Two Monkeys Travel take Craghoppers climate-hopping in South America!
I’m Jon, from Two Monkeys Travel and together with my fiancée Kach, we’ve been living in and travelling around South America for almost a year now, writing about our own and other travellers’ adventures on our website, Two Monkeys Travel.
After 6 months of living in Arequipa, a beautiful colonial city built from white volcanic rock in the high altitude desert of southern Peru, we started travelling again.
One of my favourite things about this continent is vastly different climates and landscapes, right next to each other. In Peru alone, you can travel along the rocky shores of the Pacific Ocean, surfing huge waves and savouring the best ceviche, then track inland across the blistering desert lowlands and sand dunes, then up into the Andes Mountains to explore ancient city ruins in the Selva Alta – high jungle. Only a day’s south from Cusco takes you up to the highest navigable lake in the world. All this without even mentioning the 780,000 square kilometres of Peruvian Amazon Rainforest.
We recently spent 3 months living in southern Costa Rica, where 40 degrees, 80% humidity and day-long thunderstorms were the norm. We bought the cheapest car we could find and toured around the country, just about keeping it running the whole way! When we left Costa Rica, we headed south through Panama, then crossed the Caribbean on a sailing boat for 5 days to Cartagena, Colombia. After almost 2 weeks of sleeping in hammocks on riverboats, we started our Brazil adventure, along the coast, then inland to Iguassu Falls, where we are right now.
In a few days we’ll cross the border into Bolivia, before heading back to our old temporary home of Peru. Finally we’ll travel north through Ecuador and back into Colombia again.
One of the challenges of travelling South America is all the different climates you have to prepare for – I’ve doubled the size of my pack before with warm clothing that I used less than 50% of the time and that is something I’ve wanted to change for a long time.
That was my main aim when we started talking to Craghoppers about our latest journey. We knew that we would be starting in Central America, with intense heat and humidity, then travelling through the Amazon, before heading south in the middle of Brazil’s winter, which is hot during the day and comparatively cold at night. Bolivia is quite similar, but with more extreme temperatures at high altitude.
We’ll be crossing through high and low altitude all the way through Bolivia, Peru and Ecuador, until we get back to Colombia at the end of August.
Craghoppers sent us a mixture of clothes that we can use for different climates without carrying loads of stuff.
The Nosilife Convertible Trousers have been amazing travelling through hot countries, especially when you need to change from shorts to trouser quickly to stop getting bitten by mosquitos. The Nosilife Nemla Short-Sleeved Polo Shirt is casual, but smart enough to go get something to eat in. Plus it’s lightweight and takes a good 2 to 3 days of use before it start to smell! I even proposed to Kach wearing it on a desert island in the Caribbean Sea.
The Luka II Vest is like a lightweight gilet and was really good just to take the edge off the cold from day to night. We haven’t had chance to use the Kiwi Winter-Lined Trousers yet, but they’ll probably come in handy when we’re in Bolivia and Peru and we’ll definitely need them on the way to Antarctica later this year!
Kach loves her Nosilife Sabana Dress, because it’s been warm enough to wear on cold air-conditioned buses, but it seems to be cool in the heat too and looks really nice. We’ve even been using the Compresslite Jackets too, because they squash down into tiny little bags and then we stuff them into the Kiwi Pro Rucksack for long bus journeys, when the bus drivers turn the AC onto freeze mode for no obvious reason!
We’re only half way through this 3 month trip, but so far, we’ve definitely been able to travel with less clothes and still have everything we needed. It’s the first time we’ve really thought about using specialised clothing and it’s well worth it. We’ll have to wait and see how we go in real cold weather when we get into Bolivia – I’ll update later. Now we just need to find a way to reduce the amount of chargers and cables we carry around to run the website!
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