Blogs from South America - page 5672

Rio to Buenos Aires - One Month I hired an apartment with two friends from England in Rio and after they left I spent one more night to go to a Fat Boy Slim beach party and then i traveled to Ilha grande for more beach scenery and some abuse of caipirinias Sao Paulo was next and was very pleasant, with the usual mix of cool and historic buildings and it was very much like an ant farm with its large number of tower blocks. I stayed with a friend for a week who was nice enough to welcome me and show me round ... obrigado Thatiana Victorelli. Her sister took me to one of the football stadiums and I was surprised to see two telephones next to the goals and even more fluffing surprised when ... read more

We arrived into Cuzco, which is the hub for Inca tourism. It is the oldest inhabited city in the Americas. As soon as one starts walking in town, you can feel the effect of thin air, due to the Cuzco's altitude of approx 10,000 ft. To cope with Altitude, we were offered Coca Tea. I drank quite a lot of it, but didn't get high :-) Cuzco, especially the San Blas part of town, is a beautiful city filled with cobblestone streets, art galleries, cafes, beautiful ornate churches and of course, tour operators and trinket sellers. We spent the first day visiting prominent churches and inca ruin near Cusco. La Cathedral and La Compania are two catholic churches from the 16th century that are filled with gold plated sculpture and hundreds of amazing canvases. We visited ... read more

Visiting Rio de Janeiro is always an amazing experience. It was Erik’s first visit and we spend 3 days there. We visited the usual stuff such as the Sugar Loaf, Redeemer Christ, Botanic Garden, Ipanema and Copacabana beaches and other nice spots. A shame that the weather wasn’t good but it was really hot and humid. Rio at night is an amazing experience. The Lagoa da Conceicao is such a stunning place. As Erik say, no doubt that Rio is among the most beautiful cities in the world. We haven’t taken nice photos this time but we promise next time we’ll do better. ... read more

4 days, 12000 feet, 500 perros, 200 llamas, 10 incan ruins, and 50 gatorade bottles later.... the story continues... (i couldn't send this out on our last day in peru. crappy computer) in the last email, i stated that we were headed to machu picchu on thursday. well, that didn't happen. you see, the only timely way of reaching the incan ruins is by train, and late on wednesday night a major landslide damaged 27 meters of raildroad track. perurail, the gov't owned company that exclusively runs the railway, announced that it would take 3 days to repair the tracks. CRAP. we only had 3 more days in peru! so what would a trip to peru be without visiting the world famous machu picchu? so on top of being pretty bummed out, teresa got pretty sick. ... read more

spent most our our day in the city of nazca. took a 6 hour bus ride and then took a flight over the nazca lines. wayyyyyyy cool. if you haven´t heard of the nazca lines they are geoglyphs that were created in the desert between 300BC - 600AD. really strange.. no one really knows why the nazcans made then, but they align perfectly with constellations so many think its a large astronomical calendar. others say it was a way of communicating with aliens. in fact, there is even a spaceship landing strip in the desert. the movie "signs" was loosely based on the nazca lines and the alien theory... the designs are so large you cannot recognize them from ground level. so we took a cessna (sp?) and flew over the lines. hella cool. anyway, lookup ... read more