The water looks dirty, but isn’t.  You can see the goldfish clearly enough after all.

The Santa Catalina Convent in Arequipa is an astonishing city within a city.  In spite of the noise and bustle of the city outside, it manages to maintain a quiet calm.  The nuns who lived here (and a small number who [...]

I have a thing about the b3ta.com site. It keeps me tickled in those quiet moments. The fact they mentioned my botfly incident in their newsletter meant this site’s traffic and ranking improved a fair bit for a while, and occassionally I post answers to the question of the week spot. A [...]

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.

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]