…when you’re having fun.
Category: Travel
A picture usually says a thousand words… this one says two. Yes, we’re back in Buenos Aires! It’s our final night in BA and luckily there’s enough time for one…
After a few days in Buenos Aires, we took the one hour ferry ride to Uruguay and spent a day wandering about the beautiful little town of Colonia – the…
Expect nice short posts from now on… Our time is running out! We arrived from Rio at Foz do Iguaçu airport and immediately jumped into a taxi and headed for…
Rio nearly didn’t make it into our travel itinerary. We had decided that we didn’t really have time to go into Brasil and even though we’d heard incredible things about…
We arrived in Santa Marta looking for more sun and sand, and less insects. It was certainly hot but the beach was a little lacking as most of it looked…
After travelling from one side of the continent to the other by bus over the past few months, the flights to and from the Galápagos were an absolute joy… and…
After a short (1.5 hour) bus ride and an overly convoluted border crossing – involving getting a Peruvian exit stamp miles before the border, crossing the border, getting an entry…
We didn’t have huge expectations of Lima which was probably a good thing… we really enjoyed it. We spent a couple of days eating in the lovely restaurants of Miraflores…
We arrived in Cusco an hour early at 4am on Saturday. The city was very much asleep (other than one incredibly drunken gringo party-goer with fluorescent pen all over his face who we saw stumbling in a gutter) so we were relieved that we’d decided to book a room in advance. Our hostel was closed when we arrived, but fortunately someone opened the door and agreed to let us sit in the café. Once it got light we hit the streets. We were amazed by Cusco, it is a really beautiful city. It’s the longest inhabited city in South America and is full of narrow cobbled streets and beautiful old buildings. We spent the morning wandering and searching for a company to book to take us on the Salkantay trek to Machu Picchu. Having read quite a lot about conditions for the porters and quality of camping equipment we were stunned by how cheaply some companies were offering the trek. We contemplated doing it on our own, but decided against the hassle of carrying all our own food and equipment and eventually booked with a reputable eco tourism company.
We arrived in Copacabana from La Paz after a 3 hour bus ride and trudged up the hill to our preferred hotel, without a booking. They were fully booked but advised us to turn up anyway and luckily a non-confirmed booking meant we got the room! It was a great place to hang out and, after our recent escapades elsewhere in Bolivia, the perfect place to relax for a few days. So this post will be short!
Poor old La Paz didn’t really stand much of a chance with us. We wanted to go there… but we really wanted to see everything else we wanted in Bolivia before we got there. Our disappointment at our enforced shortened trip in Bolivia and our weekend arrival didn’t exactly make it easy for us to like.
That said, our first impression of La Paz was incredible. We arrived as the sun was rising over the many terraces of the city. La Paz lies entirely in a valley so makes a for a spectacular view, particularly as the sun rises. Unfortunately once we got off the bus we couldn’t get a room at the hostel we wanted to and the one we ended up staying at was a bit weird. To get to our room we had to walk through one of the dorms and the walls to our room were glass with curtains that didn’t fully cover them. Also, we could hear everything from the dorm. Still…. it was a bed and there was a shower and given the ordeal of the past few days we were relatively happy.
Our 7 hour bus ride to La Quiaca on the Argentine border was reasonably comfortable and we arrived at 7.30am. It was freezing cold but we were treated to a spectacular sunrise. We walked with two other travellers, Antoine (French) and Johanna (German) – who we met at the bus station the night before in Salta – to the border which was about 1km from the bus station. We were pretty short of breath during the walk as we’d climbed about 2km in altitude during the bus journey. After getting our exit stamps from the Argentine immigration office we walked across the bridge into Bolivia. After a small queue and some simple checkpoint formalites we headed into the Bolivian town of Villazón. It was the first time I’d ever crossed a border on foot.