Vern: "There is a chicken's foot in your soup." "Well, that looks like a brain in yours." Hmmm... "Yes it does, but it isn't. Enjoy your claw!", I chuckled as Andrea pushed the floating foot around her bowl. Also in the soup were potatoes, noodles, carrots and herbs, and despite the intruding appendange it was quite good. We had, as usual, ordered the dish of the day after collapsing into the wobbly wooden chairs at a popular little restaurant having just spent ...

Andrea: Packed lunch in hand, we walked out to the side of the road to wait for a bus at 6:00 in the morning. The entire scenario seemed doomed to fail: wake up at an ungodly hour, wait on the side of a road, hail down a bus that you have to make in order to make 5 connecting buses to get where you want to go. Great. Well, it worked out relatively smoothly as we caught the first bus--6 hours to Zumba, a border town with a great name and little else. We ...

Vern: Another early start. We took a five-hour bus south to Loja and then switched to another which after an hour delivered us to the lovely little hamlet of Vilcabamba. The little town sits in a luxuriant green bowl with high mountains all around it and blue mountains on the horizon - 360 degrees of rocky brilliance! It is full of expats, mostly German and French it seems, and is supposedly famous because people say that its residents don't kick the bucket. The...

Vern: We woke up just before 5am in our sparce but comfy room on the Quilotoa crater crest. My watch-arm was buried below three alpaca wool blankets and the alarm only sounds for 30 seconds so we'd slept through this, but luckily Andrea's body clock had roused her (isn't it amazing how we can do that) and she threw off the covers and initiated our morning routines. We were packed, ready and waiting by the time that the bus driver and his son - who were coinciden...

Vern: A fellow passenger was on her phone talking in Spanish, "I'm in Pasto, we're leaving the bus station now." "In a bus?" we presume that the person on the other end of the line asked. "No! In a KIA!" she exclaimed in an indignant tone. Andrea and I burst out laughing, and shoulder-to-shoulder, thigh-to-thigh with the unimpressed woman and 6 other Colombians we puttered off toward the borded in a snug Korean built minivan designed for a small suburban family. ...