It was a 22 hour journey from Cusco to Lima but we went with a really good company, Cruz del Sur, so it wasn´t too bad. The area of Lima we were staying in was away from the central downtown and was kind of equivalent to the Sloane Square/Kings Road area of London. There were lots of bars and restaurants, a big park area with a church and two nice big department stores. The problem with our stay in Lima was the hostels. Without a doubt the first hostel we stay...

So the election here in Peru has been and gone. For all the excitement, parades and posters it has resulted in no clear winner. All the moderate and reasonable candidates ended up splitting the vote and so the two extremists are due to have a run-off vote in June. Some commentators have said that it is now like a choice between aids and cancer, so understandably the Cusco was rather subdue the morning after the vote. Everything seemed to pass off peacefully tho...

3 days was certainly enough in La Paz. It is a very interesting and different city, but it was nice to escape the constant beeping horns, the collectives hurtling down the streets and the endless markets selling alpaca (both as clothes and as mummified remains - apparently it´s good luck.) We were ready for something different and were very pleased that Copacabana, our next stop, was the exact opposite to La Paz. Copacabana is a small town 3 hours away from La ...

As you can see, we are currently in La Paz, Bolivia after our long journey north through deserts and up a lot of hills. We left Valparaiso nearly 2 weeks ago and took a couple of buses to get to San Pedro de Atacama in the middle of the Atacama desert. We didn't know what to expect from San Pedro as people had told us to "be prepared for the REAL South America". However, we both really liked the desert landscape of San Pedro and the locals all seemed v...

We arrived in Santiago on 7th March after an extremely good journey from Pucon. It was ONLY 12 hours and since it was overnight we slept through most of it. We also found out that we had booked ourselves into "Salon Cama" which is sort of like first class. This meant our seats reclined really far back and we had blankets and neck rests. Luxury! The bus arrived at Santiago just before 8am so we were a bit worried that we´d have to wait until 1pm for our...