David Coveney

Con­dors are scav­engers — that means they only eat meat of anim­als that have died and died recently.… Now, in the Colca Val­ley the condor watch­ing is a huge draw, although in real­ity the spec­tac­u­lar scenery should be enough for most.
So, to keep the tour­ists com­ing and to keep them happy it helps if as […]

It was Douglas Adams that sug­ges­ted that wherever you are in the uni­verse, ask­ing for some­thing that sounds like “Gin and Tonic” will usu­ally give you the same drink. Of course I’ve only been able to test this the­ory on Earth, but so far it had proven unbreak­able. So in a non touristy […]

Per­uvian food can be quite eas­ily cat­egor­ised into the fol­low­ing sec­tions:
Salty and meaty.
Egg based.
Dan­ger­ous.
Salty and fishy.
Scary.
Salty and veget­arian.
Tour­istic.
Lomo Saltado is one of the clas­sic dishes — fried and salted beef, served in a big pile with gravy, veget­ables and chips — all mixed together. There may be some salad on the side.
Dan­ger­ous food can be […]

This place is the jewel in the South Amer­ican tour­ist crown. An aban­doned town at the top of a moun­tain that never got des­troyed by the colo­ni­als — partly it seems because it just wasn’t all that import­ant and a lot because of its rather inac­ces­ible loc­a­tion.
I won’t bore on about the his­tory of this […]

A lot of trav­el­lers worry about being robbed, kid­napped, raped, or jailed for trumped up drugs charges.
But they get on a knackered bus, driven by a coca leaf chew­ing driver for 12hrs at a stretch, along the most dan­ger­ous roads in the world, without a second thought. I´m pretty cer­tain more trav­el­lers die in road […]

This is a com­plete re-write of the ori­ginal, hur­ried, post­ing which failed to cover any detail about the Colca Canyon or Are­quipa… or any­where much that had passed between post­ings. I hadn’t real­ised I’d been so scarce with information.

Arriv­ing High at Are­quipa
We took what could only be described as a mobile sauna mas­quer­ad­ing as a […]

Would have liked to, but the thought of fall­ing in sand and filling every nook and cranny of my body with sand just didn´t appeal!
So instead we climbed up to the top of the biggest dune we could see, watched the sun­set, and then ran down using these com­edy strides of about six feet. […]

And now we find ourselves in Paracas — a four hour bus ride from Lima. It’s a tiny fish­ing vil­lage with a lot of res­taur­ants good naturedly tout­ing for busi­ness on the prom­en­ade, a small beach, a few hos­tels and a feel­ing of chaotic charm. It’s clearly poor as hell, but every­one seems […]

At the end of the night a few of us were still ready to party. The recep­tion went from 2pm to 11pm and to be hon­est… that’s not enough when you have the wind in your sails. Myself and Romana had wondered off from the group to invest­ig­ate another party in the military […]