Blogs from South America - page 5358

Well, we have come a long way since our last journal entry that’s for sure. 10,000 feet upward to be exact! We are now in the wonderful Cusco, dodging forked lightening. Generally the days are scorching, but around tea-time every day, the rain comes down like there is no tomorrow! Last night there was a huge storm....so dramatic over the mountains, but there is rumbling now as I write!!! Thank god for Peter Storm waterproofs huh! So we left Huacachina last week, after going on a winery tour, around 3 local wineries, producing sweet dessert wine, and the local drink, Pisco. After many tastings, and several hilarious chats with the very drunk owners in the last place, we headed out of Huacachina south to Nasca. Nasca is a tiny town in the middle of barren desert ... read more

Cuenca - the cultural Mecca of Ecuador After our amazing hike on the Inca trail to Machu Picchu (see Discovering the lost Inca city), we caught the plane to Lima on Friday 21 January. Lima is supposed to have great surf beaches but considering that we live in Sydney there was little point in trying to verify this claim. Rather, being pretty exhausted from the four day hike, we just had a walk down to a viewpoint over the beach, where some surfers were enjoying the waves, to have an icecream. The night was spent in a Mexican restaurant before we went to bed early for our next day flight to Quito, the capital of Ecuador. That flight turned out to be a long one - flying with Copa Airlines, the plane took us first to ... read more

So Brazil. Turns out the Spanish and the Portuguese dreamt up some line of longitude to separate their New World empires. Then they discovered Brazil. Or something like that. Long and short of that is they don't even bother speaking Spanish here. Well that's no bloody good, is it?! Anyways, four months of lazily travelling far too slowly meant so far I'd cut short my stay in Costa Rica from three weeks to two days, scrubbed around Panama altogether and put Cuba off until later. So far so good. Flying into Sao Paulo late January was a bit of a shock really. My biggest problems were assuming I'd be fine with Spanish - which I guess now is getting pretty OK - and not having a guidebook. English language books in Rio are surprisingly thin on ... read more

Ilha Grande is a quiet Island just off the South Coast of Rio. It is covered with Atlantic rainforest, has only two cars (ambulance and police car) and has loads of quiet clean beaches which can only be accessed by boat or long walks. The first day was spent getting famliliar with our surroundings and catching up with things. The intention was to update the blog, unfortunately internet access on the island was that slow it seemed to be via WAP, so we gave it up as a bad job. The night was spent with an Irish couple (Sarsha and Peter), a Curitiban couple (Phillipe and Marsha) and a couple who were at university in Rio (Isabella and Fred). We drank Cachaça, vodka and guarana and talked about the corruption in Brazil, their love of football ... read more

After doing 2 days of kayaking in Bariloche...yeah I finaly control the eskimoroll now. I relaxed a bit in the city in the mountains....before I started to make my way back to Chili....Guess I was lucky with my ride, the car that stopped had to go to the same place as I wanted to go...so 4 hours later and 2 times the paperwork at the boarder I was back in Chili. there I found out that Hitchhiking even works with two guys (and two great backpacks). I met an American Guy there when freecamping at the lake side, and together we went to a Nat. Park to hike a couple days along vulcano Osorno and some beautiful lakes and mountains. days later I made my way to Chiloe, an Island a bit smaller than holland do ... read more