My original plan would have had me visit Central America (Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica) and South America (Ecuador, Colombia, Peru, Bolivia, Chile, Argentina, and Brazil) between 9 January and 24 June 1997.
I recognized there was no way I could cover all that ground, so I had a very flexible plan (read: no plan) which allowed me to stay longer in places I liked and skip over others. While all of those places sounded interesting, I changed the itinerary to include several diving locations, forcing some reprioritization in terms of time and funds. I ended up coming home at the end of April and wishing that money grew on trees.
I wasn't able to spend nearly as much time as I would've liked, and not nearly enough to do any of those countries justice. I would go back to all of these places in a heartbeat and stay for months if I could.
On these pages you will find specific recommendations of places to stay, things I enjoyed, food to seek out or avoid, and the prices of everything I could write down (and I wrote down a lot.) Photographs from the trip are all arranged under the Photography page by location.