Meet Camilo Novoa | Traveller, Athlete & Surgeon

We had the good fortune of connecting with Camilo Novoa and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Camilo, what do you attribute your success to?
The most important factor in the success of what I do, at least from my perspective, is that it is non-profit. The main engine that moves me is the passion that I have for creating content for the reader to embark on a journey through my narrative and photographs, giving them the necessary knowledge and motivation to venture on their own. When you do anything that you are passionate about without focusing your success on financial goals it is unlikely that you will fail. It’s important to learn how to channel the effort you put in into the work to meet your ends goals. If you can achieve that, the rest will follow smoothly. You need to put the work in to make your idea a reality and grow exponentially from there.

Can you open up a bit about your work and career? We’re big fans and we’d love for our community to learn more about your work.
Bitacorasdeviaje.cl was born in 2012. It started as something personal, with the sole purpose of collecting relevant travel information for friends and acquaintances who wanted to travel like me. Today, it is has become a brand on its own and it’s acknowledged and supported by my peers and distributed in different channels. The road to success has been slow, it takes time to create worthy content and choose pictures that translate what I want to convey and being able to deliver it all in words that my readers can relate to. When you work for free, that means you must take time away from your real job, which is hard for me, as I work as a surgeon. I am a medical doctor by profession and like most doctors, what I have least is time, thus keeping Bitacorasdeviaje.cl alive and make it grow has been a slow process.

I currently have the support of important brands such as Patagon Journal, Volkanica and Andesprofundo who have seen in my project a way to create quality content with a purpose. They have given me a bigger platform to publish my work reaching a bigger audience, which ultimately increases my desire to keep going on. This is my little grain of sand that I’m giving to the sports and travel world.

If you had a friend visiting you, what are some of the local spots you’d want to take them around to?
This is undoubtedly the best question you could ever ask me. I live in Patagonia, Chile, where everything you do it’s related to nature. We would start touring Puerto Varas, my hometown, enjoying the beautiful views of Lake Llanquihue and the Osorno volcano as a backdrop while we eat a “ceviche” and drink craft beers in a local restaurant on the shores of the lake. The next day we would go to “Seno de Reloncaví”, a place where the Petrohue river meets the ocean. Later, on the same day, we would enjoy kayaking in one of my favorite spots. We would spend the night in the town of Cochamó, to have an early rise to get to “La Junta”, one of the most beautiful and renown places in the area, where we would spend the next three days camping, trekking and rock climbing in giant granite walls very similar to Yosemite’s walls. After the exhaustion of several days enjoying the outdoors, we would go to Puelo, a town very close to Cochamó, and we would visit the famous hot springs, relax the whole day soaking in hot water and eating artisan pizzas and having a much-deserved night sleep in a lodge. The next day we would go to Hornopirén, a small town adjoining the beautiful National Park with the same name. We would go hiking up the majestic volcano that lays in the middle of the park, crossing a beautiful forest of coigues, tepa, ferns, and decorated with abundant exotic fungi. The final prize is the incomparable view of the Patagonian fjords and surrounding volcanoes. We then return to Puerto Varas through Seno de Reloncavi and finish our trip at a restaurant where I can promise you will taste the best barbecues Chile has to offer. This trip has the perfect balance of adrenaline, beautiful landscapes, food and relaxation.

Shoutout is all about shouting out others who you feel deserve additional recognition and exposure. Who would you like to shoutout?
Without a doubt, there were a series of events that turned this initial idea into what today is bitacoradeviaje.cl. The first time I made a travel guide, it was about Torres del Paine National Park in Chile during 2012. At that time, information was difficult to attain and it was hard for me to prepare for a trip where I had little to no information. That’s why, when I came back from that expedition, I set out to create the best travel guide ever written about Torres del Paine. Later, I found out that my guide had more than 40,000 downloads and many people had written to congratulate me on giving them something accurate on what to encounter in such journey. I recall on one occasion, I met a stranger while I was hiking, who recognized me and told me that he had used my guide to travel and that it had been very helpful, and that made my day. I owe the success of my project to all my readers; they are my motivation to keep on going. I write for them, knowing that they can learn from my experiences and that they will not only get a simple travel guide, but also my life story.

Website: www.bitacorasdeviaje.cl

Instagram: bitacorasdeviaje.cl

Facebook: Bitacoras de viaje – Camilo Novoa

Youtube: Camilo Novoa

Image Credits
Camilo Novoa Tomas van-Wersch