Walking into Israel was, in a way, walking from Kansas into Oz. Gone was the bad internet, livestock sharing bus space with us, and people yelling at you everywhere you went because you are the western tourist. In place of these things was flat-screen TV’s, cans of Dr. Pepper, Falafel served WITH hummus rather than plain, and functioning highways. The first step to entering Oz however, is making your way through the twister…in our case that would be questioning about why we would go to a country like Sudan.
Mostly the questions were innocent enough but they did get annoying:
Agent: Why did you go to Sudan?
Me: It was in between Egypt and Ethiopia, it was just a transit visa …

After waiting nearly a week we finally had our Ethiopian visas in hand and began the trip north to the border. The first few hours, going around Mt. Kenya are normal roads….with pavement. The next 300 miles or so, taking us back into the northern hemisphere (we’ve now crossed the equator 7 times in the past month) was another story.
Generally independent travelers like us have a few options on this path: 1) the dusty, dirty, once a week bus that runs to the border straight without breaks and usually has delays of around 12 hours or 2) the cattle truck, where upgrading to sit in the cab with the driver and his 10 best paying customers is half of …

Once we finished up with the Salt Flats, it was time to get a move on. The rest of Bolivia is a bit of a blur as all we really did was move, move, move. We’d won a trip to a lodge in the Pantanal of Brazil and we now had a very finite amount of time to get there. Our guidebook warns that transportation in Bolivia can be unpredictable at times and to make matters worse, we had no idea how long it would take us to travel east through Bolivia to Brazil. Some accounts put the final leg as 17 hours while others put it at 3 days.
Generally when we travel we do …

From Banos we spent virtually the next 48 hours on a series of buses to make it to Peru. From Banos we went to Ambato, Riobama, Loja and Macara. Well you can imagine how much fun that was. Considering we actually made it through Ecuador with all of our stuff (hooray!), we decided not to tempt fate and decided to cross into Peru at the Macara/La Tina border crossing on advice of other travelers and our guidebook. The more popular crossing, along the coast at Tumbes, is apparently hectic, chaotic and full of con artists, thieves, and counterfeit money.
To say this border crossing was tranquillo is an understatement. With virtually no one else at the border, save a few …