Isla Del Sol was certainly one of my highlights of our trip through Bolivia.
6 reasons to love La Paz
After a month, we left Samaipata bound for La Paz, a city we had heard very mixed reviews about.
After 24 hours travelling, we arrived in bustling, busy, polluted but very cool La Paz. We found a ridiculously good value double room (70 Bs night) in Hostel Austria and set out to explore the city and its surrounding area.
La Paz is the highest capital city in the world. At 3600m to 4000m above sea level, the city sprawls across spectacular cliff faces and mountain ranges. It’s steeped in history, political chaos, has a colourful culture and a wide gap between the rich and poor; this city is a real marmite place, you either love it or hate it. We think you should love it for all it offers both in the city, and the surrounding area!
The Benefits of Volunteering whilst Travelling
After many weeks of being on the road and just after completing our Salt Flats experience, it was time to find a place where we would be happy to spend a prolonged period of time and volunteering is an excellent way to stop for while and recharge your batteries.
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Salt Flats Tour
We left Santa Cruz for Sucre, a pretty Spanish colonial town at an altitude of 2800 metres. We had been warned off taking the long bus ride and booked ourselves a flight which was only 25 minutes and £20!
A little bit of Sucre in pictures…
Jaguar Tour
I had been chatting with Nick from Nicks Adventures Bolivia for a few weeks by the time we arrived in Santa Cruz, where his office is based. Nick offers lots of different tours in Bolivia, including a number of different wildlife tours. Although originally from Australia, Nick has been living in Bolivia for 4 years and is incredibly knowledgeable about what Bolivia offers, which is a lot more than you think, and more than most people see.
When I saw he offered a Jaguar Tour in the depths of the Chaco, a dry, thorny, arid and very dense forest, I immediately wanted to do it.
Travelling through Paraguay
Our Paraguayan adventure continued from the beautiful ruins in Trinidad to the city!
We caught a bus to Asunción, the capital city of Paraguay and were pleasantly surprised by this charming place with its cobbled streets lined with orange trees, old colonial crumbling buildings, coloured doorways and flags draped all over the place.
Iguazu Falls & Jesuit Ruins
Unforeseen circumstances meant that a 5 day stay in Buenos Aires actually turned into a three weeks one! I shall not bore you with the details, but in a nut shell, I picked a fight with a world renowned German courier company, whose logo is three letters in red and yellow. Should be fairly easy to work out.
Estancia Rio Mitre – Patagonian Life
Our experience at the Estancia had been loosely arranged through a friend of a friend met whilst staying in BA. We didn’t really know what to expect, so we had in our minds that we would stay a few weeks and see how we liked it. We were volunteering in exchange for ‘a room and food’, sort of like ‘woofing’.
Turns out it was one of the best things we have ever experienced. It’s hard to sum up this 7 week experience in a blog post but I will try my best to make it as interesting and captivating as possible. Despite falling in love with the place, it had its tough days! I will try and tell the story mostly through the pictures we took.
Torres Del Paine National Park, Chile
It was decision time. Were we going to do the notorious 9 day trek in Torres Del Paine (TDP) National Park; or not? This had always been on our ‘to-do’ list and I would go as far as saying that it sat comfortably on Max’s bucket list of things to do before he died! However, we had spoken to a lot of travellers on this trip and although no one had regrets about doing TDP, they warned us that it had become overcrowded to the point where you had to queue to ascend the remaining steps that enable you to get up close with the notorious spiky peaks that make up Torres Del Paine. Did we really want to travel 5 hours back into Chile? To add to this, my knee was still giving me a lot of grief, Maxs walking boots had given in and the buses were full for 3 days. Unbelievable really considering this was the beginning of March, which is very much the shoulder season. Patagonia was well and truly testing us. Not to mention the cost of everything. Patagonia is one of the most expensive places to travel in South America, El Calafate particularly . I think we just wanted to ‘sit still’ for a moment, to stop hemoraging money and live the Patagonian dream whilst not racing through our savings; this is exactly what we would do at the Estancia and we could have been picked up on that day and started work at the farm.
However, fate came into play. The next day whilst still debating what we should do, we bumped into some french cyclists who we had met on the Carretera Austral. They had just booked their bus tickets for TDP and told us that one company had added a bus for that day at 4pm. So that was it, a sign.
The Villa O’Higgins – El Chalten Crossing
It was again with heavy hearts that we waved ‘cheerio’ to Pepino, our local host for our unique night in the sleepy village of Villa O’Higgins. Being with him, his animals and our fellow Carretera Austral wanderers, was refreshingly humbling, as I witnessed a way of life that had long disappeared in our modern and aseptic Western societies.
Pepino was an incredibly generous human being with a heart of gold. Not only did he offer us a place in his garden for our tent, the use of his stove, but he fed us home made empanadas and assisted Lottie in making “the best hot chocolate” she has ever had. EVER. Indeed the milk used in the process was milked that morning and heated on the wood fire oven. Proper rustic, and we love rustic!
Continue reading “The Villa O’Higgins – El Chalten Crossing”
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