It’s a little over 3 weeks now until our trip and I’m starting to get excited……South America, the last of the main 5 continents I’ve yet to visit! 

My Spanish is coming along reasonably well. I now know how to say basic greetings, questions & order a beer! Although I do need to learn a few Portuguese words for Brazil.  

My good friend Abi, ex-housemate and tough cop, is my travelling companion on the trip. 

Our trip starts in Rio, where we have 4 nights, our longest stay of the trip. I’m really looking forward to the food markets, Samba filled streets at night, and of course sundrenched beaches! 

From Rio we head down to Iguazu falls in Southern in-land Brazil. The falls also borders Argentina where we’ll be visiting briefly for a day. 

From here we fly up to La Paz, Bolivia, where we’ll do a 3 day trip down the Amazon river, fishing for piranha’s, visiting indigenous villages & camping under the stars. This is followed by a visit to Lake Titicaca (the floating islands).  

Our final country on the trip is Peru. We’ll have a day and night in Cusco, try to acclimatise by drinking some of the local Coca Tea, before our ascent up the Icca trail to Machu Picchu. 

After taking in the amazing scenery we’ll be mountain biking back down the lower part of the trail, through Jungle terrain. We’ll then be finishing our trip with a few days in Lima, Peru’s capital city. 

This will be the first time I’ll be blogging whilst I’m traveling, although I won’t always have internet connection of course. I’m also going to try doing some videos so keep an eye out for these too. 

We’re travelling a lot over the 3 weeks, and it’s been fun organising it all ourselves. It’s meant we’ve decided exactly where we want to go, for how long, and saved us a lot of money. 

Flying out of prime season has meant our return flight tickets from the UK were just over £400! 

For most of our trip we are staying in hostels, which is costing around $8-$10 per night, per person, for our own private rooms. These have been booked via https://www.hostelworld.com or https://www.booking.com. What’s great about these sites, are the number of reviews on them by fellow travellers, so you know which places should be fairly decent, and which to avoid. 

Rio is the exception for hostels stays, as we are using Air B&B (https://www.airbnb.co.uk), and staying in a privately owned beach house for just £60 a night total! 

Our trip down the Amazon river and hike up Machu Picchu are through organised tours. The chances of survival of a tough cop and a blogger going solo would be pretty slim! 

If we had more time, I would have planned for longer in Argentina and visited Chile as well. However, South Americs is a large continent, so we don’t have to do it all in one go! 

April 2016 

I am using my hike up Machu Picchu to raisie money for a Leeds learning disability Charity, Pyramid of Arts here the link to my fundraising page: https://mydonate.bt.com/fundraisers/cathkane1

* None of the photographs in this blog are not my own.