Mendoza, Argentina

Remember that bad-tempered blog post I wrote when I went to Machu Picchu? The one about how annoying it was to be constantly surrounded by pretentious arty traveller types, and constantly besieged by cheap tatty merchandise and bogus ‘local’ culture? At the time you probably thought I was just being a miserable twisty-faced sour guts; and if you did, you were probably right. My only defence is that if I’d spent more time up to now in places like Mendoza, then I would never have been moved to complain like that in the first place.

Mendoza is a medium-sized Argentinian town. It doesn’t have any particular tourist attractions of note, nor is it easy to get to by train or plane. It’s just a lovely leafy little place full of parks, plazas and tree-lined boulevards, where the sun belts down all day every day. It also happens to be the epicentre of Argentina’s wine industry, with predictably happy results for yours truly. I’ve only been here two days but I already feel like I could live here indefinitely. It’s hard to explan why, either in words or in pictures: you’ll just have to trust me on that one.

Last night the hostel served up a barbecue for Ar$9 (£1.30) per head…seemingly endless portions of prime lamb, pork and (especially) beef, all washed down with a marvellously drinkable locally-sourced white wine. Tonight there was a late-night Italian festival in town, located in the Plaza Italia - naturally! - where I ate meat cappelletti and chorizo sausage in white wine. (It’s all been a bit protein-heavy recently, but I have some vegetables scheduled for early next week so don’t worry.)

It’s just a short blog today. Mendoza is fantastic and I’ll definitely come back here one day. That’s all.

Chile / Argentina border, up in the mountains

Mendoza

Plaza Espana, Mendoza

Parque San Martin, Mendoza

From the top of Cerro de la Gloria, Mendoza

Santiago, Chile

Anyone monitoring my progress with the help of Google Maps may notice a rather substantial distance between the current location and the last one. It’s a long and tragicomic story, boring to tell, but basically circumstances compelled me to stay on a bus which I wanted to get off halfway through, and that’s how I came to break my personal record for Longest Bus Ride Ever. 31 hours. (The previous record was 23 hours: see September 2008 below and select ‘Hue, Vietnam’).

Arica to Santiago is a thousand miles as the crow flies, but the crow did not fly, and the bus certainly didn’t either. Two consecutive nights on a bus, and a full day inbetween, with my partial comforts (reclining seat, a blanket, splendid daytime views of the Atacama desert) more than counteracted by the presence of an idiot with loud earphones, whose loud and idiotic earphones were consistently loud and idiotic for just about the whole 31 hours…it was a small consolation, as I sat there unable to sleep, to reflect that he’ll undoubtedly be deaf as a post before he’s 40. Fingers crossed he gets leprosy too.

Santiago is very liveable, not too crowded, and refreshingly modern compared with the somewhat ramshackle places I’ve been through in recent weeks. In fact, apart from the temperature (30 deg C and more), and the surrounding mountains, at times here you could easily imagine yourself in the nicer parts of Leeds or Birmingham city centres. The city views you see in the pictures are taken from the top of a funicular cable car type thing, which ascends a little grassy knoll called Cerro San Cristobel; there was a zoo halfway up and I took a few pictures there too.

On Saturday I took in some football: Colo-Colo 1 Universidad de Concepción 2, at the Estadio Monumental David Arellano. Colo-Colo is a funny name for a team. (I’d like to see them sign Kolo Touré, and possibly also Bolo Zenden.) They’re the biggest and most successful team in Chilean football history, but this was one of their off-days. My amateur video of Colo-Colo’s consolation goal is below.

Weird creature in Santiago zoo (1)

Weird creature in Santiago zoo (2)

Oh, for f***'s sake. There's always one.
Note how it's the fat and dippy-looking one of the three.

Estadion Monumental David Arellano. Colo-Colo in action.

Santiago

Santiago

Santiago

Santiago

Arica, Chile

If there was ever a country that doesn’t live up to its name, it’s Chile. I’m sweating like Whitney Houston’s pharmacist. Indeed I've belatedly learned that Arica is officially the driest inhabited place on earth. Fact.


My original intention had been to continue heading east, through Bolivia and into Paraguay, but I was getting a bit tired of the altitude – it left me out of breath all the time, and so I couldn’t really be as active as I wanted to be. Also the intermittent cold and rain was a bit of a drag too. So I’ve headed south and west instead, and now here I am, renewing my acquaintance with the Pacific, after a scenic ride from La Paz (see pictures).


Yesterday and today I went sunbathing, for the very first time in my entire adult life. I mean I literally went down to the beach and lay down with the specific intention of getting a suntan, as opposed to just meandering around outdoors on a day that happened to be sunny. Normally I scoff at men who covet suntans, but I claim justification for myself in that my forearms and head and neck have unavoidably gone brown already, and my milky white torso is thus presenting an ever more ridiculous contrast. There’s one T-shirt in my bag which I can’t really wear right now, because it’s a bit looser around the neck than the others and it leaves my appallingly vivid tan lines on open display. Fingers crossed a few sessions on the beach should even things up a bit.


Arica reminds me of Huanchaco in Peru: it's clearly a popular tourist destination for locals, and it's starting to attract a little bit of gringo attention too, but it would take huge investment and co-ordination to turn it into a major international draw. One problem is that, despite the two nice beaches to the north and south of the town respectively, the coastline of the town centre itself is occupied by a large and not especially pretty cargo port - 40-foot Maersk containers and cranes everywhere. I dare say the port is good for the local economy, so maybe on the whole the place is best left as it is.


Admittedly, apart from sunbathing, I haven’t really done much else here other than have an embarrassing encounter at the lavanderia (launderette), where the woman on the counter sifted all the way through my dirty clothes piece by piece - sand-encrusted socks, sweat-sodden underpants, the works - right in front of me. The price she eventually quoted for this single load of washing was 8500 Chilean pesos, about £11. At first I thought she'd gotten her maths wrong; then I wondered if maybe she was just overcome with disgust at my underwear and wanted rid of me. I eventually twigged, after having excused myself and gone elsewhere, that the sign on that first shop had actually said lavaseco - meaning dry cleaners. Live and learn.

The desert and the mountain

Near the Bolivia / Chile border

Arica town centre, complete with rocking-horse and rocking-elephant, for reasons unknown

Arica

The south beach at Arica, as recently graced by Edd 'Mitch Buchanan' Major

La Paz, Bolivia

I left Puno on a 7am bus, too early to have a proper breakfast beforehand, but I consoled myself at the bus station with a sugary treat in the form of a packet of Nerds. (A long-forgotten pleasure. Can you still get Nerds in the UK?) After crossing into Bolivia, we had to get out of the bus to cross the Tiquina strait – the bus went by barge and the passengers went by motorboat. See pictures for the alpacas by the waterfront, and also for the interesting war memorials. Bolivia used to have a Pacific coast, but lost it to Chile in the war of 1879-1883, and never got it back. As you can see from the picture, they’re still not entirely happy about this.

Anyway, Bolivia…it’s a fairly poor country, with an average income per head of just £3000 or so. Rotten bit of luck for the locals, but looking on the bright side, those are the kind of low wage expectations that enable me to rent a very comfy apartment with a well-stocked kitchen, spectacular views and a big walk-in shower, plus newly-baked bread and freshly-squeezed orange juice brought to my door every morning, all for £35 a night. And having my own kitchen makes it easier to indulge my particularly English culinary tastes. You don’t get far asking for ‘dippy eggs’ in restaurants round here.

I realise I’ve rather overdone the altitude-related statistics recently, but it must be noted that La Paz is the world’s highest capital city. Actually it’s only the administrative capital of Bolivia: the formal capital is Sucre, to the east, but never mind. La Paz spreads all around the bottom and sides of a huge mountainous bowl, and altitudes range from 9,840ft to 13,450ft. It’s spectacular, if exhausting. See photos.

Notwithstanding my recent problems on the gastric front, I was determined to be open-minded and try some Bolivian cuisine. So I went to a French restaurant called La Comedie. My main course was an interesting mix of culinary cultures: grilled llama, served medium rare, in sauce bordelaise. Call it Franco-Bolivian fusion. Llama meat is I think best described as halfway between beef and lamb: lighter and more gamey than beef, but less oily than lamb. Delicious, and highly recommended.

I realise that eating llama may be morally questionable, just as eating guinea pig was a couple of weeks ago. Llamas are arguably at least as cute as guinea pigs, if not more so. But I’m fairly sure that nobody reading this has ever had a pet llama.

So a good day overall: a fine meal and a good win for SAFC, which I was again able to watch live on ESPN, complete with the excitable gabbling Spanish commentary (“gooooooooooooooooooooooaaaaaaaal…………..San-dair-land!!!! Hhhhhrrreeeee-chardson!!!!!”).The gabbling was non-stop, except for one amusing bit of perplexed silence when the camera zoomed in for a moment on Jimmy Montgomery, sitting in the stands. You can’t say ‘who the f**k’s that?’ on the telly. Not even in Spanish.

I’m moving on again tomorrow, as always.

5-star service at the border

Tasteful, sensitive, conciliatory Bolivian war memorial.
'What was once ours, will one day be ours again.' (see above for explanation)

Alpacas by the Tiquina Strait

La Paz

La Paz

La Paz

La Paz

There was a Bolivian farmer
Who reared, and then slaughtered, a llama
When served up to Edd
It left him well fed
And caused him no bowel-based drama!

Lake Titicaca, Peru

Strictly speaking, the location of this blog is the town of Puno, which lies on the north-west shore of Lake Titicaca. However ‘Lake Titicaca’ is inherently amusing, and ‘Puno’ isn’t. Hence the title above.

Having had more than my fill of buses in recent weeks, I was glad to have the opportunity to take a train from Cuzco to Puno. And not just any old train. The ‘Andean Explorer’ costs $220 for the ten-hour trip, but it’s worth it. Three-course lunch, wine, a free Pisco Sour cocktail…even the toilet was plush, or at least it was before I used it. See pictures (toilet not included).

At one point the train trundled slowly right down the main market street of a small town, with no safety barriers or level crossings or any of that politically correct nonsense. The traders all had their wares laid out between the rails, and went back to their business as soon as the train had passed. Towards the end of the street, some local young scamp scored a direct hit on the observation car with a water pistol. Several of the rich old ladies around me had quite a fit of the vapours as a result. I got splashed too, but if I’d met that kid I’d have shaken his hand.

The next day I took a full-day boat trip out onto Lake Titicaca. The first port of call was the floating reed islands of the Uros people. This involved quite a bit of enforced ‘human safari’ activity, of the kind I spent my last blog bitching about, and I was glad when it was over. It seems like a pretty miserable existence to me, living out on a cold and rainy lake, and eating almost nothing but trout and reeds. There was a fair bit of emotional blackmail to buy their handmade textiles, to which I of course remained heartlessly impassive.

Next port of call was Taquile, a real island this time: we landed on one side of the island and then had a slow walking tour round to meet the boat on the other side. This involved a short climb, of about 500 feet or so. Normally I’d eat up that climb like it was a Greggs sausage roll, but when the starting point is already 12,500 feet – Titicaca is the highest navigable lake on earth – there is something of a multiplier effect, and so I had to take it slow.

The highlight of the day should have been the lunch in Taquile, which was included in the cost of the trip: fresh trout, rice and fries. It looked lovely, but sadly I didn’t dare touch it. I’ve been in Peru three weeks now, and the only foodstuffs which have bothered stopping to say hi to any part of my digestive system, apart from eggs, have been from tins and sealed packets. I can only conclude that there must be some kind of bacterium endemic to Peru which my DNA is programmed to reject. That’s why I didn’t take any chances with the trout today, especially as the next three hours had to be spent on a small and crowded boat where the toilet was ‘for number ones only, please, seňors’.

Fortunately my days in Peru are now at an end. Fingers crossed for different bacteria in the next country, which is…

…to be revealed in my next blog.

Posh train (my seat)

Posh train (bar)

Posh train (observation car)

Mountains between Cuzco and Puno

Take it to the limit, one more time

Train? Meh.

Lake Titicaca

Machu Picchu, Peru

It’s the rainy season here, and a landslide caused serious delays to my train from Cuzco to Machu Picchu. At one point it looked like it might not happen at all, and with my train south to Puno already booked for the day after, things threatened to get tricky. Actually it wouldn’t have felt like the end of the world to me personally if I’d missed out: I was certainly looking forward to Machu Picchu, but it wasn’t the be-all and end-all. However I just couldn’t face the prospect of spending the rest of my life having to explain to people how it came to pass that I spent three weeks travelling from one end of Peru to the other, and didn’t go to MP along the way.

Luckily I got there in the end. But the round trip took from 6am to 11pm and I only got to spend about an hour at the place itself before having to leave because it was closing. Most of the day was taken up with rickety bus rides, stop-start train rides, and lots of waiting around. I wish I’d had more time there – I could easily have spent several hours just sitting there and staring at it. But I got there, and I saw it, and the photos are below. (Apologies for the repetitive angles but the light was fading and so I couldn't get decent shots facing the other way!)

This blog can be pretty cynical at times, so I think it’s only fair to drop all the irony for a moment and record that Machu Picchu absolutely does live up to the hype. It’s like nothing else I’ve ever seen on this earth. That said, the natural setting itself would be a marvel to behold even if nothing had ever been built on it. But there is something peculiarly cohesive about the way the stones blend into the landscape. It’s almost as if the place had grown up organically out of the soil. The visit is definitely worth the time and the effort and the expense. (And the expense is rather more than you might expect, overall, but I don’t mind. Fair play to the Peruvian people: it belongs to them and it’s theirs to sell.)

As well as causing train-delaying landslides, the heavy rain had caused the Urubamba river to swell up to a quite terrifying extent. A video snippet of the rapids, taken from the train, is below. As is a picture of Aguas Calientes (ie Machu Picchu town) looking like it’s about to be swept away whole. Bit scary really, but the locals seemed unperturbed and I guess this kind of thing is routine for them.

Inevitably, Aguas Calientes is ludicrously over-commercialised. As soon as you get off the train, you’re confronted with an absolute barrage of merchandise, most of which has only the most tenuous link to any kind of ‘authentic’ Andean culture. But it’s what people come here to buy, and you can’t blame the locals for meeting the demand. I just wish they didn’t have to hammer it home so much all the time – like with the cheesy Pan Pipe Moods elevator muzak playing constantly on every bus and train within a thousand-mile radius of Machu Picchu. In Huancayo, there was a busker playing a pan-pipe version of ‘My Heart Will Go On’ by Celine Dion, complete with karaoke-style backing track. Cheese knows no borders.

As for Cuzco, it’s a lovely place, but again it’s just that little bit too manufactured. Too much merchandise. Too many hawkers and hucksters. Too many gringo travellers - not ‘tourists’, oh no, heaven forbid - all wearing exactly the same ‘alternative lifestyle’ uniform: sculpted beards, sunglasses, dreadlocks, hessian, beads, etc. (Actually it’s strange how many of the girls have dreadlocks, or braids or whatever, but I think that may be something to do with dreads requiring less day-to-day maintenance than normal hair. Perhaps some of my female friends can enlighten me on this point.) You just know that in a few months all these people will go back to Connecticut or Surrey; they’ll ditch the outlandish hairstyle, put on a smart suit and go and work for a legal firm or a hedge fund. Why pretend to be something you’re not?

I also think there is something profoundly hypocritical about the patronising attitudes with which most visitors view the locals. European and American people, intent on living scrupulously ‘ethical’ lifestyles, who wouldn’t be seen dead buying a T-shirt if it was made in a Chinese sweatshop, practically squirm with delight when confronted with the sight of an octogenarian Andean woman who’s been sitting on a pavement all day, through sun and rain alike, trying to flog a few pieces of needlework to get enough money to eat. Because it’s all so ‘authentic’, don’t you know? And when they’ve finished haggling the poor woman down for the sake of an extra 50p, they take pictures of her and the other locals, without asking permission, as if they were animals in a zoo.

Oops, I’m getting all cynical again. I think the point I’m trying to make is that trying to capture an ‘authentic’ experience is a self-defeating exercise, because you can’t capture real life and put it in a bottle and sell it off bit by bit. Real travelling is about experiencing life as it’s actually lived in the places you visit, with all its pros and cons, however mundane - real life, and not some grotesque stylised Beamish-esque parody of it.

(Lecture over.)

Sunset in Cuzco

Downhill into Aguas Calientes

Machu Picchu

Machu Picchu

Machu Picchu

Machu Picchu

Machu Picchu

Cuzco, Peru

It's a bit chilly here in Cuzco, but on the whole I prefer chilly to sweltering. In Lima I was sweating so much that the suntan lotion was melting off my shaved head and trickling forward and down into my eyes. Not a pleasant image, I know, but you get the point. Anyway I'm in good health again, so much so that I was able to take the 21-hour (yep) bus journey here without even needing a pre-emptive Immodium. I had the option of flying - I think it might actually even have been cheaper to do so - but I want to do this coast-to-coast thing properly, and I want to see Peru rather than fly over it.

My digestive system has been nursed back to life with some very safe pre-packaged supermarket food and a steady diet of three-egg omelettes. I’m afraid that even without the toilet issues, South American food hasn’t really enamoured itself to me, thus far at least. Everything is either far too salty or far too sweet. I find myself fantasising about good old English fare – fish fingers, waffles, baked beans, Monster Munch…

 …And most of all, a nice pint of bitter. On the whole I don’t think South America is especially distinguished for its beers either, certainly not compared to Europe or Asia. Corona is reliable but beyond that it’s mainly cut-price staples like Pilsener and Club. (Fortunately in Cuenca I found a little café that served Erdinger Weissbrau, well worth the indulgence at $7.80 for a pint.)

In the next couple of days I'm going off on a little expedition. Apparently there are some rocks up a hill somewhere near here which are said to be worth looking at.

Plaza de Armas, Cuzco

San Sebastian, Cuzco

El Sol, Cuzco

Lima, Peru (again)

That last update was a bit long-winded and depressing wasn’t it? Apologies to you all. I was ill and feverish and feeling sorry for myself.

A big part of travelling is exposing oneself to new experiences. In Huancayo I recorded a personal first by eating a guinea pig, or at least half of one. They call it cuy here. (If anyone has ever owned and cherished a guinea pig, then yes, I’m a bad man and I’m truly sorry. In my defence, it was dead.) I wasn’t all that impressed: even with half of the whole animal on your plate, there only seems to be about as much actual flesh as you’d get in a chicken drumstick. It’s mainly skin and bone. Still, it’s one more for the ‘been there done that’ list.

Sadly it’s also one for the ‘oh Jesus never again’ list. If that guinea pig had put up half as much of a fight at the abbatoir as it did in my guts, it’d still be alive today. At the time of writing the last update, I assumed that me feeling like death microwaved was mainly due to the chill and the altitude sickness, but I was wrong. I’ve hardly eaten anything since.

One final gripe. I’d noticed that the domestics at the Hotel Presidente seemed to be a bit over-attentive with my room. I’d been lying there ill all day, undisturbed, and then when I popped out in the evening for 5 minutes to get some more bottled water, I came back to find that my towels had been changed while I was out. At the time I gave them the benefit of the doubt, although I did take extra precautions with my money and bank cards. However on the bus out of Huancayo the next day, it came belatedly to my attention that I now have one less MP3 player than I used to have.

As you can guess, on the whole I’m not too enamoured of Huancayo. Not for nothing are the local people named the Wankas. I’m not joking: the local football team is called Deportivo Wanka, and the name Huancayo is derived from the same word – it’s pronounced ‘Wank. Aye. Oh.’. The place now has a medal ranking on the list of Things I Wish I’d Never Done, along with growing a beard and buying a Sunderland season ticket for 2005/2006.

I’ve decided to take a different route through Peru, hence me being back in Lima for the time being. See pictures for my current hostel…it’s a grand colonial-era mansion, very bohemian, right in the centre of the historic city, opposite the Museo de Arte. Very nice. And I watched Boro 1 SAFC 2 live on my computer today.

So it’s not all bad news. I’m glad to see that SAFC are performing with greatly increased spontaneity and fluidity. It’s just unfortunate that right now my bowels are doing exactly the same thing.



Palace of Justice, Lima (no this isn't the hostel, that's further below)



Smog at sunset in Lima

Maybe the irony is intentional.

Posh hostel #1

Posh hostel #2

Tins of tuna, Peru style. I might get £5 off the Viz for this.

Huancayo, Peru

I left Lima early on Friday morning and enjoyed a stupendous eight-hour bus ride east to Huancayo, up in the mountains. Nice food served, a club-class seat and fantastic views, the highlights of which I managed to capture on video. I didn’t take any actual photos, and indeed this is a photo-free update, but before too long I’ll make up for it with that compilation of video highlights I mentioned last time.

Unfortunately things went a bit wrong in Huancayo. I had altitude sickness, much more than previously, having ascended 11,000 feet in just half a day. Also, at night it gets really cold here; and I only learned very belatedly that most of the hotels, including the one I was in, don’t have any kind of heating at all. (I guess that explains that the complete absence of other tourists. How come I didn’t know this?) There wasn’t even some kind of fan heater I could borrow. So I hunkered down as best as I could, under two beds’ worth of blankets, but it was a tortuous night and I woke up with a really bad chill, aching all over and feeling utterly rotten. Fortunately I’m not a wussy female character in an 18^th-century Romantic novel, and as such a chill isn’t a near-death experience, but I couldn’t face going outside so I just lay in bed and watched all the footy.

Transferred myself at lunchtime to the Hotel Presidente (oh yes) for my second night, where even at 70 dollars a night they don’t have central heating, but they did manage to rustle up a portable radiator and that has sufficed. However the combination of altitude sickness, the chill, and some ongoing digestive issues rendered me unable to do anything today other than just sweat and shiver and ache under the blankets. (Incidentally this bed is the biggest I’ve ever seen. I reckon Rod Stewart could have fitted all five Nolan sisters in it, back in the day. Maybe even the Weathergirls, at a pinch.)

Also there was an unfortunate incident on my first night in Huancayo. Walking back from a café to my hotel, at night, I passed a young couple who were having a heated argument by a wall at the edge of the plaza. Well, when I say ‘heated’, what I mean is, he was snarling at her and she was silent. Then he slapped her a couple of times. For a brief moment I was the only other person within about twenty yards, and I hesitated for half a second only because I really did not know the turf. But then people starting rushing in from all over the place and the guy got roughed up a bit (not nearly enough) by the mob. Presently some kind of police/security guy appeared and everything calmed down.

Depressingly, but predictably, the outcome was that the girl pleaded for the bloke to be forgiven: she placed herself between him and the crowd, and she dragged him away round the corner and there was an end of it.

I should have moved quicker when it first happened. He obviously wasn’t any kind of tough nut, he was just a pudgy little spiv and certainly he had no backup waiting in the wings. It would have been worth a night in a Peruvian jail cell just to have flattened his greasy fat face and then stomped all over it. My Cat boots were ideally suited to the latter purpose.

But I think I would have been even less useful here in a fight than normal (and that’s saying something), because it’s 11,000 feet above sea level and at the time of the above incident I’d only just got there, fresh from being at sea level in Lima earlier in the day. I was out of breath and dizzy just from unpacking my bags.

So it’s all a bit negative and I’m feeling ever so slightly sorry for myself. I could really use some home comforts right now, and being 6000 miles from anyone I know doesn’t help. ("One, two, three, aaahhh”). But that’s solo travelling for you: there are always ups and downs. My chill is already beginning to wear off, so I should soon be back on the road and off to somewhere a bit more gringo-friendly.

Lima, Peru

In a way Lima marks the end of part one for me - specifically, the end of the cruise south through Ecuador and Peru's Pacific coast. After this I'm heading east, into the interior, and eventually to the Atlantic coast.

Lima also marks the end of my quite substantial involvement with the Pan American Highway, a 29,800 mile road - or, more accurately, network of roads - from Alaska all the way down to Argentina. This road is immortalised in the song 'Turn That Heartbeat Over Again' by Steely Dan ("Yeah, this highway runs from Paraguay / And I've just come all the way...").

See below for photos of Lima. I'm staying in a rather lively hostel, where the craic is OK and fortunately none of the annoying people are English. Indeed I've only met a handful of Poms / Limeys since Quito. It's much easier to tolerate annoying people from countries other than one's own, because at least the annoyance isn't multiplied by shame and embarrassment.

Lima is much the biggest place I've been to so far - about 8 million people in all. Parts of the city are distinctly rough, but I'm staying safely in an upmarket neighbourhood called Miraflores. It's a bit more expensive than what I've experienced so far, but it's still pretty good value. Indeed it’s a cliché, and a vulgar one, but everything is so darned cheap over here. It’s almost impossible to get rid of one’s money. When I checked out of my Quito hostel the bill only came to $46 for three nights’ accommodation - and that included my bar tab. The bus to Cuenca, a trip of some 300 miles, was $12. I got a week’s worth of clothes washed for $1.30. And so it goes on.

The downside is that everybody seems to be on the take. As well as the short-changing taxi driver mentioned last time, there was the guy in Subway in Quito who tried to short-change me by $10. And today, in Lima, the young girl serving in the supermarket tried to unburden me of 20 soles (just under a fiver). It's not the end of the world, but it's annoying and dispiriting. Needless to say, all these would-be Dick Turpins were unsuccessful.

I'm very conscious that I haven't been able to do photographic justice to everything I've seen. The bus rides have been stupendous, but I just can't seem to capture it in a photo. However I've shot a few videos out of coach windows, and when I get a minute I'm going to make a video compilation of the highlights and put it up here, bandwidth permitting (today Sunderland 3 Norwich 0 was hugely pleasing but I just couldn't get any kind of internet stream to view any of it. All I could get was BBC text updates at five minutes' delay. The sacrifices I make...)

This would have been more topical in Quito, but better late than never

Lima. Getting quite hot.

Lima. Beginning to perspire.

Lima. Leaving sweat trails on the pavement

Lima. Feeling like the unlucky Nazi at the end of 'Raiders of the Lost Ark'

Lima. Not looking forward to getting back up that cliff.

The global appeal of Coronation Street (only applicable to people old enough to remember the 80s)

Lima's Centro Historico

Statue of Don José de San Martin, Lima