CARRETERA AUSTRAL – Yelcho Lake to Futaleufú, Patagonia Chile
Rivers, Rapids and a Slice of Old Patagonia 26 December – 6 January. Boxing Day morning we rolled out of Chaitén, pointing the truck south once again. The road hugged the coastline for a while before turning inland, climbing gently through thick green forest and along wide glacier-fed rivers. Our plan was simple: drive until […]
CARRETERA AUSTRAL – Hornopirén to Chaiten, Chile
By the time we reached the start of the Carretera Austral, the weather had already set the tone — cold, wet, and windy. We camped that night on the roadside in the small town of Hornopirén, queued for the next morning’s ferry alongside others doing the same. Vans and campers with Chilean, Brazilian, and Argentine […]
CHILOE ISLAND, CHILE
Ancud 19-21 December. Chiloé lies off Chile’s southern coast, where the mainland begins to unravel into fjords, islands, and open sea. Separated by a narrow channel, it marks a quiet threshold between the more ordered landscapes of the north and the wilder, rain-soaked south. The island sits low and green in the Pacific, shaped by […]
SANTIAGO TO PUERTO MONTT
Chile’s Capital 6-17th December. Santiago is a city layered with history stretching back to when the Spanish first arrived in 1541. Shaped by both colonial power, immigration and earthquakes etching both grandeur and scars. Its more recent history is impossible to ignore: the 1973 military coup, years of dictatorship under Pinochet who was responsible for […]
BOLIVIA TO CHILE & CENTRAL COAST
Border Crossing 26 November. Exiting Bolivia at 4,480 metres made this our highest border crossing yet. We pulled up to the control building, took our place in line, and waited our turn to face Chile’s famously strict food-entry rules. As expected, the officer—friendly, professional and thorough—confiscated our remaining fresh fruit, vegetables, eggs, and the near […]
### UPDATE ###
Hi Everyone, thanks again for checking in on us. This transition of repair has taken much longer and has been more complicated than initially thought. Thank you for your patience, we are getting closer…still ironing out a few kinks… In the meantime we are out exploring, gathering more stories and experiences to share. Sarah, Tim, […]
BOLIVIA’S WESTERN LAGUNAS ROUTE
DAY 1 23 November. Setting off in convoy with Alex and Eric in their van and Manuel on his motorbike, we rolled West from Uyuni onto a long dirt road that would carry us across one of the most surreal landscapes in South America. The higher we drove, the more the world shifted — from […]
Uyuni & the Salar
Uyuni is a tough, wind-scoured town perched at 3,656 metres on Bolivia’s altiplano — part railway outpost, part gateway to the desert. Founded in 1889 as a strategic junction linking Andean mines with Chilean ports, it grew around the minerals that passed through and the workers who hauled them. Its broad streets, concrete buildings, and […]
POTOSI, BOLIVIA and Kevin Irvine’s memorial
A MOUNTAIN OF SILVER November 19 & 20. The town of Potosí sits high, around 3,826m. A mining town that’s a jumble of steep streets and weathered colonial buildings sprawled in the shadow of Cerro Rico — the “Rich Mountain” that once funded the Spanish Empire and, at an unimaginable human cost and set the […]
Samipata & Sucre, Bolivia
15 – 19th November The road from Santa Cruz to Samaipata winds steadily up into the cool, green foothills of the Andes, trading the heat of the lowlands for misty curves, dense cloud forest, and sudden viewpoints that made us pull over just to breathe it all in. Samipata Samaipata is a relaxed, bohemian little […]
Santa Cruz, Bolivia
Santa Cruz de la Sierra, Bolivia’s largest and most modern city, sits low in the tropical plains of the eastern lowlands—a world apart from the chilly Andean altiplano most travellers picture when they think of Bolivia. Founded by the Spanish in 1561 and later relocated to its current spot after repeated Indigenous resistance, Santa Cruz […]
Brazil to Bolivia
5th November. Corumbá, I’m sure, is a lovely town—of the little we saw. Leaving the river around 4 p.m., we made our way to a laundromat and then to a truck stop for the night, marked on iOverlander as a good spot before crossing into Bolivia. Before leaving Brazil, we tried to fill the freezer […]