David Coveney

In the Per­uvian jungle, along the Amazon, lurk mos­qui­toes car­ry­ing bot­fly eggs. Noth­ing exotic ever hap­pens to me on trips, so finally, some­thing inter­est­ing to write about. I’ve high­lighted this post because since I first wrote about it, this page has been vis­ited by over 100,00 people… who are prob­ably some­what more scared of jungles than they were before.

Well, my friend Peter con­firmed it with a dab of vas­el­ine, some patience and good light. I have a bot­fly.
I’ve done a sep­ar­ate page about it here.

When someone says they want to see you at noon, your mind usu­ally meanders to thoughts of lunches. A salad per­haps, or maybe some pasta. And a beer. Hmmmm… lovely lovely beer.
Not Dr O’Dempsey. Nice bloke though he is, he had an ulterior motive.
You see, since New York I noticed that a mos­quito bite had been getting […]

I’ve often wondered about this — a lot of trav­el­lers take out traveller’s cheques or buy cur­rency from their bank in advance. They often then exchange at banks when abroad.
As a reg­u­lar over­seas trav­el­ler I always felt, but hadn’t really researched prop­erly, that ATM’s and credit card trans­ac­tions were best — in spite of 2% […]

There’s a whole lot to catch up on isn’t there? The jungle, leav­ing South Amer­ica, and New York.
But you know, I’m feel­ing kind of lazy at the moment, so I’ll describe things in the way of a five year old. That might make for less typ­ing:
The jungle was dead brill!!! There were big snakes […]

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 […]