Hi there! I am Simon Jackson and am taking a career break from working in London to travel round South America with my wife and partner Alison Jackson for most of 2018.

This blog will record our journey around South America as we share our experiences and photographs with you.

We are not complete novices to South America, including Colombia in 1989 and Brazil for the World Cup in 2014, as this will be our sixth journey here, but it will be the longest as to get under the skin of many of the places you need to spend more than a couple of days.  Also for many years we have always had the ambition of travelling the Pan American Highway end to end, however doing that alone misses out on the wonderful country of Brazil.

Part of the attraction of South America to me is that back in the 1920’s my maternal grandparents came out to Colombia to work in one of the banks there.  My grandmother as a newly wed travelled out on a German banana boat from Hamburg to Cartagena, Colombia.  There she had no knowledge of the language, learned it in the markets there and they carved out their lives in both South and Central America for most of their lives.  My mother was born in Bogota and spent her early life there and in El Salvador and  Guatemala.  We first went to Colombia in 1989 on our first journey to South and Central America and have subsequently been over in this part of the World several times now.  This trip by being able to spend rather longer in each location unlike before will hopefully enable us to get more under the skin of the continent than a simple tourist can and may even help us both learn a bit of Spanish and Portuguese.

We have not limited our travelling to just South America, having traveled extensively round Europe and have been to India, South East Asia, North America and parts of Africa. Indeed on one of a number of work trips to India I was asked “Simon, have you been to India before?” And could respond that when a student I travelled overland from Shrinagar in the North right down to getting the ferry to Sri Lanka in the South, which elicited a number of amazed responses.

We are big football fans and have supported our local team Arsenal for many years, and personally I have been to nine FA Cup Finals which is a better record than most teams.

I am also a keen amateur photographer and will share a number of my pictures as we go along our journey.

Back in London we have packed up and rented out our house for a year and exited our jobs so there is no going back or cold feet.

Our journey begins on Monday 22nd January 2018 in Sao Paulo, Brazil and ends on Thursday 20th December  2018 in Bogota, Colombia.