Travellers' Tales

Travellers’ tales: Two very different backpacking trips. Rachel Holmes, 36, and her family spent five months travelling round South America.

Two weeks after my husband, Danny, was made redundant, we decided to take the money and run – to South America, a region neither of us had been to, with our two young children. It was our last chance to travel before Evie, who was three, started school and Frankie, seven months old, became heavier and less portable.

We looked at the weather and booked a one-way flight to Peru with the vague aim of doing a U-shaped journey, ending in Brazil and taking in Bolivia, Argentina, Chile and Uruguay. Our only must-sees were Machu Picchu and Iguazú Falls. We travelled light, filling two 70-litre rucksacks with clothes for all of us.

In Copacabana, Bolivia, we got a taste of political unrest, with buses to La Paz cancelled because of road blockades. Rushing to get to a bus we’d heard was leaving, we got stuck in a procession of indigenous people shouting anti-government slogans. Despite the high tension, every protestor had a smile and a few words for the kids. We stayed in hostels, B & B’s, weird empty golf resorts and finally Airbnbs, which were always the most difficult because of arranging to hand over the keys.

Daily budget: Around £70 for the family.

One thing we would have done differently: We’d have saved Bolivia for when the children were older and more capable of dealing with the altitude. They both got mildly ill and didn’t sleep well. Tony Giles, 40, spent three months backpacking around West Africa. I am totally blind and 80% deaf in both ears without my hearing aids, but I’ve visited all the seven continents, and in 2017 I backpacked solo through Ghana, Burkina Faso, Ivory Coast, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau and Senegal, staying with local people, via couchsurfing. com. I researched the countries I wanted to visit using screen-reading speech software on my laptop. I changed the SIM card of my simple mobile phone, as I journeyed through each country. But mostly I learnt to trust people I met on the streets to guide me into museums and other tourist attractions, and even to help me get money, because cash machines in Africa don’t have audio technology like they do in the UK.

Travelling blind and partially deaf in Africa is challenging but rewarding, as most people simply want to help. I experienced places with my cane and other senses, noticing the rough, uneven, often broken pavements and roads and was often guided by my couchsurfing hosts or one of the many kind locals I met.

Each bus journey was exciting and adventurous. All the bumps and bounces, the twists and turns gave me a picture of the country as I travelled. My hosts took me to bus stations, helped me buy tickets and told the conductors my stop.

It took more than 30 hours to reach the Guinea border from Abidjan, due to terrible roads and taking the wrong bus. After a comfortable night in Nzérékoré, I caught a shared taxi, 10 people in a seven-seater, and bumped, rattled and bounced all the way to Conakry, Guinea’s capital. My couchsurfing host had to rescue me from the military police who were being overly inquisitive about a blind guy roaming their city alone at 1 a.m.

The next morning, I was off to Guinea-Bissau, or so I thought. Unfortunately, not only did the shared taxi from Conakry to Bissau take more than six hours to find the necessary passengers, but also had the slowest driver in Africa, so we crawled into Bissau 50 hours after leaving Conakry. I stayed two nights with a friendly local and explored the capital with his girlfriend, the market being the highlight, along with the harbour.

Daily budget: About £20.

One thing I would have done differently: Organising visas in advance would have saved a lot of time.

Adapted from the Guardian website