WARNING: If you find plant photos extremely boring, I advise you to wait until the next blog email gets to you. Well, the Puyas are defintiely one of the plants to see before you die. Unbelievably tall for something in the same family as pineapples. Even the ones I saw (mostly dead adult plants) were small, and if you look closely at some of the photos with me as a scale you can get an idea of how big these monsters were! Whilst travelling parts of Bolivia I had spotted a couple of smaller Puya species, so I was floored to [View Full Entry]

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The flight out of Quito to Europe is drawing ever closer - only a month left until I fly to Madrid! Today I´m in Huaraz, in the northern regions of Peru. I´m here in search of a flowering Puya raimondii - the plant with the world´s largest inflorescence. If nothing else, this is the only reason for my visit in Peru (Machu Picchu - meh ...). My tour has been booked, and I´ll head out early tomorrow morning. The normal tour spends only 20-30 minutes in the Puya areas before heading up over the 5000m mark to the snow, and anyone [View Full Entry]

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Not much to say, as I have done bugger all here in Miraflores, just putting some more photos up for viewing. More when I get to Chile... [View Full Entry]

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Well, plenty of sunshine anyway, enough to get me sunburnt THROUGH THE FOG in only a couple of hours. You think you´re safe with SPF 100 sunblock and the traditional layer of Lima fog, but no... Still wearing the clothes I arrived in a number of days ago, as I put in all of my laundry to be done, and arrived too late to pick it up on the following day. Now everything is closed for the elections, including all of the laundromats, so I´ll just have to wear dirty stinky clothes for another day. I can´t even go and buy [View Full Entry]

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Hola! Just a quick one this time. I´m flying through southern Peru at the moment, so that I can get to Lima in time for my flight to Santiago - yeah, yeah, yeah, I´m backtracking again. I thought I´d finally left Chile and Argentina for good, but apparently there´s a new law of physics that keeps dragging you back... Yesterday was Cuzco, today is Arequipa, tomorrow is Nazca, then I get to sleep in a real bed after spending two nights trying to fall asleep on a bus seat that doesn´t recline to horizontal. As you can see by the photos, [View Full Entry]

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Hola - yay for Travelblog! I can finally put my pics on. First things first - Sillustani and the best replacement for the standard Jebus-on-the-hill: a weird looking puma. Every town in South America seems to have some sort of religious symbol towering over and seemingly admonishing its inhabitants - good for Puno to buck the trend and have a ferocious carnivore to do the job instead. Sillustani, outside Puno in southern Peru, looks a lot like the set of Braveheart from a distance - all craggy moors, windswept lochs and large crumbling stone edifices. Up close, it´s a little different, [View Full Entry]

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Yes, I finally managed to draw myself away from Bolivia, but only as far as the other side of the border, still on the shores of Lake Titicaca. However the spectre of cuisine catastrophe still seems to be following me. [View Full Entry]

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Feeling a little less than 100% after yet another bout of food poisoning. It´s raining out and there´s not a whole lot to do except read my Harry Potter book and update my Travelblog. Have finally gotten the official Death Road photos onto the computer. Ignore how bad I look - I was recuperating from my first dose of food poisoning at the time. [View Full Entry]

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Hola! Just supporting my favourite soccer team ... (I still think the Strongest suck hehehehe) Just putting on a few more photos from this morning, and some additional climbing photos. Not much to report - the weather is typical of autumn here in La Paz, more rain, a bit colder, you know how it goes. [View Full Entry]

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Hola boys and girls, I´m back in La Paz, I guess I´m just a glutton for high-altitutde punishment. Altitude sickness really is the pits, especially after 3 weeks, when it normally should disappear in as many days... anyway, I soldier on to new lands and new scenes. This weekend was my Lake Titicaca long weekend, and it was one of the best side trips I have ever taken in my life! Here´s how it all came about.. JUEVES (THURSDAY) - left my hostal with a reservation for Sunday night, getting on the bus at the La Paz cemetery to Copacabana (p.s. [View Full Entry]

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