It turned out that they weren't lying or overexagerrating when the tour agency had casually told us: 'There's no road for the last five hours of the journey'. That, we were soon to realise, was why our bus had wheels suitable for a juggernaut battling through a Russian winter. At around 2am we shifted from tarmac roads to dirt tracks, our new road formed with rocks easily the size of footballs. And unfortunately for the passengers, our driver insisted on tackling them front on- testing the suspension as regularly as possible. The bus was jumping around and bouncing everywhere, it was impossible to sleep or talk, and made for an extremely interesting toilet experience thats for sure. This wasn't however the first disruption to our night's sleep. Earlier on when we had left La Paz (after ... read more

Puno is a town on the shores of Lake Titicaca, and is famous for being the entrance to the Uros Islands, and the border town to cross from Peru into Bolivia. We were astounded that someone from Puma hostel was at the bus station to pick us up, despite our bus being one and a half hours late. There was a little man holding a sign reading our names, and we were nothing short of estatic. We were taken to Puma hostel, with whom we had not even made a booking, but had briefly emailed earlier that day saying we were interested in staying, and would it be possible to arrange a pick-up. When we arrived at the hostel we were welcomed by our lovely host Frida. The hostel seemed to be more of a family ... read more

As soon as we crossed the border into Peru the temperature rose by about 10 degrees, and we saw the sun for the first time in a while which was a nice welcoming. We entered via the Panamerican Highway which runs parallel to the coast, between the mountains and the sea. After about half an hour of driving through grassy land, we were into a barren and rugged landscape not dissimilar to that in The Hills Have Eyes. We were driving through the same unhabitable environment for what seemed like forever, when all of a sudden a town started to appear. Only on the coastal side of the road however, the other side remained rugged. We had arrived in Mancora which is a small beach/surfing resort in the north of Peru, and was our destination of ... read more

From The Secret Garden, we took a private ride from a man who worked at the hostel; he dropped us to the side of a road where we could apparently catch a connecting bus to Banos. We had thought we were headed to a bus terminal, but it doesn't really seem to work this way in Ecuador. We were harassed and lied to by numerous 'bus boys' before we finally made our decision to hop onto a bus which had no mention of Banos on the front, but we we had been assured by the driver's little helper that it was indeed a 'directo' service to Banos. We arrived in Banos around three hours later, after driving around the houses. Banos is a cute little town surrounded by steep green mountains. It is famous mostly for ... read more

We arrived at Mexico City airport ready for our flight to Ecuador. When we reached the counter we were informed by the very brusk check-in assistant that we would need to prove that we had an onward flight out of Ecuador before she would let us board the flight. Well that was bloody great seeing as we didn't have one. Even our itinerary which proved that we would be in Singapore by February (the maximum allowance for our visas would be three months in Ecuador) she was not ready to let us on. We were about to insist she booked a bus journey into Peru for us when eventually a manager let us through after proving that we had credit cards on us. We are not exactly sure what the law permits but fortunately we were ... read more