David Coveney

Funny things ste­reo­types. They give you expect­a­tions. And then you find they often don’t match real­ity. New York is quiet… almost rest­ful, after the jungle and Lima. There aren’t horns going off every­where, people are polite and help­ful (though they are in Peru also, I just can’t under­stand them so much) […]

I thought a handy idea would be to carry some samplers of after­shave. Then if I wanted to smell nice I could just use that. Small and light.
These samples tend to come in small glass vials.
And in a ruck­sack, small glass vials aren’t so clever. They were safely inside my wash­bag, but sadly I […]

Sounds kinda sweet in the song.
But not when one of the b*stard things turns up on your neck. And talk about big… I’ve seen plenty in France and Spain, but this one looked cap­able of car­ry­ing off a small child.
Other wild­life I’ve met today includes a gian ant-eater. Com­edy looks and big wet nose, but […]

Just a couple of days ago I was in San­ti­ago, a city with a gleam­ing under­ground sys­tem pur­chased from the French. If you want to get a feel for the San­ti­ago Metro, try trav­el­ling on line 1 in Paris. The trains are almost identical. The main dif­fer­ence is that the sys­tem is much […]

I’ve just real­ised, in read­ing back through the vari­ous post­ings that I’ve missed out on fair chunks of the his­tory of South Amer­ica that I want to post.
But I’m not going to do it here. Stuff like that takes a little more pre­par­a­tion because oth­er­wise you can be excep­tion­ally mis­lead­ing. But I’m dying to […]

If I’d woken up and been told that, due to a bout of amne­sia I’d been flown to Mad­rid, then I could eas­ily believe that’s where I’d landed. Ser­i­ously — San­ti­ago is a smart, mod­ern city with effi­cient pub­lic trans­port, occas­sional traffic jams, and lots of for­eign­ers try­ing to make a buck. It […]

For a pan­icked moment I thought maybe I’d picked up worms. Per­haps from a cat, dog or llama I’d been play­ing with.
Then I remembered, I’d earlier eaten spa­ghetti. And I’ve not long had a nasty bout of food pois­on­ing. And it takes a while for the digest­ive sys­tem to work prop­erly after being […]

I must like them, because I think this is about my third. No more deserts from now, how­ever. My tan is suit­ably well developed (at least on exposed skin — need to work on my back now) and I think I now under­stand what dry empty places are about.
The Vil­lage of San Pedro de Atacama
San Pedro de […]

So in Arica, look­ing for some­thing to do, I found the offices of Raices Andi­nas (or some­thing like that, maybe the other way round — I don’t have my notes on me) and booked myself on a four day exped­i­tion of the local national parks. And this was a fas­cin­at­ing trip indeed, although in […]