Ummm, where did the year go? One minute I’m swinging an all-too-indolent backside in a hammock, next thing I know I’m home and dry. So what about the last two weeks? Well with little under a fortnight left, finally I flew out of Colombia - with virtually no doubt, the most phenomenal place I will ever go - and flew straight to Buenos Aires for one last stab at becoming the youngest man in history ever to contract gout. Truth is, my outlook unexpectedly changed after the flight; following 11½ months travelling, under two weeks from home and already having started [View Full Entry]

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Santa Marta, groan... Before much longer I was well enough to want to travel and desperately needing to leave. Having kind of ground to a halt hanging out with my amigas who ran the hotel I'd stayed in I think I'd forgotten how to backpack. (It's terribly difficult don't you know... You get up each day (if you want), do what you want, when you want until you wonder whether trying somewhere new might be worth a pop. Get off bus and repeat. For best results try not to dwell too much on how sickeningly privileged your life is in a [View Full Entry]

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Hello, me again. I feel that today, as our numbers continue to grow, perhaps I should start by welcoming all new bloggers from across the world into the family. Worthy of special mention must be Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, President of the Islamic Republic of Iran, although I can't deny feeling a hint of jealousy; I have to make do with writing mundane entries about cleaning sand from my orifices and embarrassingly located mosquito bites and I won't have some bearded fundamentalist pissing on my chips with all his talk of exercising his fundamental right as a sovereign nation to cruise into the [View Full Entry]

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So, back to Medellin. So much for just staying another night. I made it out a week later. Can't remember if I said but unless you take advantage of the Monday/Tuesday window's relative calm, you just accept you'll be there for another week. Rather amusingly, all the caners who'd arrived there long before I first did were not only still there but were so sick of the excess that they'd cleaned their acts right up. They were jogging and swimming like nobody's business so each afternoon I'd join them and actually started getting my arse in shape. And each evening I'd [View Full Entry]

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Woah, what a title! So many different levels! What? Have I been abducted? No, I just thought, you know... sometimes along comes something that's pithy, terse and succinct, and that's too damn good not to use. Oh come on! You'd have done the same. Anyway, it's better than this entry's working title "Colombia, Backpack, Graham". Hmmm, is it too late to start again? Colombia! Crash! Backpack! Bang! Graham! Wallop! No, wait... too much explosive energy in the first six words methinks. This entry's in danger of climax [View Full Entry]

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Bolivia, un país roto. En Argentina las cosas son baratas y funcionan, en Bolivia más barato aún pero nada funciona. Y esto es mucho decir pero los bolivianos no son la raza más alegre. Haciéndoles justicia ellos no tienen mucho para hacerse sonreír. Llegaron los españoles en los primeros días del siglo 16 y no perdieron tiempo en destruir el Imperio Inca. En 1824, Ganó su independencia Perú de España, mientras Alto Perú permaneció en posesión del imperio español. Un año después, el héroe nacional - y por lo general panamericano - Simón Bolívar envió una fuerza bajo el mandato del [View Full Entry]

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What do you mean I told you all to read my blog and then didn't touch it for months? I've been busy... Right, let's see what I can do here then. After all the fun of freezing to death in the middle of a Patagonian winter, I jumped straight on a three hour flight back to Buenos Aires, and stayed there just long enough to go to SouthFest, a house festival for 20,000 people down by the docks. The line-up included Plump DJ's and LCD Soundsystem and was headlined by Deep Dish. Now I've got enough of Deep Dish's CD's to [View Full Entry]

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Any traveller worth his salt knows to be wary of street meat and other such delicacies while travelling around tinpot parts of the world. Now I'm no particular believer in omens but as a general rule of mine I always try to stay away from countries that resemble an enormous tapeworm. With this in mind I could scarcely believe what a brave little soldier I was being in visiting Chile. Famous for little more than its ridiculous shape and a former dictator, here is a country that's populated by 15m people who like to consider their country the England of Latin [View Full Entry]

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Know what the unluckiest thing to do in South America is? Bump into travellers fresh out of Argentina. Invariably they'll bore the arse off you about the place. They'll have you believe it's full of supermodels, the food's world-class and everything's so cheap you'll be left wondering why their worthless currency even bothers changing hands. The country famously spent many years sliding into economic meltdown culminating with an unpegging of the currency from the US dollar in 2002 that led to most of the population effectively losing two-thirds of their wealth overnight. Things have set [View Full Entry]

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Four hours' bus and a boat ride south from Salvador'll take you to Barra Grande, an astonishingly beautiful little fishing village at the end of a peninsula. Quite honestly the closest to Heaven-on-earth I've yet seen. The whole village is built on the sand of some of Brazil's most beautiful beaches. Peaceful doesn't even begin to describe it and the people are lovely. It's slowly becoming an upmarket tourist town and now's the perfect time in its development to visit it. Lovely restaurants, hardly any vehicles and a seriously laid-back vibe. So beautifully off the beaten track it [View Full Entry]

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