A Bit About Us

We are Mikey and Tamara, an adventurous couple who left the corporate world behind in April 2015 to explore the transit system and life in South America for a year (at least).

We met in college and have had some minor adventures together including traveling to Costa Rica, New York, Seattle, the Sierra Nevada Mountains, Alaska, and Hawaii, but this is our first long-term trip away from home. If we don’t get sick of each other, hopefully this will be the first of many long trips to see the world. Find out a bit more about us.

This blog is designed to serve a few different purposes. First, it will serve as a way for us to keep track of and remember all of the super fun times that we have. Secondly, we want to share our story with anyone who might be interested (maybe just our parents…). Whether you’re interested in South America or in transit or both, we hope that we can be entertaining. Thirdly, and most importantly, we want this blog to inspire you to plan your own adventure, as other blogs did for us. We want to provide helpful tools and resources that make you feel confident when stepping out of your comfort zone – or “going barefoot” as Tam would put it – and traveling the world. Feel free to ask us any questions here, or email us.

Why We Decided To Go

If you’re anything like our parents, we’re sure you are calling us crazy for quitting our well-paying engineering jobs in San Francisco to do something like this. And while yes, it is a little bit scary, it guarantees to be the trip of a lifetime. After about three years of the post college 9-to-5 working schedule we were feeling a little burned out and in need of some excitement. We thought about taking small trips to get us through but ultimately decided we wanted to go all out and fulfill a life dream we shared. We bought a huge laminated map of the world, hung it in our bathroom, and started identifying places we wanted to visit on every continent. We noticed the majority of our markings overlapped in South America. From there, it was a flurry of Lonely Planet research and reading other travel blogs to find out how feasible our ideal trip actually was. We looked at several different trips lengths and alternatives, ultimately choosing a yearlong trip that allows us to take the time to really enjoy the places we go. Sidenote: You might think it is pretty weird that we hung it in our bathroom, but it was actually a great place. Every time we stepped out of the shower, we were reminded of where we wanted to go. Every time we had extra time to sit and “think” in the bathroom, we could think about the trip. Every time Tamara was straightening her hair for hours and Mikey just wanted to brush his teeth, the map was there to keep us motivated.

How We’re Funding Our Trip

We’ve thought about this a lot leading up to our trip: how much it will cost, how to save, if we should try to work while we’re there, etc. Ultimately, we decided to try to save all the money we will need for a year before we leave. That is no simple task because we don’t really know how much we’re going to spend until we are out there spending. Therefore, we came up with what we thought was a conservative estimate, created a savings goal per month, and stuck to our budget. See our Monies section for more insight into our finances for the trip. Mikey created a cool spreadsheet tool that helped us keep track of all of our spending before we left so that we could limit our spending in non-essential areas and really focus on our monthly savings goal. Out on the road we are keeping a very detailed log of all expenses, broken down by day, week, month, country, and spending category. Can you tell that we’re both engineers? There are a number of apps that can help keep everything organized, but do you really want to whip out your iPhone every time you buy a mango from a street vendor? We are writing everything down in a small notebook and then copying the expenses over to the computer at the end of each day or week while we’re cozy back in the room.

Why South America

We both really want to see Machu Picchu, and Iguazu Falls, and Buenos Aires, but it is more than that. We want to go to a place we can stay for a really long time and experience as a local. We’re not millionaires so most of Europe was ruled out. We both agree that Asia could be cheap and fun, however we don’t think we could handle it for much more than a few months. The facts that Mikey can (kind of) speak Spanish and Tam has a Chilean passport/family in Brazil are big pluses. If you add it all together, we’re going to South America! There was a time when we were considering starting in California and somehow road-tripping all the way down through Central America and then into and around South America, but we ultimately decided that was too ambitious and we wouldn’t get to enjoy all of the places we would drive through. So we decided to save Central America for another trip and focus on South America. See our Destinations for cool photos of South American countries.

Why Transit

We both worked as transportation professionals so we obviously have some experience and interest in the field. It seems like wherever we travel together we are always comparing the transit infrastructure to other places we’ve been. We thought it would be fun to do a more thorough job of documenting what we anecdotally discuss anyway. We will try to emphasize mass public transit as much as possible. Therefore, buses (and hopefully some trains) will account for the majority of our transportation. Tamara is a little more patient than Mikey on long bus rides, but we have a few measures to keep us entertained – kindle to the rescue! Keep an eye on our Transportation section to follow us as we hop from bus to trolley to train to ferry to tram to scooter to gondola to whatever else that is willing to take us from Point A to Point B.

Travel Slowly

We don’t want to just fly in – fly out of all the main tourist hotspots in South America and then call the continent good. We want to enjoy the local life and not be stressed about always being on the road and making our next connection. There are a number of touristy “must-visits” built into our itinerary and those will be really cool experiences; however, we are equally looking forward to those days/weeks were we hang out in a small town and visit the local markets. At the end of our trip we will have a photo to remember visiting Machu Picchu, just like the other million people who visited during the year, but we will also have countless unforgettable experiences off the beaten path that will be even more cherished. Read our Slow Travel post for more details on how and why we decide to travel this way.

How to Pack For A Year

We decided to pack relatively light and only carry a small, carry-on sized backpack each. Mikey is carrying a 35L Patagonia pack and Tamara is carrying a 30L REI pack. It is certainly doable to carry smaller packs for those hyper-light packers, but we decided that we wanted to have enough room for all of our toys and didn’t want to worry about not being able to zip our packs shut. On the other end of the spectrum, we have seen far too many people traveling with massive 65L+ packs on their backs. We didn’t want to deal with checking our bags at the airport or stashing them under the bus out of our sight/control. This way we can keep our bags at our seat and have a bit more peace of mind that thieves aren’t rummaging through all of our good stuff while we’re napping. You might think that we couldn’t possibly fit everything we need for a year into two small packs, but we focused on a few high-quality, compact items that will last us a long time. See our current Gear List for a more detailed description of everything we’re bringing along.

Our Itinerary

We’ve put together a rough outline of the places we’d like to see in a logical order and timeline and we are calling it our itinerary. It is in no way a binding doctrine that we are going to strictly abide by though. We plan to just go where we want and when we want while visiting all the incredible places on our list. Then of course there are going to be those incredible places that people suggest along the way or that we just stumble upon. Check out our tentative Itinerary to figure out where you want to meet up with us!

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