1. Spend at least 3 full days there. If you’re dedicated you can see the entire island in that time, without killing yourself.
2. Buy your plane tickets in advance; set up your lodging when you land – at the airport.
3. Bring a good guidebook and rent a jeep for two days; the tours are unnecessary.
4. Spend a day walking around the town and checking out the daily life of the islanders, and the close Ahu and Moai.
5. Eat at the best restaurant – He’tuu, on the main drag (but closer to the airport than the soccer field). Don’t waste your time anywhere else.
6. We’ve heard that there is a big cultural festival there at the beginning of February – traditional dances and dresses and other events. I’m not sure of the authenticity, but it could be cool to see if you have the opportunity. Keep in mind that most travel costs (airfare, lodging, food) will probably be higher than normal, and that you’ll spend more on events because there are more to attend.

If you’re planning a trip to Easter island, let us know – we’d love to help you in any way that we can! Check out our photos here.

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There are three ways to get to Antarctica:

1. By cruise ship from New Zealand. The least popular route for two reasons: it’s a long way (three days across the weddell sea instead of one-and-a-half or two), and it’s on the side of the continent with fewer bases and wildlife.
   • Benefits: relative to other routes, you see a different area of the continent (not sure if it’s better). Also it’s less touristy (but the continent itslef isn’t very touristy).
   • Drawbacks: long, far away, and probably not very many viewpoints.
2. By plane from Ushuaia (or other airports). This is mainly the way that scientists and journalists get to McMurdo base – the American research station that functions like the capital city of the continent (albeit with a population of 1000-2000).
   • Benefits: fast. Also gets you pretty far inland to the main base. Very educational opportunity.
   • Drawbacks: not a cruise, don’t get the opportunity to see more stuff.
3. By cruise ship from Ushuaia. The most popular route, cruise ships leave Ushuaia’s port every day for trips that include some part of the Antarctic peninsula.
   • Benefits: well-supported, many travel options, probably less expensive than other routes.
   • Drawbacks: not always as fast, don’t get to McMurdo.

We went on a cruise ship from Ushuaia, and loved it. There are actually four categories of trips you can take from Ushuaia:

1. The Antarctic Peninsula (11 days total, 5 days of landings/viewings). This is the classic (and the shortest) Antarctica cruise. It’s also the most prevalent and the cheapest. Your 5 days of landings will include different spots, at least one on the continent (others on islands), and probably a visit to a research base. Lots of wildlife and icebergs. Since you’ll be on the peninsula the whole time, you’ll most likely see a few different genus of wildlife (penguins, seals, albatross, etc), but not as many different species (macaroni, emperor, king, gentoo penguins) within a particular genus.
2. South of the Circle (typically about 3 weeks). This cruise goes past 66.6 degrees south, usually in an icebreaker, and tries to get as far south as possible. I’ve never been on one of these, but my guess is that it’s all about latitude and doesn’t prioritize wildlife.
3. Seeing the emperor penguins (typically about 3 weeks). This cruise goes early in the season – November usually – in an icebreaker as far south as possible. Then, as soon as the weather is clear, everybody boards helicopters to fly to the emperor nesting grounds. This is probably one of the coolest cruises, but it is pretty much exclusively focused on one penguin species – the emperor.
4. Antarctica, the Falklands, and South Georgia (typically about 3 weeks). This covers two different island sets as well as the peninsula. It probably covers the greatest variety of wildlife possible, and certainly the greatest diversity of landscapes – from bright sandy beaches to icy/snowy/iceberg landings, all kinds of weather and conditions. This is what we did – and it’s almost three weeks long! We loved it.

Booking: cruises to Antarctica operate differently than any other kind of travel I’ve experience. Typical booking timeframes are a year or more in advance. Anything less than 3 months is considered last-minute. Why? It’s hard to get to Ushuaia, these are really expensive, and they’re long enough that it would be difficult to give only two weeks warning for a three-week vacation.

You can certainly book in advance, but if you can plan to take enough time off, it’s probably best to just go down to Ushuaia, plan to spend 2-3 weeks shopping around for a good cruise, and then the 2-3 weeks to take the cruise. You could probably save about 40-70% off the list price and still get the same cruise experience. Remember, there are only about 20 or 30 boats that go to Antarctica, and they’re operated by about 5 or 6 companies, so the market is pretty simple. Keep in mind, Quark Expeditions is widely considered to be the best company out there – that’s who we went with, and we had an amazing experience.

If I were to do it for the first time, I would do what we did – last-minute book an Antarctica+Falklands+South Georgia cruise. I would do it early (November) or mid-season (December or January) though.

Antarctica is incredible. It’s really an amazing place that is slowly dying as climate change takes hold of our planet. If you get a chance, visit – it truly is a place like no other! See our photos here.

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They’re an independent British territory, and have been controversial territory for the two countries for about 400 years. Getting there is tricky, because you can’t fly there directly from Argentina. To get there, you basically have 3 options:

1. Fly from Punta Arenas, Chile. LAN flies to Stanley from Punta Arenas, and you can get to Punta Arenas from either Santiago (international airport) or Ushuaia (international airport, but if you’re coming from another country, you’ll probably land in Buenos Aires and them fly to Ushuaia).
   • Benefits: Easy flight to the Falklands. If you’re already in South America, this is the simplest way to get to the Falklands (and probably the cheapest, as well).
   • Drawbacks: this flight only happens once per week, on Saturdays. So not only would you arrive on a Saturday, you would have to leave on a Saturday as well. So you’d need to spend exactly a week there (or two, or three, and so on).
2. Fly from an RAF base in England. The RAF offers semi-chartered flights (with some tourist seats) to the Falklands from the UK on an irregular schedule.
   • Benefits: you can get there direct from above the equator (pretty far north in the northern hemisphere, actually).
   • Drawbacks: just about everything else about this flight is a drawback- there’s no published schedule, costs are pretty extreme, and it’s really really long.
3. Visit in a cruise ship from Ushuaia. This is probably the best option, and is included in certain Antarctic cruise routes (which is how we went).
   • Benefits: scheduled visit, at a reasonable cost, guided tours of the sites on your itinerary.
   • Drawbacks: may not be flexible enough to allow for independent exploration.

What to do there:

• Visit Stanley, the main town (of 3000 people), and check out the museums, some of the memorials (including an Argentine one, which is a recent addition), and some of the wrecks in te harbor.
• Visit some of Camp (the outlying islands and residences). The thing about camp is, most of it is on other islands. You can try to travel by boat, but the distances are often long enough to eat up a day of travel. There are a few private planes that you can fly to different locations from, and I assume flight costs are reasonable – although I know nothing about them. Be aware that travel around the islands is unpredictable an often weather-dependent, so you may want to have a few days of flex time if you are making the travel arrangements.

As I mentioned, the islands are really beautiful – check out some photos if you don’t believe me…

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1. Fly through Quito. It’s a much safer city than Guayaquil and there are actually things to do there (unlike Guayaquil). Even in Quito you have to be careful though, FYI.
2. Book last-minute, unless you’re visiting between June and August (due to it being the high season, with school and summer vacations in the US and Europe).
3. You can either book last-minute in Quito or in Santa Cruz (flight would be to “Baltra”, then).
4. There are two types of tours: speedboat, and cruise ship. We did speedboat tours – they’re usually cheaper than the cruises, and you stay in hotels on the different islands (which is kind of cool, you can see different restaurants and bars).
5. The standard tour goes to about 8 different islands, including the 4 populated ones. These can range from 4 days to 8 or 10. 8 or 10 days is probably too long for just those islands.
6. A good “cheap” price target should probably be between $120-$140 per day, all meals and hotels included. Expect to pay more to rent snorkel gear, but not much.
7. There are lots of other beautiful islands, like Bartolome. They don’t get included on the standard tours; if you go for a much longer cruise (10+ days), it might be included on your cruise (expect this to be a bit pricier, though).
8. If you think you might like it and can budget for it, plan your flights so that you spend 3-5 extra days on Santa Cruz after your tour. You can jump onto one or two all-day tours that are really cool and worthwhile. Again, price between $120-$140 per day for these. A lot of them (like Bartolome) start really early – think 5 am pickup, because it’s a 4-hour boat trip, and the marina is an hour’s drive from the town.

Want to see some of our Galapagos photos? Check them out here.

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There are two primary cell service providers in most south American countries:

• Telefonica (movistar) – more recent entrant
• Claro – usually has better coverage

Their icons and messaging were usually the same cross-country, at least in the following countries:

• Ecuador
• Peru
• Chile
• Argentina
• Uruguay

We tried both companies in different countries; here’s what we found:

• Movistar beat out Claro in Ecuador and Peru. Not only were their cards cheaper, but I even got Movistar to set up complete Internet access for the phone in Ecuador – which Claro outright refused (and yes, I spoke with the techs in each of their respective national service centers).
• Claro provided better coverage in Chile. Not much more to say about that, especially because we only spent two weeks total in mainland Chile.
• Claro had the best service in Argentina. Not only was the coverage awesome, but Claro included WAP profiles on the prepaid SIM card, so I could automatically get mobile web on the phone. Quite cool!

It’s funny that both companies (subsidiaries of European conglomerates) operate across most of the countries; what’s more interesting is that the prepaid cards are sold through convenience and telephone services stores across the continent.

Of course, nobody understood what an unlocked phone was, so every time that I told them I could get a card from either Claro or Movistar I had to prove it to them – by opening up the phone and inserting each SIM separately.

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• Plan out every intricate detail, and schedule every minute of your time off
• Plan nothing – just go somewhere and do whatever comes to mind
• Something in-between – identify a few highlights/goals that you want to see/do/meet, possibly set some timelines as well.

We prefer the third option – it’s important to have goals, but if you schedule every minute, it’s not a vacation. So how do you balance relaxation and experiencing a different place? Here’s how we do it:

• Read about a place first. We use guidebooks – specifically Lonely Planet to learn about the place and what options are available.
• Identify a few “great opportunities” that seem really attractive to you.
• Rough out a timeline to include those activities plus a few days of rest and a few days for the unknowns that could be cool.
• When you arrive, talk to people to find some of the unknowns or the last-minute cool options. This helps to fill in the gaps, or to rearrange your schedule if need be.

Remember that it’s an experience, but it’s also for fun – it may not be the best plan to return from your vacation more tired than when you began it.

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1. So many Latin Americans speak English, it’s pretty easy to stay in your comfort zone (as an English speaker) for as long as you want.
2. Most of the travelers we met (especially in the backpacker hostels) spoke little to no Spanish; English was the lingua franca there as well.
3. During the three longest stays of our trip (a month in Costa Rica, a month in Galapagos, and three weeks in Antarctica), we were primarily with American and European tourists, again – and everyone primarily spoke English.

So what did we accomplish? Stef went from not being able to say more than “Hola”, to having a solid grasp of “travel Spanish” – the ability to read a menu, order food and drinks, negotiate prices, get directions, find hotels and other spots, and handle typical travel situations. I went from being able to use a little bit of Italian and get directions and order to foods to reading the newspaper and Harry potter, watching the news and other television shows, doing guided tours in Spanish, having smaller political conversations, and doing all of this across the amazingly diverse accents of south America. Overall, we did pretty well, especially when you consider that we really only had less than six months of real opportunity to learn.

Here’s how we did it:

• Traditional classes. Stef spent her month in Costa Rica studying Spanish (and doing yoga). We also each spent a week in Quito Ecuador studying as a part of our Galapagos volunteering experience. Finally, Stef studied Spanish for another week in Cuenca Ecuador on our way south.
• Street practice. We tried to speak Spanish almost everywhere we could – restaurants, bus stations, airports, hotels, shops, museums, and of course, on the street. Tours were generally a bit more difficult, because most Spanish-speaking tours have Spanish-speaking tourists, so the tour guides often speak at native-speed, which is too fast for us. The vocabulary and grammar are often more complex as well.
• Individual time. Whether with the newspaper that was at the hotel desk, writing in a notebook, or taking another piece of Spanish-language literature (Harry potter books, tour brochures, flyers, etc), we each found time individually to learn more aspects of the language.

Of course, being self-taught in this way often leaves gaps. For instance, neither of us knows anything about the vosotros verb forms – they aren’t used in South America. Also, I can use the subjunctive reasonably well, but can’t conjugate several verbs in the simple past or simple future tense at all (which are much more basic uses than the subjunctive).

We’re hoping to keep up our Spanish practice back here in the States with the help of a few things:

• Pimsleur audio language courses
• More Harry potter books (we have the first two; I’ve only finished one)
• Our collection of Hispanic music, which we really enjoy
• Meeting up with some of our Spanish-speaking friends to practice every month or so

Let us know if you’d like to join in!

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• The Colombian vacation hotspot (Bogota is the seat of power)
• On the shore of the carribean (Bogota is inland)
• At sea level (Bogota is at about 9000 feet above sea level)
• Hot and humid (Bogota is cool and cloudy)

We didn’t realize all of this until we got off the plane. We had been in 60-degree weather in Bogota; it was 95 when we landed in Cartagena. Our water bottles immediately misted over.

We arrived at our hotel, sorted out the problems with our reservation, and got some lunch. Then we relaxed in our room, while we planned out our activities for the next couple of days.

They centered around resting, but there were a couple of things we wanted to see in Cartagena:

1. The Castillo San Felipe de Barajas, which was a major part of the Spanish invasion.
2. The old city, a classic colonial city center.
3. The mud volcano which is, well, a volcano that shoots out mud.
4. We also discovered that a collection of tall ships from several carribean countries had descended on Cartagena, and that seemed like a great idea.

We visited the Castillo as part of an all-day tour that was classic Cartagena. We were picked up by a chiva:

From Cartagena – City Tour

Then we stopped at the Castillo San Felipe de Barajas. It’s actually pretty impressive, with lots of battlements and a really cool interior tunnel system that was designed to trap invaders and protect soldiers in the know:

There was a freelance trumpeter there as well:

From Cartagena – Castillo San Felipe de Barajas

From the Castillo, we continued on to the old city. Were entered a few jewelers shops (Cartagena is known for its jewelery industry), and walked around a few of the city squares:

Our tour finished outside the old city walls at sunset:

From Cartagena – Old City

Another day in Cartagena, we went to a mud volcano outside the city. It is what you think it is – a big hill that is filled at the center with mud:

From Cartagena – City Tour

The locals provide massages (in the volcano). We went, and it was alright – but it was really weird. The mud was fine, but let’s just say that we did it, and leave it at that.

After we first arrived at our hotel, the receptionist told us about a tall ships exhibition that was that weekend in Cartagena. He gave us a few VIP passes for one afternoon, so we headed over. It was awesome – there were seven or eight several-hundred-foot sailing ships from a variety of countries:

• Ecuador
• Colombia (naturally)
• Venezuela
• Chile
• Argentina
• United States

We stopped on a few of them – the Ecuadorian, Argentinian, and the American one. It turns out that this was a part of an all-Caribbean cruise, and these ships were all training vessels for their respective navies or coast guards. The crews would switch out every month or so. We had a blast – it was really cool to see all the ships and to talk to some of the sailors. We even got to surprise the Americans with native English and an American accent (most of the crew also spoke Spanish – pretty well, too!). Here’s what we saw of the tall ships:

And that was Cartagena! After that, we flew back to Bogota for a few days, and then back to the states.

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• You go to an official kiosk
• Tell them the address you want
• They print you a receipt with the destination and the price
• You give that to the driver, and he takes you there
• You pay (him) the amount shown on the receipt

It worked that way for us in Bogota and in Cartagena.

After some navigational negotiating, we made it to our hotel, which was great. We were really comfortable there – and ate really well (best eggs, and according to Stef, best coffee in our travels) too!

Bogota is a really cool city – lots of fun to walk around, several really amazing places to see, and very friendly people (especially all the military guards around the Plaza Bolivar and presidential palace). The two coolest parts of our visit were the Plaza Bolivar and the Museo de Oro (gold museum). Here’s what we saw around the city:

The plaza is just their central plaza, but it’s huge, has a few great colonial buildings surrounding it, and some kind of protest or public event in the center every day. Oh, and don’t forget the pigeons! The cover half the plaza, and flock to whoever has a few breadcrumbs (of course, there are a couple of people on the plaza who sell bread so that you can feed the pigeons, and have them land and sit all over you. No, we didn’t do that). We were there on mostly overcast days, but that made the photos better in some ways:

The Museo De Oro is another Bogota highlight. It explores the history of gold and metallurgy, especially as it relates to the northwestern tip of South America (where Colombia is located). The exhibitions are truly breathtaking, and the information provided is great -we learned a lot about early jewelry-making practices in only an hour there. Check out the colors in the Museo de Oro:

After a couple of days walking around Bogota, seeing some things, and of course trying the coffee, we headed out to Cartagena to spend a few days on the beach…

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• Culture in Bogota
• Relax in Cartagena
• Colombia by the Numbers
• Our favorite gear for Colombia

Enjoy!

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• Spare duffel for stuff. Bolivia was definitely the poorest country we traveled through, and since our flight to Colombia departed from La Paz, we decided to leave some of the gear (what we thought we wouldn’t need) in La Paz. So, we packed it into our extra duffel (which we had been carrying at the bottom of stef’s pack) and left the duffel at our hotel in La Paz. It turned out to be about a full bag of stuff, which was nice. We picked it up again when we returned for our last night in La Paz.
• Sleeping bags. Bolivia is at a high altitude – which makes it cold at night. And it’s poor, which means that most hotels/hostels don’t have very good blankets. There were a few times where we needed our sleeping bags to keep us warm enough to sleep comfortably. Our bags were just right – warm enough to be helpful, light and small enough to be completely packable.
• Spare camera. Normally I just enjoy the fact that I have a camera, but Bolivia was different. Since it’s so poor and conditions are so rough, there were a few times (like in the silver mines) when I just used my backup camera instead – it’s smaller, lighter, and if it had broken, I wouldn’t have felt too bad. Bolivia is a beautiful country – difficult to travel through, but absolutely amazing to see. A camera (at least one) is a must-have for visiting Bolivia).

So that’s what helped us out in Bolivia.

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While in Sucre, we checked out the Parque Cretacico – the Cretacious Park. It’s kind of like Jurassic park, but a little smaller and less dangerous. Basically, what are believed to be a set of dinosaur footprints were “discovered” along a wall that’s a part of a quarry. So a site was built around it, complete with informational rooms, sheets, and full-size replicas of a few more notorious dinosaur species. Check out what they looked like:

I’m pretty skeptical of the actual park’s origins, but the replicas were pretty cool, colorful, and fun to see!

We spent some more time hanging out in sucre – we saw the “Casa de la Moneda” there as well:

We got to the airport a little early for our flight (scheduled for 11:30 but delayed until 1:15), so I walked outside and got to watch the Bolivian “The Fast and the Furious”! Yes, even the tuner culture has expanded to bolivia. I watche a dozen pairs of cars race the quarter mile on a stretch of road, monitored by the military police and watched by a pretty sizable crowd. Only a few photos, but all in all, pretty fun:

We finally flew out of sucre about 4 hours after our flight was scheduled, and arrive in La Paz. The next morning, we got up early to fly from La Paz to Lima (Peru) to Bogota…

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• Jurassic Park in Sucre
• Time in Bolivia by the numbers
• Our favorite gear that we brought to Bolivia

Enjoy!

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• When the bus arrived at the station, there was no information – no one knew the destination, or if it was for the correct company, or even whether we were supposed to put our luggage on it ourselves! (we were)
• 3/4 of our 6-hour trip was by dirt road
• There were 3 detours (yes, there can be a detour on a dirt road; no, I didn’t know that either!)
• There was one stop in a hamlet, which had, to the best of our knowledge, the only no-charge bathroom in Bolivia. Not that it was much to look at, but you pay anywhere from 1 to 10 bolivianos to use any bathroom in the country.
• The windows were open to combat the heat, but no one had warning to close them when the water-truck (hosing the road to keep the dust down) drove past at full spray. The first three rows of our bus were soaked! (We were lucky and dry in the fourth row)
• Once we arrived, we couldn’t get any information from the local office of the bus company.

But, we did make it to our hotel in Potosi. It was pretty comfortable, so we stayed two nights.

The day after we arrived, I visited the silver mines of Potosi. Our tour was entirely in Spanish, and really eye-opening. The mines are still working mines, while tours are run by former miners. They are not for the faint-hearted:

• You descend about 200 meters (600 feet) inside the caves, all the time on your hands and knees (remember that the tunnels are dug for Bolivian miners to crawl through, and they’re about a foot shorter than we are)
• The whole time, you’re breathing air that’s more dust than oxygen
• Since you’re at 14,000 feet, you can’t breathe all that much of it.
• Oh, and since the Cerro Rico is a volcano, only a few of the tunnels are are cooler than 90 degrees. As you descend they get hotter, until about 140 degrees.

Did I mention that there are over 4000 miners who work there? The conditions are rough, miners work without insurance or benefits, and since the mine ran out of silver over ten years ago, only work to find a few minerals, which they expect will run out in the next ten years. They work 8 – 12 hour shifts, five to six days each week. And we haven’t mentioned the dangers inherent in working in a mine cave-ins and explosions (everyone uses dynamite).

Going inside the mines is a really powerful experience. The conditions are tough on a 2-hour tour, and we didn’t do any work or go lower than the 4th level (there are about 20 levels).

The photos don’t do it justice, but they may give you a better idea…
Inside the mines:

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Around noon, they announced our names and which 4×4 we’d be in. Our driver was Lorenzo; along with the two of us there were 4 Brits in our car: Neil, Paul, Peter and Dominic. Our group headed out quickly to our first stop: the train cemetery. The site of 30-40 rusted trains from about 100 years ago, it was a lot of fun to walk around; there were a few trains with some pretty cool graffiti, too:

The rest of the day was spent picking up our cook and playing on the salt flats. We found out that Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid hid here for a while when they were in South America. They’re filming a new movie of it – we saw the horse truck running along the Salar. The salt flats are pretty amazing – there’s so much white up until the horizon that you lose perspective pretty quickly. We had fun:

We also stopped at Incahuasi, a rock island in the middle of the flats. It’s also known as Fish Island because – alledgedly – a Lonely Planet editor called it that because he thought it might look like a fish when seen from above. It doesn’t, but it does show you the power of the anecdote!

We traveled another hour or so to our salt hotel for the night, Samarikuna. Pretty cool place:

The next day, we drove and saw a train. Then, an Uruguayan who had brought his own car (a POS Suzuki) on our tour, broke down in the middle of the plains. We had to stop and help him.

Five hours later, when his front shock still wasn’t fixed, our guide showed him to the main road while we stopped for lunch. For the rest of the day, we drove along the plains; we did get to see three of the seven lakes that had been planned for that day. We stopped for the night at a salt hotel that was at 4300 meters – the highest altitude we slept at during our trip, and we could feel it!

Here’s what we saw that day:

The final day, we left early to catch a sunrise at some geysers, as well as stop at the hot baths (we saw a few pink flamingos there as well). We passed along the Salvador Dali desert to the Laguna Verde. After a short return to the hot baths, we continued north to return to Uyuni. There were a few stops along the way, but nothing tremendously memorable. We stayed over in a $10 hotel in Uyuni, and caught a bus to Potosi the next day.

Enjoy!

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1. Its cheap
2. It’s difficult to travel in, so places to visit are all the more exotic

We got to La Paz on a tourist bus that had to drive on a gravel road for 2 hours (because that’s what the roads are like in Bolivia) and through farms for another two hours (because a strike had closed down the aforementioned gravel road). We made it from our bus to our hotel safely, which was a slight surprise because approximately 10% of all taxi rides in la Paz end with the passengers being robbed (including tourist gringos, gringos who have lived there for 20 years, and locals!).

We spent a day planning out our Bolivian adventures, and then I went on a tour with Gravity to ride a mountain bike down The World’s Most Dangerous Road. It’s an all-day affair, leaving at 7:30 am and returning at 8pm. They call it the World’s Most Dangerous Road because:

1. You spend most of the 40-mile dirt road trip with a 1000-foot (or greater) drop to the valley, that’s usually no more than 2 or 3 feet outside of the dirt road (which, coincidentally, is wide enough for two cars or buses to pass each other – but just barely, and not in every spot. Sometimes the drivers have to backup to find a good spot to cross paths).
2. Typically, someone falls every 5-6 days, and there is usually a death on the road once every two to three weeks. There are 10 or more guiding companies that offer rides down it, and moat of them run every day.

It was actually a really fun ride, with a great short uphill section (like 2 miles, but starting at about 14,000 feet), awesome bikes and guides, and a few incredible views:

Check this one out (yes, that’s me in the photo! Taken in the afternoon on the way back up):

From La Paz – The Death Road

Then, we hopped on a night bus (the last one of our trip, and the second-worst ride since we crossed the border from Ecuador to Peru) to Uyuni, where the next day we were going to begin a three-day tour of he salt flats and southwest Bolivia…

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• A Death Road in La Paz
• Amazing Salt Flats in Uyuni
• The silver mines in Potosi

It wasn’t easy travel, but it was pretty amazing to see…Tell us what you think!

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This was our most annoying border crossing yet (keep in mind that by this point – May 1 – we had crossed borders 14 times!), mainly because (I think) of the Bolivian attitude towards tourists. You see, Bolivians don’t like tourists or travelers – at all:

• They don’t want you to take pictures
• They don’t have a solid transportation infrastructure
• They generally don’t seem to like foreigners

So here’s how a Bolivian border crossing works: You go to cross the border, and pay your $135 visa fee for Americans (this I actually agree with because the U.S. requires the same fee of Bolivianos. Thank goodness they don’t adjust it for the relative cost of living!). Then you find out that you need the following:

• Photocopies of your passport (which we didn’t have extras for)
• Passport-sized photos (which we did have)
• Photocopies of the form that they make you fill out at the border (which we didn’t have)

Of course, there are some Bolivianos who park themselves outside of the immigration office with photocopiers and digital cameras, so they’ll charge you a nice sum for these. The thing that we discovered is that everything in Bolivia seems to cost more than what people tell you. There are always extra fees (we like to say that everything in Bolivia costs 20 Bolivianos more than you’re quoted). It’s really less of a “Welcome”, and more of a “So, now you’re here!”. So, we paid our way through the Bolivian entry, and continued on to Copacabana.

We really enjoyed Copacabana – we happened to arrive there on Bolivian Labor Day, so there was a huge celebration going on in the town. There was a special site up on a hill where we were able to watch every group come in and perform:

We also walked around the town while we were there, and found some cool things:

The next day, we took an all-day boat trip out to Isla del Sol, about 2 hours away, where we hiked from the north of the island to the south, checking out some of the Inca ruins along the way. We also saw some of the locals on the docks and in their sailboats. See what we saw here:

Finally, we spent half a day getting ready to leave Copacabana. You see, the strike that delayed us arriving in Bolivia kept going, and meant that only some buses were going to La Paz. And, our bus had to take a pretty extreme route on the way to La Paz – we were completely off-road (not just off of paved roads) for an hour of the 4-hour trip:

From Copacabana – Around

So then we went to La Paz…

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• Backpacks. You could travel long-term without them, but its not easy. You can’t hike the Inca Trail to Machu Picchu without them. Ours are really comfortable, and they have survived everything we’ve thrown at them.
• Sleeping Bags. We brought them with us for part 2 – and used them every night on the Inca Trail. Synthetic 40 degree bags from REI, they work great and pack into cubes which fit side-by-side in the bottom of my pack.
• Camera. Between the Inca Trail, the Amazon Jungle, and Lake Titicaca, I shot over 600 photographs. The places – and people – that we saw were incredibly photogenic, and having an easy-to-use camera that has awesome image quality made it all the more fun!

That’s what we found useful in Peru!

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• Days in-country: 30
• Passport stamps received: 7
  • 2 entry, 2 exit, 2 for Machu Picchu, 1 for Lake Titicaca
• Days in the mountains: 10
• Days in the desert: 5
• Days in the jungle: 2
• Days in cities: 6
• Days on the Inca Trail: 4
• In-country flights: 4
  • (Lima – Cuzco, Cuzco – Puerto Maldonado, Puerto Maldonado – Cuzco – Juliaca)
• Longest layover: 8 hours (in the International Terminal of the Lima airport)
• Bus trips: 8
• Overnight bus trips: 3
• Movies seen on buses: 11
• Matt’s bingo wins on a bus trip: 1
• Percentage of the local population that we were taller than: 87%
• Chifa (mixed peruvian-Chinese cuisine) dinners: 8
• Ancient (pre-1800) cultures we learned about: 5
• Times we were accosted for massages: 17
• Times we were accosted for massages in Cuzco: 17
• Spiders seen in the jungle: 5
• Polar bears seen in the jungle: 0

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• Our time in Peru, “by the numbers”
• The gear we most appreciated in Peru
• A national festival in Copacabana, Bolivia

Enjoy!

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We were able to walk around Puno a little bit, and saw some interesting sights:

Since we really only had one day to see the sights (we were on a tight schedule to make sure that Jack and Jen got back to the States), we booked an all-day tour with our hotel to see the Uros Floating Reed Islands and Isla Taquile. It turned out to be a good choice.

We started our day off early and traveled by boat out to the Floating Islands. Not only did we see some really cool boats, but we saw some of the people who live there moving around on their way that morning:

And here are the islands we saw as we traveled around:

Then we visited one of the islands (I think it was called CCapi Nativo, but I’m not sure), and learned about them. The people there have lived on the islands their entire lives, and most want to continue the traditions that their parents, grandparents, and other ancestors. The islands are pretty well-supported – not only do the kids go to school (they row or get rowed – check out the photos), there are even solar panels on them! Check out the details:

After that, we headed to Isla Taquile, an island known for its fine sewing (by both the men and the women). We walked across the island, and had a great lunch in the main town along the way. The walk took about two hours, and we saw a few cool parts of the island. Check them out here:

And then we returned to our hotel and found dinner. The following morning, we met Jack and Jen for breakfast, then hung around Puno and rested for a day before heading across the border to Bolivia. We were delayed because of a Bolivian border strike that made crossing it impossible during the week. That wasn’t the first border strike we encountered on our trip, and it was only the first of several travel difficulties we would encounter in Bolivia…

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Our two days were fun. We visited a “native family” (yes, liberties were taken with the definition of “native”, but I got some good photos so I was ok with that):

We saw some more stuff, too – here’s everything else we saw:

But that’s the jungle! Then we went back up to altitude in Puno to visit Lake Titcaca….

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Given all that, the Inca Trail is pretty freakin awesome. It’s a four-day hike that:

• Starts at 10,000 feet
• Ascends almost a mile on the second day
• Descends a full mile on the third day
• Starts at 5am in the cloudforest on the fourth day
• Ends at Machu Picchu – one of the most well-preserve indigenous sites on the South American continent

Along the way, you see villages, ruins, valleys, and lots of llamas, donkeys, and of course, porters.
Eco-tourism note – the porters on the Inca Trail are an important target for ecotourism spending. They are all from Quechua mountain towns near Cuzco, almost none speak English and only some speak Spanish, and have the hardest jobs of anyone on the trail: they carry 25 kg (about 56 pounds) on the trail, every day that they work. Keep in mind that they are all about 5 feet 5 inches tall (or shorter), and typically only weigh about 120 or 130 pounds. And they’re doing all of this at altitudes that most of us have trouble standing up straight when we’re at them! They’re great people though – and obviously very strong. Check out some of them here:

There are a lot of debates about the “classic” Inca Trail (what we did) versus alternative treks – hikes that follow different routes (sometimes with horses, bikes, and/or kayaks), but end up at Machu Picchu one way (walking into the ruin) or the other (busing or hiking up from Aguas Calientes). A lot of the self-proclaimed backpackers look down on the classic trail, although their reasoning is unclear to me. It could be for any one of the following reasons:

1. You need to sign up 5-6 months in advance to hike the classic trail (most backpackers are procrastinators)
2. The classic trail is really popular (most backpackers like to think of themselves as counter-cultural)
3. The classic trail is luxurious (read: expensive) for what it is (backpackers are notoriously cheap except when it comes to booze)

Oh, I almost forgot – we went to machu picchu at the end of the trek! It was awesome – really cool, and we learned a lot on our mini-tour of the ruins. They really are pretty incredible – and for the amount of foot traffic they get every year, the Peruvian government is doing a good job of maintaining them. Take a look at Machu Picchu:

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Actually, it was more like a 2-hour and a 1-hour flight, separated by an 8-hour layover (during which we sat in Lima’s International terminal – a nice, clean place, but really boring if you’re spending 8 hours there). Our flights were good, though – comfortable and on-time.

We arrived in Cuzco and experienced major culture shock, going from the sanity and normalcy of Argentina to the chaos and over-touristyness that is Cuzco, Peru.

You see, Cuzco is one of the top 5 most touristy cities on the planet. It’s the only major city with an airport within driving distance of Machu Picchu, probably the most famous historical site in South America. So everybody who goes to Machu Picchu goes through Cuzco, and they estimate that more than $1 million in tourist money goes through Cuzco EVERY DAY.

So, we arrived in Cuzco to 15,000 repeated offers of “hotel” and “taxi” and “Machu Picchu”, which was a little overwhelming – and extremely annoying – after the relative peace we experienced arriving in Argentinian towns. Also, its important to realize that we blended in pretty well in Argentina (with all of the Europeans – we have German and Italian blood). But neither of us have any Inca or Quechua in us, so we will never blend in in Bolivia, Peru, or Ecuador. Luckily, we had pre-arranged a taxi pickup at the airport to bring us to our hotel, so we avoided most of the chaos.

We spent most of our time in Cuzco acclimatizing. It’s at about 11,000 feet (3400 meters), so when you’re not used to the altitude, it takes a few days to adjust. We walked around, checked out the city plaza de armas, and waited for our friends Jack and Jen to arrive.

They got in a few days later, and we spent three days catching up and hanging out. And of course, getting harassed by all of the vendors trying to sell us things in the city (I photographed one of our harassers after she had repeatedly ignored our “No, gracias”s. She’s in the slideshow). They’ll sell you one of 5 things:

• Massages
• Tours
• Paintings
• Postcards
• The “right” to photograph – either a Quechua woman in traditional dress or a goat – with a Quechua child or with you

Needless to say, we didn’t need any of them.

There are a lot of cathedrals in Cuzco; we saw the outsides of a few of them. I’ve been cathedralled out since late 1996, so I didn’t photograph the insides of any of them. They are big, and a mix of catholic and inca architecture.

We were really glad to head out of Cuzco and go to our campsite at the head of the inca trail to start our hike.

Here’s what we saw around Cuzco (Click on any of the images to see the shot up closer):

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• Acclimatized in Cuzco
• Trekked the Classic Inca Trail
• Walked around and cruised the Amazon river in the Jungle
• Landed on the Uros Floating Islands and hiked around Isla Taquile

We had a ton of fun – it was great to catch up with them, and we saw some really cool sights, too! Hope you enjoy the stories!

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1. Lonely Planet Argentina. Yes, we used the guidebook a lot in Argentina. In fact, we spent so much time in-country that we brought a country-specific guidebook (for the rest of our trip we pretty much only used the book “South America on a Shoestring” by Lonely Planet). It was super-useful, from helping us to identify the primary places we wanted to visit, to giving us tips on which sights were worth it and which weren’t. Yes, we spoke with a lot of different people on the road in Argentina, but we couldn’t fit them in our packs (besides, I’m not sure they would have been ok with that, either).
2. Unlocked cell phone. Again it came in handy (seems like we used it almost everywhere!). From calling hotels and hostels when making reservations for the next night (or confirming them), to arranging meetups with locals, to coordinating tour details with guides, we used our phone several times in Argentina. This time around, we had a Claro chip, and it worked great!
3. Hiking shoes. We hiked a lot here. We visited the national park in Ushuaia, did several trails in El Chalten, hiked around La Cumbre, and walked with our packs from bus station to hotel, hotel to bus station in cities the length of Argentina (which, by the way, is about as long as the US is wide).

So that’s what came in handy while we were in Argentina.

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• Days in-country: 50
• Passport exit stamps: 5
• Number of times we returned to Argentina: 4
• Cities visited: 12
• Overnight buses: 5
• In-country flights: 7
• Longest flight delay: 4 hours
• Glaciers visited: 2
• National parks visited: 5
• Emergency room visits: 1
• Environments visited: 7
  • (city, beach, pampas, mountains, lakes, desert, jungle)
• LNG taxis used: 1
  • (in cordoba to take us to the airport)
• Futbol games attended: 1
• Criticisms of Diego Maradona: thousands
• Tango show invitations received: 10
• Mistakes made because of the Argentine accent: 84
• Packages shipped home from Argentina: 3
• Time required for packages to get to the US: 6 weeks

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Alta Gracia is primarily known for having been the site of a prominent Jesuit ranch and the birthplace (and childhood home, as well as official museum) of Che Guevarra. Just so you know, we went to the Jesuit ranch (the town has moved so much that the ranchhouse is now surrounded by the town), but I didn’t see anything that struck my photographic fancy, so no photos of it .

By far the coolest thing that happened was that, coincidentally, we arrived in Alta Gracia on the day that the regional Gaucho Competition began. It started with a parade:

Here are some of the other gauchos we saw that morning during the parade:

that the regional competition began that afternoon in town. So, we decided to walk around the town for a bit, seeing the Jesuit ranch and the Che Museum (more on that later). Then, we collectivo’d it up to the race field, where we saw this:

But that’s not all we saw! Gauchos young and old were preparing, practicing, and racing up and down a an oil-barrel-lined course. I got some great shots; this is one of my favorites:

I made 74 photos of the racing; play through this slideshow because there are some really amazing ones!

So, there are a few things you haven’t seen still. First, the Che Guevara Museum.

It was pretty interesting. Based in the family home that he grew up in, it contained a few family photos, replicas of his bicycle and motorcycle (La Poderosa II), and stories about his childhood and families. Here’s what some of it looked like:

Second, you haven’t seen much of Alta Gracia. This is what we saw as we walked around:

As always, you can click-through (even the slideshows!) and see the original images. (Tech note – I’ve switched to Picasa for photo hosting for the blog, and will slowly move all of our travel photos over. New posts will use Picasa, which enables these slideshows!)

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Enjoy!

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Literally thousands of Argentinians were lost (All of Argentina agrees about this; the only debate is whether it was 10,000 or 30,000).

A group of mothers began the crusade to find the “desaparecidos” (disappeareds) all the way back in 1977. The “Madres de la Plaza de Mayo” began meeting every Thursday in Buenos Aires, wearing white scarves as identification. They still meet every Thursday; in the meantime they’ve gotten the government to identify some 250 adopted children as “desaparecidos”, found the remains of others, and built a university and library. They’ve left their mark on Bariloche – on the grounds of the Centro Civico there are the names of some 30 desaparecidos, written in white paint along with the date of their disappearance and an image of a white scarf:

From Bariloche – Around

In Cordoba, they converted a half-city-block former prison (used for the desaparecidos) to the Museo de La Memoria, where they show the names of several thousand, some of the rooms they stayed in, and some writing about their experiences. Here are some shots of the museum (it’s a slideshow; use the buttons to move through the pictures):

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• Monday, May 31 – Sunday, June 6: USA: Providence RI, Long Island NY, and Philadelphia, PA
• Monday June 7 – Sunday, June 13: USA: Northern PA, Philadelphia
• Rest of June: East Coast, USA

We’re taking a two-week break from posting travel stories on our blog – they’ll be back the week of June 7th!

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• From Rio Gallegos to Ushuaia (with Aerolineas)
• From Ushuaia to El Calafate (with Aerolineas)
• From El Calafate to Bariloche (with LADE)
• From Cordoba to Iguazu (via Buenos Aires, with Aerolineas)
• From Iguazu to Cordoba (via Buenos Aires, with Aerolineas)
• From Cordoba to Lima (en route to Cuzco, with LAN)

We’ve had the full set of experiences, I think. It’s been pretty funny – everyone (guidebooks and travelers especially, but also some of the tour companies – like Quark, who ran our incredible Antarctic Cruise) complains about Aerolineas – how their flights are either delayed or canceled, and how they never have information for you until after something happens (or doesn’t happen, as the case may be). We’ve flown with Aerolineas three times now, and each time have had a different experience:

1. We weren’t sure what to expect when we booked our first Aerolineas flight to Ushuaia, but the price and timing was too good to pass up. As it turns out, we arrived at the Rio Gallegos airport to discover that our flight was delayed by 3 hours. By the time our flight actually left the ground, it was a full 4 1/2 hours late. However, they did get us into Ushuaia, on the same day, and didn’t lose any of our bags.
2. After we got off of the Ocean Nova to return to dry land, we flew from Ushuaia to El Calafate. This flight was surprisingly uneventful, schedule-wise. The only funny part was that I checked my big backpack, but because we had so many extra clothes I carried our duffel bag onto the plane. That bag was as large as my big pack, and must have weighed at least 25 pounds (Aerolineas limits carry-ons to 5kg, or 11 pounds, on their domestic flights). I wasn’t even questioned when I told them I was carrying it on! That was a good thing, too, as we didn’t really have too many options that afternoon.
3. Our final set of Aerolineas flights was a round-trip from Cordoba to Iguazu. We had bought the flight through Travelocity, but I visited an Aerolineas office to extend our trip by 1 day (for 2 full days in Iguazu instead of just one). This trip was fraught with problems:
   1. It took two changes in the office to get the flights right. For some reason, the agent I spoke to thought I wanted us to stay in Buenos Aires for a day between Cordoba and Iguazu (and this was all conducted in solid Spanish, by the way).
   2. Travelocity was informed of the flight changes three days before our flights took off – about 3 weeks after the changes were made! They sent several emails requiring me to call them to learn about our new itinerary. When I called, I spent an hour on the phone with an unfortunate CSR from India (whose English was OK, but not good) where I tried to explain what the tickets were supposed to be. This person actually called Aerolineas Argentinas to understand the changes (I was on hold for that conversation, but I wish I could have heard it), and then confirmed with me that what I had requested was going to happen.
   3. On our way back from Iguazu to Buenos Aires, our 10:30am flight was cancelled! No email or notice (not unheard of in this case). Thankfully, we had gotten to the airport early and were one of the first to check in for the canceled flight, so we thought it would be easy to change to the flight that was one hour later…
   4. When we spoke to the woman at the counter about getting on the later flight, she said that her records showed that we had been a “no-show” for our flight to Iguazu. This didn’t make any sense, since we had flown Aerolineas to get to Iguazu. Apparently, she was looking at our original reservation, not the updated one. After a few minutes discussing dates, she found our correct information. With that hurdle behind us, we thought that we were all set, but…
   5. She must have been very frustrated at the prospect of telling all these people that they weren’t going to get their 10:30 am flight: She tried to strictly enforce the 5kg carry-on limit with us. My bag weighed 8kg, so she told me I couldn’t get on with it. I needed to do some smooth talking to get around it, but I was helped by two things:
      1. We didn’t check any baggage, so our carry-ons were all that we had.
      2. The woman in front of us in the line had checked 30kg (66 pounds) of luggage, plus her carry-ons.

   After a lot of negotiating, we were able to get on the flight. It was a bit harrowing because we had reservations to go to Cusco the next day, and most of our stuff was stored in Cordoba, so in order to make our international flights (to meet Jack and Jen), we needed to get back to Cordoba that day.

So, in a nutshell those were our experiences with Aerolineas Argentinas. I know this was longer than normal, and there aren’t many pics, but I had to put all of these together in one place! Mostly interesting, sometimes successful, but never completely depressing…

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Our flights to Iguazu went really well, and we arrive at our hostel late in the afternoon. We decided to stop in town the next morning to try for a Brazilian visa to see the Brazilian side of the falls, as well as the Argentinian.

The thing about Brazilian visas is that they’re expensive for Americans – $150 each. They are as expensive and complicated for Americans to get as American visas are for Brazilians. Typically Americans have to apply in their home country and use their visa within 90 days of it being issued. The bonus is that the visa is valid for 5 years, so you only go through the complicated process once, no matter how many times you visit Brazil.

We arrived at the Brazilian embassy, and asked about visas. Unfortunately, we had four strikes against us in our minor quest to see the Brazilian side of the falls:

1. You have to fill out a form online before arriving at the embassy, which we didn’t do.
2. Visa applications are taken from 8am to 11am; we arrived at 11:22
3. The office in Iguazu only issues 30-day visas, so it wasn’t worth it for us (we’ll visit Brazil soon, but not on this trip – we just wanted to see the Brazilian side of the falls).
4. I was wearing my Argentinian national team futbol jersey, so I don’t think the Brazilian behind the counter was too kind to us. Even though we were speaking decent Spanish and he knew we were Americans, he spoke to us in Portuguese the whole time!

So, we didn’t go to Brazil. But we did head over to the park to see the falls for the afternoon, and it was awesome – way better than we thought it would be. The sun was out, it wasn’t too hot, and there were rainbows everywhere!

Our second day in Iguazu, we headed over early to catch the sun at the Garganta del Diablo – the devil’s throat. This is the biggest site at the falls, and worth it. You can actually see the mist that rises from this from the plane as you fly in; here’s a view from up close:

Later that morning, we hiked down a small “jungle-like” trail to the final waterfall to see in the park. It wa hot, but fun to see. On our way back, I caught some bits of a spiderweb, and trailed a huge spider (the size of my hand) along with me until Stef brushed it off. We also passed by a few monkeys hiding in the trees…

Then we left the next morning to get back to Cordoba. What really struck us was that the airport was completely cloudy and overcast when we left. Our flight back wasn’t as easy as our flight in, but you’ll read about that tomorrow…

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• Monday, May 25 – Sunday, May 30: Colombia: Cartagena and Bogota and USA: Boston
• Monday, May 31 – Sunday, June 6: USA: Providence RI, Long Island NY, and Philadelphia, PA
• Monday June 7 – Sunday, June 13: USA: Northern PA, Philadelphia
• Rest of June: East Coast, USA

This week you’ll hear about our visit to Iguazu – one of the world’s biggest waterfalls – and our adventures traveling with Aerolineas Argentinas.

Hope you enjoy!

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We also visited a museum – of “Bellas Artes” (beautiful arts). The architecture was pretty interesting:

One afternoon, we met up with a local – Stef’s college friend’s husband’s sister (really, I’m serious here). Sofi showed us a few of the different museums as well as some of the better restaurants (Cordoba is argentina’s largest university city, so most of the food is pretty greasy).

See our Cordoba photos here:

We spent one of our afternoons in a town called La Cumbre, which is about 3 hours outside of Cordoba. While we were there, we stopped at a lavendar farm. It was open to anyone, and had some really interesting older machinery, and some cool landscape views:

We also used Cordoba as a base for a few longer excursions (more on each of these in later posts:

• We spent a day in Alta Gracia, a former center of the Jesuit missions
• We flew to Iguazu for a couple of days to see the great waterfalls
• We left Argentina from Cordoba in order to get to Cuzco, Peru.

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On Monday morning, we walked out to the bus to see Ricardo and Pia seated near the back! We immediately got to talking (since Stef hadn’t met them yet), and talked about everything as we visited different vineyards. Lunch (at Cava de Cano) was amazing – everyone had a great time. We agreed to try to meet for dinner Tuesday before each of us left in different directions (Stef and I north to Cordoba; Ricardo and Pia west to Santiago). Here are some of the vineyards we visited:

Navarro Correas

Bodega Cecchin

Carmine Granata

Cava de Cano (the great restaurant I mentioned…)

The next day, Stef and I walked around Mendoza’s main park, which includes a go-kart and a BMX course, a set of tennis courts, a rowing racecourse, and a lot of road and mountain bike trails. Mendoza seems like a pretty active city. We also stopped for cotton candy here:

Next I spent an hour on the phone with Travelocity and AT&T (this is the most enjoyable part of traveling…):
Travelocity noticed that our Iguazu itinerary changed, and had all of the information wrong. I had changed it earlier in our trip; it only took three weeks for the change to register in the systems. I suspect that’s an aerolineas problem, though.
AT&T had cancelled our cell phone service for non-payment after I had set our bills up to pay themselves (one of our secrets for traveling for a long time). That was eventually settled, and we now have a $5 credit, which is nice.

Then, we met Ricardo and Pia at Azafran for dinner, and had a great time. They met in Mozambique (which was a portugese colony until 1975), and decided to travel together after about 3 months. They told us a lot about the non-touristy parts of Africa, Mozambique history, and it’s relationship with South Africa.
Our paths may actually cross again our travels; we’re not sure yet.

Then we grabbed the bus to Cordoba…

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• Monday, May 18 – Sunday, May 23: Colombia: Cartagena
• Monday, May 25 – Sunday, May 30: Colombia: Cartagena and Bogota and USA: Boston
• Monday, May 31 – Sunday, June 6: USA: Providence RI, Long Island NY, and Philadelphia, PA
• Monday June 7 – Sunday, June 13: USA: Northern PA, Philadelphia
• Rest of June: East Coast, USA

This week you’ll hear about our adventures drinking wine in Mendoza and wandering the streets of Cordoba.

Hope you enjoy!

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• 10 minutes to figure out that I couldn’t put the car in reverse
• 5 minutes to get them to explain to me how to do it
• 15 minutes to actually drive out of town.

(In case you don’t know, I’ve been driving manual transmission cars almost exclusively for 15 years).

Here’s a couple of things I didn’t know about cars in South America until we were driving in Bariloche:

1. There is a special release handle on the shifter for reverse. You pull this in, and the gate that keeps the tranny from going into reverse opens, allowing you to go backwards. Once you know how it works, it’s really easy, but until then, it’s really frustrating.
2. Passing is allowed almost everywhere, especially in cities. In fact, most of the lines that indicate lanes (primarily opposing lanes) are either absent or faded from view. The trick is to do it smoothly enough…
3. Speed recommendations only apply to commercial vehicles (which have a special sticker on the back indicatig their maximum permissible speed; usually 90 or 110 kilometers per hour). At least, that’s the way everybody drives. Several times, I was passed on the 20kph dirt road – when I was doing around 70 (yes, it was very safe – just ask Stef, as she was in the passenger seat, and even commented on how dangerous the slower drivers were).

The 7 lakes route is really beautiful. It’s about 130 miles long, with a 30-mile dirt road section (that is mostly limited to 20kph).

We arrived in San Martin de Los Andes, checked into our hotel, and went in search of lunch. After lunch, we strolled around town, and checked out the lake that borders it. We had a great dinner, saw a cool local Easter parade (it was Holy Friday, after all), and got up the next morning, drove back to Bariloche, and got on a bus to head to the wine capital of South America, Mendoza…

See a few of our photos from San Martin de Los Andes (click through to see the rest):

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In the morning, as we were changing hostels, Stef fell and cut her nose with the frames of her glasses. She left some blood on the ground:

It was bad enough that we needed to get her to the ER (called La Guardia, at least here in Argentina). Since it was early on a Friday, we were seen pretty quickly. A lot of alcohol, and a bunch of gauze pads later, and we left with steri-strips holding the cut together, and strict instructions to keep it clean and maintain the steri-strips for as long as possible…

As a result, Stef spent basically a full week sleeping and listening to music in our room, and I rode a mountain bike on the circuito Chico, met a bunch of random people at our hostel, and got a ton of work done on our blog (this is why I was able to post some of the photos from Antarctica as quickly as I did).

I also watched the buildup to Easter, in a Catholic country, in a town known primarily for chocolate. Every store had its own display of 10+pound chocolate Easter eggs, and some of them were even animated!

We left Bariloche in a rented car Friday morning, to drive the route of the 7 lakes and visit San Martin de Los Andes for a day.

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• Monday, May 10 – Sunday, May 16: Colombia: Bogota and Cartagena
• Monday, May 18 – Sunday, May 23: Colombia: Cartagena and the Northern Carribean coast
• Monday, May 25 – Sunday, May 30: Colombia: Northern Carribean coast and USA: Boston (or Sacramento)
• June: East Coast USA

This week you’ll hear about our adventures in the Lakes District of Argentina – mountain biking and easter preparation in Bariloche, and seeing San Martin de Los Andes.

Hope you enjoy!

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1. Their crazy schedule. LADE flys to certain cities on certain days of the week. For example, one of their routes on Thursdays goes from El Calafate to Bariloche (direct). But it’s ONLY on Thursdays. See their timetable. And if you try to buy a ticket for a Friday, their system intelligently offers you a ticket for the following Thursday – only it doesn’t make that too prominent. So if you’re not reading the fine print, that Ticket might not be for the day that you thought it was for.
2. Outdated technology. You can reserve a seat on their website, but you have to pay for the ticket by phone or in-person (Thankfully, they have offices in most large, touristy Argentinian cities). I was amazed that the reservation system even worked in Firefox!
3. Old Planes. (our mothers will love this one!). We flew in a Fokker F-28 from El Calafate to Bariloche. This is an old plane. The company went out of business five years ago. They stopped building these planes 23 years ago. The Dutch airline KLM (Fokker was a dutch company) stopped flying them 25 years ago. If you don’t think that makes it old, check out this photo:

There are no doors on the overhead lugguage bins! (As usual, click on the photo to see more…)

It actually reminds me a lot of the flying we did on Aeroflot in the USSR almost 20 years ago…

It turned out to be a very enjoyable flight. What was interesting:

• Carry-ons are limited to 3kg – 6.6 pounds. My carry-on weighed 8.5kg (about 19 pounds); after I moved most everything to my checked bag, they let me on with a 5kg (11-pound) carry-on.
• There are no assigned seats. You pick your seat once you are on the plane. We were lucky enough to get into an exit-row, which is more comfortable than other rows. That was good, but even better when you consider…
• Since we flew north along the Andes, all the best seats were on the left side of the plane. We manage to snag one of these (I had to run to secure my spot in the boarding queue), and watched the Andes during our short, 1 hour 15 minute flight:

It was a lot of fun. I don’t normally post about stuff like this, but this time it was too good to not pass along…

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So we spent a day and half resting and getting organized. Then, on Tuesday, we hiked up to Laguna Torre. It was a beautiful day – just cool enough so that we weren’t drenched in sweat, just warm and sunny enough that it was really pleasant. It was so clear that we could see Cerro Torre the entire way to the lake.

Typically it’s covered in clouds, so this was a real treat. On Wednesday, our last full day in El Chalten, we took a catamaran across Lago Viedma to see and hike on the glacier there. Again we had a beautiful day (the day before the wind around the glacier had been too high to enjoy it). In fact, we managed to skip a pretty poor weather day in El Chalten at the same time. We saw several different ice formations, an a bunch of icebergs. The trekking was a lot of fun, too!
Iceberg photos:

Glacier photos:

After the glacier, we had dinner with two Australian doctors we had met on the trek. We went to our favorite restaurant in El Chalten – La Cervezeria. We had enjoyed it so much that we ate there every night of our stay – it was awesome!

Thursday morning, we headed to the bus stop early to catch our 8am bus back to El Calafate, where we hoped to ship some of our winter gear home and catch a flight to Bariloche.
Here are some shots of El Chalten:

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• Monday, May 3 – Sunday, May 9: Bolivia: La Paz and the Salt Flats
• Monday, May 10 – Sunday, May 16: Colombia: Bogota and Cartagena
• Monday, May 18 – Sunday, May 23: Colombia: Cartagena and the Northern Carribean coast
• Monday, May 25 – Sunday, May 30: Colombia: Northern Carribean coast and USA: Boston (or Sacramento)
• June: East Coast USA

This week you’ll hear about our adventures in Argentinian Patagonia – hiking and glacier trekking in El Chalten, and mountain biking in Bariloche.

Hope you enjoy!

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• Las Torres. The towers themselves. These are pretty tremendous rock formations that have been carved by a combination of wind and ice (there are a few glaciers in the park, too). Our first day, we spent about 3 hours hiking up to them, and three hour hiking down to return to the Refugio, where we spent the night.



• The Grey Glacier. Our second day was spent transferring to one of the other lodges in the park, and then 4 hours hiking to the glacier and back.



• The French Valley. On our third day, we hiked up into the French Valley. We saw some amazing avalanches on the side of the towers, a few waterfalls, and ran into some people we had net earlier in the park.

Oh, did I mention the weather? The park is known for having four seasons in one day, and (especially on the higher stretches, like the exposed boulder-field ascent to the towers and the later sections of the French Valley) very high winds. All three days, we had bright sunny days, and almost no wind. It was great hiking weather. Even our guide (who had been guiding in the park for over 5 years), said he hadn’t seen anything like it. We got to really enjoy the park – it’s been protected ever since the mid-60s, and has only suffered one major fire; in 2006 or 2007 a few backpackers left their fire burning and it got out of control, taking out more than 10% of the park.
A couple of other interesting things happened:

• Our van driver (who looked almost exactly like Robert Dinero) had to remove the mirrors from his van to make it over one bridge because the van wouldn’t fit otherwise.



• We ran into our friends Richard and John from our Antarctic cruise on the trail to Las Torres (they were coming down as we were ascending the final part).
• We learned the ins and outs of crossing the border between Argentina and Chile.
  • Neither country likes the other very much, so most border crossings involve a few kilometers of “no man’s land” after you’ve left one country but before you’ve entered the other (This isn’t the case at Los Horcones, but seems to be true everywhere else along the Andean border).
  • It usually takes much more time to enter Chile from Argentina than the reverse (at the same border crossing). Chile is MUCH more sensitive to fruit and animal imports than Argentina, so they scan all incoming baggage, but Argentina doesn’t. We think that this is because the land on the Chilean side of the Andes is much more arable than the land on the argentinian side (because the pacific clouds rain down on chile before crossing the Andes).
  • No food, fruits, or meat, and you should be fine getting into Chile. The fewer people you have with you, the better (tourist buses always take longer because there are always a few people who don’t know how the system works and slow everyone else down).

Two more sets of photos:
Lago Nordenskjold

The Waterfall

Enjoy!

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1. Ship our extra winter gear back to the US.
2. Help Stacy find a new rollable duffel bag that she could carry her gear in.

I am happy to say we successfully helped Stacy, but even though we walked around all of Ushuaia, we couldn’t ship our stuff back (DHL isn’t open on the weekends, and, even though the Correo Argentino office was completely staffed, the customs officer there told us he wasn’t working that day – no, I didn’t understand why he was there to tell us that he wasn’t working, either).

Then, we flew to El Calafate. We got in, and had the easiest transfer ever to our hostel – like, we got in the van, it drove us to our hostel, and we checked in. No negotiating, no addresses, no exorbitant fees, no spoilers – just easy.

El Calafate is best known for the Perito Moreno glacier (Perito Moreno is one of only a few international Latin American heroes; contrary to popular belief, it does not mean little brown dog). It’s really impressive – not at all like a little brown dog, in fact, and is probably the closest you can get to a glacier on land on the six populated continents (you can get closer on a ship, and in Antarctica – which of course we did). We spent an afternoon watching it, and enjoying the most(ly) quiet. It was quite fun, and I managed to snap a few photos during the day (funny how that happens, huh?). Check them out by clicking on this one:

We also managed to ship some of our gear back to the US. It usually takes a few months for it to arrive, so if we’re lucky, it will make it home before we do. We were really surprised, because it was so much easier AND less expensive than shipping from Ecuador (keep in mind, Quito is about 2500 miles closer to Philadelphia than El Calafate).

Finally, we got our bus tickets arranged to go to torres del Paine, an to el chalten. It was a busy 3 days, so I only have a couple of shots from around El Calafate… Enjoy!

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• Monday, April 26 – Sunday, May 2: Peru: Puno, Amazon Jungle, Lake Titicaca, Nazca? and Lima, Bolivia: La Paz
• Monday, May 3 – Sunday, May 9: Bolivia: La Paz and the Salt Flats
• Monday, May 10 – Sunday, May 16: Colombia: Bogota and Cartagena
• Monday, May 18 – Sunday, May 23: Colombia: Cartagena and the Northern Carribean coast
• Monday, May 25 – Sunday, May 30: Colombia: Northern Carribean coast and USA: Boston (or Sacramento)
• June: East Coast USA

This week you’ll hear about our adventures in Southern Patagonia – El Calafate and Torres del Paine.

Hope you enjoy!

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If you remember, the weather on South Georgia had been up-and-down; some landings were easy, others had heavy winds, driving snow, and 10-foot waves crashing on the beach. Our ship pushed hard into a 15-MPH headwind for two days while traveling the 800 miles from South Georgia; the headwind slowed us down enough to cause us to skip the South Orkney Islands, which were to be our only research base landing.

But we’re here now. And when we first arrived at the Peninsula, we were having a rough time. The weather didn’t agree with us, either. We had a heavy mist at our first landing, Gourdin Island. Since it was late in the season, and since it’s known for supporting 3 different species of penguins, we were treated to the delightful sensory experience of an entire island covered in penguin guano. I don’t know how much experience you have with this stuff, but trust me, it doesn’t smell good. We did get to see most of our penguins though, including a few really interesting ones (both photos link to the rest of our photos from Gourdin):

Adelie Penguins

A Gentoo Penguin with a broken foot:

In the afternoon, we continued to Astrolabe Island, which we circled in zodiacs (intentionally as part of a zodiac cruise). We saw some of our first icebergs off of the Antarctic Peninsula here:

The next morning, we went to Mikkelsen Harbour, site of an abandoned Argentine research station. Here, we fought 40MPH winds and sideways sleet to walk around the island for a few hours. We weren’t the only ones, however – someone (we don’t know who) actually sailed a sailboat down to Mikkelsen!

Wow. But then, in the afternoon, the situation changed. We arrived at Portal Point, to be our only continental landing. Basically, most of the places we visited were islands, and some people who go to Antarctica go specifically to step foot on the continent, so they can confidently say that they have been to all 7 continents (Stef and I have each only been to 4 – the same 4, actually!). Brandon (our awesome expedition leader), expected our visit to Portal Point to last about 15 minutes on land, because he figured that the weather wouldn’t be great. However, it turned out to be incredible! We spent easily over an hour at the spot on land, hiking up and down, and shooting tons of photos. Here are two – check out the rest as well by clicking through:

Our final stop happened the next morning. We went to the Melchior Islands, and had amazing weather. Bright sun, blue skies, blue ice, white snow, no wind, no rain – it was incredible. Needless to say, everyone loved it. The kayaking group went out for one last paddle – we had an awesome time (I’ll put up photos from that expedition at some point later on this year). Here are some photos from the Melchior Islands:

At the end of the landing, a last-minute announcement explained that we would be able to do a “Polar Plunge” into the Antarctic Ocean. Needless to say, I jumped at the chance. Here’s one of the photos, taken by our friend Jochem.

That’s it for the moment. In case you’re curious, I shot about 2200 photos during our three weeks on the ship, of which about 400 were worth keeping. Right now (since we’re still traveling), I’ve only posted the 40 or 50 best. But don’t worry, we’ll keep them coming later on…

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• The base for all Antarctic whaling activity from the early 1900s until the 1960s (when most of the whales in the Southern Ocean had been hunted).
• The finish line of Shackleton’s spectacular rescue of his Endurance crew, after:
  • A 50-mile hike across the island, without sleep
  • An 800-mile lifeboat journey (where any slight navigation miss would have caused them to completely miss the island) from the Antarctic Peninsula
  • A 40-mile sledge pull of lifeboats off the Endurance
• It’s now one of the main research sites of the British Antarctic Survey, and supports a population of 89 researchers (nine, that’s correct)

We were able to spend four days in and around South Georgia. We made landings in incredible weather – both good and bad. We saw several spots on the 100-mile island, including (click each photo to see the rest from that landing):

• Salisbury Plain, one of our coldest landings (40+MPH winds, and a driving rain). We saw a lot of King Penguins here, as you can see from the photos.



• Fortuna Bay, where we got to see some more penguins. But, there were also a few reindeer there:



• Stromness, the site of one of the abandoned whaling stations on the island. We also saw Shackleton’s waterfall – the waterfall he and his men climbed down when they finally realized that they could be saved.



• Grytviken, capital of the island, where the British Antarctic Survey is based. It’s also the former site of the biggest whaling station on the Island, and where Shackleton is buried. Even the driving snow made it more difficult to see, we did see our first Chinstrap penguin.



• Gold Harbour, where we had beautiful weather. We saw some elephant seals, a lot of penguins (of course), and some great fur seals.



• Cooper Bay, the site of our only Macaroni Penguin landing.

Enjoy!

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• Monday, April 19 – Sunday, April 25: Peru: Cuzco, Inca Trail, Machu Picchu, and Puno
• Monday, April 26 – Sunday, May 2: Peru: Puno, Lake Titicaca, Nazca? and Lima
• May: Peru: Lima, Bolivia: La Paz, Uyuni, Colombia: Bogota, Cartagena, United States: Boston

This week is the second of two big weeks. We post our stories and photos from South Georgia and from the Antarctic Peninsula.

Hope you enjoy!

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• Event days
• Travel days
• Rest days
• Admin days

To give you a sense of each of these days, you need to know what they are.
Event days are one of the primary reasons we travel. On these days we do something related to where we are, like:

• Visiting a museum in Valpairiso, chile
• Attending a night sky tour in San Pedro de atacama
• Hiking a canyon in Peru
• Going to a futbol game in buenos aires

We get to experience something that’s different than in our lives back home, typically expands our horizons, and allows me to practice my photography . We really look forward to these for obvious reasons.

Travel days are the necessary result of not having on-demand access to a teleportation device. When you travel, you going to different places, and the going takes time. We’re in South America, and most travel here happens by bus. Chile and Argentina are big – as tall as the United States is wide. Most of the time, when we travel from one city to another, we spend between 15 and 18 hours in a bus (all at one time). The benefit is that we don’t pay for a hotel room that night. The downside is that we don’t sleep as well and we lose about a day’s worth of activity (since we arrive in the early afternoon when the bus is on time – which isn’t always the case. So a travel day is the day we arrive in a new place and spend most of our time en route.

Rest days are days without plans – we hang around the city, take walks, and generally do a little as possible. They’re hard to schedule but really important; with as much cross-cultural exposure as we get and as many things that we’re excited about, we’ve got to make sure we have some time each week to recharge. Rest days allow us to recharge and to reflect on what we’ve seen, felt, experienced, and learned.

Admin days are not at all enjoyable, but a necessary evil in a trip where little was planned beforehand. On admin days we make our travel plans for the upcoming period. We choose where to go, how to get there, where to stay, and how long to stay there. It’s not as easy as it might sound, and after a few months of it, we’ve learned to be much more efficient in the process, but we’ve also found that it’s less enjoyable. We research flights online, bus tickets at the bus station, and hotels in our guidebooks and on the web. We talk with other travelers. We often lock in our plans, which is satisfying but definitely leaves us with a sense of certainty. We’ve come to enjoy the freedom we feel from not having commitments, so this is a tradeoff.

But as we begin to approach our return date, we try to balance our enjoyment of freedom with our excitement at seeing everything that’s out there.

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• They have been disputed territory between Argentina and the Falklands (technically British territory, but the Brits say they let the Islands run themselves) since the mid-1800s.
• In 1982, Argentina invaded (in an effort to improve national morale), with a moderately bloody result (a couple hundred fatalities, in an island range with about 3500 inhabitants) that was nullified when the Brits responded with strength and retook the islands.
• At the end of February (when we visited), everyone believed that the Falklands were full of huge oil reserves. Kristina (Kirchner, current Argentinian president),  was once again raising the Argentinian “territorial integrity and proximity” claim to the Falklands, which has Falklands residents in an uproar.
  • In fact, when I asked a shop owner what she thought of the oil prospects, all she could talk about was “her” (meaning Kristina); she didn’t have anything to say about the actual possibility of oil.
  • Note, as of yesterday, drilling in the Falklands seemed to be producing poor results (Source: BBC).

As a result, it’s very difficult to travel from Argentina to the Falklands. There are no flights, and our ship spent an extra hour in Ushuaia customs before leaving port because we had the Falklands on our itinerary (this may have been made slightly more difficult with an Argentine expedition team member and another Argentine passenger, I’m not sure). You can only fly to the Falklands in two ways:

1. An RAF flight from Brize Norton (in the UK, via the Ascencion Islands), which is essentially a military charter flight, and as such doesn’t have a well-defined public schedule.
2. A Saturday LAN Chile flight from Punta Arenas, which means you must spend a week on the islands.

Regardless of all this, we spent about a day and a half in the Falklands Islands, and saw some places that are rarely visited. We went to:

• Steeple Jason, one of the most difficult landings in the Falklands, as it has a rocky shoreline (there is no beach, just a lot of really big rocks). This was our first landing, but the water was like glass, so it wasn’t as difficult as it could have been. We saw the world’s largest albatross colony (about 100,000 pairs, plus chicks and adolescents, plus the requisite penguins.



• Saunders Island, a beautiful beach landing where we got to see Rockhopper Penguins, some amazing Commerson’s dolphins, and a great sunset. The weather for this landing was beautiful, too.



• Port Stanley, capital of the Falklands, which had been a repair stop for many whaling ships in the late 1800′s and early 1900′s. There are some pretty impressive wrecks there. Our morning in Stanley wasn’t as much fun as our other landings in the Falklands, because the weather was pretty foul – cold (just above freezing), high winds (30+ MPH), and a lot of rain early on definitely dampened our spirits. But, the museum was very interesting, and we got to stop at a few different, funny, photo points.

The Falklands were cool, and have a pretty strung-out and involved history – the Spanish, Portuguese, Argentines, and Brits all fought over them. We’ll talk more about it later on. For now, enjoy the photos! (click each one above to see the others from that location).

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• Monday, April 12 – Sunday, April 18: Argentina: Iguazu and Cordoba; and Peru: Cuzco
• Monday, April 19 – Sunday, April 25: Peru: Cuzco, Inca Trail, Machu Picchu, and Puno
• Monday, April 26 – Sunday, May 2: Peru: Puno, Lake Titicaca, Nazca? and Lima
• May: Peru: Lima, Bolivia: La Paz, Uyuni, Colombia: Bogota, Cartagena, United States: Boston

This week is the first of two big weeks. We post our stories and photos from the Falklands islands and the last of our current thoughts on travel.

Hope you enjoy!

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• South America
• Philadelphia International Airport

This was really important recently when we were traveling from Puerto Madryn to Rio Gallegos. We arrived at the bus station, and here’s what happened:

• The bus was an hour late
• No one said anything to us until we asked after the bus was supposed to arrive, even though we had spoken with the staff a few minutes earlier
• The bus was full of people, all getting on and off at different times (I counted six stops in our 18-hour bus ride; these long-distance trips usually don’t make passenger stops at all).
• It smelled like urine
• When they ran the A/C, it smelled like smoke
• We received dinner, but no breakfast (which is supposed to be standard for a trip like that)
• We ended up being an hour and a half late

The key to successful travel zen is knowing when you have control, power, or influence over a travel situation.

• When you have control, you can make a change.
• When you have power, you can direct the people who have control to change it.
• When you have influence, you can attempt to subtly hint for what you want.

Obviously your expectations for change should be based on the amount of control you have.

The fact is, without fluent Spanish skills AND relatives who own or operate the specific companies we travel with, we rarely have large amounts of influence, so we learn to accept and adapt to what comes our way.

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• A great museum (The Yamana Museum) that explains the lifestyles and customs of the early Fuegians (residents of Tierra del Fuego – extreme southern Patagonia). Know why it’s called Tierra del Fuego? Because the first residents always had fires lit (for warmth and cooking, since they didn’t wear many clothes, and kept ‘dry’ by using seal oil), even in their canoes! When Magellan came through, he noted it as the “Land of Fire“.



• Parque Nacional Tierra del Fuego – one of the greatest (and largest) national parks in Argentina, of which only a little bit is accessible to tourists (still worthwhile, but also great to see a country protecting some of its resources as well).



• Estancia Harberton – an early settlement built by the Bridges, who were the most interested in the Fuegians and made several attempts to protect and (at least a little) integrate them (unfortunately all failed).



• Martillo Island, a completely protected refuge for Magellanic and Gentoo penguins.



• A great port – from which nearly all of the Antarctic cruises sail (more about this later this week). This, of course, drives the vast majority of tourism. Antarctic tourists hail from everywhere, but so many are from Europe and North America that nearly every shop takes US cash and Euros. Since most of the stuff is so expensive (this is the only place in South America where we’ve seen outdoor gear prices higher than US list – everywhere else it’s been about the same), almost every shop takes credit cards, too.

We spent about 5 days in Ushuaia, and really enjoyed it – it’s a fun town to walk around. We learned a lot about the early Fuegians and Antarctic tourism here. Plus, we got to stay in a great hotel one night (as part of our Antarctica cruise)!

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1. Thankfully, we were nowhere near the epicenter of the earthquake. At the time it happened, we were on the Falkland Islands, which are 1270 miles (as the crow flies) away from Concepcion.
2. The quake really destroyed infrastructure around Concepcion and Santiago. The airport was shut down for 10 days, and since has been operating out of tents, with limited flights.
3. Apparently, the Internet was partly to blame for a slow Chilean response. This comes from the Economist (see the fifth paragraph for details), so I trust it.
4. Tourism was hit pretty hard. Since all flights into and out of Santiago were cancelled for 10 days, and there were only limited flights after that, a lot of people coming to Chile in March didn’t go. We actually booked with a tour guide for our trip to Torres del Paine, and heard stories about several groups who had to cancel their trips because they couldn’t get there (more on that when we write about Torres del Paine!).
5. We had heard about a lot of damage to Easter Island from a tsunami, but apparently it did not materialize (based on first-person Twitter accounts).
6. I just spoke with a woman yesterday who said that many of the roads around Santiago and slightly south (in the Lakes district, near the epicenter) are pretty wrecked, especially for people trying to travel over the Andes. This is a pretty popular route – we took it when we crossed from Santiago to Buenos Aires in November.

That’s everything I’ve heard. Thankfully most of Easter Island was spared. Check out the story about our visit there (in the middle of a tropical storm) if you haven’t read it yet!

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• Monday, April 5 – Sunday, April 11: Argentina: Mendoza and Cordoba
• Monday, April 12 – Sunday, April 18: Argentina: Iguazu and Cordoba; and Peru: Cuzco
• Monday, April 19 – Sunday, April 25: Peru: Cuzco, Inca Trail, Machu Picchu, and Puno
• Monday, April 26 – Sunday, May 2: Peru: Puno, Lake Titicaca, Nazca? and Lima
• May: Peru: Lima, Bolivia: La Paz, Uyuni, Colombia: Bogota, Cartagena, United States: Boston

This week, you’ll read about what we’ve been able to learn about the earthquake in Concepcion, our adventures in Ushuaia, and some more of our thoughts on travel.

Hope you enjoy!

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• How much you try to fit in with locals. The more you do that’s like a local, the better you’ll understand and appreciate a local’s perspective.
• How specific your plans for visiting a place are. The more specific your plans (not counting “unplanned time” or “time with locals”), the less you’ll appreciate local culture. The fewer plans you have, the more likely you are to be surprised, able to do what feels right, on the spur of the moment.
• How much time you spend in a place. Well, in general this limits or extends your ability to experience a place locally. The more time you spend, the more experiential opportunities you have (discounting the boredom effect).

So here’s what I think is going on: a lot of us newly-freed westerners are confusing traveling SLOWLY for what we’re actually doing – traveling without plans. I suspect there are a lot of consultants/career professionals-turned-backpackers who have been so accustomed to having every moment of their lives scheduled, planned out, or determined in advance (often by someone else), that they are overwhelmed by their new-found freedom. So they call it traveling slowly, because that’s how it feels to them, when in reality they are traveling without fixed plans.

Personally, I know that Stef and I love to travel without plans – it’s very freeing. Sometimes slow travel is great, but if you spend too long in a place you tend to get bored or some form of cabin fever. For most of our time in Patagonia, we’ve traveled with plans, because that’s the only way to see Patagonia in the summer (yes, it’s summer down here . It’s not ideal, but having plans eliminates the hassle of trying 10 different hostels until you find one with a free room, and missing some places because all the buses were full the day you wanted to leave.
We’re not in a huge rush though – we’ve spent about a week heading down the Atlantic coast of Argentina from buenos aires; most people do that in an afternoon (by plane) or in 3-4 days by bus with stops.

So, it would be great of people could clarify what they mean by types of travel – slow versus fast, planned versus unplanned, touristy versus local.

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We did see a few things around town, including this great Yuengling beer (American beer made in upstate PA, near where were from November to January) poster (click the photo to see the others we got from around town):

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• Monday, March 29th – Sunday April 4: Argentina: Mendoza, Cordoba and Iguazu
• Monday, April 5 – Sunday, April 11: Argentina: Salta and Jujuy; Bolivia: Uyuni and La Paz
• Monday, April 12 – Sunday, April 18: Bolivia: La Paz and Peru: Cuzco
• Monday, April 19 – Sunday, April 25: Peru: Cuzco, Inca Trail, Machu Picchu, and Puno
• Monday, April 26 – Sunday, May 2: Peru: Puno, Lake Titicaca, Nazca? and Lima
• May: Peru: Lima, Colombia: Bogota, Cartagena, United States: Boston

This week, you’ll read about some of our thoughts on travel.

Hope you enjoy!

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• of Spanish
• about traveling through south America
• about what we enjoy
• about what we don’t

We’ve also learned a lot about finding a place to stay, mainly through trial (read: error). To save you six months of grief and/or poor nights’ sleep, here are some of the things we’ve learned:

• Always have a reservation for your first night in a new place (otherwise if you show up exhausted, you’ll go for whatever is available, and either pay too much or get a shitty place)
• Only reserve for one night (except in high season, see below).
• Ask to see the room AND the bathroom before you pay
• If you want to negotiate a better rate for a longer stay, do it BEFORE you’ve stayed even one night
• Sometimes an included breakfast is worth it, sometimes not
• Decide what’s important to you, and focus on that:
  • Scene (party vs quiet vs family vs oddball)
  • Cleanliness
  • Location
  • Additional services (tours, programs, languages, Internet, hot water, etc)
  • Price

We usually focus on cleanliness and guidebook recommendations. For us, a poor night’s sleep really hurts our experience of a place. Everybody has different priorities, though, and sleep is more important for some and less important for others.

High-Season recommendations:

• Make all of your reservations in advance
• You have to rely on guidebooks and the web, so find some good indicators of the most important qualities. We’ve found that German-run places are almost always exceptionally-clean, so we look for German ownership when making our plans.

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We rode along that for about 36 hours. Fun, eh?

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• Monday, March 22nd – Sunday, March 28th: Argentina: El Chalten, El Calafate, Bariloche, and Mendoza
• Monday, March 29th – Sunday April 4: Argentina: Mendoza, Cordoba and Iguazu
• Monday, April 5 – Sunday, April 11: Argentina: Salta and Jujuy; Bolivia: Uyuni and La Paz
• Monday, April 12 – Sunday, April 18: Bolivia: La Paz and Peru: Cuzco
• Monday, April 19 – Sunday, April 25: Peru: Cuzco, Inca Trail, Machu Picchu, and Puno
• Monday, April 26 – Sunday, May 2: Peru: Puno, Lake Titicaca, Nazca? and Lima
• May: Peru: Lima, Colombia: Bogota, Cartagena, United States: Boston

This week, you’ll read about some of our thoughts on travel and our time in Rio Gallegos.

Hope you enjoy!

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• Our vastly different volcano trips, within a week of each other
  • We got within 20 miles of Cotopaxi
  • We had a great time ascending and descending Chimborazo
• We were surprised by our time in Lima and in Arequipa, too
  • Thought we would hate Lima but we liked it
  • Thought we would love Arequipa but hated it

There have been lots of times when we’ve experienced this – random cases of exceptionally good luck or seemingly unending streams of bad events, but we do what we can to keep the balance in our favor. We send out good vibes whenever we can, including:

• Giving good tips to waiters and others
• Giving up our spots in line (sometimes without knowing it) when we’re not in a rush
• Helping out other foreign travelers (advice, translation assistance, etc)
• And generally just trying to relax when things don’t go the way we expect – which happens a lot here in South America…

So that’s travel karma; we get it a lot here (both good and bad).

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• Are pocket-sized, like a point-and-shoot (they fit in a jacket pocket)
• Use professional-grade interchangeable lenses, like an SLR
• Perform almost as well as a DSLR on the key aspects:
  • Focus speed
  • Low-light performance
  • Full-manual control
  • Offer sophisticated RAW file formats

So what does this all mean? This is the “Decisive Moment Digital” (as Luminous Landscape likes to say) or, a “camera for the rest of us”. Some people will still need and use DSLRs, but they will be people who already have a lot invested in canon or nikon glass, or pros who switch between the larger formats and their full-frame 35mm digitals.

Can you tell yet that I’m excited about this? I sold all my other camera gear and bought a Panasonic GF1 in December. I have two lenses with me (a 20mm F1.7 prime, and a 45-200mm F4.0-5.6 telephoto zoom). So, what has changed? Let’s review the old criteria:

• Big pixels. Better! These cameras (using the Micro Four-Thirds mount specification) have a sensor that’s 8-10 times larger than any of my previous cameras.
• Wide-angle lens. Worse. My new camera has a normal lens – it’s effective angle-of-view is 40mm (anything between 30 and 70 or so is considered normal).
• Fits in a pocket. A little worse. This camera is still small, just not as small as my prior cameras.

So why’d I do it?
There are a couple of reasons:

• Flexibility. Interchangeable lenses allow me to take advantage of different featuresets with only one camera. My GF1 fits in my pocket with its tiny 20mm pancake prime lens, but I can switch lenses and get amazing long-range bird and wildlife photos (yay! Antarctica!) with my 90-400mm effective telephoto.
• RAW+JPEG mode. Makes it easy to get uploadable photos while traveling, and large printable ones for when we return.
• Great movies. This camera shoots great 720p HD video.
• Lots of scene modes along with 4 programmable custom modes.
• Full manual mode for extended-exposure night shots.
• Auto-bracketing – this is great for making HDR photos – pictures that have way more colors than any camera (or even our eyes) can process at one time.

This makes the fourth (and hopefully final) camera for our trip. Watch for photos of Argentina (and beyond!) coming out of it!

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Here is how our plan is shaping up for the next couple of months:

• Monday, March 15th – Sunday, March 21st: Argentina: El Calafate, Parque Nacional Los Glaciares, and El Chalten; Chile: Puerto Natales and Parque Nacional Torres del Paine
• Monday, March 22nd – Sunday, March 28th: Argentina: El Calafate and Bariloche
• April: Argentina: Mendoza, Cordoba Iguazu, Salta, Jujuy Bolivia: La Paz, and Peru: Cuzco, Puno, and Lima
• May: Peru: Lima, Colombia: Bogota, Cartagena, United States: Boston

This week, you’ll read about some of our thoughts on travel and our time in Puerto Madryn.

Hope you enjoy!

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Once we arrived, we took the public bus into the city and walked to our hostel (which was not great – unclean and generally pretty noisy. Thankfully it was the only really tough part of days in Uruguay). This experience helped highlight a couple of things we experienced in Uruguay (click on any of the photos to see more):

• People are super-nice here. As in, the older man whom we asked for directions actually got off the bus with us, found our street, told us which direction to go, and made sure we were all set before he got back on a bus to continue on his way.
• Everyone drinks mate. And they have this special way of carrying the mate stuff (cup, thermos, metal straw/spoon, and ground mate):



• They have a really cool monument to one of their great generals, Jose Artigas. It’s underground in the central plaza, so during the intense summer heat (temps here were in the high 80s every day), it’s a great place to cool off for a few minutes.



• They do parilla al legno (barbeque on a wood fire) here; in Buenos Aires it’s all parilla al carbon (barbeque on charcoal). I like al legno better.

Oh, check out the photos above to find the following:

• An ice-skating pengiun
• Some amazing ocean-side sunsets
• The Teatro Solis, one of the most accoustically-perfect theaters in the world

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• The Paris of South America
• Capital of a country full of faded glory
• The birthplace of Tango
• Home to a great culinary history

We were lucky enough to visit B.A. twice – once in November at the end of the first part of our trip (before we went back to the States for a couple of months), and when we returned to South America in early February.

The first time around, we didn’t get much of a sense of the city. We arrived on a Saturday morning after having traveled about 3300 miles in two days (2300 miles from Easter Island to Santiago, and 1000 miles from Santiago to Buenos Aires) – the equivalent of flying from San Francisco to Chicago, then taking a bus to Boston. Since our plane left on Monday night, we spent two days getting reservations made for our return to the city, and then walked around on Monday. We did see one or two kind of funny things along the way, though (click the photo to see the photos of the fully-decked out Christmas tree – in a mall in early November):

Yes, it says “You are going to feel like you robbed us!”

When we came back, we were a little more rested than we had been, we were excited to travel, and we had more time in Buenos Aires. So, the second time around we were able to (Click each photo to see the rest of the photos from that area):

• Tour La Boca, the famed neighborhood of colors (and poverty)



• Walk through El Caminito – the only touristy part of La Boca



• See the stadium and fan club of the legendary Argentinian futbol team, Boca Juniors



• See an incredible Tango show, which had 12 dancers and a live band with 14 amazing performers



• Visit La Recoleta Cemetary, the famed mausoleum that houses the ancestors of many of the city’s most important families, including Evita – Eva Peron



• Experience a real pro-league Futbol game – we saw River Plate play Rosario Central at River Plate

We had a great time the second time around in Buenos Aires, and we even found had some good food karma while we were there!

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We each have:

• Sleeping bag in compression sack
• Travel towel
• Silk sleep sheet
• Money belt
• Journal
• Wedding ring
• Digital watch
• Spanish language notebook

For the both of us, we carry (some in Stef’s bag, and some in Matt’s):

• Finance notebook
• Continent guidebook (South America on a Shoestring)
• Antarctica guidebook
• Argentina guidebook
• Spanish-English dictionary

Matt brought:

• Sunglasses (with sunglasses case)

Stef brought:

• 1 biteplate
• 1 pair earrings
• 2 pairs prescription glasses
• 1 sunglasses add-on for glasses
• Sarong
• Eye mask
• 1 set of sleep socks
• 1 bag personal supplies

We each have 3 drybags, and Matt carries two more (one for the spare medicines, and one for the camera).

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Here is how our plan is shaping up for the next couple of months:

• Monday, March 8th – Sunday, March 14th: Antarctica: South Shetland Islands and Antarctic Peninsula, Argentina: Ushuaia and El Calafate
• Monday, March 15th – Sunday, March 21st: Argentina: El Calafate, Parque Nacional Los Glaciares, and El Chalten; Chile: Puerto Natales and Parque Nacional Torres del Paine
• Monday, March 22nd – Sunday, March 28th: Argentina: El Calafate and Bariloche
• April: Argentina: Mendoza, Cordoba Iguazu, Salta, Jujuy Bolivia: La Paz, and Peru: Cuzco, Puno, and Lima
• May: Peru: Lima, Colombia: Bogota, Cartagena, United States: Boston

This week, you’ll read about our time in Buenos Aires and Montevideo.

Hope you enjoy!

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This year, we headed up to the Pocono mountains, since we were in Northern Pennsylvania anyway. We stayed at a great B&B called The Eagles Mere Inn, and really enjoyed it. We walked around town (see the photo album below), drove around a bit, and even went to the movies (we saw avatar – in 3D – and it was better than either of us thought it would be!)
Our meals were incredible – the inn includes both breakfast and a five-course dinner – and everything was amazing – some of the best food that either of us have had.

Check out the rest of the Eagles Mere photos by clicking on the one below!

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This border crossing wasn’t filled with nearly as much pretense as our crossing into Chile (everyone said it would be super-easy), but it wasn’t all smooth sailing:

• We spent three hours of the eight-hour bus ride waiting at the border (where it was cold, a pretty high altitude (so I got a bit of a headache), and there was NOTHING to do but wait.
• One of the women on our bus had about 46 pairs of shoes and 12 sweaters with her, and we waited an hour for her to get finished with customs. Eventually, our bus just left without her – we heard through the grapevine that she had to pay taxes and some fines for all of the import duties she had tried to evade.

So that was our border crossing. Everyone said it would be easy, but it turned out a little more painful than we expected. After we got to Mendoza, we hopped on our 18-hour bus bound for Buenos Aires….

Click on the below photo to see the rest of them from around Los Horcones:

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Stef and I just wanted to let you know that we left for our Antarctica cruise yesterday, so we’re not going to have email or web access for a couple of weeks. There are still a few blog posts that will be going up, but we won’t be able to see, read, or respond to comments or email until the week of March 15th at the earliest. Enjoy what we’ve got coming in the meantime!

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• Doxycycline – best long-term malaria prophylaxis (we brought enough for a year)
• Dex – altitude sickness prevention medicine (prescription)
• First-aid kit:
  • Bandaids (multiple sizes)
  • Neosporin
  • Rubber gloves
  • Tweezers
  • Ace Bandage
  • Second Skin (burn/sunburn healing)
  • Moleskin
  • Medical tape
• Standard toiletries (most travel size as we buy full-size ones after we leave the US):
  • Shampoo
  • Toothpaste
  • Razor and razor blades
  • Skin cream
  • Suntan lotion
  • Aloe
  • Insect repellent
  • Deodorant
• Ibuprofen
• Migraine medicine
• Water purification tablets
• Immodium AD
• Benadryl
• Icy hot cream
• Muscle relaxants (actually, we picked these up in Ecuador and Peru – much cheaper, and you don’t need a prescription!)
• Sanitizer sprays

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Here is how our plan is shaping up for the next couple of months:

• Monday, March 1st – Sunday, March 7th: Britain: South Georgia and Antarctica: South Shetland Islands
• Monday, March 8th – Sunday, March 14th: Antarctica: South Shetland Islands and Antarctic Peninsula, Argentina: Ushuaia and El Calafate
• Monday, March 15th – Sunday, March 21st: Argentina: El Calafate, Parque Nacional Los Glaciares, and El Chalten; Chile: Puerto Natales and Parque Nacional Torres del Paine
• Monday, March 22nd – Sunday, March 28th: Argentina: El Calafate and Bariloche
• April: Argentina: Mendoza, Cordoba Iguazu, Salta, Jujuy Bolivia: La Paz, and Peru: Cuzco, Puno, and Lima
• May: Peru: Lima, Colombia: Bogota, Cartagena, United States: Boston

This week, you’ll read about our first Argentinian border crossing and our anniversary trip to the Poconos.

Hope you enjoy!

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Once we arrived home, and made it through the surgery and the two weeks in the ICU, we found out that my family was going to Vail, Colorado for Christmas.

Keep in mind that the only skiers in my family are my two brothers and me.

The family wasn’t going to ski, they were going because my sister was having hip surgery there in mid-December. Everyone would be there, so stef and I decided to surprise them with a visit. We had a good time, and I caught up with seasons of Bones and Castle.

I shot a few pics of the city around vail; check them out by clicking on the one below!

Nick, Dan, and I also spent an afternoon on the mountain – Nick took some of his first tele runs ever – and we had a great time. Here’s what the skiing looked like (there are more behind this one, just click on it!):

Enjoy!

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• The Atacama desert (in San Pedro de Atacama)
• Santiago (the capital city)
• Easter island

We may end up spending a few more days in Chilean Patagonia later on, but for now, here’s what helped us most:

• Rain shells. It rained while we were on Easter island, a lot, every day (there was a tropical depression that settled on the island for exactly the days we were there). Our shells (mine is a marmut and stef’s is from the north face, in case you’re curious) really pulled their weight to keep us dry. In fact, I had been planning to dump my shell when we came back to the states, but my Easter island experience convinced me otherwise.
• Unlocked cell phone. This was a huge time-saver in Santiago, because we made a few day trips outside of the city, and the cellphone let us coordinate travel and sights without a guidebook or problems.
• Travel towels. Yes! Easter island was so wet and rainy that we had to trade off between our quick-dry towels and the towels in our hostel.
• Travel Clothesline. I don’t normally pick four things, but the clothesline really came in handy when drying out our wet gear on Easter island. Props to it!

It’s unusual to post about four things, but these really worked out for us, even in the short period of time we were in Chile…

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• Days spent in-country: 15
• Number of 20+ hour bus rides: 2
• Number of flights: 2
• Total distance traveled in-country: ~6000 miles
• Total number of bus rides: 6
• Hours lost waiting on broken-down buses: 1
• Days in the desert: 3
• Days in the city: 5
• Days in the middle of the Pacific Ocean: 4
• Number of check-ins at hostels: 9
• Number of hostels stayed at: 4
• Most expensive meal: fish and chicken on Easter Island…
• Hours spent driving: 5
• Hours spent driving off-road: 4
• Number of ahu seen: 17
• Number of moai seen: 186
• Number of moai photographs: 56

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What specifically did we bring?

• Digital Camera. Panasonic GF1 pocket camera, with a 20mm lens.
  • Included battery and charger with International plug
  • Telephoto lens: 45-200mm Panasonic zoom lens
  • 2 extra batteries (for Antarctica)
  • 28 (yes, twenty-eight) SD memory cards to capture photos and movies, and as backup
  • Waterproof case to carry the memory cards in
  • SD memory card reader in case the netbook has a problem
  • Joby Gorillapod tripod with level
  • Additional lens cleaners and cases to protect everything
• Netbook: Lenovo s10-2 running MacOS X 10.6.2.
  • Included 6-cell, 5-hour battery and AC Adapter with US plug
  • Logitech trackball for photo edits
  • Neoprene traveling case
  • 2 SDHC memory cards with backups of the Windows and MacOS installs – not perfect, but a way to get it running again if something fails…
• 2 iPhones as backup web and email (and financial services) access
  • 2 iPod charging cables
  • 1 iPod AC adapter
• 1 Casio digital camera (backup and for underwater)
  • Included battery and charger
  • Dicapac waterproof submersible case

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Here is how our plan is shaping up for the next couple of months:

• Monday, February 22nd – Sunday, February 28th: Argentina: Ushuaia, Britain: Falkland Islands and South Georgia
• Monday, March 1st – Sunday, March 7th: Britain: South Georgia and Antarctica: South Shetland Islands
• Monday, March 8th – Sunday, March 14th: Antarctica: South Shetland Islands and Antarctic Peninsula, Argentina: Ushuaia
• Second half of March: Argentina: El Calafate, El Chalten, Parque Nacional Los Glaciares, and Chile: Punta Arenas, Puerto Natales, and Parque Nacional Torres del Paine
• April: Argentina: Esquel, Bariloche, Mendoza, Iguazu, Salta, Bolivia: La Paz, and Peru: Cuzco, Puno, and Lima
• May: Peru: Lima, Colombia: Bogota, Cartagena, United States: Boston

This week, you’ll read a couple of summaries of our Chilean travels, and about our trip to Vail!

Hope you enjoy!

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The place with the huge stone statues!

We were really excited when we bought our tickets to go to the “most remote location on earth“, and even more excited when we boarded the plane early one Sunday morning in Santiago. (Of course, flying first class was really nice, too We spent Sunday afternoon through Thursday morning there, and were really surprised by some of the things we learned about the island, like:

• The island itself is very green, with lots of grass and a few forests – there’s very little volcanic surface
• The landing strip is huge – our 767 had twice as much room as it needed to land – because the US Government helped upgrade it so it could be an alternate landing strip for the Space Shuttle
• The moai (statues) were created to honor great leaders of the island’s different clans, not gods of some pagan religion



• After the civilization suffered a tremendous population loss, a new religion (based on sea-birds, fertility, and the “bird-men”) grew powerful in the south-western corner of the island (Orongo)
• The island suffered from strong depopulation from the 1700′s to the mid-1900′s due to several factors (for more on this, read Jared Diamond’s book Collapse):
  • Inter-tribal conflict
  • European visits introducing previously-unknown illnesses to the islanders
  • European pilfering of islanders for slavery (Peru), and other purposes (Chile)
  • Chilean use of the island as a sheep-farming colony in the early 1900′s (Reminiscent of Galapageran history during the 1800′s)
• Kevin Costner made a movie called Rapa Nui that purports to document  the lives of native Easter Islanders
  • It failed in the box office
  • They managed to damage one of the infamous stone statues during filming
  • A bar in the town shows the film three nights a week (it costs US$6 per person to watch), but we showed up twice, each time about 10 minutes late, and they refused to play it for us. Kind of funny, since we were the only people in town remotely interested in seeing it!

We spent most of our time on the island doing our own thing:

• Walking around the village Sunday afternoon
• Hiking the island’s northern coast on Monday (during a torrential rainstorm that soaked us clear through in the first hour, andlasted for 5 hours)
• Rented a Suzuki jeep on Tuesday and drove all over the island, seeing Orongo, several of the Ahus, and two of the three volcanoes that make up the island
• Checking out different restaurants for dinner
• Two guided tours on Wednesday, which were alright, but nothing special

While we were on Easter Island, so was a tropical depression. It met us twice more during our travels (yes, the same tropical storm):

1. In Miami during our layover
2. In Philadelphia while we were at the hospital with Joe

Check out the rest of our photos – click each one below to see more!

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So we were really surprised when everything came together for 24 hours straight when we were in Santiago. Here’s what happened:

1. On our last full day in Santiago, we decided to try to visit Pablo Neruda’s house (now a museum).
   • A. You should know that all the guidebook says is to go to Isla Negra by bus, so we figured it wasn’t too hard.)
   • B. We had to wait in line to buy our tickets – it was a really busy Saturday at the bus station.
2. When we called them (on the cellphone) to make sure we were taking the correct bus, we found out you needed a reservation to visit, and made the last available English-language reservation (our Spanish is ok, but sometimes we opt for English tours, especially when we don’t know much about a place).
3. When we got to Isla Negra, we found out that return buses (to Santiago) came every hour. We finished our tour and walked back to the bus station just as a Santiago-bound bus was arriving.
4. The ticket assistant even got the ticket for us – we had to pay, but we didn’t need to go into the office at all!
5. The next morning, when we checked into the airport, we were issued exit-row seats for our 5-hour flight to Easter Island!
6. When we boarded the plane, there was another couple who had the same seat assignments as we did. Convinced we were going to be bumped (standard practice in the US), I went to the front as recommended, ready to fight to stay on the plane. Instead, I was told “You have an upgrade”, and Stef and I flew first-class to Easter Island!

What a great 24-hours – they were really enjoyable. We took a couple of photos of first-class – you can get to them by clicking on the above pic.

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1. Wake up in the morning
2. Shower, Get dressed
3. Order breakfast, Wait for breakfast, Eat breakfast
4. Pack our bags
5. Check out of the hostel
6. Leave our bags in the luggage storage room
7. Walk around Santiago, check out sites, do a short day trip
8. Return to the hostel
9. Check in to our new room, pay, and pick up the room key
   • we stayed in 5 different rooms in the 5 consecutive nights we were there!
10. Collect our bags from the luggage storage room
11. Go to our new room and drop off our bags
12. Go to dinner
13. Return to sleep

During that period of time, we became very good friends with the reception staff, as we spent an hour or more every day at the front desk, checking in, checking out, and chatting. Keep in mind, when you’re traveling, you want to minimize steps 4,5,6,8,9,10, and 11. We got to do them every day, so we were a little more limited in what we saw in Santiago. We did, however:

• Eat at the BEST steakhouse we’ve ever been to, Las Vacas Gordas
• See the public library
• Climb the Monastery and Military hill



• Shop at a few interesting stores (and I got a plug converter! Ours was lost 4 months before, in Costa Rica)



• Go into the bus stations – all three of them (Local, Inter-provincial, and International – Argentina and Bolivia)
• Visit Vina del Mar – a little ocean/beach vacation town where we:
  • Had our first completo – a hot dog with ketchup, mayonnaise, and guacamole (BTW – you can skip it, not really worth it other than for the novelty factor)
  • Visited the Easter Island Museum – saw a great explanation of some of the archaeological sites



• See Valpairiso, about an hour outside of Santiago, where we:
  • Walked around the town
  • Checked out the port, with all of its crazy taxi-boats



• Toured one of Pablo Neruda’s houses (the one in Isla Negra), with:
  • All of the ship’s mastheads
  • The cigar collection
  • Other collections
  • The beautiful view of the sea

I’ve given you a preview of some of the photos here; below are links to a few of the photo sets that didn’t get full coverage. Check them out!

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• Enough underwear and socks to last at least a week
• 3 layers when outdoors:
  • Wicking – closest to the body (keeps the sweat out)
  • Warming – insulation layer (keeps the cold out)
  • Weather – outside layer of weatherproof gear (keeps the rain and snow out)
• All clothing should match everything else for ease of use
• Button-downs for travel (look presentable!)
• Might need to borrow or buy in certain extremes

Here’s what we packed:
Matt:

• Pants:
  • 1 pair travel pants (quick-dry, synthetic)
  • 1 pair blue jeans
  • 1 pair travel shorts (quick-dry, synthetic, double as a bathing suit)
• Shirts:
  • 2 long-sleeve button-down travel shirts (different colors)
  • 1 short-sleeve button-down travel shirt
  • 1 long-sleeve synthetic t-shirt
  • 1 short-sleeve synthetic t-shirt
• Outerwear:
  • 1 rain shell (3-ply goretex if you’re wondering)
  • 1 pair rain pants (3-ply goretex)
  • 1 poly-fill warming jacket
• Winter Clothing:
  • 2 pairs long thermal pants
  • 2 thick turtlenecks
  • 2 pairs wool socks
  • 3 pairs gloves
  • 2 winter hats
  • 1 balaclava
  • 1 neck-warmer/insulated headband
• Footwear:
  • 1 pair GoreTex running shoes
  • 1 pair hiking sandals
• Other:
  • 7 pairs underwear
  • 5 pairs synthetic socks
  • 1 travel hat

Stef:

• Pants:
  • 2 pairs shorts
  • 1 pair capris
  • 1 pair travel pants
  • 1 pair jeans
• Shirts:
  • 2 long-sleeve t-shirts
  • 2 short sleeve
  • 1 long sleeve blouse
  • 1 3/4 sleeve blouse
• Outerwear:
  • 1 rain jacket
  • 1 pair rain pants
  • 1 fleece jacket
• Winter Clothing:
  • 1 ski hat
  • 1 balaclava
  • 1 pair light gloves
  • 1 pair heavy mittens
  • 1 thermal turtleneck
  • 1 pair thermal tights
  • 1 pair silk long underwear bottoms
  • 1 down jacket
• Footwear:
  • 1 pair flip-flops
  • 1 pair water sandals
  • 1 pair hiking shoes
• Other:
  • 1 dress
  • 2 bras
  • 2 tank tops
  • 7 pairs underwear
  • 1 bathing suit
  • 3 pairs light/summer socks
  • 6 pairs wool socks
  • 1 pair sock liners
  • 1 baseball cap
  • 1 bandana
  • 1 travel cap

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