Top 10 coolest things I did in Latin America

There is no way to summarize Latin America in a list. I want to say that upfront, because the wonder that is Central and South America resists containment. It’s too alive, too layered, too full of the kind of experiences that don’t translate cleanly into words. But these ten are the ones that I find myself talking about at dinner tables, recommending to strangers, and returning to in my mind on ordinary days when I need to remember what the world is capable of.

There are plenty of other experiences that could have made this list. And probably a hundred more I have yet to uncover. But I wanted to share with you, first, some of my favorite things I did, what I felt, and why I think you should go find your own version of every single one.

Moving from the North to South… actually ranking these would absolutely send me into a spiral hahaha

Top 10 coolest things I did in Latin America
Final thoughts

Watching Volcán de Fuego erupt right before my eyes – Guatemala

Nothing prepares you for Fuego.

It starts with hiking up the BEAST that is Acatenango – Fuego’s dormant sister – a relentless, lung-burning climb through a dusty forest that eventually spits you out at basecamp. Here the air is thin and the temperature drops fast.. But here is also where you finally get the views you came here for: actual volcanic eruptions taking place in the distance.

And then, if you’re not completely destroyed (or if the adrenaline keeps doing what adrenaline does) you have the option to keep going. Down Acatenango and up Fuego itself, to stand roughly 500m away while the ground rumbles beneath you.

I chose to keep going.

Standing on a volcano while it actively erupts is one of those experiences that short-circuits your ability to form coherent thoughts. The ground vibrates. The sky lights up in intervals, orange and red against pitch black. And the sound, low and percussive and coming from somewhere beneath your feet, reminds you in the most visceral way possible that the earth is alive and has been long before you arrived and will be long after you leave.

We made it back to basecamp late in the evening hours. Then after sleeping for a handful of them, we woke before the sun to hike the summit of Acatenango. Watching dawn break over Guatemala from up there, Fuego still showing off in the distance… that’s the image I keep. The sheer, humbling power of the earth doing what it has always done, indifferent and magnificent.

Spanish School and a Homestay on Lake Atitlán – Guatemala

Lake Atitlán has a really special energy to it. It pulls you in and wraps you up with so much growth and experience.. And I think you could ask anyone who’s been and they’d tell you the same thing. It’s one of those places that earns every superlative thrown at it from it’s volcanic peaks rising out of the water to the indigenous villages dotting the shoreline.

My second time visiting, I spent a week studying at Lake Atitlán Spanish School. Four hours a day of one-on-one lessons, just me and a teacher, at a lakeside whiteboard that made the “classroom” feel pretty dang easy to show up to every day. My Spanish improved faster in that week than it had in months of casual immersion, because there was nowhere to hide. No group to blend into, just two people at a table, working through the language together.

But the homestay is what I carry most.

I stayed with a local family (their very first hosting experience.. I mean, how SPECIAL?) and they let me in completely. Their home, their meals, their rhythms. They opened up their chocolate-making business to me, proudly showing off what they had built and letting me come in and take part where I could. We laughed across language barriers, practiced over dinner, and existed together in such an easy, unguarded way that only happens when you’re a guest someone has decided to actually trust.

That family didn’t have to make it feel like home. They chose to. And that choice made all the difference.

Camping at El Espíritu de la Montaña – El Salvador

La Union doesn’t come up in most people’s El Salvador itineraries. And that’s exactly why I went.

There’s something about a place that hasn’t been smoothed down for tourist consumption that I find myself drawn to again and again. El Espíritu de la Montaña is that kind of place. A campsite perched high enough that when the sun begins to rise, you can see three countries at once from where you were just sleeping.

El Salvador, Honduras, and Nicaragua with borders appearing invisible from up there.

I was alone for this one. No group, no travel companions. Just me, the mountain, and a sky that must put on a show each evening without fail. And in the morning, if you’re willing to drag yourself out of a sleeping bag before dawn, the sunrise delivers something equally unreasonable.

Not many people do this one. It sits outside the normal traveler route and requires a bit more intention to get to. But that’s precisely what made it one of the most memorable nights I spent in Central America.

The 8-day Huayhuash Circuit – Peru

The Huayhuash Circuit is considered one of the top 10 treks in the world. Having done it, I understand why in a way that no amount of reading about it could have prepared me for.

You are never sleeping below 3,000 meters. Every single day involves crossing a mountain pass, climbing to elevations of 5,200 meters, moving through landscapes so surreal that your brain keeps reaching for comparisons and coming up empty.

This is not a casual undertaking. It is one of the most physically demanding things I have ever done.. and one of the most rewarding, by a significant margin.

I went with First Step Expeditions, and I cannot overstate how much the company you choose matters for something like this. They cared, VISIBLY, about the ecosystems we were moving through, the communities that call this region home, and the team that literally made the entire trek possible. That ethos shaped everything about the experience.

A brief mention is owed to the Salkantay trek to Machu Picchu because… obviously. If Huayhuash feels like too significant a commitment, Salkantay is the entry point. Breathtaking, challenging, and ending at one of the most iconic sites on the planet. But if you have the legs and the time and the appetite for something truly remote, Huayhuash is in a league of its own.

Sitting with San Pedro (Huachuma) in Pisac – Peru

I wasn’t sure what to expect. I’m not sure you’re supposed to be.

San Pedro is a plant medicine with deep roots in Andean tradition. It’s a ceremony, not a recreational experience, and one that asks something of you before it gives anything back. I came to it in Pisac, Peru, alongside a man I had known for barely a week and would leave counting as one of my closest friends. We spent the morning outside in the mountains as it began to move through us, and I remember noticing the landscape transforming (and no, not just visually lol).

Here is where I noticed the mountains standing there, less like scenery and more like something present. Something aware.

Then lunch arrived.

A bowl of quinoa, carrots, spinach, tomato. Plain by any objective measure. And yet it was the most extraordinary thing I had ever been handed. I could taste the soil it came from, the rain that fed it, the simplicity of something that had been grown and prepared without pretension. I sat with that bowl and understood something I couldn’t have arrived at any other way: it is so much simpler than we make it.

We are not separate from any of this, you know? Not from the mountain, not from the soil, not from each other. The boundary between me and everything else (the one I’d been maintaining my entire life) was invented. I came from the earth. I will return to it.

In between, I get to be briefly, improbably conscious of how extraordinary that is.

I stopped being afraid of a lot of things that day in Pisac. I haven’t fully found the words for what I gained.. but I felt it then, and I carry it with me still.

Road Tripping the Atacama Desert – Chile

I can say I’ve traveled through a lot of places now. And yet, I have not seen anything quite like Atacama.

It doesn’t look real. That’s the only honest way to describe it. The lagoons are the color of something a painter would get criticized for. “Too saturated, too improbable,” they might say. And flamingos stand in them like they’re entirely unaware of how cinematic the whole scene is. UGH and don’t even get me started on the sunsets. Every single one of them. I remember standing on top of a red clay mountain on my last night there, repeating over and over with my friend Lewis about how this had to be one of the top 3 sunsets of my life. It looked like the sky was being set on fire from the inside.

We did it by car, living out of it for a few days (besides a quick day-long detour when I got too sick to explore). There was a particular freedom to that, though, after months of buses and hostels and group itineraries, having a car again felt powerful.

The nights were what undid me. The Atacama sits at altitude with virtually no light pollution, and the sky after dark… even just a few days past the full moon like we caught.. was some of the most stars I have ever seen in my life. I lay with my head dangling out the trunk of the car more than once, feeling appropriately small.

There is nowhere else like it. Go.

Sledding down Villarica Volcano in Pucón – Chile

I know this one isn’t talked about enough. I mean.. I almost never heard about it myself!

Villarrica is an active volcano outside of Pucón in the Chilean Lake District, and the experience of it is exactly as absurd as it sounds: you hike straight uphill for five to six hours, crampons packed and ready to use, until you reach the crater and stand at the edge of something that is genuinely, actively alive. The sulfur hits your lungs before you fully register what you’re looking at and you peer into the crater for exactly as long as you can stand it.

And then you suit up. Sit your ass down. And SLIDE.

Ice chutes cut into the volcano’s face, flying down them – fast, faster than feels entirely reasonable, the mountain blurring past you as you pick up speed. Fire above, ice beneath, the absurdity of the whole situation hitting you somewhere in the middle of the descent in the form of involuntary, uncontrollable laughter.

It is one of the most purely fun things I did in my time spent in South America, reminding you what it might feel like to be a child again.

The W or O Trek in Torres del Paine – Patagonia, Chile

It really is worth the hype. I’ll just say that first.

I was meant to do the O Circuit (the full loop around the Paine massif) but temporary closures rerouted me to an extended version of the W instead. I was disappointed… for approximately the first hour of the first day, and then the landscape did what this landscape does, and I stopped thinking about what I wasn’t doing.

Torres del Paine is the kind of place that makes you understand why people dedicate their lives to being outside. The towers themselves, the glaciers, the electric blue of Lago Pehoé, the wind that comes in off the Southern Ice Field and reminds you exactly where you are in the world.

And on the last day, instead of taking the catamaran out of the park like most people do, I added one last 18km leg on foot out to the administration center. All because I wanted the panoramic views of every mountain I’d spent the last week earning my way through.

It was the right call.

Living Locally in Buenos Aires – Argentina

At some point in any long trip, the pace of constant movement stops feeling like freedom. Buenos Aires arrived at exactly the right moment.

I slowed down there. Properly. I found a rhythm going to the gym and wandering the parks in the morning, working into the afternoons, and building a small life in a neighborhood I started to recognize and be recognized in. The city made it easy. The parks are enormous and beautiful and full of people reading, running, sitting with a mate… existing without urgency. I made it a daily habit to be outside and moving, and felt myself settle back into my body in a way I hadn’t in months.

Buenos Aires is a city worth staying in long enough to fall for. I fell for it. I’m still a little bit in love with it.

Rio’s Carnaval – Brazil

Everyone has heard about Carnaval by now, but I’m not sure anyone is every fully prepared for it lol

There is a scale to it that description can’t quite capture from the color and the glitter to the press of bodies and music that is everywhere all the time. The way an entire city reorganizes itself around pure, unapologetic celebration for days on end is overwhelming in the most alive way possible.

I don’t know that I’d do it again. I want to be honest about that. It is a lot, in every sense of the word, and by the end I was running on very little sleep (not great for someone who likes to be in bed by 9pm each night). But I would never not have done it. It really is a one of a kind experience that earns its exhaustion. And I will always be grateful to have been swallowed by the pride they carry, even if just once.

Final Thoughts

10 truly insane experiences and I still wouldn’t say it’s enough.

That’s the thing about Latin America: the more you give it, the more it gives back, and the list never really closes. There are meals I didn’t mention and bus rides that changed me and conversations with strangers I’ll never see again that I think about more than I probably should. It really has gotten into me in ways I’m still discovering and that I’m sure I’ll be unpacking it for years.

Go. Stay longer than you planned. Let it change you, too.

Central America, South America, Travel

May 6, 2026

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