Excellent South America travel guides

My friend Marek, after a recent visit to Ecuador, found and sent me a link to an article about climbing Rucu Pichincha near Quito. I really liked the article and upon browsing the site, called Live Travel Guides (www.livetravelguides.com) for a few minutes found many other great articles filled with tons of great advice and travel tips of locations all around me here in Ecuador I realized how useful this gem could be. With the help of the travel comunity this site could effectively overrule the need for hauling around a thick bible, (a.k.a, LP Guides, Shoestring, Footprint) of where to go and what to do in South America. Along with the other list of webtools I’ve put together on my site, its really becoming much easier to get to many interesting and unique places a bit further “off the gringo trail”. Of course, the caveat being that as sites like this become more popular, the places they elaborate about become more turistic and less off the gringo trail. But I believe the goal is not to hide away all the cool places in the world, rather, to keep the information about these places as up to date as possible. Much of the information in these softback “bibles” we travelers follow is VERY often outdated, missinformed, or misleading. I will suggest this site to the CouchSurfing.com community’s South America group.