Early the next morning I packed up, said goodbye to Dave who was travelling on for a few more weeks, and headed for the airport. The last surprise of the trip was waiting for me - my flight to Miami would be twelve hours late. I was so psyched up for going home that this [...]

Quito was a strange place. We found a hostel in what seemed like a slightly rough part of town, but then more or less all of Quito feels like a rough part of town. Most people in the hostel had been robbed here, or knew someone who had been robbed. I really didn’t want to [...]

Our plan had been to go to Alausí to get the train to Riobamba, via the famous Nariz del Diablo switchbacks. But time was now so short, and the train schedules so inconvenient, that we had to skip this. We headed instead to Cuenca, where the main interest for us was a place that did [...]

Loja seemed quite nice when we first arrived, a pleasant enough town surrounded by some fine Andean scenery. We were tired after an overnight bus ride and so spent our first day not doing very much. In hindsight this was a mistake, but we didn’t know that then. On our second day we went to [...]

Having seen Kuelap, we decided it was time to head for Ecuador. To do this we could either retrace our steps back to Chiclayo and then get a bus along the coast road, or take an extremely off-the-beaten-track route through the mountains. We decided we were in the mood for beating new tracks, and so [...]

We were heading for Chachapoyas, in the mountains of the north, but we stopped at Chiclayo because there were some pre-Inca ruins at Túcume nearby that we thought we might as well have a look at. We started our day with a breakfast of chicken and rice at a cafe near the bus station before [...]

After another day of recovery in Arequipa, sleeping and eating and doing nothing else at all, I got an overnight bus to Lima. In the capital I was going to meet my friend Dave, who had decided that being an artist in northern Spain was lucrative enough for him to afford a holiday. He was [...]

I didn’t sleep that much, and lay awake for much of the evening, dreading the midnight call. Luckily it wasn’t too cold, and when the call came I managed to rouse some enthusiasm. I checked my pack and my headlamp, and put on my warm clothes. We had some jam sandwiches for breakfast, and Roy [...]

I arrived in Arequipa just after dawn on a beautiful day. Confronting me as I arrived, soaring into the deep blue sky with a dusting of snow on top, was what I had come here to climb - El Misti. My South America plans had always involved climbing at least one big mountain, and El [...]

The journey to Peru was easy, with the border being just a few miles from Copacabana. I got another stamp in my passport, filled my wallet with more new currency, and got a bus to Puno. I killed a few hours there sheltering from heavy rain in cafes and restaurants, and then got an overnight [...]