A two-days travel over Santa Catarina State

Santa Catarina is well known for its amazing beaches. In the summer (mainly January and February) the coast welcomes a lot of Brazilian and South American (maily Argentine) tourists. 

But that time I will talk a little about a travel that I've just performed over Santa Catarina's countryside. In Portuguese, this region is known as Mid-West and West of Santa Catarina. The highlight in this region is the people's origins, formed maily by German, Austrian and Italian descendants. Cities are very small, very well organized and the local economy is strong (based preponderantly on agriculture and livestock). 

As per map below, it was traveled around 500 km in this region. Roads are paved but in single lanes. Terrain is moutainouns which means roads with a lot of curves. The travel was made in June 16th and 17th 2016. Temperatures were very low (ranging from 3ºC to 12ºC) and heavy fog was our partner all over the two-days travel, 

Highlight is Treze Tílias, a notable small city with an architecture and people that remember something in Austria and Germany. In that city, it is a good idea to try the very nice brewery BierBaum.

Enjoy!

Ushuaia 2015: until the "end" of South America

Since I made this travel with my father in Jan 2015, I intended to write about the experience we had. When I planned to do this travel, I sought a lot at internet info about road, gas station, exchange, immigration etc. I would like to help the colleagues which intend to do this amazing travel. Let me put my thoughts in short points.

- We started our travel from São Paulo city, Brazil.
- Traveled 16,000 km (round trip) in 21 days.
- We took 30% of our estimated cost in US$ cash. We made very good deals in paying fuel, hotel and even food in dollar.
- Immigration procedures between Brazil and Argentina is simple and fast.
- Immigration procedures between Argentina e Chile is a bit confusing (a lot of travelers in a small place and few guidance).
- Important to have in mind specificities on documents and equipment to travel in Argentina (two reflective triangule, an specific device to pull broken cars and green card insurance to travel throughtout South America) and Chile (basically international insurance to be made in the internet).
- The number of cities decreases dramatically after you go in the South direction beyond La Pampa province. Even though this fact, it is not that hard to find small cities with small hotels (that was one point that concerned me before traveling, as some reports showed that it would be very hard to find hotels in Southern Argentina). Me and my father used Booking.com every day to find hotels or hostels, which helped us a lot.
- Peninsula Valdez and Perito Moreno: amazing places!

Below some pics of our amazing travel.








Have an excellent travel!

Getting started

Atacama desert... That's the place where the pic that introduces this blog was taken. Once me and my wife arrived in Calama airport, north Chile, I've chosen to buy two tickets and get a transfer to San Pedro de Atacama, far 100 km from Calama's airport. In that moment, I assumed that being without car and depending on turistic rides would be nicer and cheaper than taking a car in the airport.

When I took that decision, I thought it would be hard to find the turistic places. But, for my surprise (and it was good), all the visitation places are very well signaled. As I was not with a car, I would pay a lot of money to hire the rides from turistic companies. In addition to prices, it would be boring due to the fact that we would have to be stucked to turistic companies' schedule.

Well, after trying a lot, I've got a car in San Pedro de Atacama. It was very hard to find out this vehicle, in spite of the existence of a car rental in the city.

If I can advise something: if you go to Atacama desert by airplan, rent a car in Calama's airport. Use the interner to get a reservation at Hertz or Europcar.

I did this travel in Feb. 2016.