We had finally arrived in Iquitos, the world's largest city that can't be reached by road. My first impressions of the city was that it stank, not of anything in particular and not all the time, but as we drove into the city in our moto taxi we got quite a few whiffs of off fruit, bad sewage, muddy water and god knows what else. Along with the smells my first impression was that this place was absolutely mad and not what I had expected it to be. For some reason I had expected a chilled jungle town with lots of [View Full Entry]

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After spending many days in transit we took a while to get going on our first morning in Yurimaguas. Our plan for the day consisted of finding a hammock for me, eating as usual, internet and finding a boat. It turned out to be in this order where if we were thinking logically it should possibly have been the opposite. Luckily though after spending a few hours wandering around we headed down to the port to see when we could jump onto a boat heading up to Iquitos. We arrived to find madness again.....many trucks full of cargo backed down towards [View Full Entry]

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So time had come for us to start what seemed like a huge mission......to get from Cali in the south of Colombia down to the port town of Yurimaguas in the north of Peru. From here we would then catch a boat upriver, but before that we were going to have to travel through 3 different countries in areas where tourist were not so common and were expecting the possibility of delays at any stage. First stage of the journey was to take a night bus leaving from Cali down to the border of Equador. The bus was over-sized, quite common [View Full Entry]

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After a relaxing few days around the Popayan area it was time to get on yet another bus and head north again to the city of Cali.....home of famously good looking women, salsa and apparantly the city is the world leader in plastic surgery. Luckily this trip was only a few hours on a paved road as my patience and enjoyment level of taking a bus ride is diminishing as the days go by. Cali itself I found was nothing to rave about and by the time I got there I was pretty much over concrete and buildings that you find [View Full Entry]

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After saying goodbye to Christian in San Agustin there didn't seem like any reason to stay any longer, so the following morning we headed off to our next destination. After walking into town with all our bags we decided to take a car to the crossroads out of town to catch the bus heading to Popayan, by doing this we would save ourselves a bit of money. After making it to the crossroads we saw our bus heading into San Agustin to pick up other passengers before stopping for us....the bus was already full so we hoped that most of those [View Full Entry]

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After leaving the Galapagos Islands I was on a plane bound for the capital of Equador, Quito. Quito is situated across a beautiful Andean valley and is flanked by volcanic peaks. The day I arrived was sunny so I had a great view of the city and the area around it as I came into land. Quito was a major Inca city that was destroyed by Atahualpa's general, Rumiñahui, shortly before the arrival of the Spanish conquistadors. The present capital was founded atop the Inca ruins by Sebastian de Benalcazar on December 6th, 1534.....but there is no Inca structures that remain [View Full Entry]

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The time had come to head over to the Galapagos Islands, a place that had been at the top of my wish list for quite a while. The diving here is supposed to be amazing and I was hoping that my dream of seeing big schools of hammerheads swimming over the top of me would come true. Along with the great diving the Galapagos Islands are reknown for the large amounts of wildlife, many species found on the islands are endemic to the area, so my expectations of my time in the area was very high as I boarded the plane. [View Full Entry]

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The time had finally come when I was to arrive at the beach and back to my beloved ocean.....I had been in the hills for many months now and had not been swimming in the ocean since I left Rio. After living by the sea for the past 6 years I was definately having withdrawal symptoms by this stage and I was counting the hours to when I would get to be back on the beach. I travelled over night up the coast of Peru heading for a town called Mancora in the very north, which is basically a small beach [View Full Entry]

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To leave Huaraz I decided that I loved buses so much that I would take the route to the coast that was longer, bumpier and more uncomfortable. I wanted to drive through the Cañon Del Pato...the road weaves around the base of the cañon and at the closest point the walls are only 15m apart. To do this trip I had to go on a chicken bus, a term used for the local buses where anything from chickens, dogs, food stock and anything else can be put on the bus. To start with I boarded a bus and I had touble [View Full Entry]

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On arriving in Huaraz I had to organise the trek up in the mountains. The day that I went to do that I was invited along by one of the guides to come for a short walk in the nearby hills with some of the people that would be on my trek for the next 4 days. Why not I thought and took the opportunity to have a bit more of a look around and also to do something different than sit on my bum which I had been doing for some days now on a bus. We were going to [View Full Entry]

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