There’s none of the razzle of parts of Lima here. While there are smarter neighbourhoods, and the football stadium is nicely done out, the majority of those in Iquitos are not well off. There’s a whole neighbourhood of wooden houses built on stilts on the edges of the Amazon, and begging, or at least peddling bagfuls of tourist T-shirts or necklaces, is common. While it’s generally good natured, you can make your trip a lot easier by ditching the lairy tourist get-up, and opting for something a bit more understated.

Step a few blocks away from the main square and you’ll find street stalls selling fruit juices, sweets, and cigarettes. If you’re feeling brave jump in a motorkar to Belen market, a sprawling mass of stalls offering knickers and flip flops one minute, grubs and larvae skewered on sticks cooking on grills and bbq corn on the cob the next, with stalls in the distance selling live chicks, dodgy DVDs, spices and batteries. It’s barely structured chaos - noisy, smelly and dirty, but also vibrant, exciting and alive.

Say hello to Renato, an 11-year-old wise-ass who tried to sell me all manner of tat by any means necessary. Don’t worry, he’ll find you. His English, and his patter, was impeccable. He was trying to flog me an enormous T-shirt – I told him I had plenty – but when I eventually relented and gave him some coins just for making me laugh, he looked at them in his palm and said, quick as you like, ‘Come on man, I’m hungry.’ That kid’ll go far.

C&T recommends:

• Eat: The grubs – I bottled it: but that’s one less traveller’s story I’ve got
• Drink: The deep red ‘rainforest juice’ from a local stall, unlike anything you’ve had before, but really refreshing
• Hear: Weirdly, ‘Have You Ever Seen The Rain’ by Creedence Clearwater Revival, coming out of a tinny radio in a shop selling hi-fi’s.
• Read: John Hemming’s new book, Tree of Rivers: The Story of the Amazon

There are many places you can jump off to from Lima – Cusco, to see the ancient Inca city of Machu Picchu; Puno, to play in the vast freshwater Lake Titicaca – but we headed inland about 600 miles north east, to Iquitos. Iquitos is a frontier town, accessible only by air or by sea, and is the gateway to the Amazon. Not far from the borders of Brazil, Columbia and Ecuador it attracts a fascinating mix of travellers, smugglers, beggars, ex-pats, conservationists and con artists. It’s a bit like Mos Isley in Star Wars, where Obi Wan and Luke Skywalker find Han Solo and Chewy amongst the odd-looking malcontents.

Once you’re there, the best way to get around is by motorised tuk tuk, or motorkar, as they’re known here. They buzz around the main square like bees, and if you’re not smart you’ll get stung by one too – drivers start the fare high and, if challenged, come down quickly; don’t pay more than two sol (about $1US in the local currency) for any journey under about 10 minutes. When it rains – which, as this is rain-forest territory, it does regularly – the drivers whip up plastic sheets in bright primary colours to cover their passengers.

It’s quite a sight – how Quadrophenia might look through the eyes of a four-year-old with a pack of crayons. If you’re smart enough, bring a lightweight waterproof and avoid the ‘psychedelic bin-liner’ look. The main square is the focal point of Iquitos, and in one corner is the most beautiful church. As I arrive, the sun sets behind it and pastel colours splash the sky behind the spires. Now that’s a welcome. I could grow to like this place.

C&T recommends:

• Drink: Cristal – crisp, Peruvian lager, popular with locals, and with advertising like this, it’s not that surprising
• Eat: Popcorn from a street vendor – the corn is twice the size as ours, so when it pops, you just can’t stop…
• Hear: the sound of the motorkar horns – after a few Cristals it almost becomes musical
• Check out: Fitzcarraldo – a film by Werner Herzog about a would-be rubber baron set in Iquitos

If Lima’s party animals are eating like that every weekend, they should be the size of Americans. We discovered why they’re not after lunch. Walking through the parks of Miraflores along the coast is like strolling through Miami or parts of LA. Every 10 meters there is someone doing something physical. Basketball courts, five-a-side pitches and skate ramps are all over the place, and sit-up benches, parallel bars and pull-up frames spring up on grass verges or on pavements like modern art. Because the weather’s great (in winter it drops to a spring-like 10 degrees and rain is rare), people are always outside in skimpy clothing, which means to survive you’ve got to look the part. I got by in a pair of well cut shorts and a linen shirt, but had to stick on a T-shirt to compete with local lads working out. They were cool enough though – at least, they didn’t laugh at my pathetic attempts to pump a set of pull-ups. 

C&T recommends:

• Eat: Bananas, what all the skate kids were scoffing, oddly enough
• Drink: Plenty of bottled water, the sun can get pretty insistent through the cloudy haze, and you’ll dehydrate remarkably quickly without knowing it
• Read: The poems of César Vallejo, Peru’s most famous poet
• Check out: La U, one of a number of football clubs in Lima, popular with many of the park players I watched, as well as many cab drivers

While any guide book can tell you Lima’s history, one thing it might not reveal is how spectacular its cuisine has become. Lima is the culinary jewel of South America – there are restaurants here that can out-style New York and could make our uppity little celebrity chefs in London shiver in fear.

I’d had a tip that the place to lunch was La Mar in Mirraflores, the posh end of the city. This was a chebicheria – cerbiche, the national dish, is raw fish served with spices and marinated in lime juice –  and it’s owned by Gastón Acurio, the Gordon Ramsay of Peru. It was rammed and rightly so. Here was flavour in Technicolor – tuna with tomato and coriander, Peruvian sea bass with avocado and sugar cane, clams and octopus in white vinegar and chilli, all served with the sweetest sweet potato. Peru is built on the potato – it has over 2,000 varieties. We nipped into the kitchen and nipped straight out again. It was tiny, packed with white-coated chefs sipping bottles of Cusquena beer and torching up the place with flambé-ing frying pans. It wasn’t posh, but it was slick – turn up in a collar  and you’ll fit straight in. The portions were massive and the prices tiny; a cerbiche was less than £3.

C&T recommends:

• Eat: Any of the cerbiche on the menu, they were all spectacular
• Drink: Pisco Sour – the outstanding Peruvian cocktail of Pisco grape brandy, lime juice, egg white and bitters
• Check out: Astridygaston.com - the site for Gaston Acurio’s flagship, and more formal, evening restaurant
• Listen: Jamie Cuadra’s laid back Peruvian chillout (goes down well with a Pisco Sour) 

It’s an intriguing city, Lima. I’d been warned that it was a grey, bleak and boring place, but we found a buzzing centre with death-wish drivers and laid-back locals, a town with luxury at its core but slums on its perimeter.

Peru’s capital has a violent past, as it was built on the back of a Spanish invasion that saw the conquistador Francisco Pizarro, with a pitiful army, quash hundreds of years of Incan rule and set up base there in 1535. Spain’s Catholicism sat uneasily with the locals, who were happy praying to more tangible, earthy gods like the sun and the mountains. You can see the remnants of this stilted marriage in the cathedral, designed by Pizarro himself, as the icon of the Virgin Mary wears a wide skirt, as if her torso was bursting from a hillside – the new god rising from the old.

Since then Lima has had regular bouts of instability, both political and literal. Earthquakes have regularly tested the city’s architecture – none more so than the shake of 1746 which buckled the stunning convent of St Francis, or San Francisco. Walking round the courtyard you can see where its walls have bulged under the pressure. But they’re still standing, which is more than can be said for the thousands of bodies below in the crypt. Bones and skulls of the monks are scattered in the catacombs, which are made out of brick, lime and the egg white of bird’s eggs, an early form of concrete. It’s quite a sight, genuine Indiana Jones territory. Take a guide, dress for exploration and get stuck in.

C&T recommends:

• Eat: Plantain chips – sold everywhere, a more flavoursome ready-salted crisp
• Drink: Inca Cola – the local fizz is disturbingly yellow, and violently sweet. But they love it
• Read: Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, by Peruvian writer and political activist Marios Vargos Llosa
• Listen: Bartola’s La Flor de Lima – suitably evocative of the city

In Café Rawda there’s the usual coffee-drinking and hookah-smoking. But there’s something else taking the attention of the clientele. As well as chess and cards, this is the backgammon centre of the city. Against my better judgement we challenge some of the locals to a game. Somehow I manage to win – the locals are so friendly in general I’m fairly sure I’ve been allowed the privilege as the intricacies of the game remain a bit of a mystery to me. Having avoided losing my shirt we start to head out of Damascus’s noise and crowds. There are two places to get the best view of the city; the road that runs up the hills the city is continually encroaching upon, or the Cham Palace Revolving restaurant.

Usually revolving restaurants are solely aimed at deep-pocketed tourists, but food is cheap in this town and a main meal here is only around £7. And so it should be – it gave me the worst food poisoning I’ve ever had. I’ll spare you the gruesome details of that part of the trip.

C&T recommends:

• Drink: Syrian wine – hardly vintage, but when in Rome…
• Vittels: Nothing from revolving restaurants.
• Songs in our head: The sounds of the Sheikh Habboush festival. As heard on the BBC’s ‘World Routes’ special on Damascus
• Link: Cham Palace (www.chamhotels.com/palace_damascus.html)
• Reading: The Islamist – Ed Husain (Penguin)

If you’ve seen the Passion of the Christ then you’ve heard the language of Aramaic – the mother tongue of Jesus himself. The place you get to hear it in Syria is Maaloula, home to the oldest church in the world – the Church of St Sergius and St Bacchus. This church is now the only place in the world where the language is still spoken.

You’re constantly aware of Syria’s position at a crossroads between east and west, and switching religions we head south back past Damascus to Zeinab. This is culturally as close to Iran – which is distinctly Persian, rather than Arabic – as you’ll get without heading to that country itself. The mosque here has 400kg of gold on its roof and judging by the reaction of the security guard when we get the camera out you’d think we had come here to nick it all.

Fortunately there are no guns around (at least on show) in Damascus, but there is an enormous amount of military hardware back in the capital at the Army museum. This place is worth the £5 entry purely for the stunning 360 degree exhibit of the battlefields of the Yom Kippur War.

C&T recommends:

• Drink: Arak – the local spirit on sale at the Church. Basically, a fancier version of communion wine
• Vittles: Chicken kebabs – on sale everywhere and – even when bought off the street – the best food we found
• Songs in our head: John Debney’s score for The Passion of The Christ
• Link: Maaloula (www.maaloula.net)
• Reading: Forward magazine (www.fw-magazine.com)

This is a city that runs on caffeine and nicotine. In every restaurant and café, people are near surgically-attached to water pipes. We take refuge at Café Al Nofura next to the Omayyad Mosque, a building that forms the centerpiece of the old town. We start talking to Saeid, Hiba and Bader and share coffee and tobacco. Within minutes, Bader is complimenting me on my clothes and trying to marry me off to Hiba. I jokingly agree and then wonder if I might be getting myself into trouble. The idea of trying to extricate myself from a shotgun marriage is enough to have me spluttering on my hookah – each of which contains the equivalent of a packet of cigarettes.

Despite this, the pipes taste deceptively ‘soft’ and it’s only the morning after that you realise how much tobacco you’ve gone through, so go easy if you’re not used to smoking. They last about an hour and many residents have one to themselves. Try banning smoking here and there would be uproar, despite the seeming popularity of ‘democratic’ president Bashar Al-Assad whose picture adorns every other wall. As one local points out, “you learn to ignore him after a while.”

C&T recommends:

• Drink: Coffee – lots of it. Traditional Syrian coffee is usually flavoured with cardammon and heavily sweetened
• Vittles: Fruit… well, fruit-flavoured tobacco anyway
• Songs in our head: The current Arabic Top Ten
• Link: The Shisha Shop (http://www.theshishashop.com/)
• Reading: The New Lion of Damascus: Bashar al-Asad and Modern Syria by David W. Lesch (Yale University Press)

Waking up in one of the Beit Al Mamlouka hotel’s rooms is like waking up in a work of art. Based in the Christian quarter of the old city, this is Syria’s first boutique hotel and has eight unique rooms. Leaving it to explore the old city is like entering the fabric of history.

This is the oldest continually inhabited city in the world and the sense of biblical history is almost overpowering. However, on this morning most of the current inhabitants seem to be in the bus station, less concerned with ancient culture than with watching way too many vehicles trying to get down one thoroughfare. This traffic chaos seems to be Damascus’ default setting and where possible you should get around on foot; provided you’re correctly kitted out, it’s a lot quicker.

We head to Riad’s favourite café and before I know it I’m cutting up a sheep’s head for lunch; ignore what it is you’re actually cutting up and the meat is surprisingly edible, if a bit lacking in flavour.

Dessert is provided at the Bakdash ice cream parlour. For the teetotalers of Damascus, ice cream and fruit juices take the place of booze and places selling them are as much a window into society as you’d expect pubs and bars to be. Bakdash is in the Hamidiyeh Souk – the oldest of Damascus’ many markets, built in 1880 – and rakes in a staggering $4000 a day.

Elsewhere we see old men shaping copper pots, sheep’s wool weaved into Bedouin tent fabric and later risk a bit of cut-throat shaving. The end result’s worth it, but we wouldn’t say it’s exactly relaxing; just concentrate on the Arabic posters on the wall and try to ignore the large razor hovering near your jugular.

C&T recommends:

• Drink: Local freshly-squeezed Orange Juice
• Vittles: Sheep’s tongue and cheek
• Songs in our head: The First Cut Is The Deepest – Rod Stewart
• Link: Beit Al Mamlouka (Almamlouka.com)
• Reading: I Wouldn’t Start From Here, by Andrew Mueller (Portobello). A new ‘history of the 21st Century so far’ containing several chapters on Syria and Lebanon

We thread through the nooks and crannies that define the old town area of Damascus to Haretna restaurant hoping to find some traditional food only to be told it’s a western menu. Local cuisine can wait – we’re starving. We’re thirsty too, but beer and food aren’t mixed here so we eat quickly and head to the Piano Bar only to be told that we’re not allowed in because we have no female company. “Families only,” the bouncer explains to our guide, Riad. This is nothing to do with our attire; ‘Family’ is basically a euphemism for girls who should know better and are out with blokes who should be with their wives.

This is typical of the mixed social attitudes you find in Syria and an example of how different it is from much of the surrounding Middle East. We’re warmly welcomed to Oxygen, where the clientele is resoundingly similar. We move on to the hottest bar in Damascus. Marmar is 10 years old and has them dancing on the tables at the weekends; unfortunately, weekends here are not what they are in England. Being a predominantly Muslim country it’s worth remembering that the weekend is actually Friday and Saturday, so plan you city break around that.

There is also a dubious red light district around Martyr’s Square, but this should be avoided at all costs; while Syria’s laid-back and cosmopolitan in many respects, the state takes a hard-line view of this kind of thing.

C&T recommends:

• Drink: Barada – the local beer
• Vittles: It was called Cordon Blue (sic)
• Songs in our head: The Lebanese music being sung in Oxygen. Pick up a sample of it here
• Link: Damascus Nightlife information
• Reading: Voyager inflight magazine (www.bmivoyager.com)