Bridging The GAP I (Tracey) am stuck in a Paraguayan time-warp. It has been 12 years since my last confession. On Friday 30 January I found myself back in Paraguay, 626 weeks or 4384 days since the first time I landed there, aged 18, on my Gap Year between school and University. I might have changed, but thankfully Paraguay has not. Back in 1997 I spent 4 months working in a children´s home, run by nuns, just outside the capital, Asuncion. Our travels in South America so far have been a bit of a trip down memory lane because after leaving [View Full Entry]

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So Nearly Not Uruguay To get to the border with Uruguay you can take various boats from Buenos Aires to Colonia or Montevideo, but we decided to take the slightly slower, more scenic (and cheaper) route from Tigre to Calama. This meant leaving the house on Saturday morning before Daniela had even come home from her Friday night out in BA. The train ride out to Tigre was uneventful but very busy and we were pleased we had managed to squirrel enough coins away in a severely change-challenged city to get tickets from the machine rather than queue up to buy [View Full Entry]

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A Very Bendy Beginning The journey from Valparaiso in Chile to San Luis in Argentina made us very happy we had waited until the second of January, instead of travelling on New Year´s day. It was one of the curviest, windiest and bendiest roads we have ever been on. We had forgotten the one tiny little thing in the way of a nice straight road through...The Andes! It was a beautiful trip though and aside from the 4 hour border crossing process it was a great journey. The border crossing took so long because despite it being the day after new [View Full Entry]

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Think Of A Price... Double It... Then Double It Again After weeks travelling at altitude it was finally time to come down, waaaaaaay down, to warmer climates and thicker air. The road from Bolivia wasted no time doing this, decending almost 3000 metres into a brown desert valley. Clearly this scorching hot, non-stop descent had caused some serious issues in the past as the roadside was littered with blown tires, car and truck parts and the occasional burnt out and rusting wreck. It´s no wonder they now have emergency sand filled run-offs every few kilometres for vehicles that have [View Full Entry]

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The Sun Was Born Here, But Don't Expect Us To Tell You About It Leaving Peru was simple enough and two border posts and a bit of rain later we found ourselves arriving in Bolivia. What was the welcome? An entry tax to our first destination, Copacabana. Not the Copacabana of cheesy disco fame, but a tiny border town on the shores of Lake Titicaca. From here you can visit the Isla Del Sol - the birthplace of the sun and the lake according to Inca legends. Copacabana is a tourist town, full of places selling REAL coffee, hooray! We should [View Full Entry]

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Time Travellers With all the zen we could muster we agreed to leave the trauma of the stolen bag behind us as we excitedly crossed a new border into Peru. Rather handily (insert sarcastic tones here) the border post is pretty much in the middle of nowhere, roughly half way between two border towns. As it was now dark and with no local buses in sight we decided to take a taxi to the nearest town of Tumbes. Unfortunately being in the middle of nowhere, at night, gives local taxi drivers somewhat of a price negotiating advantage....... USUALLY. What our [View Full Entry]

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But First... We´re not going to dwell on this for too long... but our bag got stolen... from right above our heads! We´re not sure how it happened, save to say that the bus was packed with plenty of people standing. It was on the way to the Ecuador/Peru border at Huaquillas and we now know that professional criminals work this route. That is why there are no pictures with this blog. Our camera and the chip were in the bag. Bugger! We Thought We Were Fit So, anyway, we started the second leg of our trip in Ecuador and its [View Full Entry]

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Living in a Toilet Bowl Having travelled in India we now truly appreciate why it is a country that polarizes opinion. Surely no other country offers such vast social, religious and sensory extremes. On one hand India is a vile, putrid and diseased cesspit. We saw a dead body in the street and there are millions more starving to death on every corner, under every bridge and in every train and bus station. At Varanasi station hundreds of people stepped over a dying woman as she lay motionless in a cloud of hungry flies. In a country with this much [View Full Entry]

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Ah, Nepal. Land of landslides and power cuts, fledgling governments and knackered buses. What a shame we didn't have longer to enjoy it - Though thanks to China and the small issue of a closed Tibet border we did have an extra two weeks and they have been fabulous. Introducing Chaos Kathmandu really is the dirtiest, noisiest city we think we have been to, though in spite of that it has a charm that is hard to put your finger on. Despite being the capital city, almost all of the roads are a slushy mixture of mud, pebbles and litter. Concrete [View Full Entry]

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Part 2, The Revenge As the saying goes, "everyone deserves a second chance" so almost two months after we scurried out of Thailand with faces like thunder we returned, this time to the far north. We decided that perhaps rude, modern and excessively commercial Bangkok did not necessarily represent the best of Thailand, especially as it is possible to say the same thing about London. Our plan this time was to head to a smaller place called Chang Mai. From conversations with backpackers Chang Mai sounded like it would be a chilled little oasis and the perfect place to res [View Full Entry]

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