as our ferry crawled sluggishly along the final stretch of water to picton, we peered out at other ferries and larger cruises - one with the vaguely familiar-sounding name of ‘london’ painted on her aft bow - and beyond, into the low, thick clouds that concealed the allegedly beautiful scenery. it was back there somewhere, but alas, we wouldn’t be ( Read more... )

it has been rather surreal being reacquainted with new zealand over the past 3 weeks, and some of the differences between here and south america have been more startling than i’d anticipated. the people, the culture, the architecture, and even the complete absence of stray dogs is completely different to the world to which i was becoming ( Read more... )

maipú - circa mendoza, argentina. we were welcomed into mr hugo’s bike shop, and the lovely lady who i presume was mrs hugo soon went about annotating our map of maipú with indications as to the best wineries to visit. by the time she’d finished, our map was somewhat unusable due to the extent of her circling this and arrowing towards that, but we ( Read more... )

our journey to salta was long but unremarkable, due to a distinct lack of the annoyances and discomforts that characterise more or less all bolivian bus rides, and to which we were apparently still accustomed. and thus, having slept surprisingly well, we arrived in the first destination of our last new south american country ( Read more... )

it was whilst whizzing along the bumpy, winding road from santa cruz to samaipata that i realised my need to escape city life and return to that of small rural towns and their scenery beyond. although i shouldn’t be too hard on myself - i have had food poisoning, after all, and there has been a nationwide fuel-crisis - i shouldn’t have spent so ( Read more... )

our bus journey from cusco to la paz was surprisingly uneventful. i managed to sleep for the majority of it, thankfully, so the 13 hours passed quickly. the border crossing was the worst part. we basically stood in a queue in the rain for 3 hours, waiting for our passports to be stamped, which took no more than 60 seconds ( Read more... )

the rest of our time in miraflores was spent finding some shoes for sally in the out-of-place shopping centre, and perusing the aísles of the huge supermarket to the tune of jingle bells for panpipes. we didn't do much else here, as miraflores turned out to be a fairly mundane place. our hostel was nice, however, though incredibly quiet. sally and ( Read more... )

i don´t think peru could seem more different to cuba, or more different to what i´d imagine lima to be full-stop. the first two things that i notice are that there are adverts absolutely everywhere - on every building, car, window, post, person - and there is a huge amount of traffic ( Read more... )

cayo levisa was incredible - probably the best beach i’ve ever been to. it’s a 3km-long island of perfect, white sandy beach and the clearest turquoise sea - just like something out of a travel brochure. part of me couldn’t help but think about how unauthentic and removed from the real cuba this place was. but after the previous day’s events, we ( Read more... )

how different cuba is to guatemala! for one, it´s very warm, even at night - i guess that´s the difference of being back at sea level. people are a lot less timid here. where guatemalans will only open up to you once you’ve established some sort of loose rapport, cubans clearly have no apprehensions and jump right in - literally, in one instance. ( Read more... )