Sign In
ben forster
OK, so you've probably had enough already of me yapping on about travel, travel, travel... oh well get over it - it's awesome!. If you wanna see some more pictures of this summers antics have a look at my latest blogs from Peru and Bolivia, which will arrive shortly.benny boy
Having just graduated from the legendary Loughborough University I am embarking on a 5 1/2 week trip to South America with my good friends Patto and Adam. We will spend most of our time in Peru before visiting Bolivia and flying home. Planned so far...surfing in Mancora, trekking in Cuzco, WW rafting, sandboarding, visit to the Amazon rainforest, island hopping on Lake Titicaka and much more!!! When i return i'll be heading straight off to london to start my graduate job so this promises to be a final memorable summer!
There are some other blogs and photos from previous trips to Thailand, Australia, Hong Kong, Vietnam and Cambodia with Rachel, Patto and Lisa.
Looking forward to seeing everyone on my return.
Ben
Travel Blog Posts
August 26th 2008
Welcome to my final blog of the holiday! It´s been an epic adventure and I´m really sad to be leaving South America, having made loads of cool friends and great memories. Our previous port of call was Mancora where we lapped up the sun and tried to improve our surfing with some success. The beaches were lovely and we found a cracker on the last day called Las Organos, which was practically deserted. The nightlife was fairly uneventful although we still managed to arrive home the wrong side of 5am once or twice! We also had some incredible meals out there - Peruvian, Mexican and Thai to name a few! The only spoiling factor was the shadieness of the locals and in particular the Tuk-tuk drivers. Three girls were mugged in seperate incidents during our stay ... read more
August 22nd 2008
Hi guys, We´re currently in the little beach town of Mancora, north-west peru. The last couple of weeks has been an incredible action packed journey across a huge chunk of the country, witnessing icy glaciers, dense sweaty rainforest and most lately chilled out surf spots. Our first adventure was trekking in the Lares valley. This was a hardcore 4 day hike of about 20km each day culminating in a visit to Machu Picchu. We found the going fairly easy after our previous treks in the Colca Canyon and actually had a chance to enjoy the scenery. on the way we stopped at a sactuary for condors - enormous vultures that glide through the Andes valleys and mananged to get up close and personal with one. one poor bloke got pecked on the arse when pushing his ... read more
August 8th 2008
Greetings from Peru! We´re currently in Cusco, tourist capital of Peru and are having a great time! After leaving Nazca we arrived in Arequipa for an action packed few days of activities and partying. This Spanish colonial city is surrounded by snow capped volcanoes and has a strong back-packer presence! First off was white water rafting on the Chilly river. The setting was perfect and we managed to successfully navigate the grade three and four rapids until the final stint, where I ungraciously got bumped in and experienced the river living up to it's name! That evening was spent go-carting whilst enjoying a few cool Cusquena beverages. The Colca Canyon was our second excursion and after a horrendous bus journey, where some cheeky locals pinched our seats, we had a couple of awesome days trekking through ... read more
July 28th 2008
Hola from Peru! We have arrived safely and it´s been an action packed 5 days! We ran into trouble before even arriving when we had 45 mins to get through Newark airport, but after a sweaty sprint avec backpacks we thankfully made our connection by a whisker! Lima was pretty cool and we stayed in the roudy Point Hostel in the Barranco region. We celebrated our arrival by joining the hostel in a trip to a local electro dance club, which just about ended us after a 30hr day! We spent the next day seeing the plaza de armas (fancy central square) and some old pyramid ruins in the city. However the best event was by far was our session at the local kareoke club with about 20 others from the hostel. They had never seen ... read more
September 24th 2007
My final blog for this summer, our holiday is now over...booo, but i thought i'd finish the story off anyway and add some pictures. Sadly Cambodia had some pretty terrible weather and the tan wasn't boosted as much as expected even whilst taking the tan enhancers (malaria tablets). We managed to get one great day of sunshine and visited the 5 star beach resort of Sokha beach in Sihanoukville. The place was deserted and having negotiated with the armed guards we were allowed to hire a deckchair and busted out the tunes! It was a classic white sand, palm fringed, clear sea resort and we finally caught up on some sleep after a few heavy nights out. Dreamland had finally been reached.. The beach night-scene was not quite up to the Thai islands but we went ... read more
September 13th 2007
Having relaxed and stuffed ourselves in the lavish Hilton Hanoi Opera hotel, we all headed to the airport. The girls rather sadly returned to the UK via Bangkok and HCMC and we headed out to Siem Reap in Cambodia. Siem Reap is the passage to Angkor the group of temples built during the 9th and 10th centuries by the royal kings of Cambodia. The most notorious of which is Angkor Wat, the largest temple in the world. The temples are mainly in ruins but have been gradually restored, although unfortunately many scultures have been stolen for the black market in Thailand. some of the temples used to be incrusted with hundreds of jewels and were also plundered by the Thai's - they're obviously not too popular in this neck of the woods... Siem Reap seemed to ... read more
Hoi An to Hanoi...confusing I know
Published: September 5th 2007Asia » Vietnam » Red River Delta » Hanoi
September 4th 2007
Hey guys, we're now about to leave Sa Pa for Hanoi for some relaxing before the girls head back to the UK. Patto and i still have a couple of weeks left and will be visiting Cambodia. this is the latest installment of what we've been up to... Hoi An was great and the full moon festival felt like travelling 200 years back in time with no electric lighting and the streets full of incense and small fires! The restaurants and cakes shops were awesome. one of the highlights was our pub crawl that patto organised. This included the local bia hoi (10p) and culminated in a competition to create a new cocktail g.y.m.p juice, named in honour of patto's uni log on code. we all made our own combo but surprisingly no one can remember ... read more
August 21st 2007
hey guys, So we've now carefully made our way from Ho Chi Minh City to Hoi An half way up the coast of vietnam. Our adventure started rather busily in HCMC, which is a more mental version of bangkok and not for the faint hearted. There are millions of cheap mopeds zipping around any part of the roads that they fancy and it's every man for themselves. To cross the road we have learnt to slowly start walking into the on-coming nutters and they will steer round you!! They city was pretty smelly, poor and polluted and we wanted to spend as little time there as poss. We did see the sights though and got pampered at some spas and posh restraunts. We also went to the very insighful War Remnants Museum which had some incredible ... read more
August 24th 2006
We arrived in Arrawarra - surf camp on the 12th and got ready to learn to 'look cool', then 'act cool' and then 'learn to surf if your lucky'.... The camp was awesome fun and we actually got quite good. It looks a lot easier than it actually is but after an hour or two we just about managed to stand up and surf a few waves! The instructor, Nat from Mojo surf was a wicked laugh and taught us to be gnarly in no time, before more beers round the campfire in the evening. Next up Barrington, some remote gold mining area where we had a go at night white water kayaking! Aparently its the only place in the world where you can do it and unfortunately rachel fell into the icey water and got ... read more
August 11th 2006
After leaving the mighty Whitsunday islands behind we headed off on the Oz bus with a new driver named 'Gollum'. First stop was Kroombit cattle ranch where we began our cow boy and girl training course... First up learning to ride a mechanical bull and crack a whip. Well, rachel managed 3 bucks on the bull but we passed that stage and the next day braced ourselves for all things goat related....(i got 4 bucks but that was enough to beat her). We began with mustering the goats (chasing into a pen) on horses which was pretty awesome fun and then learnt to throw a lasso before having a competition to lasso and milk a goat! they were pretty easy to get but we had to avoid the cancer ridden wild dogs at the same time... ... read more
Tot: 0.144s; Tpl: 0.009s; cc: 13; qc: 77; dbt: 0.0452s; 1; s:apollo w:www (50.28.60.10); sld: 2; ; mem: 6.5mb
© 2013 TravelBlog.org & Bloggers