8 Documentaries from our South American Gap Year
Two years ago we were in the middle of homeschooling our kids while slow traveling through South America. In addition to a backpack full of school supplies and a few online learning tools, our curricula was the wide world around us. But in my post on worldschooling essentials, I neglected to mention another important tool we used: documentaries.
In Brazil, the first country we visited, we watched shows about Patagonia to get ready for the next leg of the trip.
After Chile, a land of nearly 100 active volcanoes, we found a documentary on a couple who studied volcanoes together.
In Ecuador, we learned about the fading local practice of harvesting ice from the mountain glaciers from a documentary. With all the experiential learning we were doing day in and day out, sometimes it was nice to get the kids to calm down and sit in one place for a while!
Long Way Up
A fun docuseries where Ewan McGregor and his friend Charley Boorman take electric motorcycles from Ushuaia, Argentina, at southernmost tip of the continent, all the way north to Los Angeles, covering 13,000 miles in over 100 days. We ended up following in their footsteps multiple times, hitting Ushuaia, Punta Arenas, La Paz, among other places. We even had our own bout with altitude sickness, just like Obi Wan!
The series builds on their previous series Long Way Around (London to New York through Europe, Asia, and North America) and Long Way Down (Scotland to the southernmost tip of Africa).
Patagonia: Life on the Edge of the World
Continuing the theme of Star Wars actors, we watched this miniseries on Patagonia narrated by Pedro Pascal. The show’s creators seemed to have taken not only the Mandalorian’s voice, but also the heightened dramatic music from the Star Wars spinoff, into producing these stunning scenes of survival and adaptation in some of Patagonia’s most remote places.
Our kids loved saying, “life on the edge of the world!” in Mando’s voice over and over again.
Wild Life
We didn’t end up watching this documentary until recently, but our friends whom we stayed with in Chile told us about it. The show explains how some of the recently created national parks in Chile came about through the initiative of Doug Tomkpins (founder of NorthFace and ESPRIT clothing companies) and Kris Tompkins (former CEO of Patagonia).
The couple bought enormous swaths of land. They went through painstaking efforts, sometimes risking their own lives, to conserve them as wildlife sanctuaries and re-introduce some of the native wildlife species. The ending is very moving.
Biggest Little Farm
Well, this is nothing about South America, but the founders of one of the permaculture farms we visited in Brazil, Projeto Maara, told us that this show is what made them decide to leave their corporate jobs, put their life savings on the line, and start doing regenerative farming and nature restoration.
Our kids loved the show! There is a sequel, but it’s really just a rehashing of the first movie and, in my opinion, not worth watching.
Fantastic Fungi
Bart, our host at EcoCaminhos farm in Brazil, told us we needed to watch this. Again, while this is not about one of the places we visited per se, at EcoCaminhos we did talk a lot about nurturing the soil as part of how we grow healthy food and restore the land. Fungi are a critical element to microbial life in the soil. The movie was mesmerizing, and, dare I say, psychedelic.
My Octopus Teacher
We watched this show in a sweltering little cabin in Mendoza, Argentina. I’m not sure how we found it, and it had nothing to do with our current location. But in the spirit of worldschooling and learning from what’s around you, we loved watching the man in this story make friends with an octopus in his “backyard.”
He finds that she has a personality and learns life lessons from a creature so totally foreign to human beings. This show definitely tops our list of family favorites that even our three-year-old thoroughly enjoyed.
How do we know? He sat through the whole show without complaining or hopping off his seat to do something else! That can’t be said about many of the other shows we watched.
Fire of Love
This is a pretty weird show, honestly. It has lots of footage of lava flowing gorgeously down mountainsides, bubbling and shapeshifting and causing lots of ooohs and aaahs from our family.
It documents the story of Katia and Maurice Krafft, a wife-husband scientist duo who spend their lives chasing volcanic explosions. Spoiler alert: they end up dying in the last of the volcanic eruptions they chased down, in Japan.
Having just traveled through Chile, amongst a number of active and dormant volcanoes, we were primed to learn more about them. One takeaway, for example: there are two kinds of volcanic eruptions. The effusive red lava kind, though they look hot and scary, are actually much safer than the explosive, grey ash and rock kind.
The Last Ice Merchant
This mini-documentary showcases the life of Baltazar Ushca, the last of the indigenous Ecuadorean ice harvesters. Twice a week he climbed up Mount Chimborazo with his donkey to chip blocks of ice to pack in grass and bring down the mountain to sell to shops to make snow cones and other products. Ushca died in October 2024.
Our friend David Edgren, who contributed a blog post about Ecuador here, tipped us off on this documentary.
