La Gran Aventura

We realize we haven’t said much about our upcoming adventure, despite our departure date being just over one month away. While we do not want to plot out every place we will be and when we will be there, we do have some broad outlines for our year:

Phase 1: South America – January – May
Phase 2: Biking Maine to Minnesota – June – August
Phase 3: Asia & Australasia – August – December

After this adventure, the only continent we won’t have been to is Antarctica – we’re thinking we’ll save that for a future trip.

We are plotting and planning most for Phase 1 right now, obtaining visas and vaccines and figuring out where we really want to go. South America is a big place and five months is a long time, but also not that long at the same time.

We are hoping to balance moving slowly and really experiencing the places we are in with seeing as much as we can along the way. We know this means we won’t see everything, and we are ok with that.

We’ve identified seven countries we want to visit in Phase 1: Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, and Colombia. We will spend the most time in Argentina and Bolivia: Argentina, because it’s the biggest country we are going to and we are starting there with friends. Bolivia, because we have secured two weeks of WWOOFing on a vineyard in Tarija in addition to the other exploration we want to do.

Some of you might have noticed that Brazil and Chile are not on our itinerary even though they were on our wedding registry. Technically, we are starting in Puerto Natales, Chile, although we won’t be there for very long. We are beginning our trip with two friends, Sol and Travis, who will be in Argentina for a month. The way our schedules align, we will be meeting up with them in El Calafate, Argentina, shortly after we arrive in Chile and then continuing on to Buenos Aires. Prioritizing time with our friends seemed like the right thing to do, especially since Sol is Argentinean and can help us get off to the right start. We may cross over into Northern Chile later on in the trip depending on how much extra time we have.

It turns out when we sat down to plan where Phase 1 would take us, we each had a lot more thoughts and ideas about what we wanted the trip to be than the other expected. And, they didn’t always line up. I really wanted to see as much as possible while minimizing backtracking and zig zags which can add up in both time and cost. Eric wanted to be more leisurely with extended periods in each location and was really excited about going to Paraguay with its relative lack of tourist infrastructure. We decided we would likely not make a special trip back there in the future (unless we love it), so Paraguay became a priority. Eric is also interested in learning Spanish and didn’t want to get confused by introducing Portuguese in the middle. To accommodate both of our preferences, we decided to drop Brazil. Unlike most of the countries on our list, Brazil requires US citizens to get a visa and pay $160 dollars to enter. Since Brazil is so big and we will be traveling slowly, we figure we wouldn’t be able to see much there anyway, so we’ll save Brazil for another trip when we are earning money and feel better about spending it to fly from place to place.

While we are still eager to visit Brazil, including it in the trip would have required dropping other countries we also want to see. Paraguay and Bolivia still require $160 fees each and visas, so we aren’t avoiding fees altogether, but both countries are on a smooth, forward path that gets us from Iguazu Falls in Argentina to Peru over the course of eight weeks or so.  For those of you who supported our aspirations in Chile and Brazil, please stay tuned to see what your support enables us to do on our revised itinerary. More to come as our adventure begins…