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We made our way south along the coast, and decided to pull into the tiny town of Ayampe to overnight. Ayampe consists of one main dirt road, about a mile long, from the PanAmerican highway to the beach. Another dirt road runs along the water. Inviting little open air restaurants and hostels are scattered in among the foliage. A smattering of young travellers roam around and there is a low key surfer vibe on the beach. It was very chill compared to Canoa and we liked what we s

Our drive to the heart of the coffee zone, also called the Eje Cafetero (Coffee Axis), from Bogota to the town of Salento was ‘mostly’ uneventful - at least for the first 4 hours. It’s a long drive without a doubt, but the first 4 hours to Iguape were a breeze on four lane roads with not much traffic. Then came the mountains. We’ve driven plenty of difficult mountain passes and this wasn’t much different except for the fact that we were driving on the only route East to West

More than half of the country is not covered in the Lonely Planet guide for Colombia because of security issues. The guide says the security situation is unstable in those areas, and in many places tourist infrastructure simply does not exist. Violence has plagued this country for five decades, one of the word’s longest-running insurgencies. The reasons for the fighting are complicated. The guerrillas of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, known as FARC, claim to be f

Our departure from Baranquilla was delayed by a few days. John got hit with some strange flu bug. Or what we thought was some strange flu bug. He had body aches, fever, and was really weak. He rode it out in the Sheraton Hotel (our oasis hotel chain on this trip) in the fetal position. Two days later, after we set up camp in the mountains on the Caribbean Coast, I went down too. We think that we both got hit with the Zika virus that's been spreading through Latin America with

Gratitude. My attitude about gratitude is different now. It’s for different things and in different degrees of magnitude. I used to think I was grateful before, but I seem to reflect on it more now. Or maybe I just feel it more intrinsically. Not just for the amazing opportunity we have to not work for a while, but our life on the road this past year gave us simple pleasures that brought me joy. On many an evening we swam in oceans and rivers and lakes until dark. We practice

Cool mountain air. Cool camping. The coolest bird. The air doesn't feel like air anymore. It feels like a hot, damp, wool sweater we put on every time we do more than sit still. We are so done with the heat and humidity. It makes us lethargic and cranky. Locals we talked to also complain that this is an unusually oppressive October. Awesome. So we opened the map to look for higher ground and cooler temps. Only a couple hours north from here are the mist-covered peaks of the T

Costa Rica is said to be a great country for adrenaline junkies. We’ve had a few adrenaline rushes since we got to Costa Rica, and not all of them have been pleasant. The first one was during our border crossing from Nicaragua into Costa Rica. A few days before we crossed, we read about a guy who had overstayed his vehicle permit in Peru by one day - and the border officials impounded his motorcycle. He was in a mess trying to get it back; red tape, fines, lawyers, etc. I sa

As in Antigua, volcanoes surround us in Lake Atitlan. The lake is set in a gigantic bowl of deep blue water, with little villages dotting the coastline. At night we fell asleep to the twinkling lights of these villages. The middle of the night often brought light shows put on by electrical storms shooting around in the clouds. The volcanoes seem to stand sentry around the lake; their lightening bolts warding off evil spirits. We felt protected and safe here, right on the wate

Belize is our first foreign border crossing. We decided to do our border run into Belize instead of Guatemala because we heard it was an easy crossing. It was. The hardest part was finding our way around the newly constructed roads (with no signs) to get through each step in the process. All in, the crossing it took us about an hour. Which is good news, because 2 weeks later we will do it all over again in the opposite direction. As we cross the border and drive less than a

We ended up spending most of our time on the East Cape in Los Frailes. We met a couple, Monica and Jeff, in Los Barriles and caravanned there with them. We had met before at the Overland Expo in Flagstaff, AZ last May. It really is a very small overlanding world we are discovering. Los Frailes is a long sandy beach with a small fishing camp on one end, and a row of palapas on the other. As soon as we turned off the road, we passed lots of big RV’s camped in the bushes of the