South America 2008
My trip to South America in 2008 was the best thing that could have happened to me at this point in my life and set the precedent for a lot of my interests and pursuits going forward. I was feeling very antsy to travel in the fall of 2008 so before I booked my trip to South America I had this half-assed plan that I was going to go to Thailand and do some volunteer work. Why I decided that, I don’t know, but it mostly had to do to the fact that I knew I had to go somewhere and just didn’t really know where. I guess I felt like it would be a good thing to volunteer and travel instead of just traveling for my own well-being. I had good intentions but this trip just didn’t really fit me and I was forcing going somewhere instead of letting things flow naturally. I think part of it was that I didn’t have the confidence to do a solo mission and wanted to take a friend with me but nobody was able to travel at the time so I tried to work with what I had in front of me.
So out of luck or destiny or whatever, life changed for me without me going through the agony of this Thailand trip. Out of the blue, my old childhood friend Z (shortened) calls me for the first time in months and starts laying out this plan to rampage South America over a three week span. I think I decided to go with it during the first five minutes of the call and promptly called Expedia to cancel my ticket. I was all set to go in my mind and bought my ticket from Lima, Peru to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil with Delta on September 28th, 2008, a month before we were set to depart.
Like most things in life, nothing worth doing is easy. I was so used to European travel and so eager to go somewhere that I bought the ticket to South America without much research as to where I was going. First of all, Z’s plan was to go from Lima, Peru to Machu Picchu, down through Chile, over to Argentina and up to Rio, Brazil where we were to fly out. This seems somewhat feasible on a map, like everything does, but when you throw in the Andes Mountains and a bus-based travel system you realize quickly that it is hard to cover ground in South America, especially given three weeks to travel. With a flight out of Rio, I quickly became aware that any travel into Brazil by an American required a Visa. This was fine except for the fact that you had to obtain the Brazilian Visa in the United States, before departing to Brazil, and there are only 8 Consulates in the country, none of them in Denver. To get the Visa I needed to mail my passport and travel plans to the Houston consulate and hope that it came back in time for my flight. I spent many mornings calling the Houston Brazilian Consulate and listening to their voicemail service, undecided about taking the risk of sending my passport down there. By the time I realized I needed a visa, my trip was only three weeks away and sending my passport to Houston in hopes of it returning in time just seemed like a huge risk. I had heard that if you show up at the consulate in person the process of getting the visa could be done in a day and I honestly considered a flight to down to Texas, but after much mental turmoil, I folded my chips and changed my ticket to fly out of Buenos Aires, Argentina skipping Brazil altogether.
This decision caused me a lot of anxiety leading up to the trip, because I knew I would be traveling alone and I didn’t know crap about South America but I choose a different path and it worked out for the best. The day Z went on to Rio, Brazil I went to Montevideo, Uruguay and ended up meeting a girl from Chile named Daniela at my hostel. Me and Daniela became friends and kept in contact after my trip and she was a huge reason I returned to Chile in 2009.
2008.10.27-28 – Lima, Peru
I left Denver on Monday October 27th, 2008 at 10:45 AM for Lima, Peru. Like most of my vacations, I paid my almost mandatory flight change fees to Delta of $200 for indecisiveness and failure to properly plan, which always pisses me off but that’s life, things change. Z was flying to Houston and was supposed to get into Lima around the same time as me. My flight landed at 10:50 PM. I always hate landing in a foreign country at night without a place to stay. On the flight down I sat next to this little Peruvian woman who didn’t speak English. I was a good warm-up to South America and a good way to get my Spanish in gear. I feel bad for her because my Spanish couldn’t have been that great at the time but we communicated and talked about all sorts of stuff throughout the flight. The lady in front of me was from Peru as well and was warning me about how dangerous Lima is. I feel like I get the, “this city is so dangerous, be careful..” speech a lot in South America. Anyway, she recommended that I head to the Miraflores area which is a really nice part of the city, right by the beach.
I got off the plane wondering if I was going to find Z but while waiting for my luggage, there he was. We hugged and caught up for a minute since it has been so long since we had seen each other and we were off and running. We took a cab through the thick, humid Lima air at about midnight to Miraflores. We had some hostels picked out from Z’s Lonely Planet book so we had the cab take us to the first one and checked in pretty easy with it being a Monday. We headed out for some Monday night beers and found a cool little bar with a live band right in the main square.
We got up and wandered the Miraflores area the next day getting the lay of the land. It’s a cool little section of the city. For as dangerous as people like to claim Lima to be, Miraflores is one of the best areas of any city in Latin America. Peru is one of the poorer countries but I can’t think of any part of Santiago or Buenos Aires that is as nice as Miraflores. Anyway, this day mostly consisted of just exploring the city, nothing too crazy. I was still getting used to being in South America, it was such a wild place to go to. Now it’s all I think about when I think of taking a vacation but then it was something so strange and foreign.
2008.10.29/30 – Cuzco, Peru / Machu Picchu
We cleared out of Lima and headed for Cuzco by plane on LAN airlines. It was a good call because a bus would have been almost 24 hours. I took it in 2009 from Cuzco to Lima, and trust me it’s not that fun. We got to Cuzco and checked into the famous Loki Hostel which all the Aussies and every other traveling Gringo ends up staying at. These hostel types just end up irking me most of the time, you can meet a lot of cool and unique people but most of the people you meet in hostels just have something to prove or want to tell you how much better what they are doing is that what you are doing. It sucks to be on a three week journey through South America because most every other gringo you meet down there is on this year long world tour and wants to brag it up or rub it in your face. This is nowhere more apparent than at Loki Hostel because this is the place where inevitably they all end up.
We walked around Cuzco during the day and booked our voyage to Machu Picchu for the next day. We went to bed early since we had to get up to catch the train the next day. We booked the train up to Machu, which is the cheaters way to get to the epic ruins and something I don’t recommend instead of the 3 – 5 day Inca trail trip. We were pressed for time which was a theme of this trip and the main reason I spent over three months in South America the following year. I liked seeing Machu but compared with doing the three day hike and learning all about the people and region, we got the quick run-through and it felt a little rushed. I never like obligatory tourist activities but Machu Picchu is something that everyone should see in their lifetime. I felt much more emotional about the area the following year in 2009 when we did the 3 day hike to the ruins compared to seeing the ruins in 2008. There’s just something about earning the journey on foot rather than getting off a bus and stumbling upon a place as legendary as Machu Picchu with a bunch of old folks on respirators. Anyway, we trounced all around the ruins that day and headed back to Cuzco by that night.