Garcia Marquez feted in homecoming

By Luis Jaime Acosta

ARACATACA, Colombia (Reuters) - Colombian novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez returned for the first time in more than 20 years on Wednesday to the home town that inspired him to create his most famous novel, "100 years of Solitude."

Thousands packed the town's streets to greet the 80-year-old patron of Latin America's magic-realism style, with cheers, shouts and applause for the man known fondly as Gabo on a visit 40 years after his most famous novel was published.

Dressed impeccably in white, the 1982 winner of the Nobel prize for literature stepped out of the tourist train that brought him to Aracataca as people screamed out "Long live Gabo," and "Gabo, welcome home."

Like a politician on the campaign trail, he signed autographs, posed for photographs and clasped hands with his admirers, who had waited outside for his arrival undeterred by the blazing sun and dripping humidity.

"It wasn't as good as I expected but it was OK," Garcia Marquez told Reuters ironically about his homecoming after a train ride through the steamy banana-growing region.

"We love him, we want to touch him. Garcia Marquez is ours," said one man in the crowd as the writer climbed into a horse-drawn vehicle guarded by armed police and soldiers.

Born in the town on March 6, 1927, he lived in Aracataca until he was nine with his grandparents and three aunts.

When he was 23, he returned to the town to sell his grandparents' home and his imagination was fired to create Macondo, the land where generations of the Buendia family lived out the marvels of his novel.