Trip Stats

4 months
5 countries
26 cities
62 different beds
9,200 miles on the bus
$8,500 spent (about $60 a day while traveling)

… I think I’m ready to be in one place for a while

Hostel Reviews

As a backpacker, you spend much of your time finding hostels, traveling between hostels, and staying in hostels.  When you find a good one it's s joy, and when you expect a great one and it's not it's a huge letdown.  For the trip as a whole I did a pretty good job of staying in nice ones.  In total I stayed in 29 hostels of all different variety, here's how they rank:

Get me out of here

• La Sirena, Palomino, Colombia – C-

The only hostel that I actually left earlier than I intended to.  It started off looking like a little slice of heaven, right on the beach, super chill, and hammocks to sleep in.  But that night was just terrible, it was my third straight night sleeping in a hammock, it was freezing, and hence I barely slept.  In the morning I just wanted to get the hell out of there, and I did.

Ok for a night, but wouldn’t stay much longer

• Hotel Marlin, Cartegena, Colombia – C
• Casa Mojito Hostel, Taganga, Colombia – C
• Casa Familiar, Santa Marta, Colombia – C+
• 7 Duendes Base Hostel, Salta, Argentina – B-
• Hostal Varayoc, Aguas Calientes, Peru – C+

It was somewhat unfortunate that my first hostel of the trip fell into this category, but it was only decent at best compared to some of the other places that I found.  I usually consulted Lonely Planet or Hostel World for hostel recommendations, so it was always disappointing when the place had promise but turned out to be a dud. 

Felt more like a hotel

• America del Sur Hostel Buenos Aires, Buenos Aires, Argentina – B+
• Hostal Emperador, Copacabana, Bolivia – F
• Casa De Avila Hotel, Arequipa, Peru – B

Every once in a while I’d stumble into a hostel that really was a hotel, they just put more beds in the rooms.  The best by far was in Argentina, with an immaculately clean and nice hostel.  The others fell off from there, the one in Bolivia being my least favorite place of the trip.

Good, but nothing to write home about

• Hotel Pelikan, Taganga, Colombia – B
• Ayres Portenos Hostel, Buenos Aires, San Telmo, Argentina – B
• Hostel Bambu Mini, Puerto Iguazu, Argentina – B
• La Casona Hostal, Potosi, Bolivia – B
• Desert Nights, Huacachina, Peru – B

All of these hostels were great actually, absolutely nothing wrong, just got beat out by the ones that went above and beyond.  I can’t think of anything that these hostels did particularly well, or particularly different than any normal hostel, but all were a good time.

My own room!

• Hotel Anexo Mitru, Tupiza, Bolivia – B-
• Hostal Compania de Jesus, Potosi, Bolivia – B-
• Cruz de los Andes, La Paz, Bolivia – A-
• Hostal Tambo Colorado, Pisco, Peru – A-
• Ekeko Hostel, Lima, Peru – B

My first two and a half months on the road I always opted for the cheap dorm room, between 4 and 12 beds, shared bathroom.  At first I loved it, then tolerated it, finally I was over it.  It was around that time that I was in Bolivia, and so I made sure to splurge whenever possible on my own room.  It was amazing to have space to unpack my bag and have a little space to myself.  The places in Bolivia were for the most part nothing special, but the rooms in Peru were really nice, and not over the top money wise for my own room.

So good I never left the hostel

• La Brisa Loca, Santa Marta, Colombia – B+
• Arequipay Backpackers, Arequipa, Peru – B+

There were a couple hostels that were setup so that I’d never leave.  They had pools, massive televisions with binders full of DVDs, hammocks, pool tables, bars, restaurants… it was hard to get out of those hostels, let alone off the couch.  They were fun places to stay... for a while, but I didn’t fly 6,000 miles just sit in a hostel.

That little something extra

• La Casa de Felipe, Taganga, Colombia – A-
• Macondo Guesthouse, San Gil, Colombia – A
• Plantation House, Salento, Colombia – A
• The Art Factory, Buenos Aires, San Telmo, Argentina – A-
• Hostel Achalay, Bariloche, Argentina – A
• Hostel Lao, Mendoza, Argentina – A
• Pisko & Soul, Cusco, Peru – B+

This group of my favorite hostels was fairly easy to pick, as each one had some amazing to offer.  Like the Plantation House with tours of the owners coffee farm, Achalay with weekly dinners, or Lao’s free wine after 8pm that got the group to mingle.  They were also places that all had numerous activities all planned and priced out for the guests, great owners, and promoted a fun time.

The best of the best of the best

• Hostal El Refugio, Pucon, Chile – A+

However, only one hostel can be the favorite, and the only hostel I visited in Chile is the one.  It was just perfect, best kitchen, most comfortable bunk beds, best activities, amazing staff, and just a super chill atmosphere.  I thoroughly enjoyed every second of my time in that one.

My last big adventure – The Little Galapagos

It wasn’t really that crazy of an adventure, but for $20 it's a great bang for your buck: tons of birds, penguins (which are really birds but I feel deserve their own category), sea lions, jelly fish, and dolphins.  It was great fun.

I took a bus from Pisco to Paracas which is right on the water, and then onto a speed boat.  We saw the Candalaria, a giant picture in the sand.  It’s unknown who made it, when, or what it’s purpose, but it’s cool looking:

Then we continued on to the islands which was incredible and just filled with wildlife.  There used to be 22.5 millions bird but now only 300 thousands, which is crazy to imagine nearly 100 times more birds flying around above me.

 

It should be nothing but relaxation and smooth sailing from here on out, but if it’s not then I managed to stumble into a truly big adventure...

A bird with a 6ft wingspan

For the girl’s last day we hit up the Colca Canyon.  We were all very excited about our last big adventure sans one thing, the canyon is about 4 hours away from Arequipa, so we’d have be up at 2:30am for the bus…

I’d be lying if I said I remembered the whole day, because I was going on no sleep and much of the day was spent in a bus.  I know we drove about 3 hours to Chivay, and then another hour or so to the Cruz del Condor where you get a great view of the canyon and the birds flying.  We also stopped many time along the way at various villages with different activities:

The tour was pretty good, by far the highlight was watching the condors fly around, and we were lucky to see them as it doesn’t always happen.  Towards the end, Savannah, Sahar and I all felt like typically terrible American tourist: speaking only in loud English, being late for the bus, sleeping most of the bus ride, and being so tired at times to even leave the bus.  Overall it was a bit rough, but the condors made the whole trip worth it.

From Beans to Bar

Cusco, it's pretty amazing and annoying all the same breadth.  Here, you get solicited for things to spend your money more per meter walked than any other place I've been in South America.  I guess it’s what you get when you mix rich tourists with third world homeless.  Anyways, it gets to be just like advertisements, you just start to block them out and say ‘no gracias,’ without even listening or looking.  But for some reason, the flyer for the free entrance to the chocolate museum caught our attention.

It turned out to be a great decision, as they have a ‘create your own chocolate bar’ workshop deal, where you start with the chocolate beans and end up with your own chocolate to eat.  It was well worth the 66 soles. 

We went through the basic process:  the cacao tree, the fermentation process (which is super important and has to take places only hours after the pods have been picked), the tossing of the beans (basically mixing over heat until the beans start popping), and the removing of the skins to reveal just the cocoa beans.  We all tried eating the beans before and after tossing – both were pretty bitter, but we learned if you eat enough of the uncooked beans you begin to hallucinated.  Then we got out the mortar and pestle (my specialty) for a little bean grinding competition.  We all had 2 minutes to turn the cocoa from beans into a smooth paste, the way the Mayans used to do it.  After 2 minutes of pretty hard work our pastes were judged, and I won (nbd...) the prize of a bag of cocoa tea.  It tastes a lot like chocolate – delicious!

Then we used our hard earned chocolate paste to make two kinds of hot chocolate.  The first was the method of the ancient Mayans, just cocoa paste, boiling water, and cayenne pepper… as predicted, it was terrible.  Then we made an American version, cocoa paste, cinnamon, cloves, warm milk, and lots of sugar.  The latter was much much better.

Finally, we saw the final steps to making chocolate: mixing the paste with sugar for 48 hours until it is perfectly smooth, then pouring into chocolate bars.  This was the best part, as we got to pick out any mold we wanted for our chocolate and then add flavors: mint, coffee beans, nuts, coconut, whatever we wanted really.  By the end of the 2 hour workshop we all felt terrible like a kid after Halloween.  Having an empty stomach that was filled with pounds of chocolate was not a great choice before dinner.

The finished chocolate went in the refrigerator for an hour before it was ours to take home.  The consensus was clear: the tour – great, the chocolate – amazing!

PS. The girls took all the photos of this event, so I’ll add them once I get them…

If two is good, three must be better

Another trip to the airport and another person joins the crew, our friend Sahar (who originally planned to travel to Peru with Savannah) arrived to join the fun.  She could only take a week off work, so it would be an aggressive week seeing the sights of Peru.  Some of the activities: hitting up Machu Picchu (though I would skip it this time while Savannah hit it up the second time in as many days), Cusco, overnight bus, Arequipa, Colca Canyon….  I think I’ll sleep at the end of the week.

Cusco or Cuzco

Cusco is the ancient Inca capital (not Machu Picchu – who knew?), and it’s also one of the more famous cities in all of South America.  It has a bit of a strange feel that took me a while to get used to.  There’s nothing inherently special about Cusco, it’s just the closest big city to a world famous set of ruins, and as such, Cusco gets so much tourist money it doesn’t know what to do with itself.  Like, ‘why is the largest Starbucks I’ve ever seen here (and yes Savannah and I want there for coffee),’ it didn’t make a ton of sense.  But it makes the town an absolute dream, super clean, tons of great restaurants, and things just run better than your typical third world city.  There is the annoyance of everyone claiming to be Pablo Picasso and selling the same cheap art for one sol, getting offered an endless stream of terrible (so I was told) massages, and markets galore selling the same junk in every shop.  One massive market literally had 50 venders selling the same exact stuff.

The food deserves its own section.  One of my buddies from Australia told me, ‘we spend 9 days in Cusco and did nothing but eat…’ well I spent 10 (not including the Salkantay trek) and he was absolutely right!  Savannah and I found a couple amazing places and just kept eating at them.  Jake’s Café, Los Perros, and Inka Grill were among the favorites, and trust me, the food was better than I used to eat back home.