Bus rides are awful, but the days of travel are worth it to reach the idyllic little Gringo town of Baños de Agua Santa (see next post). After chilling in Lima for a day to readjust ourselves to being on the road again, Lauren and I hopped on a Cruz del Sur bus to Piura in the north of Peru. The ride cost 90 soles (about $30) for a semi-cama seat and took a whopping 16 hours. We left Lima at 4:30pm and didn't arrive in Piura until 8:30 the next morning, yik...

I think I have found my paradise. For the past 2 weeks Lauren and I volunteered on a small farm on the desert coast of Peru. The place was called Jihuay, though in no way could it be considered a town or city. It was just a cool Peruvian hippie named Alvaro, his animals and the beach. To reach Jihuay we took a series of buses from La Paz to Arequipa, where we hung out for 2 days before taking another long bus ride to Chala. Arequipa was a really nice city, i...

While we are glad we came to Bolivia, it was not our favorite of the 2 South American countries we have seen so far. Here are some fun Bolivia facts to ponder: 1. They don't seem to have working bathrooms on buses in the entire country. Even if there is a bathroom on board, which is rare, it's likely to be out of order. Given that we both have to pee every hour or 2, we have found this to be a form of cruel and inhumane torture. The drivers claim that they...

Bus rides in Bolivia are always an adventure. On Thursday night we tried taking a bus from Sucre to Cochabamba, what was supposed to be a 9 hour ride. We left at 7pm and made it as far as the police checkpoint, about 20 minutes outside the city before the bus broke down. We were told the police had called us another bus but we waited for over an hour and none came. The 2 drivers were both under the bus working on it using only the light from a cell phone, wh...

*** I would like to make a note that the focus of my blog will change slightly from here on out. I am going to start incorporating more specific information, such as how to catch a certain bus, which are the best tour companies to book with and include hostel reviews, while at the same time maintaining my journal-type writing style. In doing this I hope to make this blog a bit more useful to fellow travelers and anyone who would like to do these things in th...