Valparaiso, or Valpo as locals call it, is just 120km away from Santiago, but the atmosphere between the two cities couldn’t be much more different. While Santiago is a busy big city, Valparaiso, even though not small either with its 400.000 inhabitants and a busy port, seems more like a tranquil harbor town. Most that is interesting about Valparaiso is set on several hills around the town center: they are filled with colorful houses, cafés and artisan shops. It’s obvious that Valparaiso is quite a creative and artistic place: you just have to look at the amount of arty shops, skillful graffiti, and things like concrete stairs painted in bright colors you can find all over the place (who said stairs always have to be grey anyway…). The houses were often much like in Iceland or ... read more

We arrived quite early in the morning to Chile and San Pedro de Atacama, a quiet desert town 45 km from the border to Bolivia. Our Salar de Uyuni tour left us at the border where we also got our exit stamps from Bolivia, then we took a bus to San Pedro where we went through Chilean immigration. The border to Chile was probably the most strict we had passed this far in South America, here our luggage was x-rayed while no one seemed to care what we were carrying on the other border crossings we have passed through on this continent. As it had been a quite exhausting stay in Bolivia with lots of activities, we decided to take it easy. During the first three days in San Pedro we mostly sat in the shade ... read more

La Paz, the capital of Bolivia, is situated high up in the mountains, and at 3650 meters it easily gains the title as the world’s highest capital. On advice of our hostel in Copacabana we booked our trip there with Diana Tours who turned out to be a tour organizer, not a regular bus company. This meant we got a ride all the way to the center of the city instead of going to the bus terminal. As we didn’t know where to go from there we then had to take a cab that drove us a staggering 2 blocks to our hostel. Our first day in La Paz we decided to take a walking tour recommended to us by some fellow travelers in Copacabana. It was again a walking tour where the guide worked for ... read more

One of the places we had looked forward to seeing, and one of our main reasons to returning to Peru a second time, is Machu Picchu. Although trashed by Madventures who we like a lot, we still wanted to see the most known Inca ruins of them all. As our travels are not that planned we decided to skip the Inca Trail option which you need to book several months in advance. Instead we decided to just take the train to Aguas Calientes (the closest town to Machu Picchu), stay the night there and visit the ruins the following morning. Already when we started to look at train tickets we realized that it would be an expensive trip. The tickets were starting at 60 US$ and going all the way to 350 US$. As there are ... read more

Our first impressions of Bogota weren’t that positive. There were long queues to the taxis, the street numbering in Bogota is so confusing our taxi driver had problems finding our hostel, and it was cold and gray. Also, we weren’t that impressed by our hostel. The room was noisy with a bar right outside the window, both mattresses and pillows were protected with plastic bags so they were hard and noisy to sleep on and the room was cold. After the first night we almost changed hostel, but in the end we were too lazy to move for one and a half more nights, so we just changed into sleeping in our sleeping bags on the thick blankets we got which made the bed a lot less noisy. The first morning in Bogota it was raining, ... read more