Inside the clapboard temple, the gnostic Shamanists had all their bases covered. Glittering posters of the Hindu deity Krishna hung next to paintings of Jesus Christ and drawings of creaturesque statues from a pre-Incan civilization. A candle was placed on a rug in the center of the room along with a makeshift altar and a cross made of sticks. “This is what Christmas is truly about,” Manque Runa (spirit name) began.

“Not new clothes or Reggaeton, but about connecting with the Mother Earth and to God.”

With that, he dipped a wooden cup into the pot of hallucinogenic yagé tea and passed it to me.

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THE MAGDALENA is Colombia’s biggest and most prized river — a crooked, rambling basin that cuts through the western half of the country for about 1,000 miles. The basin, which runs from the southwest corner near Ecuador through two subranges of the Andes mountains, is the aquatic lifeblood of the country: supplying water to 80 percent of the country’s population, it is also home to 2,735 species of animals, 20 percent of the world’s bird species, and soon up to 15 new hydroelectric dams. As Colombia emerges from 50 years of internal conflict, foreign development is rushing in, and a race to harness and manipulate the power of the Magdalena is on.

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It’s a Saturday morning during the celebration of Carnival in the western Venezuelan city of Mérida. In the Plaza de Toros, several bulls are preparing to do their last dance with a Spanish man dressed in gold while thousands of spectators watch. People from all over the country have descended upon Mérida for this, for the parades and parties happening in the rolling green mountains that make the city the adventure capital of Venezuela.

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SJÓN, a name adapted from the mouthful Sigurjón Birgir Sigurðsson, means “sight” in Icelandic. Outside of his native country, he is most widely known as the author of three award-winning Nordic folk novels (finally available in English) and as a collaborator of the nation’s creative wunderkind, Björk.

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At Medellín’s Parque Norte, on a sunny Saturday afternoon Breakfest Festival was getting underway. Set against backdrop of mountains and dreamy synthpop, crowds were splayed out on coffee bag pillows, hammocks and wooden lawn chairs. The crowd was taking awhile to get moving, picnicking on water bottles filled with vodka and cans of Miller Genuine Draft, two beverages so not Colombian that it took watching a girl salsa step with that distinct one-two hip swoosh while eating a choripán (sausage and bun) to remember where I was.

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María Luisa de Rangel cracks two raw chicken eggs over a blender full of frozen fruit before she adds the infant cereal or the ox’s eyeball. At her juice and sandwich shop, Super Batidos de María Luisa de Rangel, in the midst of Mérida, Venezuela’s Mercado Principal, she is making her most famous aphrodisiac-energy smoothie.

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