Kiltros

Before we tell you about our boat journey up the river Madeira, we thought we´d add some of the things that we talked about when we left Boliva and were cosily ensconced in Porto Velho. The border crossing between Bolivia and Brazil is more than just a linguistic divide, or a bureaucratic formality, it is a line between a country that is incredibly poor and one that is "the poorest of the rich or the richest of the poor" in the memorable words of one of the first Brazilians we met. Bolivia is an example of what happens to a society that has the misfortune to sit on huge deposits of mineral wealth. Everyone that has ruled Bolivia has shafted Boliva at some point in time (Since the spanish arrived anyway). Before the Spanish arrived the ... read more

This entry will be quick cos we just lost everything that we had just written... dammit. Basically we are now in Brazil, which is lovely and very green and yellow at the moment. To get here we passed through Potosi, Sucre, Cochabamaba and La Paz...we will leave the jungle experience until later, seeing as how we are still in the jungle really, being in Porto Velho. Potosi. Arrived here at 1am and started by inslting a cabbie by asking him if he had ID. WE had heard bad things re Potosi and wanted to make sure we werent mugged. Next day we watched the footie, hard to do given that everyone was watching this festival called "El gran Poder" (the great power) on telly, and no-one was arsed about the footie. Found it in a caff ... read more

OK so the five day trek over mountains and through the semi tropical jungle was worth the pain, the discomfort and the altitude probs. We arrived at Aguas Calientes (I think we left you there in the last blog) and were straight to our rather damp hostel on the main square. Our sunken spirits rocketed upwards with the discovery of hot water in the shower...this is not to be underestimated, since we learned in Peru that hot water is a relative concept in these parts. (in Cusco I asked one of the hostel staff where I could find a hot shower since ours was FREEZING...so he looked at me puzzled like, turned on the shower tap, stuck his hand in the water and says "this is hot" - OH NO IT WASN´T! Little git, I had ... read more

Having read the last blog entry we are now laughing at our naive talk of "hellish" 12 hour journeys. Ha! We now laugh in the face of childish journeys such as that. Our last bus ride took 27 hours...more on that later tho, as first we must talk about Arequipa. Arequipa is a lovely place, people, architecture, food...everything about this place is great. A seriously chilled city based in an oasis in the desert, it has several volcanoes overlooking it (a bit like santiago with the snowcapped andes and no smog!) and what is even better it has the best kebab shop outside Manchester (Called El Turko cos over here they don´t distinguish between any of the former peoples of the Ottoman Empire, they are simply all Turks). We spent a wicked day going around the ... read more

hmm, this is our first blog entry so treat it as experimental! We left santiago on monday night, and after an emotional send off we settled down to an 11 hour journey...what chileans call a marker pen journey, cos you have to paint your bum crack back on afterwards. This journey took us to our first stop on our trip from Chile to Venezuela- the city of Copiapo...which Darwin didn´t rate much (he said they were all obsessed with mining and it was quite dull) and nor do we really. It is however notable for the astonishing numbers of pregnant women (maybe its something in the water?) and for a serious lack of local conversation skills. Maybe the lack of talk has something to do with the number of babies and pregnant women...the scenery is also ... read more