A Travel Blog by Katie Chavez
There are many, many beautiful hikes around Vancouver, one of the reasons I love this city so much. Over the years I have been steadily ticking different hikes off my list, a list that just keeps growing longer. One hike that I have been really wanting to do since I first heard about it the […] Read more…
After a stressful time on Greyhound buses involving late arrivals, rude bus drivers and an almost missed connection, we finally arrived in Chase, the closest town to the HI Squilax Hostel and General Store where we would be volunteering for two weeks. Trav and I signed up to a couple of websites, Workaway and Help X, […] Read more…
As our time in Vancouver was coming to an end, I started to feel anxious. Although I was excited about our road trip through the Rockies and the volunteering set up for after that, I couldn’t help but feel that the best part of the trip was over – this is the pull that this […] Read more…
To get from Toronto to Chicago involved 2 buses, numerous stops, an intrusive border crossing experience and a whole lot of time. I always dread having to cross into the US, especially by land. The US Border Guards are pretty much always nasty and incredibly self-important at the best of times, but the guy that […] Read more…
After a very long day travelling we finally arrived back in Quebec to Riviere du Loup, on the eastern side of the St Lawrence river. Unfortunately the bus station was located on the outskirts of town, and 6km from the camping ground we were going to be spending the night in. There are no public […] Read more…
Thanks to the accrual of many air miles, we spent our first two nights in Canada in the Toronto Airport Hilton. It felt impossibly luxurious and we made the most of it, eating stomach busting portions of the buffet breakfast, eating lots of the free fruit from the lobby, swimming in the pool, watching trashy TV […] Read more…
So our journey continued with a flight on Bolivia’s Military airline, TAM, from La Paz to Rurrenabaque. It was a bit too bumpy for my liking but in the 50 minutes we were flying the change in landscape was very dramatic. We flew over snow-capped peaks and milky turquoise lakes then dramatically the mountains dropped […] Read more…
Arequipa We arrived in Arequipa after possibly the worst night bus yet, replete with seats that hardly reclined and no leg room. As it was only 6am, it was too early to check into the hostel so we waited in the TV room watching movies before our room was ready. I was feeling pretty terrible […] Read more…
We met up with our friends Lynn and Pete in Rio Dulce, a small but busy town named after the Rio Dulce, a river that runs from Lake Izabal to the Caribbean sea at Livingston. The Izabal region of Guatemala is densely jungled and very humid, quite a shock after the dry weather and cold nights in […] Read more…
We blew into Panajachel on the wind, a very strong wind which made our lancha ride across to San Pedro la Laguna very bumpy and wet. Perhaps they were the winds of change as the date was 21st December, the end of the Mayan Calendar and the supposed end of the world. San Pedro is […] Read more…