Mark Eveleigh is a travel photojournalist who had just returned from his own RTW trip.

Below are some of the faces from his round the world journey. Enjoy

All adventurous travellers are, at some stage, captivated by the myth of the rainforest: that pristine emerald world where the silence is broken only by the singing of the birds or perhaps the uplifting serenade of the gibbons.

While these are a part of the lure of the jungle, the harsh reality is sometimes a little different. Spend a little ‘quality time’ in that Garden of Eden and it soon becomes apparent that every living thing has decided to dedicate its life mission to your torment. If it can’t bite you, it will sting you. If it can’t sting you, it will scratch. If it can’t scratch it will, at the very least, give you a very nasty suck. As a photographer friend of mine – no stranger to jungle travel himself – once succinctly put it, “it can very quickly begin to get right on your tits!”

In local slang pasar el páramo - to cross the highlands - is to die.

As our mule-train straggled across the eerie, mist-shrouded slopes it was easy to understand why the original inhabitants of the Venezuelan rainforest regarded these peaks as the end of their world, believing that evil demons governed the sierras.

Already we seemed to be a world away from the ‘Eden’ that we had ridden through only a couple of days before. Even the dripping lianas and moss-shrouded trees of yesterday’s cloudforest had been replaced here by spiky stands of cactus-like frailejon. Up here we were more likely to see a wheeling condor than a flock of bickering parrots and the numerous hummingbirds that had flitted around us in the steamy valleys below were substituted here by a single hardy species that effectively hibernates every night to survive the cold.

Roberto unscrewed the top of his water-bottle and let a little stream drizzle onto the dusty trail before he put it to his lips. “For Pachamama,” he said “– for Mother-Earth.”

Roberto Manco Huaman (who shares a name with the legendary founder of the Inca line) is from a Quechua-speaking Andean family – “there were never Indians here,” he points out – and, as a mountain-guide who gets to spend his working days on the Inca Trail, he believes that he has a considerable amount to thank Mother-Earth for.

In a patch of sunlight at the end of Chichicastenango’s cobbled main street a bus was spilling its colourful human cargo onto the pavement. It was a typical up-country Guatemalan bus: a canary-coloured hand-me-down from good ol’ Uncle Sam.

Sent as envoys to Guatemala dozens of these school buses have served out their last years shuttling Indians between the villages of the Quiché Mountains. This old ‘Bluebird’ was still emblazoned with a sun-bleached inscription; I thought how amazed the kids of ‘Oakwood County High’ (probably with kids of their own now) would be if they could see their bus.

Even as the plane swept in to land over the glowing jade and turquoise of the Petit Cul-de-Sac Marin I began to appreciate the devotion with which the Arawak Indians had named their island ‘Karukera’ – the land of beautiful waters.

At the end of his second voyage to the ‘New World’ Christopher Columbus stopped by, en-route to his recently collapsed colony on Hispaniola. Perhaps the rigours of his voyages and the strain of administration were beginning to tell because, with sadly stinted imagination, he renamed this jewel of the Caribbean ‘Santa Maria de Guadalupe de Extremadura.’

“Nice millipede,” Dr Olson cooed as the creature began to measure itself out across his palm. “Look at all those legs. It’s a classic creepy-crawler!”

To the uninformed eye this had looked like the perfect camping spot. My tent was pitched in a beautiful Costa Rican forest glade, sheltered by an ancient fig tree whose branches were so heavy that it had lowered vertical pillars to support their weight. It had seemed like a return to the benevolent arms of Mother Nature until the good doctor began to agitate the tree’s nocturnal inhabitants with a probing flashlight.

A cry rang out through the jungle night, piercing even through the shattering roars of the howler monkeys. It sounded like a cry for help. A human voice yelling out in fear or agony.

“Es el señor de la selva,” came the quiet explanation of my guide.

The Lacandon rainforest, in Mexico’s southernmost Chiapas region, is a mysterious place. And ‘the lord of the jungle’ was just another of the unfathomable mysteries that the Lacandon people seem to live with on a daily basis.

“It is not a man. Nor an animal,” Lukas continued, his faces shrouded in his long hair and shadowed by the flickering light of our dying campfire. “It is a spirit. It is calling for help to trick us. Anyone who mistakes it for a human and goes to try to help will be killed and eaten.”

I am now en-route to the Lacandon Rainforest. Even the best maps available show very little detail of the ‘Selva Lacandones’ and, apart from a couple of the most famous Mayan ruins, the guidebooks give only the barest clues of what to expect.

I’ve been making expeditions to remote regions (usually jungles) for almost two decades now. A few years ago I would be entering an area like this with only the barest idea of what to expect. But now I have seen the whole region from the air as if I had spent several hours flying over it in a small aircraft. Given the heavy cloud-cover we should expect at this stage of the rainy season I’ve seen it more clearly in fact than I could have from a plane.

Google Earth has revolutionised the way we look at our world perhaps more than any other online factor. For adventurous travellers with a hunger to get off the beaten track it offers a hitherto unparalleled potential for planning.

Latin America is not generally renowned for its great cuisine. There are exceptions: fantastic steaks in Argentina for example, and the excellent chilli dishes that make travel in Mexico such a pleasure. But, throughout much of Latin American, people eat because it is necessary. Only the privileged can afford to eat for enjoyment.

There are a few famous Latin specialities that demand to be tried…if only once. In the deserts of northern Peru, for example, they make up for a lack of fresh fish with lizard ceviche and in Colombia the giant fried ants are surprisingly tasty: a bit like beef flavoured planters peanuts (except you have to pick the legs out from between your teeth).

The church of Santo Tomás was built shortly after the Spanish Conquest on the site of a Mayan temple-pyramid and perhaps more than any other monument in Central America it illustrates the confusion that Catholicism fostered in the New World. The Spanish padres directed their religious zeal into delivering the greatest number of souls from purgatory rather than wasting valuable time in instructing them accurately in the new doctrine.

When Aldous Huxley visited Guatemala in the early nineteen-thirties he found communities who, in their misguided fervour, actively worshipped Judas Iscariot as a god. Huxley also described a bizarre local festival based upon the belief that, on the night of the Crucifixion, Saint John and the Virgin had a love affair. To prevent a repetition of this shameful event the Indians locked images of the ‘lovers’ in separate cells of the town prison on Good Friday. The next morning the two fraternities would come and pay a fine to bail them out of captivity until next year!

For many of the travellers who are drawn along the tortuous, swooping road for the famous market days Chichicastenango becomes one of the greatest landmarks in any trip around Guatemala. More than that: a few days in this unique highland town is likely to be one of the most enduring memories from an Central American trip.

‘Chichi’ is the market town of an estimated twenty thousand Quiche ‘Indians.’ Every week a large proportion of these swarm into the town to trade. The majority of tourists only make a daytrip to visit the bi-weekly market but Chichicastenango deserves much more. You should (at the latest) arrive on the eve of the markets and watch the trading families arriving. The men marching up the road from their remote highland homesteads. Their women following behind loaded with the bright woven textiles, carved masks or clucking hens that they hope to sell. By early morning the stalls are already being set up. The chill mountain mist that sits heavily in the cobbled lanes and only begins to rise when the tropical sun begins to warm up. Bent-backed porters stagger between the stalls, groaning under huge loads, or line up along the roads waiting for work.

A journey through Central America is a trip along the spine of one of the world’s most dramatic and spectacular volcanic ranges. I was already in El Salvador when I got an email from a friend back in Panama City. They had just gone through two big earthquakes she told me. The whole city had shuddered and seemed to drop a couple of feet – like the first sickening fall in a roller-coaster. Then all was quiet again. There were a few more cracks in the crumbling colonial plasterwork but even among the rickety shacks in the old town there was no major damage. This whole region has been quivering and shuddering since time immemorial.

In Managua there is a morbid museum where you can imagine the final horrific minutes of a small band of Managuan ‘citizens’ who roamed this area about 5,000 years ago. Their last footprints – as they were escaping a great eruption of Volcán Masaya, fifteen miles away – have been preserved in what was once a river of ash and molten rock. You can see from the widely spaced tracks that the people were running.

Surprisingly, Managua probably boasts what must be one of the most efficient recycling systems anywhere in the world. Every day as many as 1,200 tonnes of trash are added to the mountain of garbage on the shore of Lake Managua that is known as La Chureca.

As you travel around the undeveloped world you become more accustomed of the sight of people living in a level of poverty that would be unimaginable to most people in the cosseted ‘western’ world. You struggle against becoming blasé towards the heart-rending hopelessness of people living under plastic sheets on the streets of Kolkata. The growing townships of Nairobi or the flooded, ramshackle slums of waterfront Jakarta can become no more than just another fleeting hazard to negotiate. Now and again though you see a side of life that can once again shake you up and rattle your conscience with an idea of just what poverty means.

Carrying rum into Nicaragua is like taking tea to China. By a stroke of luck though I decided to buy a bottle of Ron del Abuelo at the Costa Rican border with my last banknotes. It’s not that this Panamanian rum is any better than the excellent Nicaraguan Flor de Caña (‘Flower of the Cane’), but there is a widespread boycott on Flor de Caña at the moment. You are not supposed to buy it due to some ongoing dispute about how this massive family-owned conglomerate (which also controls most of the coffee…and all of the Toyotas) has been treating its cane-field labourers.

There are also two main beer producers here: Toña is said to be the beer of the worker and the Sandinista and Victoria is frowned upon in some circles as the beer of the bourgeoisie. (Just to complicate matters Victoria is actually a far tastier beer than Toña, whichever side of the fence you are sitting on).

Cristina tells the story of a typical rural family moving to old San Jose -

“We left Montezuma because I was unwell as a little girl. I’ve got too many veins. You can see them in my hands. I swelled up in the heat and itched and was always tired. The doctor said that so many veins were preventing the blood from reaching my brain and unless we moved to a cooler climate I wouldn’t survive. The village was all I knew. We always went to sleep when the monkeys passed on their way down the mountain – monos congos would howl at us and carablancas would go past one by one. “Adios,” we yelled.

The first time I arrived in Costa Rica I flew to San Jose from Miami. As the plane banked over the Caribbean and began its descent I remember hearing the pilot's voice crackling out of the speakers: "Those of you sitting on the right side of the plane will now be able look down to the Caribbean atolls of Costa Rica...those of you on the left have a view of a female humpback whale and a calf."

It was the best possible introduction to Costa Rica. Since that time I have been continually amazed by the abundance of wildlife in this country. You can see more wildlife simply walking down the high street of an average Costa Rican village than you can in the national parks of many other countries.

Headlamp…warm, long-sleeved shirt…wool socks…earplugs…

I am running through my checklist of things that I need to keep handy for a nocturnal road trip on the Pan-Am Highway. There are few times when you feel the cold in the coastal lowlands of Panama. At this time of year the mercury is frequently nudging at 30°C even in the middle of the night.

But experience has taught me that – unless you are lucky enough to find a bus in which the air-con has finally been burned out – Latin American buses are almost always kept chilled to almost arctic temperatures. Perhaps the drivers deliberately keep to a level of frigidity at which sleep is impossible. Blaring salsa music invariably blasts out throughout the night for the same reason. Maybe it is because it is a safety measure that nobody ever complains. It’s all part of the experience of a Central American road-trip anyway and the thick wool socks and the earplugs (which just manage to muffle the din to a normal listening level) make it bearable.

I’m eating a four-dollar plate of rice, refried beans and ropa vieja beef (literally ‘old rags’) in Café Coca Cola. This is apparently the oldest café in Panama. Of course it wasn’t always called the Coca Cola: the most elderly clients still know it as La Apuñalada (The Stabbing). This can be a pretty gritty neighbourhood and nobody seems to think that was an unreasonable name for a café.

Just a block down the road there is the supermarket called El Machetazo (The Machete Attack). The Stabbing has been known to local people for years as about the best value eatery in the whole city and at any time of the day it is almost always packed. But it is also about the best place to soak up the atmosphere of the old town so I go there as much for the people watching as for the ‘old rags.’

The early morning mist rises through the jungle canopy and sets the howler monkeys off. The locals say that they only set up this incredible Godzilla-esque roar when it is going to rain.

My eye flickers to a flash of blue in the shadows and I catch sight of a better omen: a giant blue morpho butterfly flutters past, looking like the patch of fallen heaven that the ancient Mayans thought it to be. Farther along the trail a toucan sets up its strange, froglike croaking call as a troop of tiny squirrel monkeys swoop past. Within a few minutes we have also added agouti (like a cross between a deer and a giant rat) and coati to our sightings.

The first thing you notice when you leave the airport in Panama is the tropical heat. Sometimes the heat is also the second and third things you notice. But very quickly you are certain to notice the buses.

Panama has the most outrageously pimped buses in the world. In an earlier incarnation they were staid and respectable boxlike Bluebirds shuttling North American highschool kids around. When they were retired off they promptly swapped their boring mustard-yellow livery for a riot of lurid paintwork and hypnotising day-glo graffiti. There are garish pink buses that look like monstrous wedding cakes on wheels, emblazoned with Looney Tunes characters or fairytale castles; there are other hellish ‘death squad vehicles’ bearing hosts of vampires, ghouls and tormented spirits and with giant fibreglass shark-fins rearing from the roof. And of course many of the rest fall into three categories: busty pouting blondes, football players and the Virgin Mary.