Mexico 1967

'The train from Merida to Palenque steamed through the night at about 20 mph with no lights on, stopping every hour or so to embark more passengers and hundreds of people selling fruits and coca cola. The lights were off to prevent insects and animals flying out of the jungle and into the train.  . . .  Out of the jungle rise the most beautiful ruins I have ever seen, backed by the enormous green base of mountains with the buildings standing at different levels amongst the trees. A huge palace with a pagoda-like structure and lots of underground passages is the only pyramid in Mexico which contains a burial chamber.'

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​           Peru 1968

Machu Picchu, the 'lost city of the Incas' lies high in the Andes, above the Rio Urubamba, reached on foot by a mountain trail from Cusco. It sits like a saddle, with terraced fields, and temple of the sun, below the pointed peak of Huayna Picchu.

From Lima the railway snakes and zig-zags up the Andes to Cerro de Pasco, and the road descends to Pucalpa on the Rio Ucayali, the longest tributary of the Amazon, whence cargo boats travel slowly down stream to Iquitos.

​'The train from Machu Picchu was so crowded that we had to ride for five hours on the step. The next day we spent twelve hours on the train from Cusco to Puno, high up over the Altiplano, through villages famous for their lamb and mutton. Puno lies on Lake Titicaca, the highest navigable lake in the world, occupied by the Uru people who live on floating islands made of reeds'.

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Brazil 1969

'We arrived at Belem early on a tropical morning. When the sun rose at 5.30 am we set off towards the town to find the zoo...'  This was our accommodation for three months, while we caught migratory birds with mist-nets to discover if they carried the influenza virus, and measured the prevalence of malaria amongst the Amerindians on the Xingu river, a tributary of the Amazon.

​'Two hours before dawn we unfurled the nets, and then every forty minutes we inspected them and removed the netted birds, releasing the bats and humming birds immediately. From the others we took blood specimens for later antigenic testing'.

'The first village we visited was on the Rio Fresco, five hundred miles SSW of Belem. The Gorotire, numbering about four hundred Ge-speaking Indians, live in a village by the river, in dense game-filled forest. While we were there Apollo XI landed on the moon; it was certainly a strange experience to hear the broadcasts in such surroundings, amongst people who believed the moon to be their ancestor'.

'We were warmly received by the missionaries and the Indian Foundation postman. A sea of grinning faces strongly implied we were welcome. We spent the day making blood smears from 120 volunteers, pricking each one's finger with a sterile needle and applying a drop of blood to a microscope slide for later examination'.

Manaus on the Amazon is another 'lost city' of Latin America.  The dome of its opera house where Caruso sang Verdi, built from the fortunes of the rubber boom in the nineteenth century, is covered with 36,000 dazzling ceramic tiles and its auditorium beneath is lit by 198 glass chandeliers.

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This is a foretaste of a forthcoming book composed of my travel diaries ...

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DOWN THE AMAZON
​SLOWLY
BY BOAT