If you´ve been enjoying the blog up to this point, then thank you for your attention and interest. This being the final blog, we hope not to let you down. However, this is a little personal, and although we have no new destinations to offer you, we wanted the chance to reflect on this final and most important one - home. What it is to have a home is something we have learnt to appreciate this year; ever-moving as we have been. Having family and close friends - those who understand you, and love you for being you; that is so [View Full Entry]

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We crossed the border into Brazil, ready for part two of our Iguazu experience. Leaving the falls for later, we spent the afternoon in a local bird-park. With Hannah keeping us company, we peeked at parrots, photographed flamingos and touched a toucan! This park included in its collection, the Cassowary and the Hummingbird, two of our favourites. Our campsite was very much to David's liking; floodlit football pitch, table tennis, pool, table football and even a version of shove ha'penny in addition to the bar and free internet. We mostly spent our evenings bumming about here with Ollie and [View Full Entry]

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Arriving late at night in Salta, we abandoned camping cuisine for a quick Macdonalds, and after about a fifteen-hour bus journey, nobody was complaining! We were immediately hit by the differences. People here were a mixture between indigenous and Hispanic, and their western clothing and polished appearance made us feel like stinky vagrants after our free-camp and bus journey! The campsite was nearby, and everybody went straight to bed. Salta was a smart, modern city with large squares lined with restaurants, trendy bars and a beautiful artisan market. It was not hard to pass a few days he [View Full Entry]

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The mounting expectations for how cheap this country was to be, were leading the tour group into a shopping frenzy. Knowing that La Paz was the place to shop, but that we only had two full days in this chaotic city, put the pressure on. The landscape leading up to La Paz was barren, to say the very least. Browns and beiges were in vogue here, and the monochrome settlements blended seamlessly into the cactus-strewn wastelands all around. The roads had also noticeably deteriorated: Windy, bumpy and scary all the way. Louise had organised a bus scrabble tournament to help the [View Full Entry]

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We arrived at Puno ready for our excursion to the famous Lake Titicaca. We had a local meal with some of the guys and headed for bed. The next morning, we awaited our ´limos´ as promised by our Lake Titicaca tour guide. It made us laugh to see a long line of cycle-rickshaw outside the hotel. We picked up some supplies at the port, and began the long boat ride to the first island in the lake. The idea was to hike and have lunch on the island of Taquile, and then stay the night with a local family on the [View Full Entry]

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The Budget cattle were prodded onto a bus once more and whisked away to the sacred valley of the Incas. We started with the Urubamba vallley where we blocked out our guide Julio´s drone, to take photos of the amazing panorama of Cusco, once the foremost city of the Incas. Built in the shape of a puma, this charming city, 3326m above sea-level, was colonised by the Spanish, who mistook ´Cusco´(meaning´navel of the earth´in local Quechan) to mean ´little dog´(in Spanish). We then sidled through a long dark cave before heading back to the bus. Next stop was the llama farm [View Full Entry]

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Upon finally reaching Peru, after the nightmare bus journey, our patience was duly rewarded with four idyllic nights at the Pacific beach resort of Mancora. It didn´t take long to re-adjust to beach life, and we were soon relaxing on the sand and playing beach football and cricket (David cleaned up with 31 runs in the first inning, astonishingly). The town itself was lined with touristy bars and restaurants. Our evenings were shared between these bars, and beach gatherings. The most memorable night was undoubtedly Joss´ birthday. Our endearing tour leader was one of many of us who had a little [View Full Entry]

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We arrived in Quito with eight days to spare before the beginning of a mammoth, ten-week long tour of South America, taking in five countries and an endless list of attractions. We decided that we should have a chilled out time before its out of our hands again, so we checked into ´The Secret Garden´, one of the finest residences of the trip so far. This five-level, sprawling maze served amazing food every day, on a rooftop terrace with incredible city views. Here, Louise took some Spanish lessons, David learned a little Spanish guitar. We made friends and generally relaxed. A [View Full Entry]

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The number of unresolved mysteries about Easter Island is enough to make the mind boggle. Where did the inhabitants come from, and when? How exactly did they get those huge stone statues from up in the hills to down on the coast? And how did they practically eliminate their entire population? Well, we weren´t about to discover the answers to any of these questions on a five-day visit to the world´s most remote, populated island (governed by Chile). All the same, we were looking forward to seeing it. Having booked a room at a campsite, and arranged an airport pick-up, we [View Full Entry]

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French Polynesia is a set of archipelagos in the South Pacific; a dependent country controlled from Paris. France's power over this remote nation provided the basis for extensive nuclear testing over the last few decades of the twentieth century. This has now at last ceased, under extreme international pressure. The most famous islands here are Tahiti and Bora Bora. After an uneventful evening in an uninspiring motel in Pape'ete, French Polynesia's (and Tahiti's) capital, we set about planning the least expensive itinerary possible. Only by increasing our daily budget to one hundred pounds [View Full Entry]

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