South America can be a pretty dangerous place. After all, it’s home to some of the most infamous drug syndicates, angry guerrillas and corrupt military regimes the world has ever seen. What chance the poor traveller of having an entire holiday here without coming to grief in some horrible and unpredictable manner or being stripped of his every possession at gunpoint? The answer is virtually nil, if you listen to Rob Rachowiecki, author of the Peru and Ecuador chapters in the Lonely Planet series. In his enticing introduction to safety in the area, Rob adopts the tone of a man who sees himself in the role of the lead character in one of those Street Fighter games, where unidentified assailants try to bring you down at every opportunity.

The first defence against the myriad of attackers that Rob envisages on any trip from station to hotel is to carry your bag on your front. He advises us to “move fast and avoid stopping, which makes it difficult for anyone intent on cutting the bag.” He goes on to tell us that “if I have to stop, at a street crossing for instance, I move gently from side to side so I can feel if anyone is touching my pack, and I look around a lot…” If this begins to conjure up the image of Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man standing on a street corner waiting for the lights to change, then Rob is quick to dispel the illusion that he might be a little too worried. “I don’t feel paranoid”, he assures us, before adding, sinisterly, “I never place my bag on the ground unless I have my foot on it.”

Rob’s best advice is to employ a friend to keep a twenty-four hour watch on you, as he offers us this fascinating insight into the psyche of your average South American thief: “They’d much rather steal something from the tired and unalert traveller who has put a bag on a chair whilst buying a coffee. Ten seconds later, the traveller has the coffee – but the thief has the bag!”

Rob is clearly a man who expects things to go wrong. He warns us against snatch-theft, pickpockets, razor-blade artists, group distractions and con men, amongst other things. You soon begin to realise that, in the eyes of Rob, every single passer-by in the street is a potential villain: ”A bunch of kids fighting in front of you, an old lady “accidentally” bumping into you, someone dropping something in your path or spilling something on your clothes – the possibilities go on and on.” I always have an image of Rob standing nervously in the street, swaying from side to side and looking in all directions, then sprinting away screaming and clutching his bag because an old lady has dropped her hot dog onto the ground in front of him.

Apparently all these precautions are intended to make you as less susceptible to crime as possible. Yet it’s difficult to imagine a more conspicuous target than the one outlined in the Lonely Planet guides. At times the advice seems to border on outright paranoia. What seems most startling is the assumption that if you don’t follow this absurd amount of detail then you must actually expect to be the victim of crime. Phrases like “don’t fall asleep in a railway compartment or you will wake up with everything gone” or “don’t place your bag down for even a second” make you wonder what kind of unfortunate incidents befell Rob in the past to drive him to such lengths. He must have literally got mugged every time he stepped out his front door. You can imagine what his insurance broker must have felt like when he opened his post of a Monday morning (“So they got Rachowiecki again? How much did he lose this time?”) You begin to wonder whether he was christened Rob at all, or whether it is simply a cruel and ironic nickname that he has picked up along the way. One even wonders whether thieves saw “Rob Rachowiecki” on his luggage and viewed it as an open invitation.

Whatever, anyone reading the Lonely Planet advice on travel precautions can be left in no uncertain terms that this is no safe continent for the unprepared traveller.