Assorted South America

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 to you. For the Inca Trail, for example, we prescribed ourselves some pre-emptive antibiotics, to avoid any potential awkward situations,…

Continue reading

The Amazon

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 river in the Amazon basin, for a few days of luxury. There are two ways to get there from Cusco.…

Continue reading

Cusco: Postscript

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 town permanently in the middle of some kind of celebration. You could barely move for dancing kids in traditional costume…

Continue reading

Cusco and the Inca Trail

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 was throwing bags from the bus towards a crowd of people. We eventually got ours, and then a taxi and…

Continue reading

La Altituda

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 burger. Oh and the small matter of the taxi ride back to the bus station in the company of a…

Continue reading

Just Fancy That…

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 higher navigable bodies of water)…” Still, it could be worse, the Venezuela chapter (which is not one of the destinations…

Continue reading

Sand

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 that you’ve almost forgotten about. For example, we’ve just come back from the Inca Trail, but if I started writing…

Continue reading

On The Way

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 plastic, a flight ticket home in September (we just have to get several thousand miles across the continent to Sao…

Continue reading