64 poets coming from 42 countries would participate.

Alice O’Keefe, in her mid-twenties, street-wise, into salsa and literature, met us at the airport and bundled us into a taxi. That ride combined beauty and terror in equal measure, making it the perfect poetic intro to the Festival. Based on driving behaviour, life was cheap.

Medellín is lush, green, it felt warmer than high-altitude Bogotá. The weather was changeable – warm sun one moment, heavy rain the next. Condors circle over the mountains that surround the city. They look like vultures, black shapes, ugly – beautiful. It’s the only Colombian city that has a metro system, space-age splayed 30 metres above the churches, while underneath, in the main square, huge fat Botero sculptures shine, rain drops glinting in the sun.

All the poets and organisers were staying at the same hotel. I could write a novel on the Hotel Nutibara. There was a pool and Turkish bath on the third floor and on the second, a ballroom and dining room where we all ate. The rooms were large and airy – Humphrey Bogart would have felt comfortable rolling up his shirt sleeves, smoking a Boston Mild, looking down at the Boteros and across at the metro as it shuttled through the mountainous skyline.

On the first night, I lay my jet-lagged body down on the cool, linen sheets, closed my eyes and was swept away by wave after tumultuous wave of frenzied, disco SALSA pounding, in a way that I never thought salsa could pound, but POUNDING from the nightclub below. As I twisted and turned in a horrible horizontal parody of the dance-floor, I thought ‘I’ll see if I can move up to Hannah’s floor tomorrow. I’m too weak to try and communicate to the front desk now'.

The next morning, I went down to the ballroom, got my arepas and guanabana juice and sat down at a table of a bleary-eyed African statesmen of poetry. ‘Sleep well?’ asked Atukwei Okai of Ghana. How we laughed, hollow eyed, slightly hysterical. But it turned out, some of us were laughing for the disco, while others had pipes, followed by a man selling mango. ‘You would never think’, said Jack Mapanje, of Malawi, ‘that one man and his mango could make so much noise. But trust me, you don’t want to move to the other side’. ‘But what should we do’, I cried, ‘Go with the flow’, they said.

Go with the flow. I’m 35 and quite pernickety. The poets who I met at the festival were mostly older, in their fifties, sixties, seventies, they were established, famous, revered. They were spokesmen and women for creeds, ideas, nations that existed because these poets had given voice to them. If ever anyone was going to have a tantrum and throw a TV, artistically-speaking, it should have been these guys.

Anyway, my point is, these were very particular people and yet I never heard anyone say a bad word against the Hotel Nutibara, its idiosyncratic plumbing, lift service, phone system. I never saw any poet complain at the hecticity of the festival, the strange food, the sometimes unorthodox time-keeping – they all went with the flow. It was inspiring. This is the job for me – I want to be like that when I grow up.

The first performance was in an open-air amphitheatre overlooking the city – the view was magical, with the lights twinkling in backdrop. There were maybe 1,000 people there, all smiling and seeming to be having a great time. It was very relaxed and informal; hawkers walked in between the crowd, selling beer and fried plantain. The reading was very long – there were seven poets, but the atmosphere was wonderful. It was an experience I’ll never forget, walking to the front of the stage and waving ‘hola’ and all those people waving and shouting back ‘hola!’

After the performance, Alice took us to a party. We talked till late about North America and the effect it has on Latin America, Latin American culture and the effect it has on Indian culture and then we danced to salsa.

The next morning, we left for Bellavista Prison. The prison is aptly named, surrounded by mountains that stretch as far as the eye could see. The views are breath-takingly beautiful. Once in, after a complex series of fingerprinting and identity checks, it was a medieval walled town, with men and the occasional woman walking freely between various outdoor enclosures and hawkers selling drinks, food, cigarettes.

The reading took place in a sports hall/church, underneath a lurid white and bloodied Christ on the cross. Afterwards, we were surrounded by hundreds of prisoners, asking for autographs, kissing our hands, giving us notes. Very unlike London prisons. It wasn’t intimidating, though there were no guards to be seen and we did have to be semi-dragged out of the mobbed hall to leave. But they seemed like nice people, those prisoners. On the way out, we were told that the cells are tiny – 20 men crammed into a one-man cell and that with regard to sentencing and punishment measures in jail, human rights conditions are shocking. Apparently, you have a ninety-five per cent chance of catching HIV in a Colombian prison.

The next day, we had a day off – we were told not to go out except in big groups, but Alice showed us a circuit from the hotel round a sliver of the town that was safe, so we were able to explore a bit. I am mixed race English/South-East Asian, so looks-wise, I can easily pass for Colombian – a very racially mixed culture, where it’s quite common to have families of black and white and all shades in between.

I found that the Colombian people I met were easy to communicate with – even though I don’t speak their language and they didn’t speak mine. Every Colombian I talked to seemed to have a grasp of global economics and world politics – I’d say, much more so than British people in general. They also had sad stories – in Bogotá, everyone had a friend who was damaged by violence resulting from the drug and gun culture – in Medellín, it was personal sorrow.

I did one performance outside Medellín, in Caldas, a town where the tough guys tie their pretty pie-bald ponies to the fence while they drink rum till dawn, then weave home, singing. The night was warm and expectant. The performance went great – we bonded with the Mayor of the town during the show. He took a huge entourage out to a local taverna to sing and dance and celebrate the festival for peace. In the walled courtyard of this pub, I stood and listened to the old music drifting through the night, smelled the lime trees and saw the moon hang loose in the perfumed sky and that is a night I will never forget. Thank you.

The organisers, the Rendon brothers, were charming, hospitable but busy, so we only ever met briefly to smile – the universal language of ‘hello! Yes, Good.’ I would have liked to have thanked them – and also, to be honest, get more feedback. Being British, from London, a perfectionist as far as it is possible, it made me tense that so much seemed fluid. Sometimes, the listings in the official programme bore only the merest whiff of a cryptic relationship to the actual schedule of events. Of course, in the general scheme of things, with 77 poetry readings in 19 cities, 64 poets many of them world-renowned, representing 42 nations, giving me a bit more sense of structure was probably not their priority.

Thank Goodness Hannah was there – not just for me, but as it turned out, for many of the other English-speaking, non-Spanish speaking poets. Hannah achieved brain-melt on the third day and had to sit in a darkened room, but I’m very glad we went for it. We did discuss just going with the flow, but the standard of poetry was so high so it seemed a shame not to do the best job we could. The process of translation was incredibly intense – involving four people – myself, Hannah, Roberto, the translator of my texts and Diana, the actress that the Rendon brothers had chosen to perform my work in translation. We found that cross-culturally, some things are untranslatable in a literal fashion, that we might have to say something completely different, to get the nearest sense across.

By Thursday afternoon, we had sorted out new and improved translations, rehearsed pieces and were able to relax.

After the last performance, people came and came and gave me things – coins, origami twists, poems; girls and guys untying friendship bracelets with their teeth, rewinding the string round my wrist. I still have two origami swans and a passport photo in the bottom of my briefcase. The photograph is of Emalia, who operated the lifts at The Nutibara. The last night, she came unexpectedly to the final performance in the square. I had never seen her out of the lifts. She was different from the other operators, being female and younger and somehow the endless vertical exchanges didn’t quite suit her in the same way as beaming miniature Elvis and taciturn Spock. I found out she was normally the bar-tender, people came from all over Medellín to sip her cocktails and watch the world go by. She had hurt her ankle – I couldn’t work out how – she didn’t speak any English and I had no Spanish. The hotel was like a family to her so she did this job while she recovered. I found her a chair so she could rest her foot. She told me all sorts of lovely things, squeezing my hand and she gave me that passport photograph of her. She looks very stern, not at all how I remember her, which is radiating joy.

At the end of the performance, Roberto came and told me that there was a shaman ceremony tonight, up in the mountains. His friend was driving, we would be back by 7.00 a.m., in plenty of time for me to take the shuttle to the airport.

‘What’s the ceremony?’ I asked.

It was one of memory and forgetting, it involved stones and fire – not the one where you have to drink some bitter evil vine juice that sends you crazy for three days. But it was a chance in a lifetime – did I want to go?

Roberto was my favourite amongst the Colombian men in that he did not flirt with me.

‘Sounds amazing’ I said.

‘It will be, they hardly do these ceremonies any more – not so near to the cities. Hey, I’ll look after you, I promise you’ll catch your plane.’

It was that blue-pill/red-pill Matrix moment – if I were any kind of a real poet, surely I would go…  

‘I can’t go’, I said. ‘I have to stay here with Hannah.’

Roberto shrugged. ‘OK’, he said. ‘We’ll go to the party.’

There was yet another party on the last night – all the poets were conga-ing in a long snaky line through the tables, Amina Baraka was dancing an extraordinary dance – dramatic abstract mime, the walking band was there, trumpet, drums, African rhythms, tonal beats forming the structure of the song, the opposite to those rhythmic guitar-based Cuban or Brazilian melodies.

But me and Roberto sat on the steps of the hotel drinking Aguardiente – the national drink – a little like pastis, and then I wanted to see the city so we walked through the 4.00 a.m. streets, past the drag queens and the homeless children and the silent churches and then three hours later, I had one final shower in the gorgeous old-fashioned bathroom, met Hannah downstairs in the lobby and we began the long journey home.

Final footnote – on the plane, which was very crowded, we passed the sublime Amancio Prada in first class. He came back to talk to us. He told us – ‘The stewardess is a fan. She upgraded me but when I saw you, I asked her to let you sit in first class too, but she says she can’t… in any case, it is much more interesting here. Do you mind if I stay?’ and this legendary singer and poet perched on the armrest of Hannah’s chair and nattered with us about music and Spain and Arab culture for hours, until they dimmed the lights, started the movie and he had to get back to first class.

Thank you so much to Jonathan Barker, Maria Clemencia, Hannah Henderson, the British Council in London and Colombia, as well as the organisers of the International Festival of Poetry at Medellín. It was a mind-blowing experience, I loved it.

Francesca Beard was born in Kuala Lumpur and is now based in the UK. Her work features in many anthologies and her self-published chapbook, Cheap, is now in its fourth imprint.