I am sorry to say I have only been to South America one time. And that was about 50 years ago, when I took a trip to Bogota and the upper Amazon (Colombia and Peru) and then traveled to Lima, Cuzco and Machu Picchu. That’s it.

My reactions back then? I was surprised that Bogota seemed like a modern city. I thought the Amazon one of the most beautiful areas I had ever been in, I thought Lima a rather dull and ugly place. I thought Cuzco fascinating and of course the same of Machu Picchu. I thought rural Peru was enthralling, and the people who lived there seemed (and this is okay) from another planet.

My guess is that if I redid that trip today, things would be different. Bogota and Lima would be much bigger (they were large then) and have more skyscrapers (in 1970, metropolitan Lima had about 3,000,000 people and now has more than 11,000,000; metropolitan Bogota also has about 11,000,000 and in 1970 had a little over 2,000,000). Machu Picchu has been more built up for tourists. Cuzco is probably about the same because of strict controls (I am guessing that; have no clue, really). Iquitos, the isolated capital of the Peruvian Amazon now has about 500,000 residents; in 1970, it had fewer than 100,000. As to the river itself, then populated virtually exclusively by indigenous villages, again I am not sure.

Charles Darwin visited South America in the 1830s, on the Beagle, where he was the ship’s naturalist, and he spent the time exploring and collecting and drawing and explaining what he found. Both fauna and flora. We all know that it was that lengthy five year voyage to South America and the Galapagos Islands that provided the basis and framework for his later work on evolution. I have never read his Voyage of the Beagle, but I have read (years ago, as well) the fascinating description of the trip in Alan Moorehead’s Darwin and the Beagle. My reaction reading that book (I had already been on my Amazon trip) was: WOW!! How things have changed.

Although I haven’t been back to South America in the pat 50 years, I have tried to keep up with the many (often exciting, often sad) things that have happened there, and I have a pretty good idea of what each of these countries look like today. I am a geography buff (and have been since I started collecting stamps at probably about age 8) and I do pay attention to these things.

I also do a fair amount of travel reading. So I was interested in a book titled Silver Seas and Golden Cities, published in 1929 by Francis Parkinson Keyes. I can’t tell you much about Keyes. I know she wrote a number of well-read books. I know her husband was a U.S. Senator. But anything more I told you about her would be speculative at best, based on insufficient knowledge.

In the late 1920s, she traveled throughout Latin America, for the specific purpose of writing this book. She got the royal treatment on her trip. Perhaps because she was going to publish an account of the trip, perhaps because of her husband’s position, or perhaps for some completely different reason, on each stop, she was met by members of the local elite and treated to the best each location had to offer. The fact is that, while some of the best was truly first class, other of the best was quite challenging.

The reason the book interested me so much as I read it is again, as when I read about Darwin and compared his South America with what I had seen in 1970 or so, and what I think about what I know about South America today, is how much things have changed.

For example, when she was in Venezuela (we know how much that has changed over the last decade), and had been hosted by the President, she was impressed with a country on its way to boundless future. Her next stop was Rio de Janeiro, she realized that “you couldn’t get there from here”. Remember that South America, as opposed to our own continent, is a very uneven place, with high mountains, broad rivers and extensive jungles, making transportation very difficult. There was no land route from Caracas to Rio (today there is, according to GPS, and it will take you almost four days to drive it; it is almost 4000 miles), and of course you couldn’t jump into a commercial airplane in the 1920s. There also was no direct sea connection. To get to Rio from Caracas, you had to take a ship to Barbados. From Barbados, you had to take another ship, to Trinidad. And from Trinidad, you could take a boat to Rio de Janeiro.

In the 1920s, Rio had about 1,500,000 inhabitants (exact number seems unclear) and one of the things that Keyes was most impressed with in this resort-like city was its safety. It was by far then Brazil’s biggest city; Sao Paulo, now the continent’s largest city with about 23,000,000 residents (yes, you read that right) was then not even worth thinking about visiting.

She went to Buenos Aires, which she called the Paris of the Americas and thought one day would rival Paris in all ways – there was no possibility that future of Argentina was not rosy. The trip to Iguassu Falls in the 1920s was a real ordeal. To get there from Argentina, you had to do river travel, railroad travel, and more. Days and days to see the waterfalls. And yes, she says, well worth it in spite of the hardships. When she went around Cape Horn through the dangerous Straits of Magellan and visited various overly large plantations there and crept up the Pacific Coast, you got the feeling that the future was clear here as well, although the cities were a bit more conservative and laid back than in the east. And, by the way, she loved Ecuador, which seemed to be then virtually an unknown country, a place no one was paying any attention to, and that she really thought at least some tourists should put on their itineraries.

My purpose in writing this is not to give a full description of her trip, which is worth reading, or to give a full review of her books, also worth reading, but simply to look at how much South America has changed from the 1830s to the 1920s, to the 1970s, to today. Sure, I understand that every place as undergone radical changes over this time. But compared with the United States, for example, I think that South America has radically out-changed us. I just wish I could document this better to myself through more personal exploration.