Hello heat! Finally back to the sunshine and about time too! Cancun was like a transplanted America in the middle of Mexico with all of the familiar American brands to make the US holiday makers feel at home. But hey we were only there for a few days and the heat was awesome plus our hostel provided free Margaritas! Our main aim in staying a few days in Cancun was to visit Chichen Itza, the Mayan ruins just 2 hours outside Cancun which were recently named one of...

Arriving into George W Bush INTERCONTINENTAL airport (I kid you not!!), Houston Texas was like getting reverse culture shock. We went from 6 months in South America with hardly any shops and very few English speakers to being surrounded by shops and diners with anything your heart could desire and not having to think about what we were about to say in Spanish because everyone speaks English. I was ridiculously excited and could hardly contain myself over food f...

Arriving into Quito we could hardly believe that this was our last stop in South America after so many countries and so many good times. The new city is an area full of bars and restaurants and it honestly feels like Temple Bar in some parts. We took it pretty easy in Quito, sampling the local cuisine and even finding a great Irish bar, Finn McCools run by Ursula from Armagh. We did take a wander around the Old City but to be honest that was as far as our cultu...

Banos (yes a town named after the Spanish word for toilet!) is a beautiful place just 7km from an active and continually erupting volcano. In fact after we arrived we discovered that the Irish government states that you shouldn't travel there because of the danger. Oops!! In 1999 the volcano Tungurhua started erupting and the entire town was evacuated for 3 months before all of the locals returned and slowly so did the tourists. Now 9 years later its still erupti...

Yet another nightmare bus journey on awful Ecuadorian roads with huge landslides, smelly passengers and hours spent bumping along without any air conditioning, and then we arrived to Riobamba.Riobamba is definitely not the most happening of places we´ve been. In fact on a Friday night we couldn´t find a bar with anybody in it! But we did pass literally thousands of teenagers all spilling out of teenage discos with blazing music at 5:30 in the day! Weird! Ho...