What to Pack for South America: 32 Backpacking Essentials
Written by Lia Garcia
Before we left for 5 months of South America backpacking, we spent months researching what to pack for South America (or rather, I did – Jeremy’s less persnickety about these things). Well, after 5 months of backpacking through Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Chile, and Argentina, we can safely say that we’ve fully field tested everything that we packed for backpacking in South America!
While we made a few mistakes on that trip – there are quite a few things that we wish we did or didn’t pack – we also packed a lot of travel gear that was perfect for backpacking South America!
Since that first trip a few years ago during our year-long honeymoon, we’ve been back to South America many times – and on one occasion, we even took a group of Jeremy’s high school students with us. We’ve now perfected our packing for South America!
In this packing guide, we’ll share our favorite travel gear for South America with you. This isn’t meant to be a complete list of what to pack for South America (you know, like, “bring a t-shirt” and so on – you can find plenty of those elsewhere), but rather a specific compilation of our favorite, field-tested gear recommendations.
Whether we use them daily or they’re just incredibly handy in a pinch, this list has all of our favorites: the best things that we always pack for backpacking in South America! I hope you find our packing tips handy when creating your packing list for South America.
May 5, 2022
Practical Wanderlust
Hey there! We’re Lia & Jeremy. We created Practical Wanderlust in 2016, just before throwing all of our stuff in storage and embarking on a year-long honeymoon. The honeymoon was pretty much a disaster, but we had a great time anyway.
On our blog you’ll find practical, down-to-earth, budget-friendly travel tips that will help you avoid making all of our terrible, terrible mistakes. We love off-the-beaten-path travel and discovering what makes a place unique (and a little weird). Our goal is to inform you & make you laugh (preferably at the same time). We want to show that travel doesn’t have to be perfect – sometimes it’s a complete disaster, and that’s OK too!
LIFE OUTDOORS
MEDIA MENTIONS
Depending on where you travel, you may want to pack bug spray, too. In places like Florida and North Carolina, summers get buggy, and you’ll be happy to have packed a spray on nights when you want to sit on the porch or dine outdoors.
MEDIA MENTIONS
As a veteran of the Iraq War, I found myself struggling with post-traumatic stress disorder from which greatly impacted my mental health. In 2016, I came across the film “Wild,” an adaptation of Cheryl Strayed’s memoir about healing by hiking the Pacific Crest Trail (PCT).
MEDIA MENTIONS
Sawyer Permethrin Premium Insect Repellent is used on clothing, not skin, and it provides long-lasting protection against ticks.
