June 15, 2020
4 mins read

Life-changing guided travelling in South America

The road less travelled can be a stressful one as well as thrilling. You don’t speak the language, it’s a challenge getting the transport links to link up, you’re wary of getting ripped off or ending up in a place travellers shouldn’t be.

Guided travelling takes all this away, leaving you free and clear to enjoy every second of being somewhere extraordinary. You turn up, meet your guide, and everything falls smoothly into place. There’s all the free time you need to explore on your own too, giving guided holidays the perfect balance.

South America is one of those must-experience places; exotic, varied, edgy, vivid and totally different from anywhere else you’ve been so far. Tap into this wonderful vibe, discreetly accompanied by experts who know the ropes, and you’ll savour the flavour for a lifetime. What an exceptional destination for escorted tours.

Meet South America, your exotic guided travelling host

You might have a cool seventy five grand each to spend, in which case a forty day fully-guided tour of Grand Antarctica, the Chilean fjords and French Polynesia might fit the bill. Start in Buenos Aires and end your adventure in Papeete on a ship, visiting some of the world’s most fascinating places en route: Cape Horn, Castro, Puerto Montt, Valparaiso, Easter Island and more.

Budget guided travelling in South America is just as good, stacking up individual fully guided tours to create really good value, in-depth insights into places and their people. Think cultural day tours of Machupicchu, Pisa, the Sacred Valley of the Incas, Humantay Lake, Rainbow Mountain, Lake Titicaca, Uros, Tawuile and so on. Each day is an immersive experience with smooth, travel, no stress whatsoever and everything laid on. It just shows you how flexible guided holidays can be.

Dreaming about South America? Travel with a guide

Colombia, Venezuela, Guyana, Suriname, French Guiana, Brazil, Uruguay, Argentina, the Falkland Islands, Chile, Peru, Ecuador, Bolivia, and Paraguay. This is South America, a place of dramatic extremes, from the lush Amazon basin to the world’s driest place, Paraguay’s Atacama Desert. South America also includes the islands of Tierra del Fuego, Galápagos, Easter Island, the Falklands, Chiloé and Juan Fernández islands, making it an even more desirable place to explore.

All this variety plus a string of invasions has created a vibrant mix of cultures. The blend of indigenous cultural traditions, Spanish, Dutch, Portuguese, Chinese, Indian, Indonesian, British, plus Yoruba, Fon, and Bantu influences brought by African slaves has been overlaid by centuries of different religions, gods and goddesses. They’ve all had an impact on the unique brands of Catholicism practiced here today.

Sheer natural drama is yours in every South American country, made more fun thanks to holidays with a guide. The soaring heights of the Andes with its snowy peaks and sharp crags are yours. Visit the high, flat plains of the Altiplano where people have lived the same way for centuries, and love the beautiful traditional clothes and hats worn for Bolivian festivals and celebrations.

Painting a word-picture of your South American Odyssey

Discover green, dripping wet jungles so difficult to navigate that people have died a few hundred metres from a well-trodden path, hopelessly lost. There’s the Bolivian salt flats at Salar de Uyuni, an experience so blinding, strange and eerie it’s like being on another planet. The Atacama desert is so dry you can actually feel the water in your body evaporating, the oddest feeling and not a place you’d want to be stranded. Seeing all this on a fully-guided basis makes it so much more enjoyable. There’s nothing to distract you from the extraordinary places you’ll see.

Think immense waterfalls tumbling like vast vats of cut diamonds over dizzying cliff-edges. The Iguacu falls, 275 separate cascades bordering Argentina and Brazil, will blow your mind a lot more powerfully than the relatively sedate Niagara Falls in North America, as will the towering Angel Falls, the Orinoco river basin.

Imagine remote villages and beautiful old cities stacked with history; Lima, Puno and Cuzco in Peru. Caracas, Porlamar and Merida in Venezuela, and Bogota, San Gil and Popayan in Colombia. No wonder foodies adore this place. Every South American country has its own speciality cuisine, an endless parade of taste bud-delighting experiences complete with great local wines and liqueurs.  Your guided travelling director will be with you all the way, recommending the best places to eat where you’ll enjoy spectacular food, great service and fair prices.

South America is all about big. The landscapes are endless. The cities are enormous, bustling and seething with life. The coasts are dramatic, offering everything to world-class surfing beaches and sunbathing traps to secluded rocky inlets where opalescent shells wash in on the tide and thousands of seabirds wheel and cry far above. The experience will leave you inspired, keen to go explore farther-flung places.

South America off the beaten track

How about Guyana. The Kaieteur Falls are just as awesome as Angel Falls, but less visited. This is home to the weirdly wonderful world’s largest water lily, Victoria amazonica. A rainforest hike along a series of rope canopy walkways, high above the ground, is about as magical as it gets. The wildlife is remarkable with more than 220 kinds of mammal to spot including big cats. The Goliath bird eating spider is as big and scary as it sounds.

Suriname is off the beaten track, fascinating with its unique combination of rainforest, Dutch-influenced buildings and cultural diversity. The jungles are untamed but the cities are lively and modern, offering exciting shopping, great food, and jumping nightspots. The blend of British, Dutch, African, Indonesian, Indian, Chinese and indigenous influences means every aspect of this faraway country is packed with spicy flavour.

Find yourself, lose yourself, forget real life     

Adventure-lovers head for a remote mountain paradise, Chile’s Torres del Paine National Park where the glacial lakes glitter and the unfriendly rocky peaks soar way above, frilled with lacy high altitude cloud. Rio will captivate you. The Copacabana beach will stay at the top of your memory list, edged with luxury streets behind which there’s shocking poverty. Dance with a carnival, climb a mountain, celebrate an ancient festival.

French Guiana is a place of sharp contrasts where dense rainforests are home to centuries-old indigenous villages while space rockets zoom above you from the Space Centre. Go to the capital, Cayenne, to dive into a beautiful melting pot of French, Asian, African, and Brazilian culture, potent and thrilling. This is where eco-tourism thrives, rich in glorious wilderness with diverse wildlife, lovely Atlantic beaches, and a huge area of grassy savannah reaching right to the feet of vivid green jungle-covered peaks.

Guided travelling in South America

Last but not least, you’ll find some of the world’s best beaches here. Rio’s famous Copacabana is only the beginning of the story. Sancho Beach in the Brazilian state of Pernambuco and the beach at Jijoca de Jericoacoara in the state of Ceará. Vichayito in Peru and Capurganá in Colombia, Playa Blanca in Colombia, Playa La Bellaca in Ecuador, Playa El Agua in Venezuela, each uniquely lovely.

Take a look at our range of fully guided holidays. Which parts of South America will you explore first?

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