Having perked ourselves up with an extravagant purchase on 3 nights at a luxury hotel for our final days of our travel in Brazil 6 weeks later, we dragged ourselves out of bed, grabbed some lunch and boarded a 23 hour bus journey from San Pedro de Atacama down to Santiago; covering over a third of the length of the longest country in the world! With Trevor still feeling a little under the weather, for the first time ever Sophie got to have his free snacks on the ...

Next stop in Bolivia was the Salt Flats, something we'd both had ear-marked on our 'must do' list from the start. After looking around La Paz for good tours, on a trip that has notoriously bad safety records for drunk and speeding jeep drivers, and poor accommodation and food, we settled on one of the many Spanish speaking only, guided excursions with 'Esmerelda Tours'. After purchasing a large bag of medical supplies for Sophie to continue to change her nose dre...

On the morning of the 2nd we headed to Madidi's office in Rurrenabaque before being escorted to a small wooden canvas roofed motorboat moored by the muddy river bank. There we loaded on our bags and were introduced to our guide 'Alejandro' (Alex). Large knife strapped to his waist and bandana around his head, he looked like a young Bolivian Rambo! We spent just over 3 hours on the boat heading further into the jungle, Alex fuelled by an obvious addiction to coc...

We landed in La Paz, Bolivia, one of the least developed countries in South America, after taking a 3 hour flight from Colombia. Arriving early in the morning we thought we would save money on accommodation by sleeping in the airport for several hours. La Paz is one of the highest cities in the world with the airport located at just under 4000m above sea level, and at 3am in the morning it was a pretty cold uncomfortable place to sleep on a metal bench... We mana...

The city of Cartagena on the Caribbean Coast is beautiful, full of cobbled alleys, large balconies covered in big bright flowers, and old colourful 16th and 17th century colonial buildings lining the streets. While the city has expanded into vast suburbs, the original parts of the town still remain inside the old city wall constructed by the Spanish to protect it from pirates trying to siege treasure plundered from the indigenous people. The climate in the town i...