Anyone who has been following our drive around the world knows we are slow travelers. It took us two-and-a-half years to drive from the United States to Peru. There have been many overlanders who started down the Pan-American Highway after us and are already finished their journeys! So you will be shocked when you see the map of how much ground we covered in this video, leaving Peru and entering Chile. We didn’t intend this, but we had to make a 2,000-kilometer detour. 🫣
Watch now:
We complete our seven+ months in Peru with one final, mandatory stop: Lake Titicaca and the artificial floating islands of the Uros people. From our camping location, we take a boat tour with Omar, who lives on a floating island with his wife and two young daughters.
We learn so much from Omar about how many centuries the Uros have lived like this and what it takes to create a floating island, so make sure you watch the video for that fascinating insight.
From there, we drive for two days to reach the Chile border, near Arica. It’s an organized, straight-forward crossing for us. But the officials are very serious about confiscating fruits, vegetables, seeds, and grains. They even took popcorn kernels from our friends! Trying to smuggle in a few dollars’ worth of produce isn’t worth it. Arica has well-stocked grocery stores where you can resupply almost immediately.
We don’t plan to spend long in Chile. We want to visit the village of San Pedro de Atacama, then cross the border into Argentina at Jama. Unfortunately, two days before we need to use it, the crossing at Jama is shut down! This is due to some kind of road damage, maybe from landslides.
So our only alternative is to continue south through the Atacama Desert, the driest place on earth. We end up taking a 2,000-kilometer detour to the south, skirting Santiago and crossing into Argentina over the pass at Los Libertadores. But now I’m getting ahead of myself! We’ll share Argentina with you in our next video.
Come see us at Overland Expo West 2024!
We announce at the start of our video that we’ll be attending Overland Expo West 2024 in Flagstaff, Arizona! The dates are May 17-19, 2024.
Our Jeep Wrangler, which was our first overland build dating back to 2018, will be on display in the Storytelling Pavilion. Our big presentation will be all about the Pan-American Highway (and overlanding Latin America in general). And then we’ll be on several roundtables covering a range of topics.
If you’ve never attended Overland Expo before and want to learn more, you should read our article: 10 Tips for Your First Overland Expo.
What’s new with Hourless Life?
It’s hard to believe, after how hard and long we worked for it, but we are less than three weeks behind on YouTube! Moving forward, what you see from us on YouTube will be nearly real-time video updates.
But of course, not everything shows up on YouTube. We try to be transparent, but we also want to keep our channel fun and interesting. So not all the daily challenges and “adulting” hurdles make an appearance. Those things tend to be shared on Patreon, which we rely on as a safe, supportive community to let down our guard more.
In our next video, we plan to share more about the logistics of long-term overlanding and some of the mistakes we’ve made lately. It’s hard to know everything, but we can learn from our mistakes for the future.
-B
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