We arrived in Manaus on 22 November and signed straight up for an Amazon tour. We nearly made our first significant travelers error by going for a tour run by a guy we met on the bus from the airport. A guy called Antonio Batista (aka Thomas, Tom), he helped us out a lot and was genuinely nice to us, but we googled him and found a history of being a general conman, and using people's credit cards whilst they were on the trip. Anyway, we stuck with a recommended b...

In the last blog we fast-forwarded through Ecuador, missing Galapogos and countless other sites of note. This week was another which reminded us of the mildly upsetting fact that despite removing the most time consuming things in our lives, particularly our jobs, we still don't have enough time to do and see anything like as much as we want. Anyway, we had a week before a flight to Panama, so the race was on to see as much of Colombia as we could. The first bus w...

We recently realised that we have not spent any time on our blog discussing the food we have to date experienced in South America. Given how so much time and energy is spent when traveling seeking the next feed, we want to give this blog something of a food related theme… This is particularly pertinent now as Rich is still struggling with some bug that he picked up in Arequipa, which provides a general warning - the threat of eating a wrong'un is ever present. ...

After the slightly stressful week of Bolivian mountain exploration we booked ourselves into a 5 star hotel, "The Ritz", and lorded it up (like all good adventurers?)… We are not ashamed to say we got a suite, with cable (English movie channels), sofa and all the trimmings - including actual hot showers (which did not dole out electric shocks) and a delightful lady who turned down the bed and gave us little cakes before bed. We supplemented this feast ...

We are sitting in our hotel room in La Paz, it is 7.30 in the morning. We are listening to the world go by 5 floors below us, incessant honking by a bus driver looking to find customers from anywhere, even their beds, some market traders bantering and whistling at each other and the general clanking of street noise that you get when beat up cars go over bumps. All of our Bolivian experience so far, including this morning, adds up to the fact that Bolivia just doe...