In your 20s.... Your backpack consists of mostly bikinis, sarongs, and sundresses, having forgotten that you might be at altitude at times and then have to panic-buy warmer clothes in Peru for the Inca Trail. Your backpack is so heavy (also full of guide books, as this is the pre-Kindle era) that you can barely put it on yourself. Having lived for almost a whole quarter-century you feel worldly and mature, yet still look at people travelling in their 30s an...

So we were now Zambia-bound, and trying to see what we could of Zimbabwe on the way. From Pretoria it was a 14-hour journey, on a very civilised double-decker Greyhound coach, to Bulawayo in Zimbabwe. Bulawayo, in western Zimbabwe, is the country's second-largest city after Harare, and was surprisingly pleasant. We knew to expect a totally different experience in Zimbabwe, compared to the more prosperous South Africa, and we were certainly right to do so, but B...

If it wasn't for the fact that we were so excited about heading to Africa, we probably would have felt a lot sadder about leaving Rio, and Latin America, behind… the latter being a very welcome 5-month addition to our original route. Africa had always been very high on the agenda for this trip, and I particularly was so, so excited about getting there….however we wouldn't be arriving there any time soon, as our cash-poor, time-rich flight ticket from Rio to J...

We ended up leaving Colombia as we arrived, by boat, though of a rather different type! This time our transport was a ferry which would chug down the Amazon river for four days to end up in Manaus, the capital of the Brazilian Amazon state. What was rather unique about this boat though was that it consisted of two large empty decks (and just a few cabins) which once everyone had boarded were converted into a mass hammock camp - and that was your accommodation fo...

From Cali we flew to Leticia, a city which lies in a tiny strip of land sticking out from the southern tip of Colombia in the middle of Amazonia (the Amazon Basin - just seeing it on the map made us want to go there). Leticia is the capital of the Amazonas province, the largest city for hundreds of kilometres and very remote: 800km from the nearest highway! Flying in was very exciting: just miles and miles of rainforest and then suddenly out of nowhere, a tiny l...