Altitude sickness might not be something you've had to contend with on many previous trips, but it's pretty much part and parcel of any adventure through Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, or Peru. In fact, many of South America's premier tourist destinations, like Cusco, Lake Titicaca, and La Paz, rise well above 2,500m (the typical threshold for altitude sickness). I wrote an incredibly detailed post on preven[...]
Sometime during our weeks spent volunteering in Peru, we caught wind of Patagonia. I knew hardly anything about what we would find in southern Chile, but I did know there would be mountains beautiful enough to reduce us to tears, so we shuffled existing plans and purchased pricey flights to the end of the world in search of some Patagonian magic. A month later, after travelling through Peru, Bolivia, and northern Ch[...]
There are two really nice hills in the city, which probably every travel book would recommend, and we visit both. I always like to say that we find our own unique places and that they are always better than any guidebook crap, but sometimes Lonely Planet found the good stuff before you and it’s not like there’re many uncharted hills in downtown Santiago, waiting for you to stumble across[...]
Our night bus from La Serena gets us in to Santiago at something ridiculous like 4am (too groggy to fully process the time) so it’s about 5am when we arrive to Knutsen Hostel, which I would just like to say is amazing and full of hammocks. The hostel is in Providencia, which is probably the nicest neighborhood in Santiago (in my opinion, at least), and backs up against Bellavista, which is[...]
After 4 days in a Jeep shoulder-to-shoulder with a large German family (emphasis on large) cruising through southeast Bolivia, we are badly craving some luxury and that is nothing short of what we get. A 17 hour bus ride from San Pedro de Atacama later, we arrive in La Serena and head off in search of some accommodation. The options appear to all be shockingly overpriced so we throw bud[...]
Like every single other tourist in Bolivia, we make the lengthy trek down to Uyuni to see the world famous Salar de Uyuni, a trip that requires us to sit for 4 days shoulder-to-shoulder with half a dozen other travellers in an ageing Jeep while we drive from the southwestern Altiplano to northern Chile. We are rewarded by some of the region's most spectacular scenery, and we are also recipients of a fair bi[...]
After 3 months traveling through Peru, Bolivia, Chile, Argentina, and Brazil; trekking through both Chilean and Argentinian Patagonia and along the Inca Trail; volunteering in a medical centre and on a jungle conservation project in the Amazon; partying it up in Rio de Janeiro at Carnaval; biking through Malbec wine country; roadtripping through southern Bolivia and the Mars-like San Pedro de Atacama... I can truly s[...]