Are you keen on visiting South America?
Do you love exotic places?
Have you always been in love with road trips?
Are You more like an active-holiday person?
You can’t wait to discover more and more places?
Are you adventurous and not afraid of fully scheduled, tiring days during your travel?
If your answers are mostly “yes” for the questions above, then my following blog posts are definitely for You!
In this post, I am going to present You my recent South American road trip itinerary, that I could recommend to every adventurous traveler.
I am a person, who is always super excited about discovering new places and visiting natural wonders. That is how the idea of South America came...
...It was a hot summer day when we were discussing with my friend, what should be our next big travel destination. We knew that we have around 3 weeks of vacation time and that we can schedule this time anyway we want. After thinking it through and considering the (lots of) pros and (only a few) cons we decided to go for big and organize a trip to South America.
We opened the map and started to collect our “must-visit” places, then we started to realize that 3 weeks for South America is sooo short, but we were already so committed to this destination, that we agreed that it will be more like “training”-holiday, but what is for sure, that we want to bring the most out of these 3 weeks.
South America is huge, with numerous breathtaking places, so it was tough to set a limit of places that we actually can visit in 3 weeks, but after experiencing it, I think, we put together possibly the best itinerary for our trip.
In my opinion, the main highlights of our trip were:
Discovering the Ancient Inka Empire & hiking the Machu Picchu Mountain
4 days in the Amazonas Rainforest
Reaching and boating further than the most southern point of Continental America
100+ kms of hiking in Patagonia with its breathtaking glaciers
Rio de Janeiro
But before deep-diving into the details, a quick overview of the itinerary:
As you can see on the map, we spent most days in Peru and in Patagonia.
For us, the main cities (except Rio) were more like places, connecting the different parts of our journey. Don’t get me wrong, it is really cool to visit the capitals as well, however, if I were you, I would definitely focus on the natural wonders of the continent, and just quickly visit the cities in 0,5-1 days (---> during the time that you are spending there anyway, because of flight connections).
So our trip in details:
Peru: Cusco ---> Machu Picchu (3 days)
Peru: Amazonas Rainforest - Puerto Maldonado (4 days)
Peru: Lima (1 day)
Chile: Santiago de Chile (1 day)
Chile: Most southern point of Continental America - Punta Arenas (1 day)
Chile: Chilean side of Patagonia - Torres del Paine National Park (3 days)
Argentina: Argentinian side of Patagonia - Los Glaciares National Park (4 days)
Argentina: Buenos Aires (1 day)
Brazil: Rio de Janeiro (3 days)
This is a very intense itinerary with a really tight schedule. If You have limited time, and you can afford it, my first and maybe most important advice would be, to book one-way tickets. South America is huge, and flying takes a lot of time, so don’t waste your anyways limited time with booking return flights.
After this overview of the whole travel,I hope you are as excited about the details as I am. In my future blog posts, I am going to write about the whole trip-, and parts of the journey in details, so STAY tuned and follow me on Facebook and Instagram, in order to don’t miss my next posts!
Have a nice day,
Berni