Northern Argentina travel update After two and a half months travelling through Peru and Bolivia, it was a bit of a culture shock (a very pleasant one!) coming over the border into Argentina. The change in living standards is like chalk and cheese between Argentina and these two countries! Once again driving on sealed roads, having toilet paper in toilets, cafes with decent coffee, rubbish bins to throw out rubbish, no stale bread, and decent sized supermarkets and pharmacies to name but a few. Anecdote: Apparently drug trafficking from Bolivia into Argentina is a big problem. We saw this first hand on the bus we took from the Bolivian border to Salta. Around midnight, half way to Salta the bus was stopped next to a little hut in the middle of no where and all the ... read more

Anecdotes from Bolivia: Sucre. Our first day in Sucre was a bit of a disaster. After a 12 hour bus ride from La Paz, we arrived at 8am on a Sunday morning. At the hotel we checked into, we noticed an advertisement touting a bus trip out to a beautiful Sunday markets in a town 65km away, Tarabuco. As we would only be in Sucre for a few days, we realised this would be our only opportunity to go to these markets, so we quickly hurried down to the pick up point by 8:30am, jumped on the bus and off we went. Three kilometres down the road, we run into a massive traffic jam. We find out the major road out of the Sucre to Tarabuco has been closed for a bicycle race until midday, however ... read more

For the ones interested, here are a couple of anecdotes to tell from our travels. We realise they are a little long, so only read through if you have the time! * We had a 5 hour bus ride to get to the start of the 8 day trek through the Huayhuash mountain range. It was a public bus that we had to catch, so it was super old, suspension pretty much shot and we ended up with a couple of seats right at the back of the bus over the axles and next to the toilet. Now this 5 hour bus trip was only 160 km, however it was the bumpiest, dustiest most pot holed road we have come across so far. The whole trip we bounced around like jack in the boxes and by ... read more

We then flew to Ecuador where we spent a few days in the capital, Quito and visited the touristic sites including the “middle of the world” located in latitude 00. We stayed with my cousin and his beautiful family who also showed us around and took us to a great craft market.... read more