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Hello all,
It has been a while since our last post , as we have been travelling down the river through the Amazon for the last week!
After our last post in Cuzco, we left on a bus to Bolivia the next day . It turns out that we were incredibly lucky to get out, and actually very lucky to get off Machu Picchu in the first place - we were the last group to make it down before huge landslides started and the rivers burst their banks. After we got down, groups were stranded on the mountain and needed to be airlifted out, in many cases days later.
Having been delayed by one day, we stopped on the way to Bolivia for a day trip out on the Peruvian side of Lake Titicaca from Puno. The trip was a visit through some of the íslands on the lake, these islands were inhabited and were made entirely by floating reed grass. In order to maintain the islands structure, the reeds needed to be regulary built up to ensure that the islands could continue to float as the lake is rising. We were blessed with some great weather, and the trip was a fantastic insight into a community that we were previously unaware of.
Following the trip out on the lake, we jumped on another bus to take us over the Bolivian border to Copacabana. This turned out to be quite a small place so we just had one night out, and hopped on another bus to La Paz the next day.The good weather didn´t continue unfortunately, but luckily for Tom, 22 from Sussex, he had other ways of keeping a nice brown complexion!
We spent 4 nights in La Paz, and found it to be an amazing city. It is absolutely huge, very diverse and the nights out can only be described as hectic! There are a wide range of markets, which needed more time than we were able to give them, we spent hours getting lost and still didn´t see everything we wanted to. We met a bunch of great people in Loki Hostel, which was the third Loki we had stayed in - we would highly recommend them if you are staying in Lima, Cuzco or La Paz.
From La Paz we had a series of four flights in one day in order to reach our next destination in the Amazon rainforest; Iquitos, Peru. It was a relief to be coming back down to sea level for the first time since Lima, we really noticed the difference! Iquitos was a great location; we expected a quiet little town as it cannot be accessed by road, but it was quite the opposite. If anyone ever thinks of going, it is defintely worth the trip and we can recommend that you sample the alligator in the ´Yellow Rose of Texas´. From Iquitos we spent 10 hours on a speed boat to the Brazilian border at Tabatinga, where we crossed the border ´Al Pacino style´ and slept on a boat in the port overnight before checking in at immigration the next day. Having checked in, we hung up our hammocks on a ferry and spent the next 4 days relaxing on the boat all the way to Manaus. Again, we highly recommend this trip if you are coming to South America, there were plenty of other travellers with us, and if we had more time we probably would have stayed on the boat all the way to Belem.
We had received bad reports about Manaus; everyone had labelled it as a bit of a ghost town with not much to do. Again luck has been on our side, as we arrived just as their Carnivale weekend was beginning. Cue two huge nights before heading off for the real thing in Rio! Speaking of luck, we even stumbled upon the England v Wales game in a local supermarket , and managed to enjoy the whole game in the middle of our shopping trip!
We hope that has sufficiently filled you in on what we have been up to; we are looking forward to updating you after our next great adventure - Rio Carnivale 2010!
R and J x
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