¿Verano en Sudamerica?

A couple days ago the ESL teacher at the school I work at told me that she was thinking about visiting her home in Bolivia this summer. She said if she does it she would fly to Peru and then take a bus to Bolivia because flights to Peru are incredibly cheap right now. She told me they are only $300 right now, and I, being a generally skepticle person said I thought that would be amazing if it were true but that I would have to see for myself before I accepted that round trip flights to Peru were really that cheap. I looked it up that day and to my great surprise she was right. Flights are around $300 and after taxes the round trip flights from DC to Lima and back are under $400! Michelle and I were trying to decide what we should do with our summers off from teaching. We could make a few extra bucks teaching summer school, or we could utilize these summers before we have kids while we are both still working and go on some extended once in a lifetime vacations. We most likely wont be teachers forever and thus we feel we should make the most out of these two years tht we get two month long paid vacations each summer. We were really on the fenec about what to do until we learned how cheap it is to go to Peru. I have no idea why it is so cheap to fly to Peru. Quito, Bunos Aires, Santiago, Rio de Janeiro, and everywhere else I looked are all at least twice as much. I honestly wouldn't be able to explan it but it is true. We would love to tour some other countries besides Peru and fly home from another country but even just a return flight from another country is much more expensive. We are still thinking about it, spending a couple weeks making sure we make the right decisino and not rush into anything (as we did last year and were very forutnate to get refunds on plane tickets to Peru). We would probably go for a month or maybe even 5 weeks and try to at least visit some of the other surrounding countries. Since we would have plenty of time we would be able to save boat loads of money on transportation throughout South America by taking the bus instead of flying. I served my mission in peru and am pretty familiar with how much it costs to fly versus take a bus to different regions. It costs a couple hundred bucks to fly from Lima to Cusco but only a small fraction of that to take a bus. You lose a day on the bus but if time is not an issue you don't have to worry about it. The bus rides in and of themselves are scenic and you get to stop at some neat places. Bolivia is close enough to not have to fly to, but I am not sure about Chile and Ecuador. Wherever we went we would have to make sure we were back in Lima to fly home though. So we have a lot to consider, this would be a kind of big deal and you can't really change your mind. Pay off student loans or spend a summer in South America?