So the last couple of days of my trip were spent bumming around in Rio and savouring my final few acai's (slush puppie type drink made with the very purple Amazonian acai berry). Of course having spent 5 weeks here in January there was very little sightseeing to do so I was really just killing time watching the Euro 2008 quarter finals on the tele and buying a few presents.... and then on my penultimate day my south american experience was complete. I got robbed ...

Bolivia and my body never really came to terms with each other. On more than one occasion over recent weeks I had been lauding myself as being almost invincible to illness, disease, and calling myself 'iron guts atkins' (which I quite liked the sound of) because I barely courted any health problems at all on my 9 month trip. However I was ill on three seperate occasions while in Bolivia and got rather annoyed with not feeling well. I consider only one of those th...

I've procrastinated hugely over this blog entry and now have left myself with a giant amount of stuff to cover since last time when I wrote from northern peru with darren still within my digestive system. Our next stop was the capital Lima after another one of the surprisingly comfortable south american overnight buses (legend has it the best are in Argentina and not entirely different to first class air travel!). I couldn't really decide whether I liked Lima, I...

The last couple of weeks have undoubtedly been one of firsts:- The first time I have ever had a naked picture taken of me half way up a volcano (although it wasn't my idea I'm a little worried about having enjoyed doing it a little bit).- The first time I've been to a country that ends with the letter 'u'.- The first time I've made friends with a Darren (I don't consider Darren the warehouse manager* at Waitrose in Wokingham 1996-1998 as a friend, only a work col...

I'm in Ecuador right now (inflation 8.2%, female life expectancy 74.86, home of the world cup's and UNICEF ambassador Ulises de la Cruz) and the capital Quito (elevation 2850m and twinned with Buxton, England). More specifically I write from my favourite internet cafe of my trip so far 'Net Flanders' in the Mariscal area. This area of the city rivals Thamel in Kathmandu for touristicness given the huge number of hostels, restaurants, bars, internet places and the...