Backpacking South America

Happy New Year! This post arrives a few days late, but hopefully you’ve all had wonderful celebrations and have a clean slate for the upcoming year.

We started our journey August 19, 2009. We’re now more than 4 months in and I think the greatest adventures still lie ahead of us. Our plan has changed slightly, but not significantly. The biggest change to our original plan is that we will make it to Ushuaia via Argentina and Chile and fly back north, instead of retracing our steps or taking a combination of a boat ride and bus trip spanning several days.

Anyway, here is the rough outline of our travels in 2010 that will take us through Argentina, Chile, Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador and Colombia.

Central Chile – Santiago to Chiloe

From Buenos Aires we’ll make our way to Santiago, Chile and spend a few days exploring the city and nearby wine regions. We then begin making our way south through the Central Valley (more wine…), volcanoes, and lakes of Chile. When we reach Puerto Montt, we’ll take a ferry and a few days to explore Chiloe, an island with wooden churches and mysterious other-world feel.

Southern Argentina – Bariloche, Lakes District and the Glaciers

We’ll cross into Argentina from Puerto Montt, Chile and stop in Bariloche.

One backpack each – that is all we have for the next 6-12 months.  So what to do with everything else?

Packing our apartment proved to be a much more time-consuming task than we expected.   After spending nearly a week visiting West Coast friends and family, we returned home to the dreaded task of boxing our lives into a 7’ x 10’ storage unit.  

In all, we used 36 boxes, 5 rolls of packing tape, and 375 feet of bubble wrap.  It was quite the process.  On move day, we grabbed the 24 foot truck from the storage facility, parallel parked it directly in front of our apartment (that took a little work) and were able to load the apartment into the truck in about 3 hours.  Not bad for it being just the two of us hauling the boxes down the stairs, out the door and down the stoop and around the truck.  Unloading it was slightly easier.  We had an elevator up to our unit and with a bit of clever maneuvering, we were able to fit it all in the space in less than 3 hours.  Definitely a full day. 

All clear, it's time to get moving

Lately, we’ve been asked about where we are going and what we will be doing. So I decided to document our travel plans as they stand prior to our departure. For some portions, we have a pretty clear and defined plan. For the rest, we hope to follow a general path – always leaving the possibility to change our plan and route at any moment. It should be interesting to track our route and see how much it deviates from this plan.

Boston-Argentina

Our trip from Boston to Buenos Aires will be detoured through NYC and Mexico City. We will be leaving Boston on 8/17 and plan to spend a couple days in NYC with brother, sister-in-law and nephew. Our flight leaves 8/19 from JFK, with a 12 hour layover in Mexico City. From the Juarez International Airport, we’ll catch a cab, head to the Zocalo and spend an afternoon in and around the plaza before heading back to the airport for the final leg of our flight. From there, it’s on to Buenos aires for an 11am arrival on August 20th. We will be spending the first few days familiarizing and acclimating to the city.

This post has been updated as of January 2009

The New Year is a long way off, so a lot can and likely will change.  Our trip plan becomes a bit less defined at this point.  We hope that encounters with fellow travelers will help shape our exact itinerary, but we have a general plan of heading south along route 40, which lies in the shadows of the Andes.

Lakes District and Patagonia

We will be making frequent stops in mountain towns like Bariloche and El Bolson, the Welsh villages of Esquel and Trevelin, and a visit Parque Nacional Los Glaciares – home to the world’s third largest ice cap.  All this as we make our way to the southern most city in the world – Ushuaia.  We intend to take our time, enjoy the scenery, and likely fight the summer vacation crowds along the way.

Chile

Once we reach the bottom of the continent, it will be time to make our way back north.  At this point, our trip will decidely shift to a focus on Chile. Our first destination with be Parque Nacional Torres del Paine, where We’ll head out on a 5-7 day hike through the park.  After exhausting ourselves with the hike, we will take a few shorter hikes and hopefully spend a couple days kayaking in fjords of Chilean Patagonia.

August 19.  The date had always seemed so far away.  For a long time, it existed merely as an idea or concept.  It wasn’t set in stone.  We weren’t committed to leaving, we still had an escape route.

Now its concrete.  We have a one way tickets to Buenos Aires, we’ve notified our landlords, we gave our notice at work.  August 19 is a concrete, immovable date that signifies the next chapter in our lives.

Stay tuned as we develop this site and embark on our 6-12 month journey to South America.