A home for the raw, the unreported

Hamann

By Correspondent Jack Hamann

LIMA, Peru (CNN) -- I've been sand surfing in Death Valley. I've been lost in Kathmandu. I once slept in the crater of an active volcano. I've jumped off a bridge in New Zealand, crashed down a river in Switzerland and was beaten with branches in Russia.

And, usually, they pay me to do it.

I am a correspondent for CNN, but that isn't the half of it. I am part lucky, part dumb, occasionally brave and often foolish. You'll find plenty of network correspondents who are smarter or better looking or harder working, or all three.

But few of them, I'll bet, end up in more weird places with more interesting people than I do.

The British pig farmer in the Yukon. The Australian drug runner in Nepal.

The neurotic New England fish broker in Tokyo. People who steal meteorites or swim with salmon or suck prairie dogs or sic dogs on bears.

People you'd love to hang out with but wouldn't want to marry.

In the weeks ahead, this column for CNN Interactive will my chance to share raw nuggets from the cutting room floor. A 10-minute story on CNN is typically culled from about 10 hours of videotape. Each hour of tape represents perhaps another four hours of adventure.

Imagine all the interesting stuff never makes it on the air. Those orphaned tales will have a foster home in this little corner of the Web. In this space, I won't be a correspondent. I simply want to correspond.

As I enter these words into my laptop computer, I can see a plastic bag full of pills on my bed. We are in Lima, Peru, preparing to head into the Andes for a week of wandering around potato fields. The day began with a visit from a nurse, whose job it is to take my blood pressure, gently scold me for drinking strong coffee, and politely lecture me on survival tips at high altitude. The pills in the bag are all "in case." In case what? I'm not sure.

If anything interesting happens, I'll let you know.

Jack Hamann'scolumn will appear regularly in Nature.

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