After meeting our guides Victor and Edson last night, this morning we headed off at 6am to start what proved to be both the best and toughest thing we've ever done. The journey began with the fifteen of us and the two guides eating breakfast overlooking the Sacred Valley of the Incas. Next we headed off to the 82km mark (not sure why it's called that as we only walked 49km to Machu Picchu) to start the Inca Trail, after a quick stop off to buy our walking s...

After a days travel we were pretty exhausted. The company who we chose to do the Inca Trail with picked us up from the airport and dropped us at our hostel. Cuzco is the oldest inhabited city in the Americas, and is 3600 metres above sea level. The guidebook told us to expect altitude sickness, consisting of loss of appetite, sickness, diarrhoea and headaches, and to take it seriously because it can be life threatening if your lungs fill with fluid. Nic...

"La Isla Bonita" (really called San Ambergris) and Caye Caulker are the most visited places in Belize by tourists. If you've ever seen a picture of Belize it's more than likely the Blue Hole, which is a huge hole by Lighthouse Reef which goes down a couple of hundred metres, making the deep water look a beautiful blue colour and the surrounding shallow waters green. Most people visit Belize to dive the Blue Hole, as when you get about fifty metres or so dow...

Leaving Belize City we took a five hour bus journey South to a place called Independence, where we took a water taxi to Placencia, a strip of land connected to the mainland by a small land bridge to the North. The bus journey was hot (no air conditioning), busy and uncomfortable, but luckily the water taxi owner was on the bus, so we got straight to the island. Driving through the country we saw some real poverty, so were glad to reach Placencia which is q...

What can we say about Belize, except that if we had our time over we probably would have stayed in Mexico for longer. The Lonely Planet Guidebook let us down in it's description of Belize as a relaxed, chilled out place where the wind carries Caribbean music across the beautiful, white sand beaches, and where diverse cultures (whose ancestors where slaves, British pirates, indigenous peoples plus Spanish colonists) live in harmony together. When we boarded ...