After spending New Years Eve with fellow overlanders at CodaVista, we set off to visit the cloud forest to the west of Quito. This involved a drive up into the hills on tarmac before turning onto a track and climbing into the cloud forest and our destination, Bellavista Lodge. On the way, we camped in a town called Calacali which […]
Francine has wanted to visit the Galápagos Islands, off the coast of Ecuador, for a long time. A big birthday in 2024 was a good reason and so we booked for January 2025. What a start to the year! But first we must apologise for this photo heavy blog; we have tried to include only the best of a huge […]
Wishing our family, friends and fellow overlanders a Very Happy and Prosperous New Year! We hope you enjoyed the New Year’s Eve celebrations wherever you were on this marvellous planet we call home. This year NYE found us perched on top of a hill at a small, but very nice, campsite on the outskirts of Quito in Ecuador. Although on […]
On our way to Puyo we took a detour from the E35 and visited a Cocoa farm in the jungle. It was a really neat experience where we got to make chocolate and then take it away with us! Step1 – Pick the Cocoa pod from the tree, open it up and strip the beans from the ‘tube’. The fleshy […]
We went from the arid and dirty Peruvian coastline to the lush and tidy jungle of Ecuador. A very pleasant change! Crossing into Ecuador at the small border at Macará, we followed a busload of passengers, that completely overwhelmed the border staff. A few hours later we emerged as the sun was setting and we scrabbled to find our first […]
From Nazca, we headed towards the coast. On the way, we visited Ica and its splendid museum, where we saw real mummies recovered from the nearby archaeological sites and examples of elongated heads. This cranial deformation took place when the person was an infant by applying tight cloth bandages and was an indication of high status. We met up with […]
We travelled north along Peru’s coastline from Lima, with a short deviation into the mountains, before cutting inland to our preferred Ecuadorian border crossing. I have to say Northern Peru does not have so much going for it as the south does. The main feature of driving north of Lima is the incessant rubbish that lines the edge of the […]
Leaving Lima, we wandered up the coast to Paramonga and, against Francine’s better judgement, turned inland to explore the Peruvian mountains. We climbed 2,500m, with the weather deteriorating the further inland we went and camped half way up before reaching the plateau at 4000m plus. It was very spartan countryside before slowly getting more populated as we followed the Rio […]
Just outside the town of Nazca in southern Peru is a flat desert plain on which ancient peoples (500BC – 500AD) etched hundreds of large images (geoglyphs), sometimes over 300m in length, that only really become apparent when viewed from above – the Nazca Lines. Our merry band of overlanders, David and Francine, Ivan, Heather and Jon, and Gerhard and […]
I do love a good ruin and so I wasn’t disappointed with Peru’s Sacred Valley! Although the Inca empire is estimated to have lasted for less than 150 years (before it was rudely interrupted by the Spanish Conquistadors quest for power and gold), they managed to accomplish a great deal of infrastructure and construction in that time. We bought a […]