BOGOTA, COLOMBIA - In her first hours of freedom, Ingrid Betancourt held her children tight, visited her father's grave and sent her husband out to find oranges for breakfast.

"Last night was very beautiful," her husband, Juan Carlos Lecompte, said at the apartment of Betancourt's mother. "We talked all night long. We haven't slept."

After six years as a prisoner of Colombia's rebels, the former presidential candidate rushed onto the plane that brought her children from France and threw her arms around Lorenzo, 19, and Melanie, 22.

"They're my babies. They're my pride and my reason for living, my light, my moon, my stars," Betancourt said, holding their heads close as they planted kisses on her cheeks.

While the three Americans rescued with Betancourt stayed out of sight in a military hospital in Texas, television cameras followed Betancourt everywhere, and adoring Colombians gathered in the streets to shower her with applause.

Meanwhile, details emerged about her years in captivity.

Then, a meal was rice and beans. Bed was the ground under a patched plastic tarp. Betancourt and her fellow hostages bathed in rivers, and when they weren't chained by the neck to trees, they were forced on long marches to new hideouts under the jungle canopy.

Things worsened in recent months as government troops closed in and supplies became scarcer. "In the last year, it was tougher to get food. There was little variety, no fruit, no vegetables," Betancourt said.

The hostages would wake about 5:30 a.m., kidnapped Colombian soldier William Perez said Thursday, speaking to The Associated Press from the military hospital where he was being treated.

They would eat a breakfast of coffee and corn cakes, listen to the radio and exercise for an hour.

Lunch was rice, pasta and lentils. About once a month, they would get a little bit of meat or vegetables. They would be in bed by 6 p.m.

"Nothing more," said Perez, who spent a decade in captivity. "The only thing was the radio. They gave us batteries."

Clothing, especially underwear, was scarce, Betancourt said. Meals came from an old pot -- "shiny from so much use" -- that didn't have a top. They slept in improvised tents of plastic tarp.

"We had to patch up our boots because there was no way to get new ones," Betancourt said.

The hostages made references to the cruelty of their captors but offered few details. "It was not treatment that you can give to a living being ... ," Betancourt told France 2 television Thursday. "I wouldn't have given the treatment I had to an animal, perhaps not even to a plant. ... There was only arbitrary cruelty."

But often the greatest challenge was boredom, Perez said.

His worst memories were being chained by the neck to a post and going on forced marches without boots.

Hostages lived with injuries suffered during capture and with jungle diseases they had no way of treating. Two of the Americans were infected with leishmaniasis, a jungle parasite that causes often painful sores on the skin, with raised red edges and a central crater.

All three Americans were described Thursday as being in very good physical condition and high spirits.