Goodbye for now, South America!

After 10 weeks in South America, it’s time for us to head off again! 

Our time in South America has been filled right up with fun activities and exposure to new traditions, cultures, and language. 

When we started planning, we hadn’t had Colombia on our list of places to visit, but we just had to add it after meeting Hernan in Zambia. Colombia turned out to be the perfect place to start our South American travels! After a couple weeks here, we flew down to Argentina, where we spent four weeks touring the northern half of the country. We then travelled by land to Bolivia, exploring this beautiful country over the span of two weeks. We have now finished off with a couple weeks exploring the area around Cusco, Peru. After finishing our hike to Machu Picchu, we spent one last day in Cusco and then flew over to Lima in order to get a flight out of the country. 

During these 10 weeks, we spent a lot of our time out in nature. We walked through SO many beautiful parks! We visited numerous waterfalls (big and small), a mud volcano, a couple hot springs, and many red rock canyons. We travelled to lakes of all different sizes, colours, and altitudes. We ventured through valleys, amongst hoodoos, and across salt flats. We saw thousands of dinosaur footprints on a massive rock wall! We travelled to a couple islands, and even spent a night on the beautiful Isla del Sol. We took in a few more stunning sunsets. We took some time to hang out on beautiful beaches and in quiet parks. We even tucked ourselves away in a perfect cabin in the woods. We explored the Sacred Valley of the Incas, walked along the Inca Trail, and camped under the stars. Throughout this time, we experienced lots of warm weather during the day, but we spent more time bundled up in layers during the mornings and evenings than we ever thought we would. 

We kept our blood pumping by ziplining, horseback riding, running through rivers, snorkeling, swimming across rivers, and biking down STEEP gravel roads. We danced our hearts out. We hiked many mountains, and spent a considerable amount of time at high altitude. We even caught a football match at a River Plate clubhouse (in South America, this definitely counts as a ‘high adrenaline’ activity)!

We really loved the small towns we visited, but we also had fun exploring some pretty big cities too! We learned the history behind many of the cities we visited by participating in free walking tours. In these cities, we visited museums, palaces, cemeteries, and markets. Fruit markets, clothing markets, witches markets, markets on the top of mountains… SO MANY MARKETS! We visited numerous churches, including an underground salt cathedral. We loved seeing how certain communities were revitalized, complete with funky restaurants and bright colours. We visited towns filled with clay brick homes. We walked many cobblestone streets, and spotted numerous monuments. We learned about the graffiti that covered so many walls of the cities. We enjoyed finding new breweries, visiting beautiful wineries, and listening to local music. We watched multiple street celebrations, including the Semana Santa festivities that completely took over the town of Tilcara. We learned a few new games, including Tejo, Sapo and Harry Beans. And we can’t forget attending our first ever tattoo convention! 

We had received safety warnings about travelling here, but we didn’t experience any problems at all. Again, we exercised a normal degree of caution as travellers and suggest others do the same. We ended up surprised by the prices in Argentina (higher than expected, especially for transportation) and Bolivia (lower than expected). 

We saw lots of interesting creatures during the past two and a half months. We encountered llamas, pequeñas, viscachas, sloths, monkeys, iguanas, coaties, alpacas, flamingos, fox, and mosquitos. 

It is so hard to believe now that I had been convinced we would be limited to beans and rice during our travels here. We have enjoyed so many amazing foods! Right from the get go, we were treated to many local delicacies in Colombia. Our favourite South American foods include arepas, soups, tamales, empanadas, guacamole, lomo, bife, chicha (corn beer), trout, quinoa, and almost everything we ate in Bolivia (aside from that one dreadful chicken soup, of course). We enjoyed so much fresh fruit in each country as well. And we cannot forget about dolce de leche and alfajors, sweet treats we enjoyed in all four countries! We also tried mate in Argentina and Will tried guinea pig in Peru, but these items didn’tquitemake it to our ‘favourites’ list.

Guinea pig, a delicacy in Peru

We travelled by car, train, bus, plane, jeep, boat, and bike. We took one dreaded rapido. We also covered many miles on foot. We took multiple cable cars, which were also referred to as funiculars or telefericos. More importantly, we had a lot of great people to do this travelling with. We kicked things off with Hernan and a great crew from France, then later travelled for ten days with Monika. We had an awesome group for our Salar de Uyuni tour, and another amazing group for our hike along the Inca Trail. And then we also met loads of great people in between! We met many people spending between four months and a year in South America, and we now see why this is such a desired travel destination! 

We wish we could say that we are fluent in Spanish now. We really thought we would learn so much more through conversation as we travelled. However, many people chose to speak English to us when they could, and we often were with others who could translate for us. We are leaving with much more Spanish than we arrived with, but plan on taking our Spanish lessons more seriously before returning to this part of the world. 

Highlight of each country: 

Colombia: visiting Hernan (and having awesome plans each day as a result!)

Argentina: Iguazu Falls, San Carlos de Bariloche, Cafayate

Bolivia: Salar de Uyuni, biking the Death Road, Isla del Sol

Peru: hiking the Inca Trail to Machu Picchu, the Sacred Valley of the Incas

South American countries we want to visit next:

Ecuador: Galapagos islands

Chile: everywhere!

Argentina: Patagonia (with our camping gear)

Colombia: Amazonas, Triangulo del Café, Parque Nacional Tayrona, San Andres

Peru: see the Nazca lines, Amazonas

And I won’t even get started on our dream list for Central America! 

In addition to saying goodbye to the amazing people, food, and landscape, we will now be saying goodbye to our practise of collecting bracelets. Fanny, one of the French girls we hung out with in Colombia, had been traveling in South America for four months and had collected an arm full of bracelets from the various places she had stayed. We were inspired by this idea, and decided to collect a bracelet for each country we visited here. We had a lot of fun searching for bracelets that represented each country we visited! 

Since we will be stopping over in Spain for a few days, we aren’t quite ready to say goodbye to Spanish. However, we are more than ready to say goodbye to the many stray dogs roaming the streets of this continent.

The past 10 weeks have been educational, entertaining, and enlightening. We feel like we have had the perfect mix of relaxation and adventure here! We say goodbye for now, knowing that we will be back again soon! 

And now, we turn our attention to the final continent on our list this year… Europe!