Fran
Fran M Joined: August 18th 2008
Logged in: January 5th 2011
Logged in: January 5th 2011
Travel Blog Posts
From Ayacucho to Cusco
The best of Peru was yet to come... We didn't want to miss a trip to Nazca to see the famous Nazca lines-pictures of animals and shapes in the desert which are best seen from the air, so we took a flight over the lines in a tiny propellor airplane, just 4 passengers and the pilot. It was brilliant but was a bit rough since the cabin was unpressurised and the pilot was swinging the plane sharply to the left and right so that we got a good view of the different shapes, you could feel the blood draining out of your head! It was a cool experience, but unfortunately my camera completely died and I only had a cheap disposable yoke to take pictures :0( After Nazca, we took a very roundabout route to get ... read more
The pride of peru?!
After a great time in Cuenca, it was time to move on to Peru, somewhere we had wanted to go for a long time before this trip. We left the Scots in Cuenca and the rest of us got the bus down to the hectic border crossing into Peru and after a long day of travel we got to the fairly bleak beach town of Mancora. After being in the mountains for so long the heat in Mancora felt absolutely savage. Mancora was supposed to be the surf capital of Peru, but with only about a 30 metre stretch where there was a break onto some rocks and about 50 people on top of each other in the water with their surfboards it was fairly brutal. After a day on the beach and not much else ... read more
Terry at laguna Quilotoa
After a great time in the Galapagos, we headed off through the south of Ecuador towards Peru. We did some nice hiking around Laguna Quilotoa, but got completely lost as we usually do! We bumped into Siobhan and Anthony from Scotland who were also lost and made our way together to Chugchillan, a really nice mountain village with a very cosy hostal! There are very few buses out of the tiny town, so we had to make our way back to civilisation wedged into the back of a milktruck, some craic! After that we headed to Baños, a really nice little town with lots of thermal baths and loads of trips to do. We randomly bumped into Kirsty and Ali from England who we hadn't seen since Colombia, so the six of us had some good ... read more
Sealions!
After looking foward to this trip for so long we were finally off to the Galapagos Islands. The flight from Quito was about 3 hours and the first half hour is over the Andes so it's spectacular. As soon as we landed the heat was unreal. We got picked up, met our guide and were off to see our "pirate ship" home for the next 5 days. As we waited on the dock for the dingy to collect us a huge bull sea lion climbed up a sat down beside us. After meeting the crew and the other passengers we were off touring for the evening. Within a few hours of being there, we were swimming with sea lions, turtles and sting rays and we'd seen lots of the famous marine Igunas. Our boat, "The Sulidae" ... read more
Welcome to Ecuador!
....Terry's second blog.... Our first stop in Ecuador was in the town of Otavalo & we arrived just in time for it's famous Sunday market. The market was a bit touristy but nonetheless was incredibly colourful & had all sorts of handicrafts. We bought a few bits but had we been near the end of our trip we probably would have fleeced the place. We spent a few more days there hiking around the crater lake of Cuicocha & seeing Condors in a reserve & then we moved on to Quito. Quito was one the few capital cities we spent time in. We took a bus out to the "Midad del Mundo" (middle of the world) monument. Surprisingly there was nobody with buckets of water & sinks doing the water trick but we soon found out ... read more
Inside the salt mine cathedral
This is going to be a very short one-sorry!! Well as Terry already said, we didn't really have any impressions of Colombia before we came here and after spending the best part of 2 months travelling around, it was hard to leave in the end. On the last part of our journey towards Ecuador we basically spent some time travelling through the Andes and skipped past a couple of the bigger cities. The Salt Cathedral outside Bogota was really amazing, an enormous underground cathedral built inside a huge salt mine. On our way towards the small town of Salento, we ended up in a town called Honda waiting for a bus the following day. Spent the evening playing the Colombian version of bowls with a group of old guys, it was a very funny night-great game ... read more
Christmas Shopping...the Canadians are happiest in the beer aisle!
Well it was our first Christmas away from home, away from the usual excessive eating and drinking, the delicious food and Christmas parties...in the land of rice and beans we were really worried that our Christmas dinner might be a sad $2 plate of chicken stew, fried banana and a huge pile of white rice and some sort of beans. So we decided to splash out and rent a nice apartment for a few days with the lads whom we just got back from the lost city trip with. It turned out to be a great plan, we got a really gorgeous apartment for about $12 each a night and had a huge kitchen and a big roof terrace with a barbecue so it was perfect for throwing together a decent attempt at a christmas dinner. ... read more
Terry in the giant crib
Well, Since I've been appearing in Frans blogs, I decided I better write one of them. So here goes the first Colombia entry. Well, Colombia gets a lot of bad press so it was hard not to arrive with a few preconceptions. In Panama we had seen the Colombian tourist board advertisements on the TV, telling us the when you go to Colombia 'The only risk is wanting to stay'. After a couple of days we soon realised how beautiful and safe Colombia is & how much they are doing to shake off the bad image. We arrived in an amazing colonial city called Cartagena. The old part of town is contained within the original city walls & everything inside has been preserved in the old colonial style. The city was decorated for Christmas & had ... read more
Terry crossing the border
Crossing the Costa Rica-Panama border at Sixaola is one crossing you are unlikely to forget. The two countries are separated by a dodgy bridge with some railway sleepers and plenty of holes between them big enough to fall through...but with our enormous backpacks we were sure we would be fairly safe and wouldn't slip through to the raging river 40 feet below! The weather had been consistently bad for the last few days in Costa Rica so there was some doubt as to whether the boats would be running out to the Bocas del toro islands off the coast of Panama. Anyway we managed to get there and hoped the weather would clear up soon and we could enjoy the beautiful caribbean islands which we were dying to return to after our last trip there. Well ... read more
A baby Eyelash Pit Viper
Well since we had spent some time in Costa Rica before, we decided that we would just have a quick trip through it and revisit some of the best spots from our last trip. Our first stop was on the pacific coast in a town called Tamarindo, where giant leatherback turtles are supposed to nest on the beach at night. Well after paying for a turtle-spotting tour and sitting up for two nights waiting to see them there was no sign at all, so we were very disappointed after wasting our money and fairly tired as well! We then headed towards a place called La Fortuna, which has the best hotsprings we have ever seen..although they were way more fancy than the last time we visited but it was pure luxury and we were delighted to ... read more
