Sitting in a beautiful organic garden overlooking rolling hills, we were beginning to relax after a very bumpy bus ride which ended when we were dumped at the roadside in the early hours of the morning. We opened the hatch to retrieve our backpacks, and struggled to find them under a good inch of dust that had been sucked in from the road. On the map we had hardly moved at all, but with poor and indirect roads we knew that was an important section of the journey ...

The old capital of Bolivia is very peaceful in comparison to La Paz, and is awash with beautiful buildings. It is hard to believe that we are in one of the poorest countries in Latin America. We got a bird's eye view of Sucre's streets and surroundings from the roof of Iglesia de San Felipe Neri, and when we weren't wandering the streets or looking down on them, it would have been rude not to have tried two of the city's specialities - tasty little pasties called...

We were wondering why our driver Jonas was using the second gear stick as a toilet paper and sticky tape dispenser until the jeep got stuck in some snow. This is when we discovered that he didn't know it was a gear stick and had no idea how to use the low ratio gearbox. Oh dear. But at least he drove slowly and wasn't drunk like many of the drivers in Bolivia. Apparently the bus drivers recently went on strike when the government announced that they were about to...

Whichever way you arrive in La Paz, the first view of it is impressive. Sitting in a huge natural bowl at 3600m and surrounded by giant snow-capped mountains, I can't think of another capital city that occupies such a dramatic position. The name is Spanish for peace, but it can be hard to understand how it got this name at times.There were miners from Potosí camped near the main plaza who had come to protest about a large Canadian company's involvement in the si...

We ran into an Aymari Indian called Maximo Catari close to the shore on the southern part of Lake Titicaca. We asked him if he could take us across to Isla Suriqui, and although he wasn't a fluent Spanish speaker we soon learnt that we were talking to one of a band of unique men with knowledge of building traditional reed boats - a dying art. Amongst other projects, he had been involved in the construction of the Ra II - a reed ship which was used by Thor Heyerd...