R: We started with a quiet day after our bus adventures overnight. We used the time to explore the town, and book a tour for the following day. Most of the sights are outside of town, up to 150km, in some cases, so the tours are a cheap and easy way of seeing them. We opted for the Altiplanic Lagoons for the second day. We are staying in a small hostel here run by an elderly gentleman by the name of Gustavo, who speaks no English, but loves the sound of my name. So we go by with "Buenos Dias, Gustavo", "ROJER! y, er, CATERINA!" , "BUENOS DIAS!" shouted back at us. The afternoon receptionist helped a lot in explaining anything else. Though I have to say, my crash learning of Spanish before we left has ... read more

C: The flight From Lima to Cusco was just over an hour and we got a ridiculously cheap taxi to our next hotel which was very nice and certainly had more of a Peruvian feel than the one in Lima. We unloaded the luggage and went off to explore. I love city travelling and especially ones with lots of history so Cusco was right up my street and made a refreshing change from the more modern cities of North America. It was originally inhabited by the Incas but not much remains from their time unfortunately as the Spanish did a pretty thorough job of looting it and destroying most of the buildings. Fortunately the Spanish built attractively so there's still a lot to see. There's a beautiful central square surrounded by balconied buildings and several churches ... read more

R: After Dominical, we took a bus to San Isidro de General, apparently the new upcoming city of Costa Rica. There isn't much to see here, so we ran from bus station to bus station, in hope of making our 20 minute connection to a bus to San Jose. Success! Our next bus was a bit more complicated as we were to get off in the middle of nowhere to visit an Eco lodge. Thankfully it was well signed and there were no dramas. After an 800m walk down a muddy track, we found the place, and it is stunning. C: The lodge is built on the edge of the mountain and is made up of lots of individual wooden cabins. Ours had a great view down the mountain and was surrounded by bird-filled trees. It ... read more

R: Next stop is Costa Rica - a small rainforest filled nation sandwiched between Panama and Nicaragua. Our flight took us via El Salvador - and to fans of the band Athlete, yes I was humming the song all the way there. We had an initial night in San Jose which was pretty much completely taken up with standing in the immigration line and sitting in a traffic jam into the city. The next morning we headed out on the early bus to La Fortuna, a tiny town in the shadow of the Arenal volcano. The bus took about 4 hours and along the way we mused about whether it was good or bad for a public bus to be this full of tourists when many of the locals couldn't get a seat. We actually had ... read more

R : Happy new year! We have landed in Belize which is our first new country for a while now. Our flight from New Orleans was via Houston which looked grotty and miserable from the plane. Once we got to Belize, and passed through the extremely grumpy immigration step, we transferred to a 12 seater airplane for onward transfer to Caye Caulker (pronounced Key) which is a small barrier island in the Carribean. It was all a bit chaotic - our flight being at 14.40 we happily wandered off in the airport at about 13.30 and suddenly we got paged to return to the desk. Within 10 mins we had been rushed* across the Tarmac and were seated in an aircraft that had agreed to divert to Caye Caulker to take us there. There seems to ... read more