Andrea: Our taste of the Amazon continued with our pampas tour from Rurrenabaque. Some of the group from the previous boat trip managed to book on our boat so we were excited to have some familiar faces on the tour. We jumped in a jeep with the Australian couple, the Aussie/Kiwi couple and a new couple from Quebec and set off on a 3 hour journey down rough dirt roads with the driver peering through a windshield that was severely cracked and seemingly held togethe...

Vern: To get to Rurrenabaque, a small town within the Amazon jungle, we decided on the path least travelled, the river. The options were: a short boring flight; a bus ride said to be so scary that travelers seek out Valium from shady pharmacies in La Paz; or a little known travel company who run tourists up the river in a simple wooden motorboat over three days, with camping each night on the riverside. We stayed in foggy Coroico for two uneventful days, living ...

Vern: We arrived in La Paz after a lengthy but uneventful bus ride. Andrea was stung for $135 reciprocity fee for a visa for USA citizens. She was actually lucky to get one as the visa is a sticker which is pasted into one's passport and the border post only had two stickers left on the reel. The third American on the bus was permitted into the country but instructed to present himself at a government building the next day. He shrugged off the inconvenience but i...

Vern: The minibus to Colca Canyon picked us up an hour late at 4:40am. We climbed in with five other trekkers (one of them hurling abuse at the driver for getting lost since she'd been on the bus since 3:15am) and tried our best to get a little more sleep. Two and a half hours later we stopped for a basic breakfast and then after one more hour we pulled over at Cruz del Condor - a view point over the canyon near a condor nesting place. "This is pornography for g...

Vern: I'm sure that in the same way that the human body forgets childbirth and severe trauma so that we can get on with our lives our bodies will forget the bus ride from Cuzco to Arequipa but in the meantime we're still coughing up soot and insanely scrubbing dirt from our clothes like Lady Macbeth. We'd bought tickets from an upper class bus company but at boarding time that evening we were informed that our bus wasn't going anymore because of violent rioting m...