Colombia’s Leticia is the tropical Amazonian paradise that I had expected Iquitos to be in Peru. It’s a small town, surrounded by jungle, with great street food and a warm, welcoming culture. The horns of mototaxis don’t blare incessantly like they do elsewhere, and every evening, tens of thousands of parrots descend on the main square as the sun is setting.

Leticia also had the worst internet of anywhere I’ve been so far on my travels. You would struggle to do much other than send messages, let alone watch Netflix or scroll social media. Interestingly, however, I wonder if this has had an unintended consequence for the town. More so than anywhere else I have been, Leticia was a vibrant hub of community activity, particularly in the evenings. The strong sense of human connection there was truly infectious. Groups of children would finish school and spend hours playing on their own in the streets – football, volleyball, dancing, and a myriad of other games they’d probably invented themselves. And it wasn’t just the kids, I spent almost every evening in Leticia playing football with the locals in the town plaza. We’d play for hours, drenched in sweat from the tropical heat, while others from the community watched on, chatting endlessly.

My favourite artist, Horrorshow, recently released a song called ‘Have A Nice Day’, exploring feelings of being a cog in a machine that values economic growth above all else. There’s a line in it where Solo says he’s daydreaming “of a magical land far away, where the children still know how to play, and the bottom line don’t get the final say”. As I wandered the streets of Leticia, with its kids running around the streets, and vendors selling cheap, delicious food purely for the love of it – I wondered if I’d accidentally stumbled across the magical land he was referring to.

While economic pressures and a desire for ‘progress’ certainly still exist in Leticia, there’s no doubt that they’ve got something right that much of the rest of the world has got very, very, wrong.

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Photos from Leticia, Colombia