The Amazon

Eighteen years ago, Doug and I were looking for an exotic destination for our honeymoon, and after a lot of thought, we decided to go to South America. (This was 1995, and South America was quite a lot more exotic then than it is now.) One of the places we decided we wanted to see was the Amazon rainforest, and we chose one of the only ecotourism companies that was operating in that area at the time: Explorama. The conditions were rustic, but hey – we were in the jungle! My memory of those five days we spent with Explorama was that it was hot and humid and there were lots of mosquitos, and that we saw amazing things.

Fast forward nearly two decades. When we decided that we would spend a couple of months of this trip in South America, we immediately thought about going back to the Amazon. There are many more companies now, but we really wanted to go with Explorama again. We even decided to stay in the same lodges, just to see how much they had changed.

Los Domenicos and Chilean food

We've now had almost three full weeks in Santiago, and we're really taking it easy. If we go out and do one thing every day, that's totally fine. This is a city we've spent a lot of time in and we have a list of stuff we'd like to do, but we're definitely not feeling any stress about getting out and seeing the sights. The rest of the year will be spent at a much quicker pace, so these weeks have been more about getting used to being on the trip and relaxing a bit.