So for my entire holiday I seem to have avoided all tropical diseases: hepatitis, malaria, yellow fever and that common travelling illness I can only begin to spell (and end) - begins with d, ends with a, there are a number of other letters in between and you have to go to the loo a lot if you have it, you know. BUT, I have now come down with a cold, a common cold. I feel rotten, and want everyone to know about it. It´s putting me right back in the zone for London and work. I´d be in bed but I don´t have one so I´m bugging you instead. I have to be at Bogota airport at 7-something tonight which gives me several hours to kill. Bought a pirated The Killers album which should ease ... read more

Despite now having nine mosquito bites on my right hand big toe alone (Not kidding, I´ll take a photo, and this toe is no rare exception), I´ve decided to spend six days trekking through the Colombian jungle to the Lost City. I´ve dumped all but a day of my time in Venezuela to do this. It should be good though. I won´t get back until, ooh, Saturday, so you´ll have to amuse yourselves for a while.... read more

Apropos of nothing in particular (apart from the fact that Bogota has been boring, cold and rainy so far and I´ve just been to a couple of art galleries and played some basketball), herewith the Liz Bates Official Ways To Make Friends With Foreigners: Americans: Litter your conversation with words such as "wicked, rubbish, bin, swimming costume, golly, plasters and gumboots". They find this hilarious, they never tire of it, and it´s much easier than thinking up clever jokes or amusing anecdotes that they probably wouldn´t understand anyway. French: Be as sarcastic as you can. Dutch: Nothing in particular. They´re just really friendly to everyone with their red cheeks and hearty laughs. Israelis: Tell them you paid a lot more than they did for exactly the same thing. Germans: You probably won´t want to bother. If ... read more

Where they don´t have computers. Or antidotes, apparently, because they would have to be refridgerated, and they don´t have refridgerators. So if some horrible poison frog bites you, you have to get into a canoe and begin the 9 hour journey back to civilisation. Unless this happens to me, I´ll be back in the middle of Saturday night. I´ll have seen more animals (you´d think I´d have had enough of animals, but it seems not), including pink dolphins and birds, and I´ll have lazed in hammocks. I´ll surely have been bitten to pieces as well. The best bit is, I´m going to able to take some of my enormous supply of malaria tablets, which I spent three days´wages on and have so far just carried around with me. Then I´ll be in Bogota not long after ... read more

For the first few days of my Galapagos trip, my internal monologue was really pretty boring, going something like this: "Oh my god, this is so amazing. Oh my god, this is so amazing. Oh look, another one, even closer. Oh my god, there are about fifty more over there. Oh my, this is so amazing. ... ... Oh my god, I feel so ill. Oh my god, I feel so ill. I think I´m going to throw up. I feel so ill ... ... Oh my god, this is so amazing. Oh look, there´s a baby one. This is so amazing..." I think maybe you got the drift of this from my mid-trip entry. Anyway, I saw so many incredible animals. They´re crawling all over your feet practically. Heaped on top of each other. Not ... read more