One of the few things to which we are committed on this trip is keeping the itinerary flexible. So this itinerary could, and most likely will, change as we are traveling. Here’s the current rough plan:
October 15, 2008: Depart St. Louis
October 16: Arrive in Lima
October 16-Nov 4: Lima/ Cusco/ Maybe Southern Peru
We’ll spend some time in Lima, then start heading towards Cusco. Depending on how we feel about Cusco, we may stay there, or we may do some exploring in Southern Peru and head back to Cusco for our Inca Trail Reservations.
November 5-November 9: Inca Trail/ Machu Picchu
November: Southern Peru
This depends on how much, if any, of Southern Peru we covered before the Inca Trail trek. We’d definitely like to see Colca Canyon before we move on to Bolivia.
November/December: Bolivia
Highlights: Lake Titicaca, La Paz, the salt flats. We’ll be racing the rainy season in Bolivia, trying to balance spending as much time as possible in this country that travelers seem to love so much against getting out of Bolivia before travel gets too difficult.
December/January/February-Argentina
Highlights: Buenos Aires, Iguazu Falls, Patagonia. We have more time slated for Argentina because we expect to want to spend around a month in Patagonia. We also haven’t ruled out side trips to Uruguay while in BA.
February/March-Ecuador
Highlights: Amazon & Galapagos. We’re still not 100% on the Galapagos Islands. It really is #1 on my list of places to see, but we’ll spend as much in one week as we will on a month in most of the other destination s we plan to visit. Hopefully we can work it out.
March/April-Colombia
This is a new addition to the list, so we really haven’t done a whole lot of research yet on specifics of what we want to see. Most people are going to freak out when they see this on the list based on what you see on the news, but we have researched quite a bit about safety in Colombia, and the country really has turned the corner over the last several years. It’s quite safe if you are smart, and luckily for us, we are both very smart. And since most people cringe when they think of traveling to Colombia, it’s still off the radar for many travelers, making it cheaper. But that is all changing as most people realize that Colombia is a safe and beautiful country to travel in.
After that it’s off to SE Asia, and we have absolutely no clue what will happen there. (We’re also hoping to make a stop in St. Louis on our way to SE Asia.) We will have a ton of research to do for that portion of the trip. But the general idea is to go to Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam, maybe some islands in the South Pacific, then to India, but not necessarily in that order. We might hit New Zealand and/or Australia if we can swing it.
