I was feeling a little excited about my return home but I think this was largely subdued by tiredness and the desire to just get back after 3 flights, 20+ hours and some interesting customs experiences. Arriving back in London, I didn't really have any kind of surreal feelings. It all seemed too familiar but I think the reality of my experiences may not truly be absorbed for some time yet. Hindsight is a wonderful thing and after having experienced something l...

....proceeding to immigration at the airport I was met by a gentleman who again seemed to take his time looking through my passport. This was all too familiar to me by now and once again it was only because he had never seen a Greek passport before and was intrigued. We shared a little joke before I completed formalities. Then the real fun began. I was next greeted by a couple of guys who wanted to inspect my hand luggage. No issue initially but upon inspe...

A good friend had made a very apt joke when he ridiculed the fact that my guide book was called 'South America on a shoestring', referring to the fact that I hadn't really done things on a shoestring budget. True, I always paid a little extra for some comforts but at my age these were deemed necessary. Flying to La Paz from Sucre I considered to be one of them. Spending roughly 12 hours on a Bolivian bus or take a 40 minute flight on a new airplane overlooking ...

Towards the end of our bus journey to Sucre, we were to experience something quite amusing. About 30 min away a man got up in the middle of the bus (or he had gotten on somewhere recently) and started giving a lecture to everyone on board. I couldn't quite work out what he was saying at first and thought he was preaching but then, Antonia burst out laughing and told me he was lecturing the bus about the importance of brushing your teeth regularly and the benefit...

......the next couple of days took us touring through more rugged countryside, where we encountered several beautiful lakes that all seemed to come out of nowhere in this vast desert environment. They where all of different significance with some being toxic due to the arsenic and other mineral content and others being used to extract minerals for industrial purposes. The one common theme they did share, was that they were all spectacularly light blue ...