The Earth + Nat

Mariciela in what used to be her bedroom After hearing so much about volunteering from other friends on the road, I decided to give up a couple of weeks to volunteer in a small town badly hit by flooding in March this year. So after a 23 hour bus to Lima, a night in the capital and another 5 hour bus up the coast, I found myself at the scene of one of the most catastrophic disasters to hit Peru in decades. Around the time I was flying into South America, most of the coastal provinces of Peru, normally a desert area, were subject to more rain than they would normally get in a year in a less than week. A lot of significant damage was done in the north of the country which is where most of the disaster response has occurred, but next to the small but important provincial town of Huarmey, the normally very placid local river became a raging torrent that sent flood water as high as 2 metres in two separate floods a few days apart. Before... The organisation I work for, All ...

I felt like starting a series showing my experience of the day to day backpacker life - something which is full of its own little challenges every step of the way. First up: hostels. The most basic element of any day is where you put yourself at the end of it, and you have a few different options on the South American landscape. Party Hostels These places are wild. The fiesta literally never stops at a true party hostel. Many of them are chains you can find in many cities and countries such as Loki and Wild Rover, but there are also smaller ones such as Kultur Berlin in Sucre. They have massive capacity, onsite bars or clubs with volunteers whose job it is to get people to mix together, usually via a drinking game. If you want to have a good time, you don't even need to leave the hostel! ...which is the weird part of party hostels. Some people swing from one to another across the continent, strange denizens barely sobering up from one day to the next, not taking the time to...

This blog is coming much later than I expected because instead of spending the 5 days I had planned in this town, I was here for two weeks. That's the great thing about solo travel, if you want to get lost in a place, you can just do it. New country, new border crossing selfie! Two weeks ago I stumbled into town off a night bus from Bolivia. Well actually, a collectivo, a short walk across the Peruvian border, a tuktuk, a minibus to the next town, a bicycle taxi and finally a coach. This may sound horribly confusing, but this was using all the local transports, getting directions along the way when my phone died and haggling down greedy drivers on prices, which all in all cost me less than half the price of the direct tourist bus. Making all of that effort isn't just a reward on the wallet, it's actually pretty fun turning an easy route into a testing challenge of wits, language and geography. But I digress. I had finally arrived in the town of my dreams: Cuzco! Th...

Lake Titicaca is a place surrounded by myth and legend. The name means 'stone Puma' in Quechua, so called because it resembles a Puma's head, but also because the Puma is the sacred animal of the lands of the living, and the Quechua/Inca people believe they were born out of the lake. This myth may stem from the fact that the founder of the Incan Empire, Manco Capac, came from a collapsed civilisation called the Tiwanaku who lived by the lake. Either way, it is a place of deep significance in indigenous culture. That's not the ocean I arrived in the lakeside town of Copacabana with my buddy of the last few days, Barney (from Byron Bay Aus), and after a solid night's sleep to work off the last of our La Paz hangovers, we set off for Isla del Sol. The island is something I had heard much about from websites and other travellers because it has a wealth of heritage sites and indigenous culture. Unfortunately, when we got there we found that the north and south ...

My stay here has been a weird one. I was only going to be around for a couple of days, but a nasty bit of food poisoning meant that I stayed here a week. Despite being the dry season it has also managed to rain almost every day, which really limited what I was able to do. Nevertheless... This city is a strange one. It kind of sprawls through a deep valley, then overflows over one side into the neighbouring city of El Alto. It is an incredibly picturesque place, with the craggy edges of the valley framing the city and soaring 6000m peaks in the background. The streets are crammed with buses and taxi-trufis (a minibus of sorts), street food, the bustle of people and a cacophony of noise from all of them. It's possible to get above this quite literally by taking the Teleferico , the system of gondolas built above the city which wins the prize for the coolest and most mildly terrifying public transport experience in the world. Indigenous tradition runs very deep here and come o...