DebP

After visiting Costa Rica, I had to travel up to Guatemala to meet up with my friend Jane from the UK, who was in Central America for a month. After discovering it would take around 3 days on the bus, I looked on line for a flight, and hey presto - a ridiculously cheap business class ticket was mine! I have never travelled anything other than cattle class before, so this was something of a pleasant novelty - they brought me drinks (seemed a bit silly to order a G&T at 9am so settled for endless cups of tea and coffee), and then a nice meal with proper cutlery! An hour or so later, I was in Guatemala City and soon after that, I was on a bus up to Coban, from where I would attempt ... read more

I arrived in Cali, Colombia after journeying continuously from Quito in Ecuador: foolishly, when I looked at the map, I guessed the travel time to be about 6 hours, including the border crossing, but it turned out to be more like 20, including a solitary walk over the Colombian border in the dark. It was early morning when I got to Cali, and after unpacking and a quick breakfast I set off from the hostel to find Aviatur, the travel agency who handle visits to Gorgona. I had read about Gorgona in my guidebook a few weeks earlier - it's a small island off the pacific coast and was a prison colony for several decades before becoming a national park. The island is full of snakes and monkeys (and the surrounding coastline teeming with sharks( and ... read more

After Cusco, next stop was Nazca, a place I was really excited about visiting. The bus trip there could be done overnight from Cusco, and the staff at our hostel produced a nice, shiny leaflet, showing a nice, shiny bus. I´ve travelled on many buses like this in South America, and they´re fine for long trips - reclining seats, toilet, air con etc. Normally, I go down the bus station and buy my ticket there once I´ve checked out all the companies, but we decided this time to let the guys at the hostel book it for us. They hostel also doubles as a tour agency and books stuff for people every day - what could go wrong? We booked three days ahead, and got a bit nervous when the tickets didn´t materialise. Then when they ... read more

And so after 5 days of disappointments and false starts, I finally took off from La Paz and headed for Rurrenabaque, a small town in the jungle from where I would do a little tour in a boat for a few days. The first few minutes of the flight were exciting, but small planes do jump around a bit and before I knew it, I was having to sit very still with my eyes closed, praying that I didn´t throw up. Fortunately, the flight was only 40 minutes long, and we were soon landing on the rather muddy runway without too much drama. The change in landscape was incredible - no more high altitude, scruffy city - instead there were palm trees, greenery, huts and a rather significant increase in temperature! After checking into a small ... read more

They say the road to hell is paved with good intentions. I don´t know what the road to Sucre is paved with, but it made the bus stop every few minutes, then crawl onwards again until it finally terminated several hours short of my destination. Unbeknown to me, my ´direct´ ticket to Sucre actually terminated in Potosi, one of the highest altitude cities in the world. What with it being 5am 'n' all, I was seriously, utterly underwhelmed. I always knew the Argentian bus system was a luxury that wouldn't be repeated in other south American countries, but I must admit my heart leapt a little when I saw the symbols for ´reclining seat´and ´video' printed on the side of the bus before boarding. Turned out that yes, the seat did recline, but the mechanism to ... read more