Got The Travel Bug? Travelling Solo in South America

It was almost a year ago, after a year-long fight, that Natwest decided to reimburse the £1,000 of charges they had creamed off my student account during my debt-ridden university years. Rather than fritter the money away, I decided early on to put the money towards something worthwhile, and promptly planned a three week trip backpacking around Peru and Bolivia.

So last month, on July 4th, I headed out to Peru for a three week trip of a lifetime. To put it lightly, you could say it started rather badly. After almost missing the first of three flights from Heathrow, I arrived safely in Lima, the capital of Peru. The only problem was my luggage didn’t.

The most depressing moment was walking out of the airport that night knowing that my luggage was on an entirely different continent. After a total of 17 hours in the air and additional stop-overs totalling 7 hours, I hardly looked, or smelt, my best. After arriving at my hostel, I spent a sleepless night wondering exactly how I was going to cope without the entire contents of my luggage. To top it off, at this point I had been informed that if my luggage was ever going to catch up with me, it would be arriving at the same time the next day which meant I had to accept I’d be missing my connecting flight into the jungle, which left the next day.

After being convinced by my boyfriend not to book a ticket home on the UK-bound flight, I was finally reunited with my baggage and bought a new ticket to out to Puerto Maldonado, the tiny town from which all jungle expeditions depart.

Once I finally made it to the rainforest, I began to relax. I was staying at a remote lodge which was a two day boat ride downriver. Despite the lodge being very basic – no hot water, electricity or walls and curtains and railings in lieu of doors and windows, the whole experience was actually very relaxing.

The rainforest is ridiculously noisy at night, and despite my fears of waking to find tarantulas in my bed, the only insect that ventured into my room was a slightly pathetic looking cockroach. The only downside was the mosquitoes, who obviously took a liking to me and proceeded to attack me morning, noon, and night.

It could have been worse – on the river journey back to the airport I came across a surprisingly unconcerned American family whose son had been bitten after “prodding” a wild monkey. How you even get close enough to prod a wild monkey I’ll never know, but then again they were American.

After making it out of the jungle I spent a week in Cusco, which is one of Peru’s largest cities and the starting point for the Inca Trail. Despite having a reputation for a traditional way of life, the residents of Cusco have nonetheless taken advantage of the influx of rich western tourists and colourfully-clad women parade around the central square in traditional clothing only to demand money should they even catch a whiff of a camera pointing in their direction.

Anyway, onwards and upwards – literally – to Machu Picchu where I clambered around the ruins and had my photo with various llamas. Apparently they’re prone to spitting, but luckily for me I evaded such an attack. Although in hindsight, perhaps such an incident was precisely what I needed to alleviate the guilt caused by eating one of their cousins the night before.

I then took a 5 hour train trip to Bolivia via the border town of Puno. I won’t bore you with details of the place, but it exists solely as a stop-over for those wishing to cross the border and is a pretty miserable place. The one memorable event was a street sign falling on my head and smashing my sunglasses, which should give you some idea of how depressing the place was.

So anyway, I ended my trip with a week in La Paz – Bolivia’s capital and one of the world’s highest cities at more than 3600 metres above sea level. I spent the third day there on an organised bike ride down what has become known as the “Worlds Most Dangerous” road as a result a of record-breaking death toll and 12 seconds of freefall should you be unlucky enough to fall off the edge of the road.

The road is littered with memorials to previous victims in additional to several drug checkpoints as the town at the bottom is known for the manufacture of cocaine. Apparently a tell-tale sign that you’re planning on making the stuff is an industrial-sized stash of toilet roll. Nobody seemed sure what part this had to play in the production process, but seeing as the checkpoints were manned mostly by stray dogs I don’t think the criminals had anything to worry about anyway.

So that was pretty much it. Except for one more memorable episode. Two nights before my internal flight from Bolivia to Peru, I woke up with the worst stomach ache ever. I knew immediately it was food poisoning. I spent the next 7 hours with my head down the toilet, knowing full well there was no way I could afford to miss my flight to Peru which left at 7am that morning.

To make things worse, I knew the hair-raising 20 minute taxi ride to the airport would probably be enough to bring on another round of vomiting even if I hadn’t already been doing just that for the last 5 hours. In the end, I made it. Well, to be fair that’s not strictly true as I did have to scream at the taxi driver to pull over 100 metres from the airport so I could squeeze in a pre-departure vomit. I was actually sick 4 more times before even making it through security, and after realising that the pale, sweating girl before them wasn’t in fact an international drugs mule, the ground staff even wheeled out an oxygen tank and got the airport nurse to give me some drugs.

But apart from that, the trip was amazing and I think I’ve fallen in love with South America, even if a sign did fall on my head and I ended up with food poisoning. In hindsight, I don’t think I’d have managed to fit into the dress I wore for a wedding two days after my return if it wasn’t for that bout of projectile vomiting. So there you, proof that every cloud does have a silver lining after all!