While in Colombia we decided that we wanted to do our South American border crossings by land, which we came to find out is/was not as common as I once thought. Whether that was as a result of the Venezuelan refugee crisis or just your average day, I will never know. But what I can tell you is that more than any other experience while traveling, it changed my life.
It’s time to switch it up a bit and give you a live-action story. Here’s a bit about our journey to Peru and into The Amazon. It’s a good one, I promise.
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As you probably gathered from our last post, leaving our work exchange was vital to our sanity. We threw a few ideas around before we decided to head to Bologna. Hannah, our friend and fellow volunteer, was planning to take a bus to Bologna and then continue home to Germany. Since we didn’t have anything else planned, and car rental seemed relatively cheap, we opted to for indulgence.
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Work exchange is a topic that we’ve discussed before, and more often than not, it is a great tool for engaging with the local community while working with a limited budget. Before leaving home we scheduled three separate work exchanges through HelpX. We gathered a number of different perspectives from friends and fellow travelers regarding their successes and failures on the road.
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Cinque Terre is one of those places that has started to boom with tourism in recent years. If you’ve ever looked at Instagram travel photos, chances are you’ve seen more than one photo of Cinque Terre. Unique in its composition, Cinque Terre is comprised of five small fishing villages dotting the cliff-filled coastline of the Italian Riviera. Considered a gem amongst most tourists, the crowds and infrastructure here reflect the hype.
Oh, Florence. Coming from Rome where there are plenty of tourists, but also bountiful space, Florence confronted us with situational claustrophobia. We were hopeful that the end of September was just late enough in the season that we could dodge crowds and squeak our way into some of the famous sights. In retrospect, we severely underestimated the amount of preplanning that needed to happen in order to ease the tension of the crowds and navigate Florence smoothly. However, if we were to do it again, the only thing I would change would be the not-so-forgiving stomach bug.
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Thailand is a place, that in my more youthful mind, was impossible to fully envision. A place so far away had to be so different, you’d have to practically turn the world upside down to get there. Almost two years ago I had my first visit to nearby Nepal. It gave me validation that Southeast Asia is a wonderful place. It is a place with friendly, hard-working people, bustling industry, vivid food culture, and beautiful traditions.
If you research the world’s best cuisine, Italy is often considered #1 or #2. The quality of ingredients allows for the city to be full of variety and pride. This is why we’re dedicating a whole post to our favorite food and drink. We had high hopes for delicious food experiences, but we weren’t expecting to find new and interesting bites around every corner.
With as much as we’d like to glorify every day of our lives on the road, we wouldn’t be telling the truth. So we’ll get right into it with this one. Maybe you read the last post about all of the wonderful experiences we were able to have in Rome. Unfortunately, we didn’t begin our Roman adventure with sunshine and rainbows. We instead started off with… BED BUGS! Yep, those delightful little fear-mongering, filthy, blood-sucking pests.
Brevity is impossible when describing Rome. It is a city full of life, excitement, diversity, and history. While we had an extremely testing experience right out of the gates, we quickly fell in love with Rome and made it a point to visit three separate times during our month in Italy. To top it all off, we were able to align ourselves with my grandma, Mikee, who came to visit us for her first trip to Italy.