An extremely early hungover morning, hauling our arses out of bed at 5am to catch the bus to Cuenca, our final destination in Ecuador before hitting Peru. I have totally learnt my lesson with drinking before bus trips. 8 hours of manic Ecuadorian bus driving equals having a plastic bag on the ready to catch last nights dinner. It was awful, but I really only have myself to blame! Finally we arrived in Cuenca, it's Ecuadors 3rd largest city with a population of a...

Got up early this morning to take some spanish lessons at a local school. It was $6 an hour for one on one tuition, such a bargain considering Spanish classes at home are about $40 an hour for private tutoring. Unfortunately my teacher couldn't speak much english at all, so I had to look up phrases in a dictionary every two minutes. It was good to be forced to speak the language though and im definitely picking it up quickly. After that I walked back to our host...

Had a fairly cruisy day today. Got up late and wandered down to the middle of town to visit the catholic church. It was right up there with some of the churches I've seen in the Vatican, really beautiful architecture and mosaics on the walls. Later that day we got taken about 3000m up Mount Tungurahua by a crazy man called Mario. He insisted we call him Super Mario, and drove like a bat out of hell. Mount Tungurahua is a highly active volcano in Baños standing ...

A sad goodbye to Sergio, Matildo and the crew at Sacha Runa this morning. It hadn't stopped raining all night and this morning so we were all soaked standing out on the road waiting for the bus to Baños. Then the next four hours were spent in a damp bus, drenched! It was worth it though, arriving into Baños, there are huge waterfalls everywhere and the town is very colourful and touristy. We shopped around for a bit and then spent the rest of the afternoon wa...

This morning saw us gearing up for another 3 hour trek around the island we are staying on. We were guided by Matildo and Sergio, both are native amazonians. Matildo could not speak any English but Sergio could translate most things. We were shown countless plants and fungi that are used for food and medicine, including the sap of one tree that translates to 'dragon blood' in english. This is used both internally and externally for many ailments and skin condit...