Tour of South America

A tour of South America has not crossed my mind until a friend talked about a 30-Day 6-Nation South America Cruise & Land Tour. After reading the book, "101 Things You Should Do before Going to Heaven", there seemed to be urgency to visit SA to see some of the wonders of the world on the other side of the globe. SA has both man-made wonders like Machu Picchu in Peru and Christ the Redeemer in Brazil as well as natural wonder like the Iguazu Waterfalls.

We decided to sign up for the SA Tour basically to see first hand some of these exotic places and wonders.

This 30-Day tour with a tour company was the longest we have had so far. In the end, it was not as rewarding as we had expected simply because it's a touch-and-go experience. Ten minutes here, 30 minutes there etc are just too short a time to see, feel and enjoy the ambiance of the place.

We also failed to see two of the places that were promised in the itinerary.  Puerto Madyn in Argentina and Cape Horn.  A delay to leave the port in Stanley, Falkland Islands due to some unexplained reason caused the Captain to skip Puerto Madyn and instead sailed straight to Montevideo, Uruguay.

Having visited Cape of Good Hope in the African Continent in 2013 (Read here), I was really looking forward to cross Cape Horn scheduled on 29 December 2019. In that morning of 29 December, the Captain simply announced that the ship would not be sailing to Cape Horn because of forecast big waves said to be 3.8m high. That miss has really been a great disappointment to many of the travelers in the ship!

Still, the tour was a wonderful experience of learning about new cultures and people, eating some of the highly recommended dishes and cuisines and making new friends!

Before the trip, I had little knowledge of the geography of SA. This trip to some extent has been a lesson on geography, history, people and culture of this huge continent.