South America Archives - Duff's Suitcase

Four months of South America in photos

Sarah Duff — Sun, 01 Mar 2015 19:57:02 +0000

The second part of this year-long around-the-world trip (after a three-month stint in the USA), was South America, a continent I had never visited. It had always seemed so far from South Africa, so I felt like a normal-length two-week trip would never cut it. I saved up South America for a time when I […]

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Providencia Island: Colombia’s secret Caribbean paradise

Sarah Duff — Thu, 12 Feb 2015 21:19:48 +0000

“Welcome to Providencia, where everything come in slow motion”, said our taxi driver, Jerry, as he coasted down the gently winding road along the coast of Colombia’s tiny Caribbean island. Jerry hooted and waved at just about every scooter and car that passed us: “I don’t know everyone on the island, but I will do […]

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A jungle trek to Colombia’s Lost City

Sarah Duff — Fri, 06 Feb 2015 22:55:10 +0000

Sweat ran in thick rivulets down my back, soaking through to my heavy backpack. My face felt as hot as a pizza oven. My thighs burned and my dodgy knees were aching. My breath came out as an unpleasant sounding rasp. I was less than two hours into a four-day trek through the Colombian jungle and […]

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Mashpi: a cocoon in an Ecuadorian cloud forest

Sarah Duff — Fri, 06 Feb 2015 20:34:52 +0000

I have a special place in my heart for cloud forests. There’s something undeniably magical about being in a world of trees, where every view is of hills of green wrapped in thick bands of mist, and every piece of moss is covered in jewel-like droplets of water. After a week in the natural Disneyworld […]

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An evolutionary Eden: the Galapagos Islands

Sarah Duff — Wed, 28 Jan 2015 19:18:32 +0000

“No area on Earth of comparable size has inspired more fundamental changes in Man’s perspective of himself and his environment” said ornithologist Robert Bowman of the Galápagos Islands, which he surveyed for UNESCO in 1957. Humans first stepped ashore on the Galápagos Islands, which lie just less than a thousand kilometres offshore from Ecuador in the Pacific […]

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Machu Picchu in photos

Sarah Duff — Fri, 23 Jan 2015 21:20:23 +0000

Photos of famous sights can be misleading. The Pyramids of Giza look like they’re in the middle of the desert, surrounded by empty horizons of sand, while they’re actually on the edge of the dirty, chaotic city, a Pizza Hut and KFC just across the road. Stonehenge looks like it’s in an English bucolic paradise, […]

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