I travelled to Banos up in the Andean Mountains with Rich & Gill, the British couple I met in Guatemala and then caught up with again in the Galapagos. They are Couch Surfing experts after many trips around Europe and I decided that it was time for me to try Couch Surfing for myself with them in Banos. For the uninitiated, Couch Surfing is a website that matches people looking for somewhere to stay for a night, with those who have a spare room or couch to...

Before I got to Ecuador I hadn't realised the extent to which Ecuador had been the focus of a couple of major discoveries about the planet we live on. On my first full day in Quito I went to the Mitad de Mundo or the middle of the world centre. It was in Ecuador back in the 1700's that a group of European scientists determined the dimensions of the planet Earth and the Equator around the middle of it. I must say, and I'm not sure why, but I loved straddling ...

Dropping 15 degrees in temperature and climbing 2600m in altitude, I flew from Panama City to Bogota and immediately felt the difference, particularly at night when jeans, t shirt, hoodie and jacket were in order and even slight inclines raised the heart rate. We found a small eatery to take in some local cuisine and watch the England football match that was happening, Colombia is currently hosting the under 20 World Cup and they're taking it very seriously. ...

Panama - the country that wasn't on my original list of destinations, started with the most memorable of border crossings. The Costa Ricans wave you off on one side of the river; you walk across (in this case very wet) wooden railway sleepers on a 200m long bridge, and ask the Panamanians nicely to let you in on the other side. It's full of pedestians making their way one way or the other, interspersed with massive trucks crossing the bridge barely wide enoug...

Costa Rica was originally going to be my last stop in Central America as I had planned to fly to Colombia from there, missing out Panama. However the more I heard about both Costa Rica and Panama, I decided to spend only a couple of days in Costa Rica and head for Panama. Apparently, Costa Rica was going to be very expensive, (about the same as Europe) and was very touristy, whereas the Bocas del Toro archipelago on the North West Caribbean coast of Panama wa...