South America | See It Do It Live It

Death Road

There are varying statistics about the Death Road. What they all agree on is that it is very dangerous. In its heyday, an average of 26 vehicles dropped off the edge every year. In 1995, the Inter-American Development Bank declared this road as the most dangerous in the world. In 2009 the Bolivians finally realised that owning this deadly ‘road’ wasn’t a great claim to fame and built a new, safer route. These days, the Death Road (or North Yungas Road as it is really called) is mainly used by…read more

Getting High in Bolivia

Update: Check out the video at the bottom of this post! One of the things that I have been most excited about in South America is visiting the Bolivian salt flats. Simon, Graham and I booked onto a four day jeep tour and were joined by Jamie, an ecologist from North Carolina. Before I tell you about one of the most incredible trips we have taken so far, here is some information in case any of you want to do it in the future. I would highly suggest starting your…read more

Taking a Break in Tupiza

Originally we had planned to cross back into Chile to visit the Atacama desert, and then go from there to the Bolivian salt flats. After looking into it though, it appeared that travelling from Salta to San Pedro de Atacama is tricky and expensive. It is also not recommended to go to the salt flats from Chile as the huge increase in altitude leaves most people feeling very sick. With this in mind, we decided to travel up to Tupiza which is just across the border in Bolivia, where we…read more

Just for the Stamp

Posted by Kylie in Argentina, South America

We had originally planned to travel north from Valparaiso to the Atacama desert before crossing over the border to Bolivia. However, after a bit of invesitgating, it turned out that there is very little to see in Chile between these two points. Instead, we decided to cross over the border to Argentina and travel north, before crossing back to the Atacama. We took a bus over the border to Mendoza, travelling through the beautiful Andes mountains and up some of the craziest roads so far. Mendoza is a lovely Argentinian…read more

Two days in Valparaiso

Ask anyone in Chile where you should visit while you’re here and they’ll all say Valparaiso – or ‘Valpo’ as the cool kids call it. So we hopped on a bus from Santiago and two hours later found ourselves in this crazy little port town. Unfortunately we’d arrived on Sunday and it wasn’t so much crazy as sleepy! Nothing was open – so we had a quiet afternoon entertaining ourselves at the hostel before heading out for a bite to eat. In Valpo (yep – I’m now a cool kid)…read more

Kylie Hits South America

Towards the end of my time in Australia, I decided that I would go back to the original plan and spend my final two months of travel in South America. I flew from Adelaide to Sydney to Santiago, and travelled back in time by 13.5 hours! The flight was amazingly good, and I had two seats to myself. This resulted in me sleeping through the maltesers, the ice cream and the cheese and biscuits, to my utter disappointment! Graham had already been in Chile, working on a farm, for a…read more

Brilliant Bariloche

With much sadness, seven of us left the farm on Friday, crammed into the truck with all our stuff and Sofi the dog in her crate. At Osorno we all got buses to our different destinations, promising to definitely meet up again in the future. My bus was taking me to Bariloche as I’d decided to make my way back up to Santiago via Argentina – just because I could. The border crossing was painless – but felt odd as its a good hour-long drive from getting stamped out of…read more

Life on the farm

For the past three weeks I have been living in another world. Well that’s what it feels like at least. Life on the farm is so different to my life back home – I have learnt and experienced so many new things in such a short period of time. And I’ve met some awesome folk from around the world that I know I’ll stay friends with for years to come! The farm is truly remote – it is accessed by a long dirt track which winds (often steeply) through the…read more

To bee or not to bee

One of the key elements on the farm (at least during the summer) is bee-keeping. Bees are an important and useful part of the permaculture farm environment in terms of the pollination they provide. But they also make a heck of a lot of honey! I was lucky enough to get to assist Jorge with the honey harvesting on one of the days, along with Clayton and Ian (both from the US). We all donned masks and gloves. There weren’t enough suits to go around so that’s all I got…read more