Just a quick one to avoid having to write anything like the length of the previous entry as we are still moving pretty quickly as we aim to get in everything on our planned itinerary. Thankfully we had a fine final day in cold and wet Barriloche, so we had yhe opportunity to take in the lakes and mountains on the amazing chico circuito bike ride. That night we boarded a bus for 13 hours taking us across to the Atlantic side of Argentina and Puerto Madryn. PM is an old Welsh settlement, but thankfully the Welsh language has died out [View Full Entry]

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Getting a bit lazy with the old blogging now so need to update for the past three weeks or so. As we're getting closer to the end we need to cram in as much as possible so we're moving quickly. Not everywhere has been massively eventful or noteworthy so I will try to skip over a few places where I can. So after Sucre we had a tiring 12 hour bus ride to Uyuni which went via Potosi (the worlds highest city) which was a pretty bleak place. Uyuni wasn't much better, so on arrival we made plans to leave the [View Full Entry]

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At the end of the last entry we were in Puno on the Peru side of Lake Titicaca. A few hours bus journey took us over to the border into Bolivia which has so far turned out to be a real gem of a place - great people, amazing scenery, loads of activities, obviously no coast, but you can’t have it all….. First stop was Copacabana which predominantly acts as a stop off town for the beautiful Isla del Sol, where we did a four hour hike, ignoring Inca ruins which we have decided to retire from after Machu Pichu. After [View Full Entry]

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It’s been two and a half weeks since my last entry, which has all been Peru. A bit of a mixed experience……………… After arriving at the permanently grey capital of Lima we made a swift exit to the high altitude Inca town of Cuzco (3400 metres above sea level). Cuzco was an initially appealing town - mix of Spanish and Inca architecture but the place is very touristy. You spend half the day batting off offers of paintings, massages, ´please look at my menu´ etc. Within hours of arriving in Cuzco I was somehow roped into eating the local delica [View Full Entry]

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Just arrived in Peru so we´re swapping the Atlantic Coast for the Pacific Coast, the shorts for sweatshirts, the Havaianas for the hiking boots, and limited Portuguese for limited Spanish. It was a long flight from Recife to Lima (via Sao Paulo) but we had our first glimpse of the Andes and the ´inland ocean' Lake Titicaca which was a nice preview of the weeks to come. Anyway I need to fill you in on the last couple weeks - our last day in Brazil was uncharacteristically wet and grey. We were in Olinda which was not typical of most of [View Full Entry]

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All is well over here in Brazil bar a couple of hiccups (see below!). Since the last entry we´ve mostly been around Salvador which we´ve been using as a base. Our first trip out of there was to Lencois, a quaint little town about 6 hours west. Until twenty years ago it was a diamond mining town but when that source of cash dried up they turned it into a tourist destination as a base for exploring the nearby national park which is full of rivers, lakes, waterfalls and caves. Everything is connected by roads and paths created by the miners. [View Full Entry]

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Arrived in Rio last Saturday and headed straight to Ipanema Beach. Glad we went there actually versus Copacabana which is too big and packed, apparently it has the highest density of people than anywhere else in the world (thought I’d get a fact in early). Anyway Ipanema is a perfect place for Brazil beginners - it’s quite a well to do suburb with a very European feel. Everyone speaks English which is useful as we know no Portuguese. We’d heard that it was home to some of the beautiful people of Rio, but this wasn’t really the case (with some notable [View Full Entry]

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