Filicki

Our first stop: Georgetown, Guyana Our first few days were in Georgetown, Guyana which was about an hour from the airport on a slow, busy road. We stayed at Cara Lodge. The hotel was in what felt like an old wooden house. Our room was on the third (top) floor in a large loft apartment. It was spacious, but the ceilings were low enough that we had to be careful not to hit our heads. It is a bit more rustic than places we usually stay, but it was clean and the restaurant was in a lovely, open courtyard with good, local food. While in Georgetown we did the obligatory tourist attractions: walked around St. George's Cathedral, down Main Street and along the Sea Wall. We saw many children in their school uniforms and the streets didn't feel as threatening as the US State Depart had said they would be. Interestingly most of the streets running east-west were missing sidewalks and with the busy streets we needed to be very strategic about getting around. The weather was hot and muggy, ...

Back to Atacama for a little rest and more hiking After the intensity of our last day in Bolivia, we were ready for something different for our final few days in the region. Instead of returning to Explora Atacama, we decided to try one of its competitors: Tierra Atacama, part of the  Baillie Lodges   collection that we had enjoyed in Australia. The concept is similar to Explora — all-inclusive with guided excursions — but Tierra aims for a slightly more upscale, boutique feel.  We arrived late on our first day thanks to the mudslide delays coming out of  Bolivia , tired and a little frazzled. Fortunately, Tierra delivered exactly what we needed: a calm atmosphere, a delicious dinner, and a very comfortable room. The heated floors combined with air conditioning created the perfect sleeping environment — and being at a lower elevation than we had been in Bolivia probably helped too.  View of the Licancabur volcano from dinner Our favorite part of the lodge was th...

Our journey with Explora continued into Bolivia with the "Travesia". The plan was to spend 2 nights at Ramaditas, 2 nights at Chituca and 3 nights at Uyuni Salt Flats all with Exlpora. On Tuesday we would  drive back to San Pedro. We left around 8:30 on Tuesday morning and had to wait for about an hour to cross the Chilean boarder- which was pretty civilized. We pulled up got out of the car and had our passports stamped. We then said goodbye to Celeste and met our new guide Elvis and driver Johnny and prepared to cross into Bolivia.  The Bolivian border was a little bit more chaotic with many people standing around and many parked cars. Elvis took our passports, along with a bag of sodas,  and told us that he had a friend inside, and that we should go stand in "that very long line". After a few minutes he came and got us, gave us our stamped passports back and off we went to customs- which went pretty smoothly, except our forms had an error, but Elvis assured us tha...