Best things to visit in South America?

[slidey]

I have 9 nights in South America, Im happy to fly anywhere but the trip has to start and end in santiago and Id like to fit in as much as possible, where would you go? 🙂

[ringingup]

Anywhere in Chile! Santiago, Valparaiso, Lake Region, Atacama, Patagonia. If you want to splurge look at Tierra and Explora Hotels.

For the lakes: Hotel Awa.
Wine: Vik in Colchagua

[yorkshireRich]

9 months wow. Not sure what Peru will be like but the obvious one is Macchu Picchu.

Igauzu falls is awesome, rio Buenos Aires Etc. I’m sure 9 will give you plenty of opportunity to see quite a lot.

[RobL]

yorkshireRich wrote:

9 months wow. Not sure what Peru will be like but the obvious one is Macchu Picchu.

Igauzu falls is awesome, rio Buenos Aires Etc. I’m sure 9 will give you plenty of opportunity to see quite a lot.

I guess the nights are longer in Yorkshire.

[yorkshireRich]

Doh, that will teach me to reply on here after a few 2.20 pints of Tetleys Bitter. I will try again. Valparaiso is nice. I would highly recommend San Pedro De Atacama. I believe you can take a short flight up there.

[JonathanC]

You should’ve specified that you’re flying into Santiago in the subject line, you could’ve been flying to north Colombia !

I went to Buenos Aires for a few days in February 2019, three days max did it for me, you can push up to four if you really like it there

If you simply want to visit Macchu Picchu, it’ll be a nice long day visit, but it’s very embedded into Peru, you have to from Lima to get there…

[meta]

What time of the year? This is crucial. Some destinations are not good or closed such as Macchu Picchu during certain times of the year.

[zio]

My top two would be Iguazu and Machu Picchu. Obvious, but there we go.

However, a triangle between those two and Santiago will take at least three of your nine days up in travel (I’m not sure you will get from Santiago or Iguazu to MP in a day). To me that feels like a lot of flying and not much holiday- you’ve set quite a challenge to fit a continent into nine days.

[slidey]

The original plan was to go to Easter Island, but flights dont seem to have picked up post-covid, so theres no availability and thus I’m having to replan and have the 9 night constraint 🙂

Flight routings do seem to be the biggest issue. I was thinking of some combination of Machu Picchu, Iguazu, Atacama, ‘the Amazon’.. but none are really quick to get to and even more difficult to be able to fit two of them in.

[JDB]

slidey wrote:

The original plan was to go to Easter Island, but flights dont seem to have picked up post-covid, so theres no availability and thus I’m having to replan and have the 9 night constraint 🙂

Flight routings do seem to be the biggest issue. I was thinking of some combination of Machu Picchu, Iguazu, Atacama, ‘the Amazon’.. but none are really quick to get to and even more difficult to be able to fit two of them in.

If you were to attempt that in nine days you will spend all your time in transit and see very little of the sights mentioned. Not only are the distances huge, but travel around Chile and particularly Argentina is often affected by extreme weather or random strikes. If Santiago is your base you would be better to stay in Chile do the glaciers (merits the greatest amount of time) then consider Atacama and then perhaps either lake district or wine country.

[Michael C]

My fave near Santiago is Zapallar.

The overland route down to Puerto Montt is also nice. From there,
it’s easy to do Chiloé then do the stunning road trip into Arg. to
see Bariloche / Villa la Angostura / El Bolsón. Many flights from
Bariloche to Buenos Aires and to Mendoza (for THE wine country).
We actually drove from Bariloche to Puerto Madryn, through the very
sparsely populated (Welsh) Patagonia: signs saying “if you do not
have xxx amount of petrol here, you will NOT make it to the
next service station”. Quite the experience!

[Greenpen]

Fly to Calama and hire a car to visit San Pedro de Atacama and environs. Fly back to Santiago and take the bus to Valparaiso. Interesting place, visit wineries, edgy (more so than Naples or Liverpool). Day or so exploring Santiago. That’s your nine days.

Flitting to Peru or Argentina won’t work. You may have to curtail some sights around San Pedro if you’re hit by the altitude. Most people fine in the town but some sights in the altiplano are 3500+ metres and difficult for some.