Thursday, March 31, 2011

Research for our South America Trip

Now that our cruise is less than a year away we are busy planning, researching, and reading.  We are of course researching the most thru Cruisecritic.com and our roll call is huge!  Almost 200 people, heck we don't usually get that big a roll call when we sail  in the Caribbean!


We have a Lonely Planet book on South America, we have a book just on Rio de Janeiro and we have read them both!

We have narrowed down the flights and are just waiting for us to accummulate a few more air miles (probably will reach it some time this month) to book our flights thru Airmiles.ca   Looks like we will fly to Rio via Toronto and Sao Pablo and arrive six days before our crusie.  This should give us a lot of time to do a thorough tour of Rio and the sourounding area.  We are hoping to get a feel for the city and are currently researching three different tour guides to provide us with two days of tours.  We hope to narrow this down within the next two weeks.

We also hope to get out and enjoy the pre Carnival events.  As well as maybe renting bikes and riding around, taking the metro to downtown and  visit museums and perhaps visit some other sites that we miss while touring around.


I am trying to find out about visiting a Samba School while we are there but not sure if this will be possible because of being so close to Carnvial weekend.  But it would sure make Bernie's day.

With regards to the other cities we will visit, looks like we have a good understanding of what we want to do in each port.  We do have a tour of Volunteer Point in the Falklands allready reserved and it looks like his tour is allready sold out!

Not sure what to do in Lima, Bernie really wants to see the Nazca Lines, so hope he can get more information and see if it is at all possible. 

For now we are researching, but have a quick trip to the Mexican Riviera planned for April and then a coastal cruise home.