Latin America is an incredible place, like a collection of different worlds all stitched together into a tapestry of cultures, traditions, history and natural and man-made catastrophes, all of which have shaped the continent into what it is today. There is something very different about traveling in Latin America compared to somewhere like Southeast Asia, in that even the well-trodden routes are not simply laid out for you to follow, no dedicated tourist buses shuttling you around from one backpacker-party-hotspot to the next.
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Oh no, in Latin America it’s not so easy to simply get swept along with the flow, which is part of what makes it so rewarding, with so many more opportunities to get off-the-trail and have real experiences with real people in real places.
Here are our 7 tips for traveling in Latin America!
1. Plan your route wisely.
Most backpackers embarking on an epic Latin America journey choose one of two different routes – from Argentina to Central America until they reach Central America or the other way around from Mexico until they reach Ushuaia, Argentina. Of course routes vary, but these are the most common.
What makes a Latin America trip so different to say, backpacking in South East Asia, is that there are some truly dead end routes if you don’t do your research first. Take our trip to Patagonia for example – We arrived in Puerto Montt, ready to head to Torres de Alpine, only to find that all the ferries were booked up and we couldn’t cut through Argentina to get there by land as Kach one of us needed a visa. Flying was out of the question, so we quickly scrapped those plans and had to come up with new ones, which was exciting in itself and resulted in an incredible journey, but it was eventually a dead end and we had to travel back 1090 km in the direction we has just come from! There are any number natural phenomenon that could block your path, the biggest being the Andes Mountains and vast, impassable glaciers!
Another very good example of a Latin America miscalculation comes from a young traveler we met in Panama. He had adventured all the way from the US on a 125cc motorbike, through Mexico and Central America, ultimately ending up in Panama, where he encountered a small problem – The Darien Gap! This is a huge area of dense, impenetrable jungle and swamp,…
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