David Coveney

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 still […]

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 big snakes […]

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 […]