Back into Peru to continue our march northwards, we stopped in Arequipa for a few days. The central part of Arequipa is a bit like a less polished, less touristy version of Cusco, but walk a short distance from the centre and it becomes a bit unappealing. Like many others, we used Arequipa as a base to make a trip to the Colca Canyon, touted as the world's second deepest, where we did a two day hike. We were fortunate to see Condors flying in the canyon, and t...

Our last stop in Chile was in the coastal town of Arica for a day. The best thing about our stay there was the hostel which was more like a cosy BnB than any hostel we've been in before, complete with a breakfast that the owner obviously took great pride in. The tourist attraction in this town is the surf but as we're not really into that we got some bikes and made our way out to a bizarre cemetery on a sand dune. Each grave had its own little shelter and they w...

We had a great time in San Pedro. The town is very small, basic and seems just to exist for tourism sake. We could easily spot every type of traveller there, from the hippie doing nothing all day, every day to the retired couple travelling through in their fancy hire car. It's the base for some very expensive tours to the driest place in the world, The Atacama Desert, but we managed to keep costs to a reasonable level by hiring bikes and checking out a few thing...

Further north along Chile's long coastline, we ventured to the medium sized town of La Serena. This is where the Atacama desert begins, and also where you can find a whole lot of telescopes taking advantage of the clear skies. We arrived early in the morning from our overnight bus (again) and were lucky enough to find a nice hostel that let us have a bed straight away, giving us a chance to sneak in a few hours of quality sleep instead of "bus sleep". The mo...

Out of the big city of Santiago lies two smaller, but popular coastal towns that we decided to visit, Valparaiso and Vina del Mar. We spent most of our spare time in Valparaiso wandering the streets looking at the edgy art painted on many of the buildings in the area we were staying. Valparaiso was a bizarre little town with a lot of hills and pretty graffiti on all of the buildings such that we couldn't help but feel like we were in a mix between the towns in ...