Travelling Monkey

Background Salar De Uyuni Bolivia’s Salt flats, what can I say! This is one of the most remarkable places on earth and I had no idea until I had such a surreal experience myself. Few facts: Stretching more than 4000 square miles, it is the largest salt flat in the world Salt build up and left behind by evaporated lakes long ago 3,656 meters (11,995 ft) above sea level 2 seasons to see the salt flats in, wet season (Dec – Apr) where you get brilliant mirror images or Dry Season (May – Nov) where the ground is harder and creates the iconic heptagon shapes. 2 types of tours available (1-day tour or 3-day tour) Routes & Different Tours When planning your trip to Bolivia’s Salt Flats investigate the different routes from which you can travel to and from. For my partner and I we had a short amount of time and chose to go from Uyuni on a 1-day tour. If you choose to do a trip that is longer than a day see where the route ends as I don’t be...

1.  Time Zones: Know the time zones in each country you are travelling to and from, its easy cross the border and the time has instantly changed. We went from Bolivia to Argentina and we missed our bus as the time had changed by an hour. Peru: (GMT -5HRs) Bolivia: (GMT -4HRs) Argentina: (GMT -3Hrs) Brazil, Rio: (GMT -3HRs) 2. Weather: With South America being such a huge continent, spanning from the Equator to the Southern Hemisphere and the variations in altitude it has very different seasons and weather all over. Being close to the Equator makes a year-round destination but don’t forget rainy seasons. For example, visiting Bolivia’s salt flats in the wet season would look and feel very different to the dry season. Also travelling from Bolivia (cold) to Brazil (hot) the weather is drastically different. 3. Booking your Activities/Hikes: Booking your major activities/hikes in advance! Activities like the Inca Trail needs to be booke...

As you may or may not know South America is one huge content containing many countries, so when planning a trip its hard to figure out where you want to go and to get around... If you know there is one place/country/site that you want to visit, then that’s a great place to start. For my partner and I we always wanted to do Machu Picchu, so this was our starting point.  Secondly its important to understand the amount of time you have to travel – we had 17 Days, 4 Countries and 9 Flights! We decided that we wanted to see as much as we could in this time period as we originally wanted to do 3 months travelling but was very unrealistic, hence we went for cramming as much as we could into a small time period. With our 4 Main bucket list items incorporated into our plans the next step was figuring out how to get from once place to another, which is not as easy as you think in South America. Night 1 (24 th - 25 th April) - Lima, Peru: Flying ...