In order to do an obligated practical of two months for my university, I decided to go back to the "Research Center Taricaya" which I already visited for three months in 2013. I planed my internship for September-October 2016. Fortunately, Laura who had finished her studies as primary teacher, decided to do a internship in Latin America too.  After two months, mainly capturing and studying birds in the Peruvian rainforest, I  joined her. We met in Costa Rica and started from there on our travel through Latin America.

We stayed about one month in Costa Rica but only had the option to discover the country on weekends. However, we still had an awesome time and visited several national parks, the volcano Arenal and it hot springs and a cemetery in the ocean. 

End November we leaved the country to continue to travel to Panama. The first place, was Bocas del Toro which was a paradise in the Caribbean Sea. We couldn't have a better start. We learned how to surf and met some ingenious people. Of course we visited the famous "Panama canal" and we had the possibility to go up the second highest building of Panama city. We celebrated Christmas with an Rastafari, his family and whole neighborhood on the street of Peadsi and watched the firework of new year in Panama city before we continued our travel to Colombia. 

Colombia was my favorite country during the travel.  In Medellin, we had the possibility to do the Pablo Escobar tour and visited the dangerous neighborhood "Comuna 13". Hence, we learned a lot of the bloody history of Colombia. We climbed up to 4 000 meters above sea level for the first time in Salento and enjoyed the beautiful days old village in Villa de Leyva before we went to the amazing desert Tatacoa and to the sculptures of an unknown civilization in San Agustin.

In March, we arrived in Ecuador. We stayed mostly in the Andean region and enjoyed their handcraft. Ottovalo was our first destination and one of the favorites of Ecuador. Unfortunately, the weather wasn't great and we skip the hiking trip to the famous "Laguna Quilotoa", but not the lake. We released our inner child on a huge swing in Baños and climbed up to 5 000 meters above sea level on the mountain Chimborazo. Furthermore, we visited the first Inca site and Laura had the pleasure to met many guitar constructors.

On a two day drip from Vilcabamba to Chachapoyas, we crossed the border to Peru on the first April. It was now the third time I was in Peru and beside Colombia, it was a highlight of our travel. We discovered plenty Inca sites, of course Machu Picchu, where we did the same way I did in 2013. We reached our record and climbed up to 5 200 meters above sea level on the rainbow mountains (Vinicunca mountains), discovered turquoise blue lakes on the Cordillera Blanca in Huarz, surfed on the dunes of the desert in Huacachina. Moreover, we hiked during three days through in the second deepest canyon in the world, stayed for a week in the research Center Taricaya and visited the legendary floating islands of the Uros.

The last country on our list through Latin America was Bolivia. It was the end of our travel and beside a short visit at the city  La Paz, Surce and Santa Cruz de la Sierra, we manly concentrated to get to Tupiza where we started our five day trip to numerous lakes and the Salar de Uyuni.