Since we had 6 months of vacation, the first thought was to do a round the world trip. However we didn't have enough budget for a trip like that and we also preferred to see fewer things but more in depth. We are both from Barcelona and therefore going to Latin America would be an easy choice as it has the most similar culture and same language!
Once we decided that we wanted to go to Latin America, we chose those countries where we had never been, those that we had close friends to visit and those that we thought were reasonably safe.
Now, once we already know the countries we want to visit we looked at typical itineraries in that country. Two good sources are the free "Getting started" PDF chapters of country guides that you can find in lonely planet website, and the other one would be
www.intrepidtravel.com. Looking at the these itineraries you can get a good grasp of how long you want to stay in each country. The order of countries had to be from north to south because we are starting our trip when its summer in the northern hemisphere and we want to finish during summer in the southern hemisphere. We are also lucky to have lots of friends that gave us tips on where and where not to go, which usually is much more valuable than what a guide can say...
Knowing the typical itineraries, we were able to book our flight tickets. We used a local travel agency because it was convenient, but
www.airtreks.com is a good company that gave us very competitive quotes. For flights within Brazil, a friend recommended the air pass of
www.brol.com. With the air pass we were saving about half of the cost of the individual flights!
These days we spend the days reading our new bibles: Lonely Planet's
Central America and
South America on a shoestring guides and fine tuning the itineraries.
For those who are curious we are going to go to Mexico, Guatemala, Costa Rica, Panama, Peru, Bolivia, Chile, Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay for a total of 138 days (four and a half months).
