Guayaquil and The Galapagos Islands: 13-21 September. We took the bus from our beach-break in Mancora (Peru) up into Ecuador. The border crossing was straightforward: we all piled off the bus on the Peruvian side of the border to get stamped out and then went through the same process on the Ecuadorian side to get stamped in. Fortunately we got waived through both customs checks so didn't even have to take our bags off of the bus. We weren't long over the bord...

Nazca - Mancora: 25 August - 7 September. From Arequipa we caught the bus to Nazca. It felt like we'd been in the mountains for weeks and it was a bit of a surprise when we suddenly saw the sea again. The scenery hadn't changed too much though, it was still very barren, the mountains having given way to the coastal desert. With the Andes, the desert and the jungle, it struck us that Peru is home to some pretty extreme climates - something we knew before, but it...

Arequipa and the Colca Canyon - 18th August to 24th August We were up nice and early in Puno for breakfast before checking out of our hotel at 7.15am to make our way to the bus terminal to catch our 6 hour bus ride to Arequipa. We used a different bus company for our journey to Arequipa and the tickets were much cheaper than our tickets to Puno – even though the journey times were fairly similar – so we waited to board with a certain amount of trepidation a...

Cusco & Puno: 13-17 August Fresh from the Inca Trail, we returned to Cusco to rest our weary limbs and to look around the city that was the capital of the Inca empire, or 'the navel of the world'. Cusco is a very attractive town, the centre of which has retained a lot of it's character despite, or perhaps because of, the massive amount of tourists that pass through. There are still examples of the mortar-less Inca stonework down the many old cobbled streets...

The Inca Trail to Machu Picchu: 5-12 August 2011 We flew from Buenos Aires into a grey, overcast and quite bleak Lima where we would meet part of our tour group for the Inca Trail. Our hotel was in the Miraflores suburb, some way out from the centre and, still feeling the effects of jet lag, we didn't head into the middle of the city. We did look around our neighbourhood though, from the park where artists were selling their paintings and people were dancing in ...