Comparing some Torrontes
A wonderful thing about spending much of 2015 travelling around both Argentina and Chile was that we had an opportunity to do quite a lot of wine tasting in two of the world’s great wine regions. This was a task we took seriously to heart and luckily there was some trekking in Patagonia to try and offset the expanding waistlines…
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Hycinth Macaws asking us to turn the heat down
September & October 2015: They say, if you want to see jungle, go to the jungle, but if you want to see animals in South America, go to the Pantanal. Although South America doesn’t have the chart topping diversity of big animals that some other continents have, the Pantanal displays what it does have in glorious quantity and boy does it make up for it in diversity of bird and insect life.
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Flying out over Sugarloaf, Rio
September & October 2015: Whilst Brasilia has been Brazil’s official capital city since the 1960s, Rio de Janeiro is still the country’s heart, beating to a uniquely Brazilian rhythm. We flew into Rio in mid-September, using it as a hopping off point for a return trip to the UK. We stayed for 2 wet days on the way out, then enjoyed 10 glorious days on our return from the UK in October, before flying into Brasilia for a one night stopover on route back to the van in Campo Grande to continue our exploration of the Pantanal.
A year ago today, the van was pushed out of it’s shipping container, given a push start by a fork-lift truck and then made it’s first journey on South American soil straight to the nearest VW garage! A year later, these 12 pictures are our highlights of our first year on the road in Latin America, along with some reflections…. Continue reading
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From Uyuni, our journey across Bolivia took us north and east, first, to the historic mining city of Potosi, then onwards through the lovely city of Sucre and slowly (via very bad roads), down from the Andes and onto the plains below, near Santa Cruz, from where we headed East towards the wetlands in Brazil. Continue reading
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This amazing drive, the first half of our first crossing of Bolivia, started with the “Lagunas Ruta”, in the remote southwest corner of the country, and took us across one of the wonders of the world, the Salar de Uyuni – and not without incident! As we left Chile, we were braced for one of the most remote and challenging drives of the trip…
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As we descended into the Atacama Desert, the driest place on earth outside of the polar regions, on Sunday 12 July, we were expecting to spend around a week exploring the area around San Pedro de Atacama, but that wasn’t quite how things turned out…
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We continued our journey north through the dramatic wildernesses of Argentina’s northwest. The journey to the this corner of Argentina turned out to be an amazing road trip, with each day revealing new landscapes, sometimes several a day. This blog is presented as a photo story, to try to relay some of the drama of what we saw. Continue reading
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Central Chile and mid-Andean Argentina is where most of the vineyards of these two great wine producing countries are. The region also includes some great cities (Santiago, Valparaiso and Mendoza) that have the added charm of decent climbing nearby… Continue reading
With Santiago as our base, we were fortunate enough to have the opportunity to travel to both the seldom visited Robinson Crusoe Island, to do some research fieldwork, and the more famous Easter Island (Rapa Nui), as tourists….
Yellow Van Days 