#budgetbackpacker

Meet my new friend Ben.

You see it’s actually a pretty strange coincidence how Alex and I met up with Ben in Amsterdam. Alex, who is from Germany, first encountered Ben in Paris at a couch surfing hangout. For those of you who do not know, couchsurfing is a site which connects travelers to locals or to other travelers. One may stay at a person’s home and or they may just meet up with others.

Anyways, Alex and I decided to have a reunion in Amsterdam. We both were searching for a couchsurfing host and lo and behold Ben, who is originally from the U.S., showed up. She didn’t even remember that he was living in Amsterdam. Unfortunately, we didn’t get a hold of him in time, so we opted to book a hostel. We ended up booking seperate hostels that were thirty minutes apart due to availability.

Surprisingly, we actually did end up staying at Ben’s lovely home. We decided to meet up with him Saturday night and he offered for us to stay there since it would be way more convient. So yup, we paid for our hostels and ended up not even staying the night in them. Instead we were hosted by the amazing Ben and had a wonderful time.

Euro Trip 2019- A Different Kind or Trip

Colca Canyon Tour

The sad thing about this specific story is I suffered and didn’t even achieve greatness of hiking to a summit or something of that nature.

Six in the morning, we woke up in the city of Arequipa. My throat dry and my nose runny, I quickly dressed for our 2 day tour to Colca Canyon.

On the bus, we drove through gorgeous, scenic, natural landscapes that reached some pretty high altitudes. My ears were the first to give signs of the oxygen decreasing. Then came the headaches. I was already stuffy, so you could say, I was definitely having problems breathing from a normal day. Thankfully, Peru had its special kind of medicine for high altitude- coca leaves. In the side of my mouth, I had a big ball of leaves that I chewed profusely. I felt like a country boy chewing tobacco.

The bus stopped to see alpacas, llamas, and pecunias. At night, we stayed in a relatively nice hotel (at least for backpacking standards). There I slept and slept and sweated and coughed and sniffed. I was pretty gross to say the least. Anyways, the next day we were able to see the magnificent Colca Canyon!

Workaway Número 3 in Chile

Wow, so who would of thought that we would have spent our whole time in Chile doing workaways(not us). But then again, who didn’t do any major research on Chile; so therefore, didn’t realize how expensive Chile can be on a budget(yup, that would be us).

The funny thing is that we literally just went 5 minutes away from our 2nd workaway in Chile to go to our 3rd. Out of the whole city of Valparaiso, we managed to stay on the same hill!