Oh. Did I mention that you can buy any drugs you like over the counter here? There’s none of that time consuming “getting a doctor to write you a prescription” lark that we have at home, you can just wander into a pharmacy and ask for whatever you feel like. And then they sell them [...]

So after arguing the toss about exchange rates, and before heading south to Bolivia, we decided to blow the budget by heading to the Amazon. We’d read about this place called Inkaterra in the Indie travel section, so, Malaria pills in hand, we decided to hop over to Puerto Maldonado, on the Madre de Dios [...]

After the Inca Trail, we spent a few more days in Cusco. Tennille and Matt were in town, for one thing, so we spent a few days just hanging around with them. Cusco starts to drag you down after a while, though. On the one hand, at least while we were there it was a [...]

We had better seats on our night bus to Cusco, and so I was fast asleep in the morning when one of the other passengers tapped me on the shoulder to let me know that we’d arrived. We stumbled out of the bus into a particularly dusty yard where a guy from the bus company [...]

We made it out of Huacachina alive, though, surviving a tough hour’s slog up the sand dune directly behind our hotel to watch the sunset, as well as a bad lunch in a restaurant down the street that featured not only a fly in my coffee but also hairs on Sal’s straw and in my [...]

Lonely Planet: South America on a Shoestring (10th Edition): pp864 (Peru Chapter): “Lake Titicaca: South America’s largest lake is also the world’s highest navigable lake…” pp205 (Bolivia Chapter): “Lake Titicaca is deservedly awash with gushing clichés. Although it is often wrongly described as the highest navigable lake in the world (both Peru and Chile have [...]

The problem with doing an amazing trip like this, is that you spend so long doing exciting things that you never have any time to write about them. And when you do, you’re so far behind that you can’t write about the exciting things you’ve just done, but only the ones that happened ages ago [...]

And so that’s it. After finishing up at work last week, then cleaning the house and leaving London on Sunday, and a few days back in Southport with the family that passed all too quickly, we’re finally off on our big South American adventure. I feel moderately underprepared, but we’ve got a wallet full of [...]