The secret to taking ayahuasca

If you’ve ever wondered what happened to drug lord Pablo Escobar’s enormous cocaine and occasional execution palace, as featured in the Netflix series Narcos, I can tell you. These days – following the violent death of Escobar in 1993 and the consequent escape of his pet hippos from his private zoo – the estate is now a garish, plasticky, hippo-themed children’s waterpark called Hacienda Nápoles. I have just driven past it.

I am deep in the Colombian province of Antioquia. Until about six years ago this hilly, jungly, notably remote region – halfway between the capital Bogotá and the once-murderous cartel citadel of Medellin – was strictly off limits, thanks to Escobar and friends, alongside revolutionary guerrilla outfits, militias and kidnapping gangs.

Happily, much of that violence has receded, even as Pablo’s feral coke hippos have multiplied (they are now regarded as a pest, and sometimes wander into local towns). This means tourism has returned, via guest houses and quaint resorts – and boho-delic lodges dedicated to the legal ingestion of the Amazonian drug known as ‘ayahuasca’, ‘yage’, or ‘the sacred vine’. Ayahuasca is the most powerful psychedelic found in nature: it is known for making you puke, sob, howl and crap yourself. That’s if it doesn’t send you into a delusional spiritual meltdown, culminating in psychosis or even death (never mix it with SSRIs like Prozac).

So why do it? Because the best ayahuasca induces wild spiritual revelations, accompanied by exquisite visual hallucinations. That’s why people from across the world come to take it in its Amazonian homeland.

That is why I am here and why I have been joined by a motley but compelling crew of American tech bros, a notable neuroscientist, amusing Hackney artists, inquisitive local coffee barons, beautiful girls from Seoul and Berlin, a New York computer wizard, two Anglo-Danish film-makers, a guy in a feathered Sikh turban, and the granddaughter of a famous Spanish novelist.