Rain, Rain
They don't call it the rainforest for nothing. It sounds like a train coming - it's perfectly dry and simply overcast and all of a sudden you hear a noise like a strong wind coming. It gets louder and louder, the sky turns instantly darker and within 20 seconds the...
How do you do, Peru?
Spent 10 hours of yesterday bouncing (that's on a boat not a spacehopper) up the river Amazon to get to Iquitos in Peru, a town of 370,000 people, that has the honour of being the largest city in the world only accessible by boat or air. It's a chaotic sort of place,...
King of the Jungle
A quick update from Leticia - got back here last night from a few days in Puerto Narino, which is 70km up the Amazon towards Peru. Tomorrow we're getting a fast boat from Santa Rosa (an island across the river in Peru) to Iquitos (also in Peru). To buy the ticket we...
Whoops
So, we turn up at the airport all excited this morning, ready to begin the jungle adventure. Monkeys here we come!! Except that our ticket is for the 30th and today is the 28th. Kinda put a damper on things... But, guess what? The day after tomorrow I'm off to the...
Going Quiet
So I've got you all excited with a new blog design, loads of fascinating and insightful commentary to read and now I'm going to bugger off for a couple of weeks. Your disappointment is tangible. This is not because I don't love you - you know I do - but on Thursday we...
Dealing with the Past
Cocaine is a tricky thing. You can have as many high-profile ad campaigns promoting tourism as you want, place all the police you have on every street corner and generally clean your act up for both residents and tourists alike, but at the end of the day, people in...
Long and Winding Road
So, from Bogota we spent a couple of days in lovely colonial Villa de Leyva, about 4 hours north. On the way I got my first taste of Colombian bus drivers. In the cold light of day it's one thing to sit here typing away and say that they drive like lunatics. It's...
Bogota
I wasn't sure what to expect from Bogota. Very much like Colombia itself, its reputation precedes it. It's huge (9 million population), hard to travel around, some areas are total no-go areas for the average backpacker, and it's cold, even in summer (mainly die to its...
Emergency Numbers
Wallet Garden is a very simple and neat idea, which could come in very useful for travellers (and non-travellers alike). Create an account using an email address and password and it allows you to save the emergency numbers and web addresses for your bank. No important...
Is it Safe?
One thing that I have been asked a lot is whether or not Colombia is a safe place to be. For sure it does not have a good reputation for safety, and everyone has heard of FARC, Pablo Escobar and the fate of Ingrid Bettancur. So, it has a violent past, does that mean...
Getting Around
Having spent a very nice Christmas and New Year with the family, yesterday I arrived in Bogota. One of the first things you I like to do when arriving in a new city is try to figure out roughly where things are and how to get around, so when Laura gave me a Tourist...
Snow
Some snow in Wales. It's not all tropical beaches you know...