I stepped off the bus onto the bustling main strip in Mancora town. 20 hours on a coach and my spine felt like a wire pipe cleaner that had been bent into the shape of a seat. I hobbled to the hostel with my backpack teetering on my shoulders and checked in, itching to feel sand in my toes and wash off the bus and the sleepiness in the Pacific ocean. The beach wasn't the most breathtaking I'd ever seen, but then Watamu and Diani beaches have set the bar almost im...

Cuzco's greeting was cold and ungrateful. "I'd still be in jungle paradise if it hadn't meant losing so much money on pre booked travel arrangement's to see YOU, and you greet me with altitude sickness and close to zero temperatures" So on the evening I arrived I went straight to bed at 6.30... giving it the silent treatment. It worked because Cuzco, the gateway town to Machu Picchu, tried very hard to impress me the next day. I took a bike ride through dram...

Armed with apalling Spanish and directions vague enough to make a Kenyan proud, I left the bright lights of Lima and headed for Pucallpa in the north east. It´s the gateway to the Peruvian Amazon and is a town of damp desperation famous for its constant halo of vultures. I jumped in a piki piki and handed the driver the address of a place in town where a car would be going to the town of Curimana, 2 hours west. "Car" was a generous word for the smoking, rusty ...

Just a quick update from Lima. After spending a long night on the floor of Heathrow, made a hell of a lot easier by 3am phonecalls and Ben Howards album on repeat, I got my flight to Lima. Flying in over the northern Amazon was awesome - the sheer size of this massive expanse of pristine tropical rainforest, and the vast amount of water that snakes its way over hundreds of kilometres, was enough to keep my nose glued to the plane window for 2 hours. We flew into...