Compared with the countries we visited earlier, there is relatively little to see and do in the northern half of Chile. There are few really spectacular locations or places with grand history, and the beaches are not the greatest in the world (not to mention the cold water…). But it was actually quite nice to have a bit of down-time at the end of the trip and we have been enjoying the local food and wine (both of which are good) or simply chilling out in city squares, in ports, or on the beaches.

Still, we visited some quite interesting places, which included the ghost town of Humberstone which used to be a prosperous nitrate production centre, a colony of sea lions in Iquique, a nice white beach at Bahia Inglesa and the historic town of Valparaiso with its cobbled streets and buildings covered in colourful graffiti.

We spent the last three days of our trip in the capital, Santiago the Chile, which although it lacks major tourist attractions, is a pleasant place to spend a few days. Here, you can go to the theatre, go shopping, visit museums or the zoo… so, we did all those things.

Sadly, today is the last day of our trip… It feels quite strange to be thinking that we’re going to be back in Australia in a few days time – we’ve kind of gotten used to being on the road It’s hard to believe that the 11 weeks have passed so quickly – probably because they were so packed with amazing places and activities.

It’s the end of our trip but by no means the end of our updates – in the coming weeks we’ll be posting a much more detailed reports from all the places we have visited in South America, as well as reports from our previous travels to various corners of the world. We will be also migrating our Australian blog to this website, and posting regular updates from our trips around Australia, so please keep coming back!

Thanks a lot for following our trip, for commenting on our posts, for ‘liking’ our website on Facebook, and for sharing it with your friends. We have enjoyed sharing our stories almost as much as we enjoyed the trip itself

If you have any questions or suggestions for future content, please send us an email or write a comment on the website. New posts will follow soon…

J&W

In Arequipa, we also visited the convent of Santa Catalina, which looks like a city within a city, with its cobbled streets and colorful buildings. Here we found out a lot about the history of the convent and how the nuns´ lives looked like.

We also spent three days in the Colca canyon, supposedly the second-deepest canyon in the world (second only to another canyon in the same area), where we saw three condors, one for each day The trip involves a descend of over 1000m into the canyon and, of course, you have to climb it back all the way up after a day or two… Fortunately, we could recover in a swimming pool located in a place called Oasis at the bottom of the canyon, where we spent one of the nights. We have to tell you, nothing tastes better than a cold beer or rum & coke by a poolside bar after a long trek on a sunny day.

Meanwhile, we´re already in Chile where we´re spending last week of our trip, so look out for the last update!

Last week we spent in and around Cusco, the former capital of the Inca Empire. The city is very nice and full of remains of Incas history, art and architecture, sadly many of which have been converted into colonial churches or other buildings or simply decomposed piece by piece by locals.

The area around Cusco, called the Sacred Valley contains many well-preserved Inca towns and temples, including historic sites such as Saqsaywaman, Pisac and Ollantaytambo.

The jewel in the crown is however the famous site of Machu Picchu, which is simply breathtaking, hidden in beautiful rainforest among steep mountains. The pictures can´t show the beauty of the place, it has to be visited to appreciate it properly and we are so happy we could spend a whole day there.

That´s it for today as we´re short on time – the next post will come soon…

On the Peruvian side, we first visited an archeological site of Sillustani, located near the lake, famous for its burial towers (both from the Inca and pre-Inca times).

Finally, we visited floating islands of Uros. These seventy artificial islands, made of reed, are home to about 2000 people who speak the Quechua language. The population mainly lives off fishing and tourism, with women making and selling handicraft. Even though the islands are heavily commercialized and very touristy, they are still worth a visit for the beautiful views and to get a feeling how the Uros people used to live in the past. And its worth remembering that despite the reliance on tourism, they still really live there: there are two elementary schools and a church on some of the bigger islands (which are still floating and made of reed).

As we´re already in Cusco, our next post is going to be about the Incas, the Sacred Valley and, of course, Machu Picchu so be sure to check the blog regularly!

Thanks to Mika and Antoine for making the trip even better and teaching us how to play backgammon

We’re now at Lake Titicaca, from where we’re going to cross onto Peru tomorrow and see it from the other side. We’ll post an update in a few days’ time…

J&W

The main reason many people come to Potosi though is to visit one of the mines in Cerro Rico, which are still working as cooperatives despite the fact that the silver deposits have been severely depleted. About 12,000 miners who work there are now looking for other minerals, mainly copper and tin and in reality they are happy with whatever they can get. The mines are very deep, with many levels down and can get extremely hot, with temperatures reaching 45C in some places, all of this at over 4000m above the sea level. It’s a very tough job and some miners start working as early as 15 or 16 which is illegal.

Potosi turned out to be quite unlucky for us. Firstly, one of our cameras got stolen at the bus station and we lost some of the best pictures from the first half of the trip It must have been just seconds and we never left our bags, still we didn’t see how it happened – these guys must be true pros… Second, we both caught some kind of annoying cold virus that we’ve been fighting with for the last few days. Third, there was some kind of political protest and they were blocking the roads around Potosi on the day we wanted to leave so that we got stuck for another 12 hours in the city. But that’s all a part of the adventure isn’t it ?

From Potosi we moved further south to Tupiza, a lovely town surrounded by spectacular, colourful rock formations. Here we spent two lovely days recovering and just chilling out. The only activity we did was a half day od horse riding, which was truly fantastic and the scenery was spectacular.

Now, we’re getting ready for a four-day trip to the salar of Uyuni, and really looking forward to it as this should be one of the highlights of the whole trip – an update will follow shortly.

Yesterday, we spent the first half of the day shopping, first visiting the largest market in South America in El Alto, where you can buy everything: clothes, car parts, electronics or live animals. Then we did some more shopping in the markets in central La Paz. The result: a huge bag full of goodies, which we´ll probably have to carry for the rest of our trip…

The evening was something different altogether – we went to see a lucha libre show, which is a South American variety of wrestling. Similar to (North) American Wrestling it´s all staged but still a lot of fun. The best part was that the La Paz show also includes fighting Cholitas, that is Bolivian ladies in traditional hats and dresses! We can tell you, it´s quite something to see one lady smash an aluminium tray against another lady´s head…

Today was different still. First, we went high up to conquer the peak of Mt Chacaltaya at 5421m! The mountain used to be a home to the highest ski resort in the world, now shot down because tha glacier melted a few years ago – that´s a real effect of the global warming for you… Since you can drive almost to the top, it wasn´t a long climb – only about an hour – still, you can really feel the altitude and Julita had to stop just before reaching the top and go down due to headache and dizziness…

After Mt Chacaltaya, we visited the beautiful Valley of the Moon, notable for its limestone formations set spectacularly against the backdrop of red-coloured mountains. It was a truly fantastic day, if a bit tiring (only due to the altitude).

Tonight, we´re catching a bus out of La Paz and moving to the southern parts of Bolivia, first to Potosi and then to Tupiza, from where we´ll report back in a few days´ time.

This post will always bring memories of great time spent in La Paz with other backpackers Lucy, Josh and Donagh: drinks in sky bar, crazy search for a jazz club one night, madness of shopping in El Alto and a night out at the wrestling.

La Paz itself is located slightly lower, at around 3650 meters above the sea level, occupying a canyon below El Alto. We didn’t know too much about the city before we came here so we were quite surprised by its size and thousands of red brick houses spilling along the slopes of the canyon (La Paz itself has close to 1 million inhabitants and over 2 million together with El Alto).

The city is very vibrant and colorful, with many street markets selling everything from food, to cosmetics, to clothes and souvenirs, to magic talismans and charms, including such gruesome items as dried llama foetuses…What definitely adds to its character is hundreds of women dressed in traditional dresses and hats, often carrying something on their back in a colorful bag, be it a baby or some items for sell.

Because of the rapid ascent to almost 4000m, we had some mild symptoms of altitude sickness for the first day or so but are on the mend now and are acclimatizing well. What has been helping us greatly in the process is the local delicacy – the coca leaves, which we have been chewing and drinking in the form of mate (a herbal tea) since we arrived. It doesn´t get you any higher than you already are but it has some relaxing qualities and definitely helps dealing with the altitude.

We like La Paz so much that we decided to stay here longer than originally though (six instead of three days), especially that we found out about some really cool things to do and places to visit around here. But we will tell you all about this in our next update, that should be posted in about three days or so, meanwhile, do enjoy a selection of pictures from our first three days in La Paz.

We’re now back from our 3-day trip to the jungle, or more specifically to parts of the Andean rainforest in the Bolivian section of the Amazon basin. We stayed inside the Madidi Nationak Park, which is supposedly one the most biodiverse protected areas in the world. We were exceptionally lucky too – nobody else signed up for the trip with the company we went with, so we ended up having a private tour! The trip involved a three-hour boat ride to our camp inside the national park, and staying in the middle of the forest without electricity or phone coverage. When the boat dropped us off in the jungle and left, we were left with just our guide Juan, our cook Amalia and the custodian of the place, whom they respectfully called Don Primo No communication with the outside world and no way out

We slept in leaf-thatched huts with mosquito nets and spent our days doing walks in the jungle, fishing or learning how to make jewellery from seeds and nuts. Juan was a great guide, very knowledgeable about jungle trees and plants, which can be used to produce all sorts of medicines, poisons or colouring substances. Amalia was a fantastic cook who was able to come up with amazing dishes prepared in very basic conditions, e.g. fish cooked in three different ways (which included steaming it wrapped in some natives leaves) for one of the lunches!

The Amazonian jungle is fascinating – partly similar to rainforests in other parts of the world but it also feels more primal and more dangerous. Seems like all animals and plants have developed some protective systems aimed at keeping potential attackers at bay – either spikes or poisons, or at the very least good camouflage. It’s extremely hot and humid during the day (even now, i.e. in the dryer season) and can be a bit spooky at night with all the insects (including fluorescent ones!) crawling or flying or around and wild animals hunting. We saw a few species of monkeys, a deer, and many parrots, as well as fluorescent bugs, huge cicadas and several tarantulas right next to our cottage!

Tomorrow we leave for La Paz and the altiplano, which should be a totally different experience altogether, so check our blog in a few days time!

The weather was quite poor during our first couple of days here (unusually cold) and we didn’t come across anything extremely interesting so we blitzed quickly from the border through the biggest city in Bolivia, Santa Cruz and got to the tropical north in the Amazon Basin where we spent two nights in a town called Trinidad. There, we had quite a nice time simply relaxing as there was not much to do, so we ended up watching the Champions League matches live (Wojtek), as well as catching up with news from around the world and the CSI series (Julita). We tried some local specialties, such as saltenas (a kind of pastries similar to what they call empanadas in other countries), and a corn brew called chicha (which used to be traditionally produced by old women chewing the corn – hopefully not any longer…). We also spent a couple of hours watching two sloths right in the middle of a city square, even though they supposed to be rare sightings even in the jungle

And after too many hours on a bus, driving through an extremely dusty dirt road, crossing a river on an improvised barge and spending the last several hours in an overcrowded car with eight people, including one guy carrying a TV set, we reached a town of an unpronounceable name Rurrenabaque (mercifully shortened to Rurre). Here, we had some really great time with some nice Brits we met on the way, Lucy and Josh, as well as organized a tour to the jungle where we´re going to spend the next three days – and shall report back upon our return! Meanwhile, have a look at a selection of pictures from our first days in Bolivia.