[mausoto]

Hey Mark, first of all let me congratulate you for this great website!!! It is exactly what I have been looking for and it will be very useful for me.

My name is Mauricio, I am 19 years old and in december I will have a friend come over to visit me from Italy here to Costa Rica. First I will take him to some great places here and then we'll depart with our backpacks to Panama, where the journey will start. From there we'll head to the south. We have almost nothing at all planned, in fact that is kind of the idea, since we want this trip to be totally flexible for us to have the freedom to decide where to go, etc. on the moments. More or less we want to visit Colombia, Venezuela, Peru, Paraguay, Bolivia, Brasil, Argentina, Chile, but as I said it is a totally flexible plan. For sure we will be visiting Machu Picchu and I am very tempted to the Inka Trail where you walk for about 4 days, but it will depend on the budget.

I am planning to do this with about 900 dollars, my friend probably has a bit more.

Anyway, do you think it is possible to move around like this through South America, without having previous reservations and still find cheap accomodation in hostels and transport in buses? This will be in the months of December/January.

Feel free to add any advice you want regarding anything .

I thank you in advance for any help you can give us and again, congratulations for such a cool website!!!