Early morning arrival by train, 3 hour wait in line to pass Bolivian immigration office, short walk across the border, brief stop in the Brazilian immigration office = viola! Welcome to Brazil! We spent 3 days on a tour in the Pantanal. The Pantanal is a wetland/swamp the size of France. It is home to an amazing array of wildlife. There are indigenous tribes that still live deep in the wetlands. There are also cattle farms, called fazendas. They clear land and h...

The last few days in Bolivia were spent mostly on buses and a train. We spent one day in Santa Cruz. It is a large city with relatively little tourism, but unlike most of the country it isn't in the mountains and is close to Brazil and Argentina contributing to its status as Bolivias economic capital. We saw almost no other extranjeros during hours of exploring the city. From Santa Cruz we took the overnight train to the Brazilian border. Sooo much better than ri...

We got to the town of Uyuni in the morning after a relatively comfortable night bus where we got to watch the third hobbit movie ! But since it was in Spanish on really low volume we missed a lot of dialogue so we look forward to seeing in it English ;). We got lucky and got a good deal on a tour to the salt flat, Salar de Uyuni and national park reserve. The next three days were spent driving around in a full 4x4 jeep, stopping to take in sights , explore, etc...

La Paz was a busy city- loud, smoggy, and crowded- but the mountains surrounding it were pretty. We rode the city's gondola (it was very interesting to see gondolas used for public transit, but in such a hilly city it seemed tow work really well) up a neighboring mountain to a massive open air market.

We entered Bolivia at the beginning of April. Before we crossed we stopped in the Peruvian town of Puno which is near the border with Bolivia on Lake Titicaca, the highest "navigable" lake in the world. There we visited the Floating Islands, a community that builds and lives on floating reed islands out in the middle of the lake. Their community has lived like this for hundreds of years. They initially took to the lake to escape the persecution of another local i...