Bill Clinton loves to shop.

On a March day in an elegant crafts store in Lima, the Peruvian capital, he hunted for presents for his wife and the women on his staff back home.

He had given a speech at a university earlier, and just came from a ceremony kicking off a programme to help impoverished Peruvians. Now he was eyeing a necklace with a green stone amulet. Standing all by himself, the former president of the United States moved his eyes across shelves of wooden carvings, jewellery and sculptures as he searched for something distinctive to take his wife. “She used to look forward to me coming home from wherever I’ve been,” he mused with a laugh.

“Now I’m afraid I’ll be second fiddle to whatever world leader she’s just met.”

Hillary Rodham Clinton, the secretary of state, had in fact just returned home from a trip to Mexico, then rushed to the White House to help announce a new war strategy. “I saw her on CNN standing behind the president talking about Afghanistan,” her husband said. “Then she went to Dallas for something. I don’t know why.”

He spotted a turquoise bracelet. “Hillary likes turquoise,” he noted as he fingered the item. He decided to buy it.

In between his globetrotting philanthropy, speech-making and legacy-burnishing, Clinton is a regular at crafts stores worldwide and can tell you the best ones in Hong Kong or Arusha. “They’re a great thing,” he said. “If all your staff are women and all your family are women, you just buy what you like and bring them home and figure out who to give them to.”

The store owner showed Clinton a selection of shoulder bags. He selected one he thought would be great for his friend Frank Giustra, the Canadian mining mogul, to give to Giustra’s girlfriend.

After half an hour, he slipped back into his motorcade and headed to a restaurant adjacent to pre-Incan ruins with his party: Giustra, six aides, some local people and me.

Clinton seemed tired, having flown overnight to Peru from New York before plunging into a full day of activities. More than eight years after leaving office and nearly five years after an open-heart operation, he looks, at 62, older than the boy president who dominated US politics in the 1990s, but he remains more robust than most men his age and full of intellectual energy. His left hand trembled a bit during dinner, as it tends to do late in the day. It worried him enough at one point that he had himself tested for Parkinson’s disease, but the results came back negative; his doctor says he has just signed too many autographs over the years. When I mentioned that he had to get hearing aids during his White House tenure because of the effects of too many campaign rallies, he cheerfully pulled out the latest equipment from his ear and showed off how sleek and virtually invisible it was.

By the end of a three-day jaunt through Peru and Colombia to check up on programmes sponsored by the William J Clinton Foundation, I realised how familiar the trip felt — not because it resembled the travels he made as president, but because it resembled the ones Hillary Clinton made as first lady. As a White House correspondent, I accompanied her to Africa, Europe and Latin America. Her trips were built around round-table discussions or visits to far-off villages to explore how people confronted the challenges of their world. That’s what Bill Clinton was doing now. The next day he would wake up in Lima, fly to Barranquilla in northern Colombia, and then to Medellin, before settling into a hotel in Cartagena. When I made the observation to him, he said with a laugh: “We’ve reversed roles.”

One day during the trip, he was standing on the tarmac at an airport in Colombia, struggling with the mobile telephone pressed to his ear. “The only bad thing about Hillary’s being secretary of state,” he groused good-naturedly, “is I can’t always get hold of her. They changed all her phone numbers, and her phone doesn’t work inside the State Department building.”

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