Twenty years have passed since Berlin. Two decades which have a special meaning for me. Being there on that fateful week in November and facing the Brandenburg Tor from the safety zone of the West, launched me as a photojournalist, a career, which would bring me to Colombia. This newspaper, the one you now hold in your hands is in many ways the product of nineteen years, which followed the fall of The Wall.

I always wanted to be a war photographer, and after passing as an intern through The Independent in October 1989, I begged the then Photo Editor of the newspaper, Christopher McKane, to help me get to Berlin. I knew it would be one of the world’s great happenings: I had watched the exodus of refugees from the East on the BBC. I remember seeing desperate families cutting through barbwire in some Hungarian field while I sipped on cheap Bulgarian wine in my Islington Council flat. I had racked up my hours doorsteeping outside the Willesden Crown Court as a day-rate photographer for The Sun, Express and Sunday Sport. Fifty pounds a picture brought me another week of life as a “snapper”. The Albion Pub became my refuge as were the South Downs, where I could catch a Brighton bound British Rail from Waterloo. These were the early days and the muddy tracks on a steep and slippery slope that would lead me to the foggy plains of Berlin and the hills of Colombia.

McKane stoically acquiesced to my petition and handed me 40 rolls of Tri-X film. I booked an early morning flight from Heathrow to Tegel on British Airways. Having lived in Germany from 1973 to 1980 as my father worked for a Munich-based reinsurer, I hadn’t forgotten my Bavarian. I knew I could take the U-Bahn across Berlin on a couple of Deutschmarks. My years in “volkschule” in the farming communities of Murnau and Herrsching would not to be in vain, I justified. And I wanted to see the Zoo station, the setting of a book which marked my early adolescence; ‘Christiane F: We the children of Bahnhof Zoo,’ the story of a teenage prostitute and heroin addict at the famous Berlin train station. Waterloo was a place for Eton-bound Harrys and Potters. Zoo was rife with sex and syringes. I wanted to cross those tracks.

The U-Bahn took me to Zoo and Schlesisches Tor, from there I walked to check point Charlie through bohemian Kreuzberg, smoking my Silk Cuts and wearing the brown scarf that my Canadian “ex” had given me. War photographers always wore woolly scarves. It was a sign you were going places: to foreign lands with desert winds or frozen tundras. If you weren’t in Berlin you had to be in Kurdisthan. Chechnya in winter was for the brave.

Just follow the collapse of the Iron Curtain, make it to Prague and the orphanages of Ceaucescu’s Romania and your name would be cast forever in the history of photography. Then, you earned the right to wear the Bomber jacket: it went with the studio in the Rive Gauche. Magnum, Black Star and Contact were names dropped across cups of steaming coffee served up in late night diners along Der Mauer. My Silk Cuts were very Fleet Street. Gitanes were for those whose pictures changed the world.

I spent a week in Berlin shooting through cracks in the wall. As Trabants “crossed over” to freedom, I clicked away with my Nikon, catching rest on park benches, drinking warm wine, and looking for German sausages near “No Man’s Land.” It was a week to remember in a lifetime of photographic moments. The wall eventually did come down, but it took years to take away. When the story moved on so did I. My scarf-clad colleagues worked their way down the Danube covering revolutions and I headed back to London. Because of Berlin I earned another assignment the following spring: Colombia. Cover the elections and the “war on drugs”.

Two decades before the term became a cliché of cable news, the war was all too real. Galan had been gunned down. Car bombs exploded on the Calle 127. Power outages plunged the country into darkness and Pablo’s Hacienda Napoles wasn’t a tourist attraction of hippo-sensitive journalists, but a death trap where narcos and sicarios roamed. Colombia was a dangerous place and there were real risks in staying. Maybe there still are, such as making friends and a good life for oneself here.

Many near death encounters were never quite assimilated over the years. A 48 hour “detainment” in 1995 by the ELN along the Cacarica river in the Darién was in fact a kidnapping and another story in my yet to be written book. My years as a Black Star photographer led me to El Tiempo and I became their Photo Editor for six years. In journalism there are always twists and turns to a good story. From the house of the Santos, I began musing on what would become The City Paper. In April 2008, our newspaper first hit the streets of the Colombian capital. Now, into our 19th edition, I have made a return to the beginning. Berlin, a city that inspired these lines and Bogotá, the one that made them a reality.