So we have made it to the captial of Peru - Lima - and we are pleased to report that the buses have got considerably better (we´ve just got off of one where we were actually laid flat), wine actually exists again and we recognise some of the food. We arrived on Thursday morning to a foggy Lima. A friend of Madeleine´s Mum had offered to put us up so first thing on the agenda was getting to her apartment - no mean feat as the taxi driver appeared to be looking...

So, we have made it into Peru. The bus across the border was not too bad - apart from having to get up at about 4am to sort out border formalities and physically walk across the border we actually got some sleep and arrived on Monday morning. First stop was Piura, but we literally stayed there for breakfast before catching another bus to Chiclayo on the North coast. The bus took us through several miles of desert - nothing to be seen but sand for miles around ...

Hola amigos! We have spent the past 2 nights in a pretty grotty hostel in Cuenca. This is not, however, a reflection on the city, which is beautiful. Joe has dutifully been dragged around the various plazas parks and cathedrals of the town, but before you call relate, it should be noted that she also got to do plenty of sitting. The town is another that has been named a UNESCO world heritage site and is full of beautiful colonial buildings and plazas. There...

We have done a lot of travelling in the past couple of days - first from Lago Agrio to Riobamba, then Riobamba to Cuenca - a total of about 12 hours on buses. The plan was to get to Riobamba in order to get the train to Alausi and then on to Cuenca. The train goes down from Riobamba, through the ´valley of the volcanoes´to the ´Devil´s Nose´where it zigzags up and down the side of a cliff. That´s the theory anyway. We got to Riobamba to discover that th...

Well, we´re not sure a blog is needed as the photos probably explain it all but here goes... We left Lago Agrio on Monday night and had the night-bus from hell - blaring music, lights on and off all night, bumpy roads and no sleep. But we made it to Tena in one piece and found a nice hostal and did some sleeping. Today we have been white-water rafting on the rio Jatunyacu - a tributary of the Amazon. We rafted down 25km of both flat and white water, with lot...