Hello amigos, So if they'd told me it was called the Chilean Antartic maybe I'd have been more prepared for Patagonia - the 100mph winds, the snow blizzards, the sheer bloody cold of the place!!!! It is astonishingly beautiful, and the glacier "Grey" is gorgeous - but then I have no point of comparison!!! And the Eco camp is great, and I chose it, but the fact that these are posh tents hadn´t really sunk in! Ours was en suite and had a wood burning stove and once you got that going for a couple of hours it was wonderful - [View Full Entry]

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Well the Atacama has proved a bit of a disappointment. The trips seem a bit lightweight based around lacklustre ruins that have been reconstructed, and the scenery is just much less spectacular than Bolivia. Lagoons with half a dozen flamingos and a thousand tourists, while in Bolivia (oops sorry the Pluricultural Republic of Bolivia) there were four of us looking at a thousand flamingos. They point out a few vicuña (smallest of the llama family, wild and rather deer like) but we saw big flocks of them - you know where! It feels like they are trying to create a tourist [View Full Entry]

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Hello my loves, Well last time I wrote we were in Peru I believe, since then we have done Bolivia and moved on to Chile!!! Of course it is no longer called Bolivia but The Pluricultural Republic of Bolivia - don't it just trip off the tongue? - whoever came up with it really should consider a career in advertising! Although we went to La Paz, we didn't get to see any of it. We were exhausted having travelled all day and had to be up at 5.30 to set off to Oruro. We did this part of the trip by [View Full Entry]

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Hello Darlings, Greetings from Puno (where?) - on the shores of lake Titicaca - the world's highest navigable lake (though no-one seems to be entirely sure what that means!!!). And this is our last day in Peru! We had a final day in Cusco and they were having a big festival. This consisted of lots of people marching each group accompanied by their band. Pretty much everyone in Cusco seemed to be taking part: the nurses paraded, the lawyers, the accountants. the building workers and auxiliary trades, the young Israelis, various saints, virgins and churches were represented . . . . [View Full Entry]

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Some photos from the long march. [View Full Entry]

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Hello my lovelies, We have just completed our second big adventure. . . . an enormously long and arduous trek through the mountains to Machu Picchu. We met up in Cusco - a group of twelve - people we were to get to know very well over the next six days! I was very nervous about this part of the holiday as it involves walking up and down hills and vallies at altitude for on average 5 hours a day and is not recommended for "novices". Our fellow travellers were four Germans, two Americans (mother and son), two Mexicans, and another [View Full Entry]

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This is our fourth day in Peru and it´s day 17 of our holiday. We flew to Lima and had an afternoon and a night there. Big polluted city . . . not very nice hotel . . . hmmm that´s about it really! Then we flew to Cusco - the stop off point for those doing the Inca Trail etc. Cusco is like a cross beween Florence and Dehli (how do I come to that conclusion having not been to either????) full of churches and beggers. Well they aren´t exactly beggars, just poor people wanting to sell you things you [View Full Entry]

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Hi - this is the last of the blogs from the rainforest (slightly out of order). Flora and fauna. First the jungle was very green but there was little other colour which was unexpected. (I can hear Neil sharpening the keys of his keyboard for an acerbic comment along the lines of what an idiot I am, but I did expect a flower or two.) All the flowers etc. are up in the tree tops and so you only get to see them from the river (sometimes). Whilst treking through the jungle you can sometimes smell a sweet scent and that [View Full Entry]

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Cotopaxi is an active volcano two hours drive from Quito and the scenery is spectacular - provided you have the energy to look up from the handlebars of your bike, over which you are slumped, to appreciate it! We were cycling at 3600 metres and it was our first taste of what altitude does to you when you try and do something harder than lifting a tea cup to your lips. I found it hell - but surprisingly so did my super fit husband!!!! But it was good training for the Salkantay trail to Machu Picchu - which I am now [View Full Entry]

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The Achuar traditionally didn't live in communities at all but in isolated family groups. This has changed in the last 20 or so years and the main factor has been the influence of the Catholic church. Traditionally they killed each other a lot, which lead to revenge killings and so it went on .... and on and on. Now they don't kill each other, they sometimes go to church (they didn't worship a God before the arrival of the Catholics) but they maintain their own customs which are all linked basically to the forest and pachamama or mother earth. We went [View Full Entry]

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