Sean and I got home from Barcelona (by way of an overnight layover in Boston) on December 6, and it felt like we had ages to recoup before leaving again for round two. We spent our first week back in a lazy, jet lagged haze—fighting off colds, decorating for Christmas, and staring glassy-eyed at HGTV while mainlining frozen waffles (let’s hear it for American culture, people!). We emerged from our stupor about six days later, remembered that we had a whole ‘nother trip to plan south of the border, and immediately hit the panic button.
We realized right away that our strategy for Europe—show up and see what happens—was not going to work in Latin America. For one thing, it’s huuuuuuuge. Eight of the 50 largest countries in the world are in Latin America. France is the only European country (besides Russia) to crack the top 50. You could fit 16 Frances in one Brazil!
And unlike Europe, Latin America isn’t neatly linked by frequent high-speed trains that can be booked at a moment’s notice. In fact, trains are practically non-existent; buses are the name of the game. And while we’ve heard they’re usually quite nice, they’re not exactly efficient.
You can buy a train ticket in Venice at 10am and be in Florence by lunchtime. (I know because we did it.) But in Colombia, the equivalent is a 15-hour bus ride across vomit-inducing terrain from Cartagena to the next major tourist town (Medellín). Low-cost airlines are a fine alternative, but we’ve never found last-minute flights to be budget friendly.
Latin America is also not the same peaceful utopia that we enjoyed across the Atlantic. In a lot of countries, you can’t just throw a dart at a map and go (like we did in Hungary) or you might end up on the wrong side of the coca farm.
I kicked off our second week in the U.S. glued to my laptop. I barely left my seat for two and a half days. I spent hours upon hours upon hours acquainting myself with different countries, reading blogs, and building a Google doc of potential destinations. And once we finally agreed on an itinerary, Sean spent an entire day figuring out how to get us between countries and booking our tickets.
By the time my birthday rolled around on December 19, we knew broadly where we’d be going and when (a little over two months in Mexico, Colombia, Chile, Argentina, and Brazil). But we still needed to nail down the day-to-day, city-by-city details.
(It just occurred to me that I’m one of the only people here who spent five years in the travel industry earning a degree in world geography. Maps would be helpful in these posts, no? I was not a graphic designer at that job, so please forgive me.)
We managed to book all of our accommodations in Mexico before Christmas kicked off on December 23, but we took a week-long break to revel in the holiday at various family functions.
We’re now less than three days away from leaving the country again, and we’re in 100mph mode—booking our first few tours in Mexico, buying last-minute bug spray and Dramamine, and digging our water shoes out of the storage unit.
It feels unseemly to call what we’re doing “work.” It’s not like we’re breaking a (literal) sweat, and it definitely beats the interminable meetings, aggressive deadlines, and difficult personalities of yesteryear. But traveling long-term is challenging. We spent most of our downtime in Europe planning our next steps in Europe, and we’ll spend the rest of this week stress-eating leftover Christmas cookies because we can’t find a decent hotel in Medellín.
Objectively, we really are in a pretty good place though. We know exactly where we’ll be through the first week of February, and by the time our flight to Oaxaca leaves on Saturday, we’ll likely have enough hotels, tours, and transportation booked that we can spend our first few days in Mexico just...being in Mexico. But boy am I looking forward to my first glass of mezcal!
What’s the first thing you think of when I say Colombia? Cocaine? Pablo Escobar? Narcos? FARC? Terrorism? That’s fair. But what if I told you everything you thought you knew about the country is wrong?