Our next sojourn out of La Paz was to head for Lake Titicaca and Isla Del Sol (Island of the sun), the birthplace of the Sun, according to the Incas. We were trying to decide whether to go to Lake Titicaca from Peru or Bolivia. After talking with people and reading up a bit about it all, we decided on going from Copacabana in Bolivia. Apparently there is a lot of tension between the locals and the foreign owned tour companies in Peru, and as a tourist you can feel unwelcome as a result. It also fitted in with our plans [View Full Entry]

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From the Amazon jungle, it was back to La Paz, which was feeling less crazy and more like home by now. We have both decided we love the City, and if anyone reading this is planning to go to La Paz, I have to give our hostel a big plug. It is called Arthy´s Guesthouse and is run by a local family, as opposed to a lot of hostels in Bolivia which are foreign owned. The whole family is really friendly and super helpful. The father, Ruben, has the warmest, most contagious smile you will ever see and always has a [View Full Entry]

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"Go on, Dahna, the more you fear, the worse it will be," came the voice of our guide as he read the mixed feelings showing across my face. I do not really know what grounding that theory has. It was a new found fairybook style dream of mine to swim with pink river dolphins. However, the murky brown opaque water that hid alligators and piranhas, were NOT part of my fairybook style dream. Just twenty meters away we had seen a 4 meter alligator baking in the sun with his jaws wide open. Our guide told us that the caymen, this [View Full Entry]

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Volunteering was a great experience on many levels... but I still did not get to see any pink river dolphins and I could not let go of the idea. I never even knew that they existed until I was reading up on the Amazon last year, and then I got really excited. So, we spent a couple of nights in Rurrenabaque to organise a pampas trip. When we were not shopping around for a responsible tour company to go with, we wandered the streets and took in more of the town and I thankfully managed to not have any more cow [View Full Entry]

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We spent most of our time in La Paz trying to find a responsible tour operator to go to the Bolivian Amazon basin with. La Paz is full of travel agencies and tour companies, and the more we read, the more disillusioned we became. Visiting the Amazon rainforest has been a childhood dream for me. I see it as a totally sacred place: home to the greatest biodiversity of flora and fauna in the world, and also one of the major sources of oxygen for the world. It is a living natural museum, that is being desecrated from all sides (Brazil, [View Full Entry]

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Cobblestone streets zig zag up either side of a steep canyon: full of mini buses, vans and taxis that collectively define anarchy better than any dictionary. There are absolutely NO rules. No need for indicators. Traffic lights occasionally exist, more occaisonally work and even more occaisionally yet they are followed. Crossings are not crossings. Lanes are not lanes. Walkways are so narrow in many places that pedestrians spill out on to the bustling slippery steep streets, seemingly oblivious to the traffic around them. Right of way is determined by the vehicle with the loudest horn and brav [View Full Entry]

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Here are some more pics from Parinacota. [View Full Entry]

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The most popular gringo route from Chile or Argentina to Bolivia is to go through the Atacama desert, stay at San Pedro and then do a jeep tour of the salt flats. We wanted to do it a bit differently, so we decided to fly to Arica, on the coast of Northern Chile then head up to Bolivia stopping at Putre and then Parioncota. It turned out to be such a worthwhile and interesting trip, all the more so because it was a little off the beaten track and we often had places all to ourselves. It turned out that our [View Full Entry]

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We caught a bus from Cordoba to Santiago and then headed to Vina del mar where our friends Bergoña and Cristobal live. Actually, they live on the beach right between Vina del Mar and Valparaiso. These were the guys that we met in the Ancud hostel on chiloe, and they invited us to stay at their place when we came back through Santiago. I love that there are people in the world as friendly, open, inviting and welcoming as these guys are. They had only just met us when they invited us to come and stay with them, and they have [View Full Entry]

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The highlight of our Cordoba stay was a day trip out to Condorito National Park. Just under two hours out of Coroba by bus, this park was an un planned trip just to escape the city for a day, and it was amazing! We were almost 3000 meters above sea level, so it was icy cold, but luckily we had sun to take the edge of that a little. It was such an amazing landscape, and as it is not one of the heavily promoted parks, there was no one else there. We had it all to ourselves, which was blissful. [View Full Entry]

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