88 Days In South America

After 88 days touring around Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Bolivia and Peru, here are some of our lasting impressions and memories.

ON SOUTH AMERICA...

South America is the land of creepy window manikins, Mercedes Benz buses, and walking breast-feeders.

South America is on a BYOTP (Bring Your Own Toilet Paper) basis.

South Americans love mate, coca leaves, soccer, family, Coca-Cola, religion and their plazas. The order is debatable. South Americans also love music from the motion picture Rocky. We’ve lost count how many times we’ve heard “Eye of the Tiger”.

We’ve seen various creative forms of barbed wire.

Most of the souvenirs here are fakes produced in mass quantities. "Do you want to buy my alpaca sweater? It's one of a kind that I hand knitted". Okay lady, but I've seen 500 exact replicas of your hand-knitted alpaca sweater across 3 different countries.

People can’t add. In stores, the workers have to get a calculator out to add up 22.00 + 4.50.

They don't refrigerate milk, eggs, meat, chicken or butter. Somehow it works.

No matter where you are, or how small of a town you’re in, everyone knows California.

Just about everybody here could use a good pedicure.

Vehicle smog emissions are shocking, but South Americans use compact fluorescent light bulbs everywhere…including in the most inappropriate places like century-old church chandeliers.

The hit song of the summer has been “Au Si Te Pego” by Michel Telo. Even though it’s a Brazilian song written in Portuguese, it has completely infiltrated all of South America. It’s hard to go a day without hearing it on the radio, being sung, or as a ringtone.

Pizza and sandwich shops consistently list “Americano” as a flavor. Every time, the “Americano” would have anything but typical American ingredients. When’s the last time you had a pizza with ham, green olives, eggs and spam?

South America is dusty, broken and a little ghetto. Even the Eternal Flame at the Maldivas monument in Buenos Aires had stopped working. Even though it is rough around the edges, the South Americans own it and that’s part of the charm. It’s a passionate and rustic place with pockets of absolute beauty, a rich history and a cast of characters.

ON OUR STATE OF WELL-BEING...

On a restaurant menu in Cuzco, we found this quote:

“You got here...all the way from your beautiful country…wow…it is a huge accomplishment…once in a lifetime…for some…really!!! Enjoy it to the fullest…and this is just one of the tasty moments your life will give you…how lucky we are!

We talk about that all of the time…how lucky we are. We have made it successfully through 3 months in South America. We are safe and healthy and happy.

We’ve been asked by people back home, “What’s it like to wake up every day and not have any obligations?” This question makes our eyes bug out. Steve summed it up best by saying that he has more obligations now than he ever did back in the US. Yes, it’s wonderful that we don’t have to go to work and that we’re off playing in these incredible places. But we also wake up every day needing to find a roof over our heads, food that won’t make us sick, and transportation to places we know nothing about. Our days are full of decisions that either lead us to harm or lead us to safety. It is a big responsibility.

Among the backpacker crowd, there is a funny but clear designation between "traveling" and "vacationing". Before this trip we had never distinguished between the two, but now we are absolutely certain that we are traveling. Vacationers get to stay in nice places and spend money on trendy dinners and bottles of wine. Travelers nit-pick every expense.

We are proud to say that so far we've spent the biggest portion of our money on activities. We've worked very hard to pull that off. Here's how it's broken down:

Activities – 38%

Lodging – 25%

Food – 23%

Transportation – 13% (not including flights)

 Internet, Toiletries, Souvenirs and Laundry – 3%

Would you believe that we keep running into people that we know? It turns out that the backpacker circuit is quite small and everyone seems to be moving in a similar direction. It’s always fun to spot someone on the street after not seeing them for weeks. It makes us feel connected.

We have spent every waking moment with each other for 88 days straight. The longest we were apart was for 2 hours in Arequipa when Katie visited the convent and Steve didn’t. We have come to rely on each other more than ever…it was a lonely 2 hours for both of us.

We never know what day of the week it is.

Given the amount of carbo-loading we’ve been doing with white bread, you’d think we were prepping for some major athletic event.

We are bringing the egg-over-easy on everything back with us to America. We are looking forward to eating salads and not having to brush our teeth with bottled water.

It is a sad reality, but we have become untrusting of people. Even when someone walks up to us offering help, we immediately think they’re either trying to rob us or sell us something. We have had one eye over our shoulders every day for the past 3 months.

After using up a lot of our lotions, shampoos and toothpastes, our backpacks are feeling lighter than ever. We could run a 100-meter dash with them on, if we ever needed to.

We have had the perfect mix of city and nature…flipping every week or so from one to the other. We have been to every capital city and bused our way through the countryside of every country we visited. But even so, there is so much land we still did not cover. South America is a BIG place!

We really hope that we don’t forget too much of our Spanish before we make it to Spain. Are we sad to be leaving South America? Not really! We had an absolute blast, but we are too excited for the next phase of our trip. Until next time, South America! Hasta Luego!

OUR FAVORITE PICTURES

Uruguay…Why Not?

Buenos Aires is so close to Uruguay that it would have been a shame to miss it. There are ferries that run between the two countries every day, so we decided to take a 3-day side trip to check it out.

From Buenos Aires there’s a quick 1-hour ferry, but we opted for the slower and cheaper 3-hour boat ride across the mouth of the Rio de la Plata. The river is so vast that it gives the illusion you’re in the middle of a brown ocean. The boat was a miniature version of a cruise ship, and it was a no-hassle hop, skip, and a jump into Uruguay.

Our first stop was Colonia del Sacramento, a 17th century Portuguese colony, which is the oldest town in Uruguay. We enjoyed walking around the old section called Barrio Historico. We strolled along the waterfront promenade, saw the original city wall and drawbridge, walked amongst the ruins of a monastery, and climbed up into the lighthouse. From the top of the lighthouse, we got a good feel for how small the original town must have been. We could also just barely make out the cityscape of Buenos Aires from across the river. Beyond spending an afternoon in Barrio Historico, there is not a ton to do or see in Colonia del Sacramento. It’s a city to simply enjoy on foot as you meander the tree-lined cobblestone streets.

 The next day we took a 3-hour bus ride to Uruguay’s capital, Montevideo. We started off walking around their historic center (Ciudad Vieja) and many plazas. We saw a lot of their important national buildings such as the Supreme Court, Office of the President, Statue of Liberty and the original city gate. On two occasions, we were walking by the Stock Exchange when a horse-drawn wagon trotted by. We could also hear the clip-clop of horses from inside our hostel at night. Given all of the construction that we saw, we got the impression that this is a city (and country) trying to put one foot towards the future with one foot still in the past.

On our last day we hopped across town to a neighborhood called Pocitos to go to the beach. This turned out to be a nice residential community where we ate lunch and shopped the fruit stands. We discovered that children in Uruguay also wear white lab coats to school, but they've added a piece of flare in the form of a massive navy blue neck bow…even the boys.

One of the highlights of Uruguay was the food. We had our best empanadas to date…made to order from a little restaurant in Montivideo’s Ciudad Vieja called El Rincon. We also discovered three brand new foods.

Milanesa is a very thin patty typically made of beef or chicken. It’s soaked in egg and then breaded and fried. It can either be served on its own or as a sandwich.

Chivito is the Uruguayan version of a hamburger…but even better. It was stuffed with meat, lettuce, tomato, ham, egg and cheese.

Finally, in our effort to taste test ice cream flavors from around the world, we sampled Sambayon. It’s a bright yellow ice cream made of vanilla, wine and raw eggs. The taste was unique, but not yummy enough to bring back to the US.

We also felt compelled to drink Uruguayan wine. We can tell you that there’s a reason Uruguay isn’t known for wine making. Neither of our bottles was very good, but we did get to try a new varietal called Tannat.

And a recap of Uruguay would not be complete without mentioning Mate. Yerba mate is a loose herbal leaf, reminiscent of tea, but served in a squash gourd called a mate. After the leaves are placed in the gourd, hot water is added and the drink is taken via a metal straw called a brombilla that has a filtration system on the end. While mate is very popular in Argentina, it is an obsession in Uruguay. Everyone is ubiquitously carrying around their gourd, brombilla, and thermos full of hot water. It’s amusing to see grown men coveting their mate gourds in the same way that a baby needs its bottle.

The weather forecast for our 3-day Uruguayan escapade was calling for 100% heavy rain showers. We had even considered calling the trip off, but we’re so glad that we didn’t. It didn’t rain a single drop the entire time, and in return for our steadfastness, Uruguay blessed us with sunsets like this.