Rio de Janiero is loaded with things to see and do. And in a month, we hardly cracked the shell on its offerings. But we saved the best for last…yes, our most fun day trips and favorite activities in Rio unintentionally occurred on our last few days in the city. Unsurprisingly, they were both adventures we hadn’t read much about…
Getting There (Is Half the fun?!) Flashing us back to India or Nepal, getting to Ilha Grande was the complete backpacker package to welcome us back to our fast travel month of August 2023. We don’t have days like this very often (anymore), so it’s always good to have a reminder of why we don’t. 🤣 It was complete with sweat-on-sweat…
Getting There & Where we Stayed From Ilha Grande, we took the local ferry ($5/each) to get to Angra Dos Reís, followed by a local bus to Paraty further west of Rio de Janiero. Paraty is one of those places typically known as "a colonial gem" by local and international tourists alike. Because of this, it was also a bit…
Getting There From Paraty, we boarded our first long distance bus in Brazil and had some major sticker shock at the price…far from the norm we’re used to in Latin America. For a 4.5 hour route, it cost 215 Reais or $44 for the two of us to Rio de Janiero. We then traveled an additional 1.5 hours north to…
More than 40% of South America is the Amazon Basin. It stretches across 9 of the 13 South American countries and is commonly known as Planet Earth’s Lungs, serving as the world’s most powerful oxygen generator, which is also critically endangered. Thus, we knew it was time for us to get there. We chose our entry point to be Leticia,…
There are a LOT of ways to experience the Amazon…from super rustic to super luxurious to everything in between. Because we knew this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, we decided to maximize our experience and not to stick to our normal $50/day ($1500/month). If we had wanted to do so, it would have been close to possible by staying in Leticia…
We woke up at 5 in order to get to Leticia in time for our 7:00 tour, (which didn’t leave til 9:00. Oh ColOmbia. 🙄.) We chose a tour through our accommodation that would give us a variety of things: an indigenous tribal and a nature reserve visit, a stop to let monkeys crawl all over us, the chance to…
After a day with an internet hit, fluffy pillows, and getting officially stamped out of Colombia and into Brazil, it was time to graduate from Amazon Light to the “real” Amazon. This leg would take us 3-4 hours up a Brazilian/Peruvian Amazon tributary to Palmari Nature Reserve, and encompass our biggest budget splurge since our Tanzanian safari in 2019. …
