This little piggie went to market

Chugchilan, Ecuador
[by Paula]

We have become proficient enough at getting ourselves lost without any help from anyone, so we really don’t need someone telling us that when we’re going north we’re actually going sideways.

Jeremy reacts to seeing the equator by displaying his Ministry of Silly Walks repertoire.

And so it was when we crossed the equator. We pulled into the ‘solar clock’ at exactly 0°, in Quitsato, Ecuador and glimpsed the much-anticipated line on the ground. We’d made it! We straddled it, star-jumped over it and did funny walks across it, because that is what you must do when you encounter that magical point between the earth’s hemispheres.

We were so happy. But by the time we’d finished listening to the guide’s explanation about the solstices, the position of the sun, and the spinny-spinny earth thing that my dad used to demonstrate with apples and oranges, our world had been turned upside down. Or sideways, by about 23°.

I know we should have known this. Science is not our strong point – we prefer words. We decided to move on from the shock news that north is not up, the news that all our lives we have been lied to, and focus on looking for somewhere to camp.

Miguel’s super-enthusiastic uncle insisted on a farewell photocall. Quitsato, Ecuador.

The Quitsato guide, Miguel, saw we’d arrived in a campervan and asked where we were staying that night. “No idea,” we said. He said his family had some land we could camp in, just a few minutes drive away. Brilliant! We got settled in and spent much of the afternoon and evening talking to various sections of Miguel’s massive extended family, including a particularly enthusiastic uncle who questioned us for hours on every subject imagineable, and giving our Spanish skills a bit of a workout.

They wanted to know what we thought of Ecuador. We were able to report that our first week had been all good. We hadn’t eaten roasted guinea pig yet, but it was on the list. That day we had tried one of the area’s specialities, bizcocho, a sweet melty flaky pastry served with a cup of hot chocolate and a finger of stringy mozzarella-style cheese. I asked the family why they served cheese with hot chocolate. They just looked at me and burst out laughing, as if I was the weird one.

We’d spent the first week in the country in Otavalo, a delightful mountain town with famous animal and crafts markets, and surrounded by volcanoes and lakes.
We settled into a beautiful campsite with volcano views from every angle. When the skies were clear we could see the shining snow-capped peak of Volcan Cayambe from our door.

Volcan Cayambe from our van door, Otavalo.

On market day we had a rare spree at the craft market – some winter-wear for the van, including an alpaca wool blanket and two woolly hats to brighten up the headrests.

At the animal market we restricted ourselves to spectating only. Loudly protesting pigs were being lead around on strings, chickens carried around underarm like bags of rice, and guinea pigs pulled from sacks and held aloft amid passionate bartering for the price. We definitely haven’t reached the stage where we can face buying our dinner live.

One of the most strikingly obvious differences between Ecuador and its neighbour Colombia is that the former still has a significant indigenous population, some of whom still wear traditional brightly-coloured wool clothing, long plaits and trilby-style Andean hats. The children are often just wearing miniature adults’ clothes, which makes them look so serious. Tiny little girls shuffle about in blouses, shawls and thick woollen skirts like – as we say in Scotland – ‘wee wifies’.

On a less poetic note, the other differences from countries we have previously visited are the shiny new roads and cheaper petrol. The Ecuadorian government, under the popular Rafael Correa, has discovered that if you collect taxes you can do things like build roads. And if you renegotiate your contracts with multinationals so your own country profits from your oil, you can have cheaper fuel and more money for social projects like education and health.

Guinea pigs for dinner anyone?, Otavalo.

We marvelled at the smooth drive south from Otavalo, over the equator, and down to the capital city, Quito.

For reasons mentioned in earlier posts, the van was still in need of some TLC, and we took it straight to a mechanic Jeremy had found online. A German former racing driver, who specialised in German cars. Now, surely, if someone could help us he was the man!

We left him to investigate while we spent nearly a week exploring Quito. We had a great feeling about it – after Mexico City, it was the best capital we’d encountered. Its dramatic mountain valley setting, lovely colonial centre, good (if crammed) trolley bus system and endless cheap cafes were a treat. At 2,850m (9,350ft) it’s the second highest capital city in the world. We puffed our way up to some of its higher points to get a spectacular view over the city, and one day I left (vertigo-afflicted) Jeremy behind to take the ear-popping telefériqo (cable car) another 1,000m up to get a vista from cloud level.

We spent an evening in the city’s chi-chi La Ronda area, drinking way too many jugs of canelazo and watching a modern Andean folk band that was so good it made Jeremy realise the panpipes are not something only to be played blandly by ridiculous stripey-trousered poncho-wearing hippies on Britain’s high streets.

Next day we took our hangovers to a Sunday morning football match, between LDU Quito and Macará (1-0) and were entertained by constant singing and drumming throughout. Later we dragged our heavy legs up streets that make San Francisco look like a billiards table, and were rewarded with the magnificent Capilla del Hombre, an impressive and moving space dedicated to the work of Ecuadorian artist Oswaldo Guayasamín, who focused his life’s work on the oppression of indigenous poor of Latin America and the brutality of man, but also on hope for social progress.

It seems a bit shallow to go from that to our campervan woes… but meanwhile at the mechanic…. after a process of elimination, and an ultra-sound clean-up of two dodgy fuel injectors, the mechanic told us one was beyond repair and needed to be replaced. Was this available in Ecuador? If you have ever read this blog, then you will know what the answer is – of course not!

One was swiftly ordered from the US, and we left the van behind and set off southwards by bus to explore the area around the town of Baños while waiting for the part to arrive.

When we got there we met up for a good catch-up with fellow road-trippers Thomas and Sabine – last spotted by us in Nicaragua last June. Who knew you could ‘bake’ apple strudel on a stovetop? Thanks Sabine!

The cable car gave me a cloud-level view of Quito.

From a hike high above the town we got an almost-too-close-for-comfort view of the smoking Volcan Tungurahua, which last had a major eruption in 2006 and was recently responsible for local evacuations in December 2012. Eek.

We travelled to nearby Ambato for another footie match, this time a home game for Macará, against fellow bottom of the table-dwellers Deportivo Cuenca. From the stadium, aptly named Bellavista, we got a bullseye view of Tungurahua’s smoking cone. The locals were battered 5-1, and by the language being directed at some of their players and their manager, I think they would have happily tossed them straight into the volcano’s fiery throat.

Baños is – unsurprisingly, given its name and location – centred around its volcanic hot springs and various spin-offs like massages and therapies. This week we walked that fine line between pleasure and pain when we took a ‘health steam bath’ in our hostel. A portly Ecuadorian lady cooked us for several minutes in a steam box that was not unlike being put in the stocks, then removed us and doused us in freezing water, before locking us back in the steam box. After three rounds of that we were blasted with a cold jet hose.

It’s a similar process to the one our fuel injectors have been going through this week but, at just $4 each, we anticipate our own de-tox will turn out to be considerably cheaper.

Days: 539
Miles: 17,551
Things we now know to be true: Almost every map ever made is a lie.

—–

HOUSEKEEPING – HOUSEKEEPING – HOUSEKEEPING

Below are some photos of our first couple of weeks in Ecuador.
In other housekeeping news, our Colombia campspots map is now complete.

Also, we’ve been doing a belated catch-up of our Colombia photos on Flickr. If you haven’t been subjected to these several times already, click here for our Flickr collections

A pig awaits its fate, animal market, Otavalo, Ecuador.

Chicks for sale, animal market, Otavalo, Ecuador.

Woman and baby, animal market, Otavalo, Ecuador.

A woman brandishes one of many guinea pigs she has for sale, animal market, Otavalo, Ecuador.

Chicken trading, animal market, Otavalo, Ecuador.

Shopping at the Animal market, Otavalo, Ecuador.

Animal market, Otavalo, Ecuador.

Many indigenous people wear spectacularly bright colours. Animal market, Otavalo, Ecuador.

New purchase? Calf and owner at the animal market, Otavalo, Ecuador.

Shopping at the animal market, Otavalo, Ecuador.

Sheep walkies, animal market, Otavalo, Ecuador.

Kitten for sale, Animal market, Otavalo, Ecuador

Chicken trading, animal market, Otavalo, Ecuador.

Shopping for a blanket, craft market, Otavalo, Ecuador.

Jewellery galore, craft market, Otavalo, Ecuador.

Basket of wool, craft market, Otavalo, Ecuador.

Sorry Mr Pig, but you made a delicious lunch. Otavalo, Ecuador.

Shopping for dinner, food market, Otavalo, Ecuador.

Set camera timer. Sprint up rock. And… look relaxed..!

Laguna Grande looking ominously grey, Lagunas de Mojanda, near Otavalo, Ecuador.

The Dears reach point-zero. Equator, Quitsato, Ecuador.

Jeremy is pleased to be crossing the equator, Quitsato, Ecuador.

Keeping a foot in both camps. The equator, Quitsato, Ecuador.

Our first alpaca sighting, Quitsato, Ecuador

A five-day-old alpaca stays close to mum, Quitsato, Ecuador

Plaza San Francisco, Quito, Ecuador

Sorbet for sale, Quito

Plaza Grande, Quito, Ecuador.

Quito spreads for miles along the valley.

Bolivar is the undisputed hero of most of Latin America.

I can never get over the fact that Calla lilies grow outdoors here, usually in the highlands.

The great thing about Latin American football matches is that there is a steady flow of food and drinks for sale in the stands.

In the absence of a Spurs match, Macara vs Deportivo Cuenca will have to do.

If you want this view of Banos, your legs have to pay the price.

Banos by night.

The smoking Tungurahua volcano looms large behind Ambato’s football stadium.

Hasta luego Colombia

Campspot with a view, Tatacoa Desert, Colombia

Otavalo, Ecuador
[by Paula]

Hello Ecuador!

We’d been in Colombia so long we were in danger of starting to look suspicious to the authorities. The last customs official to renew our car permit told us one more month would be plenty to get us to the border. So we took the hint… and after five months there it seemed like a good time to start heading south again, which is, after all, kind of the aim of this journey.

We were sad to leave. But our grief rapidly lifted when we crossed the border and filled the tank with petrol at less than a third of the price of Colombia. US$1.48 per gallon. Let me say again, hello Ecuador!

Good morning Ecuador. Otavalo is our first stop.

Our last couple of weeks in Colombia had fulfilled our now expected quota of serenity, drama, beauty, wilderness, city stress, desert, mountains, mechanics, blistering heat, cold nights, rain, drought, and ups and downs of both the geographical and emotional variety.
The bad day, of which we blogged recently, was joined by some others vying to be contenders in the Really Bad Days stakes, but they were – happily – outnumbered by some last minute entries in the Best Bits of Colombia contest.

The morning after that hideous day we started up the van without a hitch and were chaperoned by the owner’s son, Jose, to Hacienda Venecia – a coffee finca that served as a perfect haven for a few days. The fabulous view, fresh mountain air, bracing swimming pool and a rare, indescribably brilliant, hot shower were only enhanced by the constant smell of fresh roasting coffee.

I may be a tea addict, but even I could appreciate that what we were drinking there was some of the best around. We took a coffee tour one sunny morning, and learned a lot about the process, the politics and the economics of growing coffee – which at the moment is a pretty disastrous situation for most small growers in Colombia and beyond.

Our journey through coffee country took us onwards to the less idyllic location of Pereira, a fairly unremarkable industrial city that contained something crucial for our future progress – a VW specialist mechanic. There followed a few days of back and forth, with the owners Martin and his wife Liliana gradually adopting us as their latest cause. As suspected, our recently-bought ignition wires were shot to pieces and needed to be replaced. A few days of searching for compatible parts in Colombia led to the conclusion we expected – nada.

We had no option but to order some from the US and hand over obscene amounts of money to FedEx to get them down to Pereira quick smart. To make sure there was extra pressure added, we were scrambling to get everything done ahead of the interminable shutdown that happens in Latin America at Easter.

These wax palms are really tall. Valle de Cocora, Colombia

As we headed off to the nearby mountain retreat of Salento to wait out the delivery, we asked Liliana when they would close for the holidays, at which point she generously offered up their home phone number. “Whenever the parts arrive, call us at home and we’ll open up the workshop for you”, she said. Result.

From Salento we got re-aquainted with our hiking boots and tackled the steep trail up through the Valle de Cocora, with its impossibly tall and incongruous-looking wax palm trees. At Finca La Montaña, hummingbirds with luminous long tails darted around among the flowers, announcing their presence with a whirr that seemed disproportionate to their size.

As we returned to the town we rewarded ourselves with two regional specialities in a local restaurant – trout with a giant patacone (bashed, fried plantain) and the heart-condition-inducing bandeja paisa; a platter of chorizo, blood sausage, ground pork, fried pork rind, rice, beans, avocado, fried plantains, fried egg and arepas. “I wonder if you’ll get through all of that!” I mused, about 180 seconds before Jeremy washed down the last bite with a swig of Aguila, then accepted some of my spare patacone.

We were outside the FedEx office at 8am, the day before the Easter holidays, gazing at the as-yet-unopened office door like a pair of creepy stalkers. By this time the car was really in a bad way, with steep uphills proving to be the ultimate nightmare. The parts were there. Yay! We just had to hand over yet more cash (a disappointingly high import tax) before we could pick them up. Boo. All we had to do was drive them across the city to the mechanic.

Post-hike snack for one. Bandeja Paisa, Salento, Colombia.

Unfortunately Pereira is like a mini Latin American version of San Francisco. As we tried to navigate the one-way systems we kept coming upon the most vertiginous streets imaginable. It was like a weird dream – we just had to get 6 blocks over that way, whilst avoiding all one-way streets and up-hill manoeuvres. At one point we had to roll back down a hill that the van simply refused to drive up. A passer-by, on hearing our predicament, suggested we reverse about one kilometre down a one-way street to get there. Helpful.

Thanks to Jeremy’s photographic memory of the city’s grid system, finally we made it! After a long day the new wires – and a new coil pack, if you are remotely interested – were fitted. We drove off, heading back to Salento, with the van feeling all powerful and macho again.
About 20 minutes later, as we ascended the mountains, we started to lose power, again. It was nowhere near as bad as before but was undoubtedly still playing up.

Much as we’d wanted to avoided it, the next day we dragged Martin and Liliana away from their holiday to investigate. He spent hours sorting out a problem with the electrical wires governing the throttle, or something, and then would not ask for any money (we soon rectified that).

The van was driving really well, powering up hills like it actually enjoyed it, and we headed off south with renewed gusto. During a quite punishingly mountainous drive we stopped to drink a coffee and let the brakes cool. As we pulled out again the shop owner shouted for us to stop, pointing to brake fluid spilling all over the back tyre and saying ‘dangerous’. Before we knew it we were surrounded by a group of guys, some of whom were roving highway mechanics (aka highway robbers). It all seemed rather convenient, and we were suspicious at first, but when he pulled the wheel off there was an obviously deteriorated rubber seal on the caliper.

“We’d been so furious we’d thrown every penny we had at them. One km later we came upon a road toll. No money.”

He went off for 2 hours to source some replacements and after the wheels were back on, the bill they presented us with was laughable. At nearly 3 times what we’d paid for a highly technical mechanic to work on the van for a day and a half in Pereira, this bill was no joke. We had a furious argument. The truth was we didn’t have the cash to pay it, but even if we had we would never have accepted it. I told them they could have the money we had on us (less than half of the bill) or we could go together to the next city and “take advice” about it, perhaps from the police. They took the money we offered and we sped off.

Trouble was, we’d been so furious we’d thrown every penny we had at them. One km later we came upon a road toll. No money. The officials refused Jeremy’s pleas about what had happened, refused to change our US dollars or take a card and, for the sake of $4, they told him to hitch 12km to the city to find a cash machine. After walking 3km a motorcyclist stopped and picked him up, ‘kindly’ offering to pay the toll and then drive with us the ATM so we could pay them back. When we arrived we offered a tip to say thanks, but they demanded a ridiculous $25 for their petrol. We were so sick of arguing by this stage we threw the money at him and drove off. In 5 months we can safely say we had not met any nasty or unwelcoming people in Colombia, and yet in the space of a morning we’d had them in spades. When added to recent frustrations, we temporarily lost faith and felt down for a little while.

But here I am rattling on about the van again – it was still going, and the next 10 days saw our spirits life as as we put in a lot of miles, by our standards, and visited some of the highlights of the country.

We left the mountains for a while and descended to the hot valley that leads to Colombia’s tiny southern desert, Desierto de la Tatacoa. The desert, ah how we love it! 

Camping in Walter’s living room, Espinal, Colombia.

At the end of day one of driving there we were looking for a place to camp and asked at a country club outside the town of Espinal. The owner wasn’t keen, but a guy who was there giving a tennis lesson offered us a space to camp at his house. Okay, we said, if you are sure you have space. He got in the van and directed us straight into the busy town square. ‘Here we are!’ he said. Erm, we explained again that we wanted to camp, in case he hadn’t understood. ‘Yes, my house is very big’, he said. Two street stalls were moved aside to make room for us to drive through large gates sandwiched between a packed restaurant and a shop. We drove in to find a house arranged part outdoors, part indoors, with a living and dining area outside and bedrooms arranged around the courtyard. We would be camping right next to the the sofa in his living room! Definitely a first.

We took advantage of the location and went straight into the adjoining restaurant, which specialised in a local dish, lechona – a slow roasted whole pig stuffed with rice, pulses and spices and served with a sweet stuffing. Oh yes.

A bumpy final stretch took us to the desert the next day, and one of the best camping spots we’d encountered in Colombia. We enjoyed sunset beers and early morning coffee from our position on the edge of a spectacular canyon, filled with jutting cacti and a labyrinth of protruding rock formations that changed colour with each stage of the day.

Heading south and west, towards the Andes and the Ecuadorian border, we spent a glorious few days in San Agustín, the site of hundreds of pre-Columbian statues in the surrounding hills and forests. On a horseback trip through the area, the scenery was spectacular, taking in lush fertile farms of fruits, coffee, yuca and bright red peppers. On a coffee stop at a little house we were talking with the owner about the animals he had. He pointed into a little hut and asked if we knew what ‘cuy’ were. “Yes!” I exclaimed, looking a three cute little furries, “a guinea pig was my first pet.”

“We roast them over there,” he said, pointing to a large clay oven beside us. Oh. A taste of things to come in Ecuador, where guinea pig is a popular dish. 

Horseriding around San Agustin, Colombia

Moving on from San Agustín was never going to be easy. We had three options for getting back over the Andes to Popayán. 1. The very rough, albeit shortest and most common route, otherwise known as the ‘Kangaroo Express’. 2. A similarly rough, and more dangerous, route known as the ‘Trampoline of Death’, or 3. A really really long way round that involved backtracking and taking a, reportedly, less terrible gravel road. We asked the police about the state of the road in option 1, which we had heard was, on top of just being generally bad, churned up with road works and deep muddy ruts.  ”Well, there are guerillas in that area, but if you are lucky you won’t encounter any,” he said. Right. Actually we were just asking about the road surface, but now you’re really spooking us.

After much deliberation we decided on option 1, before changing our minds at the last minute and taking 3 – the long way round.

What a day. After about 6 hours on normal roads and 5 hours of grinding along the washboard gravel road – all through spectacular scenery – we were rewarded with a final awesome stretch through the páramo near the 4750m Volcán Puracè. Wow. 

We arrived in Popayán at twilight and managed, almost, to stay awake through dinner before collapsing. We felt like we were on the home straight, we were going to make it to Ecuador.

The spectacular Sanctuario de las Lajas was our final sight-seeing stop in Colombia

Two more days of driving got us to the border, via a beautiful stop overlooking Volcán Galeras, plus the unreal Sanctuario de Las Lajas, an enormous cathedral built on a bridge over a gorge near the border town of Ipiales.

As is often the way, we spent our final night in the country in rather grimy circumstances – at a gas station truck stop convenient for an early start to the border. We reflected on our 5 months in Colombia, all the things we had seen and done, the amazing people we had met, and the fact that – despite the luxurious amount of time we’d had in the country – that there was still plenty we hadn’t seen.

As night came we couldn’t believe it when another overlander pulled into the truck stop, a guy from Switzerland. We chatted a while and he explained that he had only crossed into Colombia from Panama one week earlier.
“A week!” we said. “And you are already leaving for Ecuador?”
“Yeah”, he sighed. “There’s just nothing to see here.”

For once, we were truly speechless.

Days: 519
Miles: 17,484
Things we now know to be true: Everyone sees the world through different eyes.

Learning all about coffee, Hacienda Venecia, nr Manizales, Colombia,

Waking up and smelling the coffee, Hacienda Venecia, coffee country, Colombia

Hiking through the rock formations, Desierto de la Tatacoa, Colombia

View over the labyrinth of rock formations, Desierto de la Tatacoa, Colombia

Desierto de la Tatacoa, Colombia

Rock formations, Desierto de la Tatacoa, Colombia

Rock formations, Desierto de la Tatacoa, Colombia

View from our campspot, Salento, Colombia

Relief after a steep climb while hiking near Salento, Colombia.

Forests of wax palms are a strange site in the mountains near Salento, Colombia

Sharing our campspot with the animals, San Agustin, Colombia

Fresh beans are ground for coffee during our horseride near San Agustin, Colombia

Pre-Columbian statue, San Agustin, Colombia

View of Volcan Galeras from our campspot near Pasto, Colombia

500 days!

Today we celebrate 500 days on the road!

People often ask, ‘what have been the best bits?’ Impossible to answer. They range from huge awe-inspiring sights – like hiking an active volcano, gazing at Mayan ruins, or looking a snake in the eye – to little moments that would be lost in translation.

It’s been 500 days of exploring, learning, making friends, being rescued by strangers, having more time to be silly, to read, to think, to look around, to travel without a plan. It’s involved spectacular beaches, mountains, jungle, wildlife, and indigenous culture. There have been ill-advised ferry journeys, crazy cities, sanity-stretching bureaucracy, a lot of food, even more beer, unhinged drivers, a few scary moments and more mechanics than we could shake a catalytic converter at.

Here’s a slideshow, not selected for its artistic merit, but because it might go some way to summing up some of the sillier moments of life on the road.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

Portrait of a bad day

Pereira, Colombia
[by Paula]

Life on the road has so many advantages it’s hard to know how to begin to quantify it. I don’t think we need to explain, any more than we have, how it feels to be free – at least for this chapter of our lives.

But despite all the obvious privileges, when you are travelling there is no reason to presume you can escape having a bad day sometimes. You know, those days that come along specifically to be utterly, unambiguously, shit. There’s just no getting away from it, and any traveller that tells you otherwise might just be fibbing a little.

We had one of those recently, and it went something like this. (*all times are approximate)

Nice spot. There’s just one flaw….

4pm: We are en route to the town of Honda, between Bogotá and Manizales. We’re pleased to have left Bogotá behind and, after a brief stop at the mechanic as we left the city, are reassured(ish) that we have no major mechanical issues to worry about. Before Honda we come upon a road block – unbeknown to us this section of the main route across country is currently closed every day from 11am til 6pm. Not wanting to drive after dark we turned back and find a good camp spot a few miles back. The owner asks us to camp in a spot with a great view over the mountains, but it’s down in a bit of a dip.

10pm: The rain comes on with gusto. It rains and rains, all night. Jeremy has half-awake concerns about whether we will wake up in a quagmire.

7am: We wake up in a quagmire.

8am: As we try to exit the campspot the van creates a nice deep sticky trench for itself and sinks into the mud. The owner and his wife try to help push us out, and we make several attempt to get some grip under the tyres with rocks and our levelling blocks. It’s still raining – everything and everyone is caked in mud. The main thing is, we have to get out of there soon so we can drive the section of road that will close at 11am for seven hours.

9am: The owner calls a neighbour with a truck to haul us out.

Bugger.

10am: After 5 rope-snapping attempts, we are still well and truly stuck.

10.20am: New rope found. Finally freed! I’m sliding the van all over the place as the truck drags us out of the dip, with Jeremy et al pushing from behind. “That looked like fun!” said Jeremy. No, it wasn’t. No time to wash the mud off, we make for the road so we can get out of the area before 11am. As we try to ascend the very steep driveway, the car loses all power and stops in the middle of the hill. I roll back, put it in first and take a run at it. It works, but we are worried about the severe loss of power, which is something that’s been happening on hills recently.

12pm: After grinding through queues of trucks we’ve made it to Honda, and quickly check emails for news we are hoping to get from various editors we have pitched story ideas to. Nothing. Grr. We head for the steep mountain road to Manizales, where there is a coffee finca we really want to camp at for a few days.

2pm: The van has been behaving terribly since we left Honda, bunny-hopping up the hills, losing power one minute and leaping ahead the next. It smells of burning plastic. We pull over at a hilltop cafe and see there is something like hot wax pouring from under the van, and solidifying on the ground. We ask the owner to call a mechanic, and two arrive from the next town. Our car scanner shows that two more of the (new) ignition wires are misfiring, along with some other long-running issues we’ve had with the catalytic converter and fuel/air mix – possibly all related, or not…

3pm: The mechanics insist that the hot grease is nothing to panic about (really?). We follow them into the town and they look under the bonnet. We explain about the ignition wires, and they say we really have to drive on to Manizales to find a specialist. That means climbing up to about 4,000m (more than 13,000ft) before descending again. We decide to go for it.

3-5pm: Hellish 2 hours of more of the same. Feels like the van is going to keel over any moment, and there’s hardly anywhere safe to pull over. Jeremy keeps telling me to move back in my seat, he can’t see in his wing mirror because I am a hunched-over ball of tension, leaning forward with my head in my hands. We are willing the van to just get to Manizales. We think we will make it although it will probably be dark when we do.

Sorry, on account of you officially having a Bad Day, we have had to close this road.

5pm: (one hour before dark). Another road block. The route is closed ‘for about an hour’ for urgent road works up ahead. No choice but to sit it out.

6.15pm: The road opens and we sputter ahead. We are going so slowly we are a hazard to ourselves and others. We come over one of the highest passes at twilight and can see the belching, snow-capped volcanic peak of El Ruiz ahead of us. The clouds are below the road. Spectacular.

7.15pm: Feels like we are never going to get there. Big delay when the road goes to one-track and two lines of traffic have a face-off. The truck ahead of us, and one coming the other way, have half their wheels up on the bank and are so tipped as they nudge past each other that the tops of their trucks are touching. I’m picturing being there all night if they topple over.

8pm: We finally arrive at the outskirts of Manizales. We’ve been so preoccupied we didn’t notice that none of the leaflets or guidebook actually have a proper address or directions to the finca we want to go to, but we know it’s about 20 minutes out of town. We stop and ask the police if they know it. The officer calls the finca – they say that it’s too complicated to find it in the dark, and suggest we get a hotel and call them in the morning for a chaperone. Tiredness, altitude and sheer bloody-mindedness affects our decision-making. We really, really, don’t want to go to a hotel, so we decide to screw that advice and try to find it anyway.

9pm: We are still asking around random taxi drivers and petrol stations for directions, and getting closer to finding out roughly where it is, although no one seems sure. We head out on what we think is the right highway.

The always-active El Ruiz volcano. An eruption in 1985 killed some 25,000 people.

9.30pm: We follow a sign to the area where we know the finca is. It immediately becomes a narrow downhill track with towering grass and bushes at either side, so we can’t see a thing ahead or around us. We are very tired, starving, and getting quite scared. All I can think of is that squeezing through this path reminds me of the Stephen King film Children of the Corn. We don’t really want to go on but there is nowhere to turn round either.

10pm: We finally see some light ahead and have a glimmer of hope it might be the finca. But as we turn the corner we see it is a luxury mansion. We pull up and the owner leans over his balcony to see what the hell is going on! Jeremy calls up to them for directions to the finca. Him and his grandson come down to the gate and explain that the owners of the finca are relatives of theirs. They know where it is, but it’s a bit complicated to get there – the most direct route requires crossing a river and the road has been washed away. As they explain the way we need to go, I finally crack. I just want to drink a barrel of wine and go to bed. I ask if we can safely sleep on the track near their house, as it is too late now to try to find the finca.

They insist we come into their property and park next to the house. When we pull up it looks like a scene from Father of the Bride – huge luxury home, swimming pool, and a manicured garden set out with gazebos and tables adorned with cloths and flowers, as if they are hosting a wedding. The whole family comes out to greet us – turns out the owner’s daughter is turning 50 the next day and they have gathered there to have a party for her.
They are so kind, asking if we need food or drink, and chatting to us about our trip. They say they will escort us to the finca in the morning. They show us to a bathroom we can use, and I am mortified to even step in there as my feet and legs are still caked with mud. Everything is so shiny and smart. We must (we do) look like tramps.

Getting ready to leave the morning after – pictured with two members of the family, Simon and Santiago.

11pm: We cook our dinner in the van, and every time we look outside we chuckle a little and cannot believe that this is how the day has ended. A horrid, stressful, day that ends with an act of kindness and some semblance of a sense of humour from us – not entirely atypical of this trip.
We pray that the van starts up in the morning and that this family does not have to have its posh party with our muddy van stranded next to the gazebo.

Days: 496
Miles: 16,371
Things we now know to be true: Tomorrow is, always, another day.

Is it a bird, is it a plain?

nr Manizales, Colombia
[by Paula]

Cowboy country, Los Llanos

We’d spent the morning watching a vet shoving his arm up the backside of several cows, then shovelling out the excess manure with a cupped hand before feeling their ovaries for signs of damage. Not for the first time did we pause and comment on how weird our life sometimes seems these days.

We had travelled to Los Llanos – the plains of Colombia, a rough wilderness of tropical grasslands, sprawling cattle fincas, and undisturbed wildlife that stretches hundreds miles across to Venezuela. We were going a little bit on instinct. Not a lot of tourists go there yet, and the area we visited remains sandwiched between parts of the Llanos that are as known as much for their guerillas and paramilitary groups as they are for their birdlife and cattle.

We’d been invited to stay at a finca by someone we had met briefly at the mechanic’s in Bogota. He was a really nice guy, he drew us a detailed map of where his finca was, told us to go there, and said he’d call the farm manager and ask him to look after us during our stay. We were aware that if something had gone wrong, this could all sound a bit sketchy.

Sometimes, when making decisions like this, I try to imagine how I might explain it to my mum.

[Mum: What do you mean you've been kidnapped? How did it happen?
Me: Well, we met this guy at the mechanic's and he said it would be okay...
Mum: Did you know anything about these people, or the farm, or the roads, or who you might encounter on the way?
Me: Um.... kind of, well, not much really...]

But instinct is about the most valuable asset you can bring with you when you are travelling. We really wanted to go to Los Llanos, we knew this was a unique opportunity, and we had a good feeling that we wouldn’t regret it.

The cattle farm also grew African palms for oil.

We were right.

Before leaving Bogotá we’d had the new ignition wire installed in the van, and all seemed to be well with it. We had, yet again, a deadline for renewing the permit for our vehicle (which allows it to legally be in Colombia for a set period) but could not face a re-run of the bureaucratic hell involved in doing this in Bogotá. So we headed for the provincial city of Yopal in Los Llanos, to get it done before driving the final leg out to the finca.

The whole process was like night and day compared with the capital – a nice small customs office and helpful staff who didn’t over-complicate things. We completed the forms and headed back the next day to collect the permit. It was ready later than we’d have liked, and we were getting a bit tense about getting away and finding the farm before dark.

Just as the final stamp was hovering over the form, the official in charge was suddenly in the mood to chat to us about our trip. Her eyes got wider and wider as we explained we were driving the Americas and living in the van. “Aren’t you scared?” she asked.

We politely conversed. I was trying not to make it obvious that I was sneaking glances at my watch. 4pm! The farm was in the middle of nowhere and Los Llanos was not really the place where we wanted to be wandering about in the pitch black.

She patted our arms as we finally left, giving us god’s blessing and repeated wishes of good luck. It wasn’t very effective because as we tried to find the right road out of the city, we missed the turning. With little time to lose we decided to take a cheeky u-turn and head back to the junction.

We swooped left. But, unbeknown to us, a moped had just scooted up our inside and was attempting to drive straight on. I heard a thud and a scrape and saw a flash of a helmet out of Jeremy’s window.

There was a lot of shouting from passers-by as we pulled across the road and stopped (we later learned that we should have stopped exactly where we were – it seems people might have thought we were trying to leave the scene of the accident). Jeremy rushed straight over to the woman we had hit, and thankfully she was okay, if a bit bruised and shaky.

“Not only have we managed to knock over the relative of a police officer, but we’ve done so while carrying out an illegal u-turn. Not good.”

She called various friends and relatives, and lots of men started turning up, as well as the police. We felt terrible, and Jeremy’s attempts to apologise and ask how she was were quite brusquely brushed aside. As we waited for a second policer officer to turn up, it’s fair to say we were starting to feel a bit intimidated, and were pretty sure that at the very least we were going to get it in the neck from the police.

When the second officer turned up, his colleague said to him, “is she (the victim) a family member of yours?’. He said yes and went over and hugged her.

“Bollocks” I thought, we are really going to get stiffed here. Not only have we managed to knock over the relative of a police officer, but we’ve done so while carrying out an illegal u-turn. Not good.

After a bit of discussion, though, the police said: “Look, no one wants to bother with a load of unnecessary paperwork. How about you just fix her moped and that will be that?” They said they understood that we didn’t know the town and probably didn’t realise we weren’t supposed to do a u-turn there!

Jeremy went with them to the bike workshop while I stayed with the van. After a bit of a debate – during which the moped driver’s friend tried to get Jeremy to cough up for some un-related repairs – he paid 50,000 pesos (£20/$30) and left them to it.

“I bet you couldn’t get out of there quick enough!”, I said to Jeremy later.

“Well, I was trying to, but they were playing the Tottenham v Inter Milan game on the TV in there, and it was 3-0 with 5 minutes to go, so I watched a bit of it.” he said.

I don’t think that boy’s priorities will ever change.

A great place to roam around.

Running even later than before, we got the f*** out of Yopal and headed down the pot-holed road to the finca. Thanks to a great map and the directions of various drunk people along the route, we pulled in to the farm well after dark but without getting lost. Only a couple of rooms on the property had electricity, so it was pitch black. The farm manager, Luis Carlos, and various other workers were there to meet us as we emerged from the van, blinking in their torchlights.

We spent a magical four days there, being shown around and looked after by Luis Carlos, the head horseman Miller and his family, and many others.

By day we walked, rode on the horses, and spent hours marvelling at the birdlife. One morning the guys took us out to another finca in the area, which was like going on a mini safari – lagoons full of dozens of caiman and turtles; capybaras (also known as chiguiros – the largest rodent in the world) roaming around or taking mud-baths, and hundreds of exotic birds darting around, including flamingoes and stork-like gabanes with their smart red collars.

We spent a morning watching the cattle being rounded up and selected for the backside treatment referred to earlier. At one point a young farm worker played ‘bullfights’ with a particularly stubborn calf, while others were lassoed into position. It was all in a day’s work for them, but hugely exciting for us to see real cowboys in action.

On the Saturday night Luis Carlos innocently suggested we drive them all to the nearby town of San Luis de Palenque, so we could ‘see the riverside malecon’. After a walk he suggested a beer in a local tienda. “If you fancy one, I’ll drive back,” I said to Jeremy. Thirty two beers later (between four of them) I rolled them out of there and into the van.

The next day they took us back to town to enjoy a traditional carne asada – a hunk of cow roasted for 6 hours on an open fire – for lunch. Divine. And this time it was my turn to quaff the beers.

Carne asada. Yum.

There is a romance to Los Llanos that is hard to put your finger on. It’s a tough life for those who live there, but there is a lot of love for it.

At dawn and dusk there is a cacophony of birdlife like we have never heard. The flat plains stretch as far as the eye can see, before the view pixelates into the steaming haze. The darkness at night is like someone throwing a blanket over your head at 6.30pm – in more ways than one because even at 9pm the thermometer was showing over 80 degrees.

We will always be grateful to Jaime for the invitation, and to everyone at the farm for their warm welcome and their patience with our Spanish speaking. It certainly helped our vocabulary to try to give a coherent explanation of our lifestyle, our atheism and our lack of desire for children. And we had no trouble understanding their reaction – on all three counts, and in the nicest possible way, they thought were were absolutely nuts.

Perhaps the photo slideshow below will speak a few more thousand words about the magic of the Llanos.

[If you are a subscriber and you are reading this on an email, we think you get a better version of the slideshow if you open our website, rather than just clicking on photos from the email]

Days: 493
Miles: 16,347
Things we now know to be true: Cows don’t seem to mind a rectal examination.

The finca was nicely decked out.

Clear the runway, coming in to land!

Jeremy finds time in his busy schedule for a bit of a read.

Glad I didn’t fall off! Post-horseride photo-call.

Sofia, just hanging around on the farm.

Our room at the finca, Los Llanos

Pretty cool bird – the crested oropendola – in the finca garden, Los Llanos

Rounding up the cattle, Los Llanos

Rounding up the cattle for the vet.

The vet wait for the cows he has selected to be rounded up.

Head horseman, Miller.

A young farmworker acts out a bullfight with a calf.

The son of farm manager, also called Luis Carlos, helps round up the cattle.

The vet digs deep, Los Llanos

Miller takes his turn with the rectal exams, Los Llanos

Luis Carlos Snr does his bit to up the beer tally.

Deer, Los Llanos

Stork-like gabanes found what water they could, Los Llanos

In every lagoon, there were dozen of pairs of eyes.

Capybaras (also known as chiguiros) – the largest rodent in the world

Bright yellow birds were everywhere. When we asked the name we were told it was ‘mucho amarillo’ (lots of yellow). Not the latin name I suspect!!

What have you been eating?! Scarlet ibis, Los Llanos.

Los Llanos gets eight months of rain a year, but this is dry season.

Nice clean bath to freshen me up. Capybara, Los Llanos.

A couple of beers with some new friends.

Parts and flowers

Bogotá, Colombia
[by Jeremy]

Forests of freilejons at the Paramo de Oseta gave it an other-worldly feel.

A typical day at the beach in Britain is characterised by ruddy-faced hardy people huddling together behind ineffectual windbreakers, dressed in thick jumpers, raincoats, thermals and wellies.

It can sometimes feel similar at the stunning white-sand beach of Playa Blanca. At least it has a decent excuse. It’s at 3015m (9900ft). No, really – a white sand beach at over 3000m! It’s the breeding ground of Oxyura jamaicensis andina – the Colombian Ruddy Duck – and we know how he feels.

Despite the cold, Playa Blanca – on Lago de Tota, Colombia’s largest lake and an important centre of the Muisca culture – is just one of a number of stunning highlights in the region around Sogamoso, our base for a couple of weeks. Soaring volcanic peaks, treks amongst the incredible and other-worldly landscapes of the páramo, beautiful colonial villages – one, Iza, whose streets are even lined with locals selling homemade desserts. Try them? Well, it would be rude not to. Heaven.

Quick photo-call at Playa Blanca with Kristen and Jonathan before retreating to the warmth of the van.

Dessert capped off a fun-filled day exploring the lake and the surrounding villages and chowing down on some local empanadas with our two new Canadian friends – Kristen and Jonathan.

We’d met them two days earlier as we huffed and puffed our way in the early morning sun from the picture-postcard village of Monguí, founded in 1601, up to the to Páramo de Oseta. Over the years we’ve done many amazing treks in a number of continents but this 8-hour hike up to almost 4000m (13100ft) ranks up there with the best. At every turn the scenery is amazing – giving us relative oldies the perfect excuse to rest while taking pictures, simply trying to find new superlatives to describe yet another amazing view – or in my case applying more duct tape to my rapidly disintegrating boots. At the summit, looking down over Laguna Negra is awe-inspiring. What was also awe-inspiring was the huge ice-cream we gobbled down several hours later when we staggered back in to Monguí.

But it’s the flora of the páramo – the unique ecosystem above the continuous forest line, yet below the permanent snowline – that sets it apart. The changing skies and the intensity of the sun provides an ever-changing palette of colours as the plants that grow only at such altitudes – in particular the lupins and forests of flowering freilejons – begin to dominate. In thinning air you can still find enough breath to gasp at the beauty of it all. We let out another gasp as our 12-year old guide froze at the sound of gunshots nearby. Hunters? There are none round here, he told us. Army practice? No, he said definitely. Guerillas, paramilitaries? He shrugged. Gulp.

But before we get all tourist board on you let us take you back. It’s a while since we last blogged and expressed aloud for the first time that with the van jerking and juddering its way in to Bogotá we feared the transmission was on its way out – again. Here we are a month later in Bogotá. But fear ye not… the transmission is fine. Cue HUGE sigh of relief.

It’s only the spark plug wires playing up – I say only, but those wires are the very same ones we just replaced. The ones we spent weeks getting sent from the US to a friend in the UK to be brought to us in Cartagena, to be fitted by the specialist VW concession. Yes, those ones. Turns out, VW didn’t have a clue and for some unknown reason yanked on the new wires, ripping one of them in two. Instead of telling us they just taped it together, closed the bonnet, charged us $100 and waved us off. Needless to say, pretty quickly – albeit 1,000kms away – the problem resurfaced. Back to square one.

Our unique Colombia sticker, courtesy of Klaus the mechanic.

Luckily in Bogotá we found an excellent mechanic. They repaired the wires as best they could, gave the transmission the once-over and a clean bill of health, mended the broken door lock (it’s only been a year!), did a better repair job on the bumper we’d pranged a few weeks ago, fixed up the radiator and – unable to find an exact match for a new headlight and us being unwilling to pay $300 to get one from VW – they took us to a backstreet workshop where a genius fashioned an exact replica in a few hours and fitted it for the princely sum of $45. Oh, and they even heard us complain that we couldn’t find a Colombia sticker for our van, and had one custom-made at a local print shop. That’s service.

With the car on its way back to full health there was the little matter of having to sort out extending our temporary import licence. A quick trip to the customs office, fill out a form and bingo. Yes? Er, no.

We did visit the office. They sent us up to the 4th floor. They sent us to the second floor. They told us we needed to go to another office, miles away by the airport. We did. They sent us up to the third floor. They said we first needed to go to the second floor. On the second floor they made us fill out a form and go back to the third floor. They sent us to see an inspector. She told us she needed to inspect the van. We said we didn’t have it because (as she surely knew) it was the one day of the year when all private cars are banned from driving in Bogotá. What are the chances?! She told us to bring it back tomorrow. We did – after a tear-inducing two-hour drive through Bogotá’s rush hour. There was someone different who asked us why we had brought the van – it wasn’t needed after all! We managed to resist punching a wall, or someone’s face. They told us to go to another desk. They stamped our original form and told us the licence would be posted to us on Monday. We said we didn’t have a postal address and could we pick it up. No, it has to be posted. So we gave a hostal address we weren’t staying at and called the owner to explain. Fine. Let’s just wait. We waited and waited.

Don’t step back! Overlooking Laguna Negra, Paramo de Oseta.

Four days later we couldn’t wait any longer. So we went back to the customs office. They sent us to the second floor. A bored, unsatisfied cog in the capitalist machine said he had no idea what we wanted, it wasn’t his job, mustered enough energy to ring someone and then point us to the 4th floor. As various people shrugged when we asked about the licence we began to lose hope until… a miracle. A woman picked up our form, called someone over, instructed them what to do, was polite and said she’d have it sorted in a few minutes. She then sent us back to the second floor. Bollocks. A secretary led us back to the desk of the aforementioned cog. Slumped almost vertically he barely looked up, stamped a sheaf of papers 4 times, handed them to us and said we could go. We literally skipped out..and ran a bit to ensure they didn’t change their minds. Hurrah, legal again. For 4 weeks, when we would have to go through it all again.

It’s all in a day’s work these days.

Such irritations are nothing but that, and they paled into complete insignificance when our thoughts turned daily to home. As some people know, Paula’s aunt Janette – her mum’s twin – had been seriously ill in recent months, and sadly died on 19 February. Paula headed back to Scotland within a couple of days to be with her family. It’s hard to know what to say in a forum such as this. Anyone who knows Paula’s extended family knows how close they are and how much Janette is missed by everyone – her sons David, Alan and Gavin, husband Andrew, her sisters Christine and Marjory and the many many others in her family and wide circle of friends.

While she spent those sad few days in the UK I adjusted to life in the van alone. Luckily I had the perfect location.

Finca San Pedro in Sogamoso is one of the best places we’ve stayed in the whole trip. Chilled – without being full of unwashed hippies lying around all day – it has amazing common spaces and an enthusiastic and friendly owner who loves travelling himself. Its gardens are lovely and a fascinating band of travellers and a professional cyclist doing altitude training while I was there made the time go quicker than expected.

There was a sublime sunrise the day I returned to Playa Blanca.

But refusing to just sit and wait I also got out and about. With a new love for the páramo I drove up 9 km of dirt mountain roads to the Páramo de Siscuni, stopping for a delicious trout empanada on the way, and trekked in eerie solitude around Laguna de Siscuni, visited the picturesque colonial town of Tibasosa, camped on the beach at Lago de Tota. I also took the opportunity to satisfy my football withdrawal symptoms by heading to the regional capital Tunja to watch local premier league team Boyacá Chico take on Tolima. In a spookily empty stadium, with just 19 away fans – one dressed in full knight’s outfit – the home side won 3-0 while the visitors had five players booked and two sent off and a band played Rivers of Babylon non-stop for 90 minutes. Weird.

So now we’re back in Bogotá and in a kind of groundhog day scenario are heading back to visit the mechanic armed with yet another new spark plug cable, bought in Scotland. Surely nothing can go wrong this time…

Days: 480
Miles: 15,502
Things we now know to be true: It’s people that matter.

——-

Some more photos from the last few weeks for your perusal. [If you are an email subscriber, to see the slideshow properly it is best to open the blog, rather than click on the photos from the email]

We took the van on its first little post-repair test run into the mountains north of Bogota.

We stopped off again at Laguna de Guatavita on the way to Sogamoso

Beginning the hike up to Paramo de Oseta

Paramo de Oseta

The colours as we reached the paramo were incredible.

Keeping up the pace, hiking Paramo de Oseta

Jeremy re-enacts an Olympic torch moment, Paramo de Oseta

View over Laguna Negra, Paramo de Oseta

Made it to the top! Overlooking Laguna Negra, Paramo de Oseta

Climbing through the rocks on the hike to Paramo de Oseta

Frailejons for miles, Paramo de Oseta

Lago de Tota, near Sogamoso

Iza, the town of a thousand desserts, near Lago de Tota

Playa Blanca, Lago de Tota

Jeremy’s drive to Paramo Siscuni

Spot the van! Jeremy’s solo hike to Paramo Siscuni.

Laguna Siscuni

Jeremy met just one person – the ranger – on his hike to Paramo Siscuni

In the pink. Sunrise at Playa Blanca, Lago de Tota

Sunrise at Playa Blanca, Lago de Tota

Early morning after camping at Playa Blanca, Lago de Tota

Home in Scotland with the family, including Mr Gizmo, our (nearly) 18-year-old kitty.

Ups and downs

Sogamoso, Colombia
[by Paula]

As we came over the mountain pass we just couldn’t believe the eye-popping views over the Chicamocha Canyon. After several months on the Colombian coast, it was like being in a different country.

Caroline comes to stay

I was equally incredulous when, after a long descent down the other side of the mountain, our over-heated brakes failed as we headed for a sharp corner. It was a like a classic slow-motion dream sequence – a huge truck in front of us had come to a halt to take a sharp turn and I was pushing the brake pedal to the floor, but nevertheless we continued to sail towards it. I stated the obvious with something along the lines of “fuck, I can’t stop”, as Jeremy and our friend Caroline stared silently ahead, open-mouthed.

As it turned out we did come to a stop, with the help of the back of the truck. Crunch.

Mission accomplished! We had given Caroline – who was visiting us from the UK for 3 weeks – a birthday to remember.

We’d picked her up in Cartagena 10 days before, where we began our endeavour to give her a great holiday, a taste of our life on the road, and a good varied dose of the incredible country that is Colombia.

Post-mudbath, pre-shower. Volcan de Lodo El Totumo, near Cartagena.

We strolled the city, dodging cruise ship trippers, and panted in the shade every few metres. The heat gave us plenty of excuses to stop for a raspado (shaved ice with fruit syrup and condensed milk), a cup of ceviche or a cold beer.

South of Cartagena, we rolled onto a tiny ‘ferry’ to Isla de Barú and the impossibly luminous Playa Blanca for a day of sun and swimming, which seemed like the right thing to do to let Caroline acclimatise to the Caribbean weather. We’re all heart.

On the way north up the coast from Cartagena we stopped off at the rather strange but irresistible Volcan de Lodo El Totumo – a teeny little volcano which now operates as a natural mud bath and is usually filled with giggling Colombians and tourists. We’d been before, and were looking forward to seeing Caroline’s reaction to sinking into the creamy mud which, for some reason, does something strange to gravity and leaves you flailing around and grasping at half-naked strangers to try to stay upright. She didn’t disappoint.

We returned to the beach at Palomino for a few days of shameless laziness that involved little more than reading, swimming, strolling and eating. One day the local fisherman provided us with the biggest and best prawns of our entire trip – I’m still drooling from the memory of that night’s barbeque.

In most places Caroline got a room while we camped, but in an unplanned turn of events she had the great fortune to share the van with us one night at Tayrona National Park, at the foot of the Sierra Nevada mountains. Two snoring Dears and a light-sleeping Caroline seemed like a recipe for disaster, but lo and behold she climbed into the pop top and slept like a baby. Turns out the floor of the pop top has very effective sound-proofing!

Passing through Arrecifes on a hike through Tayrona National Park.

We explored some of Tayrona’s spectacular beaches, with their incongruous rock formations, and decided to do a longer, 7-hour return, hike to the pre-Hispanic ruins at Pueblito the next day. We woke to a troop of tamarin monkeys – tiny little fellows with comic fluffy white hair-dos – springing across the trees above the van. We did our best to beat the worst of the heat by setting off early, and had a spectacular hike on beaches and jungle trails, before the final steep upwards push over enormous rocks, to Pueblito. With burning calves, we wandered the site before setting off for the blistering return journey, which we ended with a celebratory swim in the sea near our campsite at Cañaveral.

After a brief overnight stop in Taganga, we turned southwards for part two of the trip which would take us up into the mountains of the Cordillera Oriental and, ultimately, to the capital Bogotá.
We had a couple of long days of driving ahead, with the aim being to get to the colonial town of Barichara on Caroline’s birthday, in plenty of time for a wander and some drinks and dinner.

On day one we battled the trucks and the heat but made good progress with the plan, eventually pulling in at the little town of San Martin, where we found a cheap hotel, some decent street food and cold beer to wash it down.

Why get your shoes wet when you can get a lift across? Tayrona National Park.

We set off at a leisurely pace the next day, expecting a 5-hour journey or so to Barichara. This turned out to be rather an optimistic estimation. Immediately south of the city of Bucaramanga, we began to climb into the mountains and the going was slow, partly due to the volume of trucks on the route. On top of this though, we started having serious concerns about the van, which was behaving badly, including cylinder misfires and some horribly erratic gear changes that made our blood run cold (let me refer you to our earlier experience with a transmission failure ).

It was a day of fluctuating emotions because aside from our fears about the van we were driving through some of the most dramatic and beautiful scenery we’d seen in a long time. It was exciting to be exploring a new and different territory – from the cowboy towns of the altiplano to steep mountain passes that seemed to go up forever. We accepted we were looking at a full day on the road, and took things easy on the van.

That is, except for the crashing into a truck part, which left it with a bit of a sad face and a smashed headlight.

We were all delighted and relieved to pull into Barichara in the early evening sunshine, and to see that Caroline’s hotel room was a gorgeous colonial house with wooden beams, sky-high ceilings and a great view. Saving our pennies for splurging on meals and drinks, we opted to camp on the street outside the hotel, much to Caroline’s amusement!

We grabbed a bottle of red from a hole-in-the-wall bar and drank it on the steps of the cathedral, before having amazing luck in finding a lovely atmospheric meat-free tapas restaurant (Caroline is veggie) – no mean feat in Colombia – for dinner. Potentially disastrous birthday pulled back from the brink – phew.

Getting ready to pop a crunchy fried ant into my mouth, Barichara

Beautiful pristine streets with white-washed buildings, a gorgeous hike to the nearby village of Guane, chic shops and some decent cafes made Barichara a big hit on the trip. I even got the chance to try the local speciality of tasty fried ants – cooked up into a delicious sauce and poured over a rare steak. Once I got over the shock of the size of them (they are not called fat-bottomed ants for nothing) I crunched through them quite happily without freaking out about the whole insect-in-mouth concept.

Keeping up with the gorgeous colonial town theme, we moved on to Villa de Leyva and a sublime hostel with great rooms and camping space. With one of the largest plazas in the Americas, it was a perfect spot for people watching with a coffee by day and a beer or hot canelazo at night. At more than 2000m, we were feeling the chill in the evenings for the first time in months, and quite enjoyed the novelty of woolly socks and blankets on the bed again.

Our worries about the van were never far from our minds, and the owner of the hostel recommended a mechanic in Bogotá, from which he’d had good reports.

Plaza Mayor, Villa de Leyva

As we set off from Villa de Leyva, bound for Sogamoso, we were employing the crossing-fingers tactic. But about 15 minutes into the journey we realised it was just going to be too stressful to head out there and risk being stranded, especially with the added element of Caroline needing to get to Bogotá for her flight home. So we ditched the plan and headed directly towards the city, deciding to stop for a couple of nights in Guatavita, about 50km north of the capital.

We made it there without incident, albeit with a severe lack of power coming from the engine, and camped at a fabulous spot next to a family house, which had a great cosy two-storey cabin for Caroline. We all piled in there for dinner in the evenings, played cards, and lit the huge wood fire to keep toasty.

It was another steep 7km uphill to the main attraction of the area, a volcanic crater lake held sacred by the indigenous Muisca people. Even that seemed like pushing our luck with the van, so we hiked the 7km to the start of the trail and then up to the beautiful lake, from which there was a spectacular view over the alpine scenery that seemed yet again like a whole other Colombia.

A last night drink with Caroline, Bogota

We were all happy to see Bogotá spreading out before us as we began the steep descent into the ‘bowl’ in which the city sits. The van had limped there, but had arrived in one piece. After a night out sampling the Bogota Beer Company’s finest brews, we said sad goodbyes to Caroline at first light.

We grabbed a coffee and steeled ourselves for a few tricky days in the city of dealing with the nightmarish bureaucracy of trying to renew our car permit, finding our way around the streets while avoiding the most insane drivers we’d encountered to date, and – most importantly – getting a diagnosis on the van.

Days: 466
Miles: 15,075
Things we now know to be true: The best laid plans are subject to change.

Warm front from the south

Tolú, Colombia
[by Paula]

There’s only one word that can describe the last few weeks. Warm.

Caribbean christmas feast. Cheers!

Yes, as it happens we have discovered whole new levels of sweltering as Colombia’s dry season roasts everything in its path, but – much as we love to obsess about the weather – we’re talking about a different kind of warmth. We’d heard about it from many a traveller, but the collective hug of the Colombian people is really starting to reveal itself to us. In recent weeks we have received more good wishes and invitations to the homes of strangers than we have in a lifetime of travelling.

It started with christmas. We were returning to our old favourite, the beach, to see out the festivities in as low key a way as possible. We don’t do xmas in a big way, but there are certain traditions that are just non-negotiable, such as eating and drinking to excess.

We stocked up accordingly a few days before at a supermarket and on the way out popped into the pharmacy to see about an infection on my leg. The pharmacist gave me some ‘very strong’ antibiotics. Alarm bells rang. I examined the package and ask whether I could drink alcohol with them. “No!” she said, “it’s only five days though..”.

“Ah, that’s a shame”, I replied, tucking the pills away til Boxing Day.

We drove to Palomino, a beach on the Caribbean coast we had visited before, and parked up on the sand. Although technically a campsite, we were effectively camped right on the public beach, close to the access path from the village. This being peak season for domestic tourism there was a steady stream of Colombians, mainly from the chillier southern cities, coming on and off the beach and passing by our door.

The van usually attracts quite a bit of interest, but suddenly we felt like the number one attraction. Over the next few days we were inundated with visitors asking about the van and wanting a look around. It’s not the world’s longest tour, but we are always happy to oblige. One woman even offered to buy it. We conducted umpteen tours and at one stage were videoed cooking and being interviewed by a huge family who were holidaying together.

We appear to be spending a lot of time at the beach.

We explained, as always, that there was a bed in the pop-top, but that it was a bit small for us and was better for children. “But we don’t have children,” I said, pre-empting the inevitable question that seems to fascinate every Latin American (what, no children?!).

“Here, you can have this one!”, laughed the mother, selecting a random child from the bunch. We politely declined.

But what was most astonishing to us was the number of strangers who came by and asked whether we would be visiting their part of the country, then invited us to visit them when we arrived.

It seemed only right to give a Caribbean twist to christmas, and on the day itself we feasted on barbequed jerk chicken, fried plantains, carrots sauteed in Jamaican ginger honey, and potatoes. We even pushed the boat out with one of my (not very Caribbean) banoffee pies.

The festivities over, we faced the inevitable and, after a stop in Santa Marta, set off for the industrial city of Barranquilla to try to sort out a major lingering van-related issue – filling the propane tank, which we’d heard might be impossible in Colombia because of the particular fitting that foreign campers like ours have. We weren’t prepared to give up without a fight, and headed for the main propane plant in the city, our only hope.

We came across this strike protest in Mompox – these health workers had been out for 14 months.

We knocked on the gate and the guy came out. We explained our predicament, while he shook his head a lot, saying they didn’t have the right adaptor. We pleaded a little for any solution he could suggest. The next moment he disappeared and came back holding an adaptor. He screwed it onto our tank. Perfect fit, hurray! “Thank god, it fits”, he said, “but we still can’t fill your tank here” (they usually fill lorries, and the position of our tank was impossibly low). He told us to drive to the other side of the highway, pointing to a collection of dusty rudimentary buildings, and wait for him to meet us in his lunch hour. He would borrow the adaptor and see if his brother, who worked at a propane gas bottle shop, could help us.

It all sounded a bit dodgy but we were desperate enough to give it a go. He turned up as promised, and he and several other guys set about trying to fill our tank from a bottle. We spent a hour lurching between hope and dejection, as they struggled to get it to work. The adaptor appeared to fit but was missing a vital element. As with so many occasions on this trip, we were bowled over by their refusal to just give in and send us packing. Eventually a piece of metal was sawn off something else, wedged (rather unsafely, we observed) into the adaptor and shoved in. Gas appeared to be trickling in, and after 20 minutes or so the tank was declared full. To be honest, none of us were totally sure if it had worked as the gauge doesn’t work, but we took their word for it and drove off in a celebratory mood.

By the time we’d sorted out the problem it was late and we decided to just drive out of the city and get as far as possible before dark. We were heading south towards the Unesco world heritage site city of Mompóx for new year, about a 10 hour journey.

As dusk fell, we scanned the roadside for a farm or something that might be happy to allow camping, and pulled in at one to ask. The guy suggested that we instead follow him down the road to a motel that he thought would have space for the van. As we arrived he had already asked the woman working there, and she enthusiastically invited us to pull in. It was a grim looking place, but by this stage we were keen to just stop and were too polite to make our excuses and run.

I asked about toilets and she showed me to one of their rooms. She patted the damp, heavily-stained bed as we walked in, then proceeded to rub two raw cables together to try to get the light bulb to work. There was a toilet for our use, but no running water, and cockroaches were scuttling about in a panic, as if shocked that someone had actually turned up. Hopefully my face did not reveal my thoughts.

Mompox is tricky to get to but worth the pain.

“Rancid hellspawn” is one of Jeremy’s favourite phrases for describing the worst places we come across on our travels, but it’s a phrase he uses very sparingly. The words did pass his lips that night.
In contrast, the woman working there could not have been nicer. She twice fed us food she had brought from home including the most delicious, anise-infused, arepas we have tasted to date, and quizzed us enthusiastically about our trip.

However we were pleased to pull out early the next morning, and set off through cattle country in bright sunshine.

Mompóx is a gorgeous well-preserved colonial town which can only be reached by river ferry. We pulled in at the ‘dock’ – just a disturbingly steep dusty slope that plunged towards the river – which was packed with trucks and cars, this being the Saturday before new year. After a stiflingly hot 2 hour delay, tempers were starting to fray, especially when those who had been waiting for hours realised there may not be space on the ferry for everyone and some last-minute arrivals had been pushing into the queue.

As we approached they put us to one side so we would be one of the last to board. This provided the biggest audience possible for Jeremy, who had to reverse/slip down onto the ferry and into an impossibly small space between the barrier and another car. At one point two officials were shouting completely contrasting directions at him and several other passengers were chipping in. I nearly throttled the obligatory drunk guy who was leaning in the window and telling us to remain calm. Our tyre screeched off the barrier as we wedged ourselves in, but we were still hanging over the hinge for the pull-up door.

A fellow passenger helpfully demonstrates he can barely get two fingers between our two cars on the ferry.

“What will happen to the front of the van when the door is closed?”, I asked a fellow passenger. “Oh they don’t close it, they’ll put 7 or 8 motorbikes on there before we leave!” he replied. Silly of me to worry.

After arriving in the dark we free-camped in a riverside park in the centre of Mompóx that night, which was already in pretty festive mood, complete with banging speakers on every corner. We awoke at sunrise the next day to the sounds of the adjacent football pitch being set up for the big Sunday game! As we were parked directly behind the goal, it seemed like a good time to move on, and for a couple of nights we retreated to an edge-of-town camping spot.

It was good to be somewhere with a bit of culture again. Mompóx, formerly a trading post dripping with wealth, now has that isolated old-world feel. We wandered the baking streets by daytime but could only take the temperature for short bursts. Mercifully, there was a pool where we were camping but even this was warm. “Is nothing cold?” asked Jeremy.

It seemed not – there was even a town-wide ice shortage on new year’s eve. Ice is just as commonly sold from people’s houses as from shops here, and I was sent from door to door to door, searching for the cold stuff. ‘None left here! Try the red house on the corner….’ and so it went on til we found the last bolsa in town.

Waiting for our new year’s eve dinner to come off the grill, Mompox.

Preliminary cold beers dealt with, we headed into town to wander some more and take in the atmosphere. Most families held their house parties out in the street, with their pavement speakers competing in both the size and volume stakes. The town’s many churches were packed, and families spilled out into squares filled with fairy lights. We ate a delicious plate of mixed meats from a street stall and even managed to find a cocktail for midnight.

With the temperatures sizzling, our little 12-volt fan chose this time to stop working. To be honest we were amazed this $12 supermarket fan had lasted 15 months. But would we be able to find a new 12v car fan in Colombia? This episode highlighted one of the big beefs we have with most of the Western world – that when things break we can rarely get them repaired, even if we want to. Here, it is the opposite. Men sit at roadside stalls repairing mobile phones. There are shops for fixing cameras, cookers, food processors, you name it. We took the fan to a little shop and had it repaired in 3 minutes. I told the guy this would be difficult at home. “I heard about that! You just throw things away and buy a new one!” he said, shaking his head.

Chopping a ‘bagre de mar’ for dinner on the beach.

After a calmer return ferry journey we headed north-west to a coastal area south of Cartagena, mostly visited by Colombians. We’re not sure why the gringos haven’t found this lovely stretch of coast. During two stops near Coveñas and San Bernardo del Viento, we were again on the receiving end of numerous good wishes for the trip and left with our notebook bursting with more addresses, including from one family who have a coffee roasting place near Medellín. Yum!

At the latter spot we wild-camped on a beach that was blissfully quiet following the music fests of Mompóx and Tolú. We flopped on the beach, buying fruit and fish from passing locals, including our first ‘bagre de mar’ (a type of catfish), a new favourite.

We are waiting for our friend Caroline to fly into Cartagena soon and join us for a holiday, after which we will turn south towards Bogotá. It’s about time we hit some mountains and cities, else we are in serious danger of becoming full-time beach bums.

Jeremy cooks up the bagre on the barbie.

As the altitude increases we’ll get some fresher weather too, but we feel sure of the warm welcome awaiting us further south.

Days: 426
Miles: 13,544
Things we now know to be wish were true: A quote from Jeremy this week: ‘Why hasn’t someone invented sand that doesn’t stick’?

Two sides to every story

Santa Marta, Colombia
[By Paula & Jeremy]

When you live in a house with wheels it can feel a bit counter-intuitive to stay still for long, but there are times when you just have to sit tight and get stuff done.

So the mileage count for the last few weeks hasn’t even reached triple figures, as we continue to potter about on the north coast of Colombia.

For ten days of the last three weeks we were in separate parts of the Caribbean – Jeremy was working in Jamaica as guest speaker and all-round troublemaker at their National Journalism Week, and I stayed in Colombia and filled my time with Spanish school and catching up on some jobs we never get around to.

So we’ve split the blog into two parts again. His ‘n hers.

—-

HERS: LA CHICA SOLA

The way our work schedules used to be when we lived in London, we both got pretty used to spending chunks of time alone. But after more than 16 months of being together 24/7 I felt like I had forgotten how to do it.

Still, Taganga wasn’t a bad little place stop a while.

So when Jeremy was heading off to work in Jamaica for 10 days, I admit I was feeling a bit nervy. I was adamant I wanted to stay at home in the van so we found a good hostel in Taganga, with a garden for camping and all the facilities I needed. I booked into Spanish school for a week and made a to-do list that could have kept me busy for a lifetime.

With spectacular – but not unsurprising – timing, two things went wrong the very night before Jeremy left. Firstly, we realised our second battery (which operates lights and other appliances like the fan) was failing to charge properly. This is bad enough when you are camped for a few days, and a prize pain in the backside when you are stopped for a long time. Secondly, and without warning, our pop-top roof came crashing down in the night. The hydraulic struts holding it up had picked this moment to start failing. I was worried enough about coping with the roof on my own, and this only added to my problems.

As Jeremy left the woman who helped run our hostel said: “La chica sola. You are leaving her alone. Bad husband!”. I couldn’t have agreed more.

But within a day I had found ways to live with both issues and felt pleased that I was staying relatively sane.

[I notice, below, that Jeremy doesn't mention missing my campervan cooking - ed]. Steamed fish in coconut sauce.

It was a long week and a half. But being alone reminded me of several things about one’s partner being away.

There is more space in the bed. Food doesn’t disappear so quickly. You can watch 3 episodes of Downton Abbey back-to-back, and no one says a thing.

But I remembered another thing too. When Jeremy is away, there is no Jeremy. And that is in no way fun.

He flew back to Cartagena on a Saturday night, and I decided to take a bus there to meet him and spend a couple of nights enjoying the city, before we both returned to Taganga and another week of Spanish school. He’d gone so crazy shopping for Jamaican seasonings, chutneys and sauces – not to mention rum – that he could barely carry his bags into the hostel. Our campervan cooking repertoire has had a very welcome injection of Caribbean spice!

Back in Taganga, we returned to a familiar routine of going to Spanish school in the morning, then spending the afternoons avoiding homework and bitching about verb conjugations and “ridiculous” tenses. The stifling temperatures gave us a further excuse to loaf around in a stupor. I know, life can be very tough on the road.

See. Not even the dogs could be bothered with homework in the Taganga heat.

But by the end of the week we had, of course, learned something and restored some of the Spanish we felt we’d let slip in recent months.

Being stopped enabled us to get around to a few things that can be tricky when you’re always on the move. Replacing our infuriatingly annoying ‘wardrobe’ shelves – the source of about 50% of the swearing heard coming from the van – had been on the to-do list for, um, 16 months. We also really wanted to paint the boring grey doors inside the van, but could never be bothered to work out what to use on their formica surface.

Luckily for us, there was a lovely handyman called Jorge working at our hostel. When we mentioned it to him, before we knew it we were all at the shops buying wood and paint, and 24 hours later, job done! We’re very excited about the new look. There are some pictures here.

During our stop we’d also ordered some of the specialist parts we needed from the US, and were pleased that for once we had an address to which we could have the things sent. That plan soon imploded when we learned that the US shipping companies wanted to charge us more than $850 to send parts to Colombia that were worth a tenth of that. Our response to that quote both started and ended with the letter ‘f’. Bizarrely, we are now sending these parts over the Atlantic to the UK, so a friend can bring them over here in January, for an eighth of the price of sending them within the same continent.

Jeremy gets on with writing a feature on Jamaica, in our new-look van.

We don’t always blog about the humdrum stuff because, well, if we find it dull then why would we make you suffer it too? But it’s all part of life on the road – so as a Christmas treat here is a summary of the other issues we are currently dealing with…. solving the mystery of the second battery; finding out whether we also need a new engine battery; looking everywhere for power steering fluid for our vehicle and so far failing; hoping the new pop-top roof struts don’t get lost in the post; finding someone to fix our awning.

Lastly, we really need to find a way to refill our propane gas tank, after discovering that in Colombia and other parts of South America – unlike all the countries we’ve been in to date – the usual filling places do not have an adaptor for our vehicle. This is potentially disastrous as we cannot contemplate not being able to cook in the van, or being unable heat it in cold weather further south. So yesterday we spent the entire day driving round filling stations and industrial estates in Santa Marta, asking for advice. The answers ranged from ‘you can have an adaptor made for $600′ to ‘you’re screwed’ to ‘I think you can fill it up at a gas plant in the next city’. We’ll go there after Christmas and see what we can find.

We promised you an adventure, but we never said it would be round-the-clock glamour.

—–

HIS: MEANWHILE IN JAMAICA

Take an injustice. Add a touch of militancy, a dash of inspiration, stir well, agitate… then bring to the boil.

Trouble? Me? Perish the thought!

Having spent a decade leading the 37,000-strong National Union of Journalists in the UK and Ireland, it’s in the blood. And so, after hearing me addressing Latin American union leaders in Costa Rica last year, the organisers of the Press Association of Jamaica (PAJ) extended an invitation to speak at a range of events during their National Journalism Week. It’s work… but not as we know it!

And that feeling was reinforced when my first meeting took place on the deck of a restaurant on a white sand beach at Montego Bay. Rather than schlepping home on the night bus to a rainy London suburb after my meeting, I had a quick dip in the Caribbean.

Once reunited we loved hiking around the cooler mountain town of Minca.

Jamaica can appear a paradise from outside – and Jamaicans are rightly proud of the beauty of their country and their sprinters – but scratch below the tourist surface and it is a country bedevilled by corruption and too many people who, away from the oh-so-chic tourist enclaves, live in poverty.

Jamaica’s journalists document the country’s highs and lows, its crime, its social issues, its sporting triumphs and its struggle to build for the next 50 years of independence. But many of them do so in conditions of poverty themselves, and as a result too many are susceptible to payola and other forms of corruption.

To help the PAJ draw attention to that battle to tackle corruption, and to the fight for improved pay and conditions for media workers, was the aim of my visit. Mission accomplished!

Over a few days we constantly hit the headlines, had media owners scrambling to respond and justify their shameful treatment and helped inspire lots of younger journalists to get active, get organised and act.

And all achieved while having some great meals and good times with new found friends. The true spirit of solidarity in action.

And crucially, I was earning some money writing a couple of features to top up the trip fund…

We couldn’t tear ourselves away from the view from our campspot in Minca.

Back on the road – after a week of school in Taganga – it was a steep, potholed and winding one to the stunning mountain town of Minca. Perched on the edge of the mountain and surrounded by dozens of varieties of colourful birds, our camping spot at a wonderful little hospedaje had incredible views out over the valley and across to the hazy heat of Santa Marta and the sea and islands beyond.
We revelled in the cooler fresh air after several baking hot and humid weeks on the coast.

We sat and stared at the view for hours… not just because it was so amazing but also because, having trekked for 8 hours to a nearby waterfall and pine-clad peak with even more incredible views, we were unable to walk. Owww. Four days later the legs are still aching. Note to selves – need more exercise.

Unable to put off our chores any longer we have now headed back down to the city. Time for some christmas shopping – petrol, power steering fluid and an adaptor. That just leaves one thing before we head to the beach for the festivities. I wonder where you can find brussels sprouts in Colombia?

Happy Christmas everyone.

Days: 407
Miles: 12,803
Things we now know to be true: The world didn’t end. 21/12/12.

—-

MORE PICS MORE PICS MORE PICS
If you haven’t seen them already, we’ve been busy loading more photos from Panama and Colombia onto Flickr. There’s also a batch from our trip to the UK in Sept/Oct.

1. UK trip
2. From Panama to Colombia
3. Colombia part 1 – carnival time in Cartagena

—-

Just a couple of old stick-in-the-muds

Excuse me, where’s the ice cream shop? Sand dunes, Taroa, La Guajira, Colombia

Taganga, Colombia
[By Paula]

When we were in California buying the van last year, a story hit the news which has haunted us ever since. A couple of tourists, who were healthy and in their 30s, died in Joshua Tree National Park after their car got stuck in the sand during a heatwave. They walked off to find help but were later found dead, a mile apart from each other, having succumbed to heat exhaustion.

A nice cheerful start to this blog entry then?

And yet despite our fear of being stranded in deep sand, with not a drop of water in sight, we are strangely drawn to desert landscapes, like moths to the flame.

We love the beach and ocean too, so when we read that at Colombia’s most northerly point the desert met the sea in dramatic fashion, it was a no-brainer.

At this price I don’t care if it’s real petrol or not. Filling up on cheap Venezuelan gas.

The La Guajira peninsula – which borders Venezuela – is not only the tip of Colombia but is the most northerly point of all of South America, and home to the fiercely independent indigenous Wayuu people. It sounded like a potential headache to get very far without a 4×4 vehicle, but we had plenty of reasons to give it a go.

After a few days on the beach further south, at Palomino, we decided to head north and see what happened. We were a bit short on information but it looked like we could make it as far as a town called Uribia and then would have to ditch the car and continue by a combination of 4×4 trucks and boats.

A couple of hitches on the way delayed our arrival, and as we pulled into the town at dusk it became clear quite quickly that there was nowhere obviously suitable to camp in the car. We pulled into the police station, where a group of officers were hanging around outside, and asked about a hotel. Two of them jumped on their motorbikes and escorted us there, but it was full due to a regional event and there didn’t seem to be another one.

‘You could park here?’ said the police chief, waving towards the town square opposite the police station. It contained a football pitch, playground and was basically the middle of a roundabout. We thought about it for a minute and said ‘what the hell’. We rarely camp on the street but reckoned we’d be safe enough with the police station opposite.

De-scaling a pargo fish for dinner, Cabo de la Vela. Bear Grylls eat your heart out.

As we drank a beer outside the van they came over the chat. We told them we were trying to get to Cabo de la Vela, a beach town in the north of the peninsula, but didn’t know if it would be possible in our non-4×4 van.

‘Yes, no problem!’ they said. ‘The road is fine’. We hadn’t really contemplated this as our guidebook says that going to Cabo without a 4×4 is a ‘definite no-go’.

Hmm. It was a dilemma. On the one hand, the guidebooks are often wrong about road conditions because they are almost never researched by people who drive. On the other, we sometimes find that local advice can be a bit cavalier because so many people drive 4x4s and don’t consider how it might be with a 2-tonne front-wheel-drive campervan. As for the maps, well…

What the hell. Next morning we set off for Cabo in the van, and resolved to turn back if it got too hairy.

The main part of the route was remarkably driveable. A bit muddy and bumpy in parts, with a large flooded dip to deal with at one point. We filled up on cheap contraband Venezuelan petrol on the way and became more and more confident we’d make it. We revelled in the desert landscape, with its unfeasibly straight road cutting through acres of scrub and cacti. We saw the sign for Cabo, turned off the ‘main’ road and passed through a little village before heading down to the 17km track to the coast.

Oops.

Within metres we paused and looked ahead with sinking hearts. The track was made of deep sandy ruts which is parts changed to sticky mud. Not a good combination. We inched forwards and kept telling ourselves, ‘well we’re still moving so it’ll probably be okay’. The further we went the more difficult it was going to be to go back, as there was no way to get out of the deep tracks and turn around. After about a mile and a half we were really quite scared.

We came to a point where the track went several ways, each one looking muddier than the rest. We tried to change course onto what looked like harder packed mud. But as the van rolled over it, the topping crumbled and gave way to soft sand. The wheels spun and spun, Jeremy revved – we were stuck. Remarkably I managed to push us out, and Jeremy tried to turn us around and get the hell out of there. But just a couple of metres later we were well and truly wedged in the sand again, this time even deeper.

So here we were were in the desert. It was roasting hot and shadeless, but we did have water and supplies. The Joshua Tree story wasn’t expressly mentioned but hung loudly in the stillness. “What should we do?” I said. “Maybe walk back to the village, it’s only a couple of miles… or no, maybe we’re not supposed to do that…” I tailed off.

I was trying to remember why people said the Joshua Tree tourists should have stayed with their car. Was it to make it easier to find their bodies, I thought?

The woman from the house opposite our camp spot brought her baby, Valerie, over to be photographed in the van.

We hadn’t seen any other vehicles on the track yet but felt fairly confident the route was used by 4×4 trucks ferrying people to Cabo, so waited for something to come along. It might have felt like 20 hours at the time, but a mere 20 minutes later we saw a truck driving on a different track, and shouted and honked the horn to attract attention.

They pulled around and drove back towards us. The driver leapt out, yelled at us a lot, and then his passengers set about pushing us out. We told him the police had advised us that the road was okay. Surely they can’t have meant this one!?

Once free – phew! – we made our way (carefully!) back to the main road and continued north, looking for a better route out to the coast. We found another turn-off and checked with someone that it was driveable. Nice of the police to let us know there were two completely contrasting routes!

We enjoyed the views and let someone else do the driving on the trip to Punta Gallinas.

It was a very rough road but nothing like the sand hell of the other one. We pulled into Cabo and let out a big sigh of relief. It was a dusty, boiling desert town, with a long white sand beach and calm waters. The beach was lined with large palapas, perfect for camping. There was no mains electricity or running water, but we had the van and we had the sea for bathing. Perfect.

We camped on the beach opposite one of the village shops and for the next few days had a steady flow of visitors to the van, from the shop owner and her family, to passers-by, to other tourists. The van can become quite a focal point, especially in rural places. One night we were cooking dinner when a bloke just appeared from the darkness and flopped into one of our chairs, saying he was waiting to be served petrol at the shop across the road. ‘Like a beer while you wait?’, we said. ‘Si, por favor’, he replied. It’s a great way to meet people.

From Cabo we explored the nearby stunning beaches of Play Pilon and Ojo del Agua (more sandy tracks!). We asked about driving further north, and were told we’d need an amphibious vehicle at this time of year because, despite everything seeming to be as dry as a bone, there was flooding further north. It’s good to know when to quit. We left the car behind and continued to the most northern point of the peninsula by 4×4 truck and boat.

I can’t seem to stop! Sand dunes, Taroa, La Guajira.

It was well worth the effort. After travelling through impossibly luminous turquoise waters which lined the burnt orange terrain of the peninsula, we arrived at the family home-cum-hostel where we’d be staying. We spent the rest of the day travelling on in the back of a cattle truck to the Punta Gallinas, the tip of South America, and then on to Taroa where gigantic untouched sand dunes rise and then fall sharply towards the ocean. We half-ran-half-staggered down the dunes to the beach – truly one of the most scenic we have seen on all our travels – before watching the sunset at Punto Aguja, and returning to our hammocks for the night.

We’d heard Colombia would be choc-full of pleasant surprises, and so far we’re finding this to be no exaggeration.

Once back in the Santa Marta area, we decided to spend a few days at a surf camp. With beautiful open areas for camping among the palm trees, it looked ideal. We pulled in during a rainstorm and headed straight for a good spot right on the beach. But just before we reached it we heard the dreaded sound – spin, spin, rev. We were going nowhere.

You wait a whole year to get stuck in the sand, and then two come along at once.

Days: 387
Miles: 12,728
Things we now know to be true: Quitting while you’re ahead is generally preferable.

Things we now know to be true – special edition

Panama City, Panama
[by Paula]

We’re heading back to the UK to celebrate a special birthday, and see family and friends. It just so happens that as we fly out on 10 Sept, it’ll be a year to the day since we picked up our beloved campervan in California.

It’s been the most exciting and liberating year of our lives. And there’s plenty more to come in Episode 2: South America.

We’ve learned a lot too – about driving in Latin America, about living in a van, about understanding what the hell is going on in a different culture, and about ourselves. Below – in no particular order – are some of the lessons learned and observations made.

WARNING: – the following list may contain sweeping generalisations, blatant stereotyping and unashamedly subjective statements.

—–

HAVING LESS STUFF IS LIBERATING

It’s hard to convey just how freeing it is to be lighter of things. With a few small exceptions (who packed the airmail writing pad – what is this, 1985?) we have nothing in the van that we do not need.

But even when you whittle your possessions down to the bare essentials, you still seem to spend an awful lot of time tidying up…

SOME MAP-MAKERS ARE CHARLATANS

And should be publicly held to account.
All we’re saying is – if there’s a road there, put it on the map, and if there’s not a road there, don’t. Simple.

SAYING NO IS OKAY – NO, REALLY

This is a cultural thing which we’ve found to be universally problematic – and occasionally quite amusing – for road-trippers in particular.
In Central America, when people don’t know things or can’t do something, they don’t want to admit it and say no. So they often say yes, and then just make stuff up. This is rarely malicious, but that doesn’t make it any less confusing. As one ex-pat delicately put it: “People here just don’t want to deliver bad news.”
Imagine how this translates when you are seeking directions to somewhere. After a few weeks of being sent on wild goose chases, we realised that the person who gave the directions actually had no clue where it was. We started to pick up on the subtle gestures that suggested the giver of directions was fabricating them – such as the general overhead-wave-of-the-hand-in-no-particular-direction.

I think what Jeremy is trying to say here is: “No”.

It’s also an unhelpful habit when one is asking a mechanic if they know how to do something. They will always say yes, regardless of the facts.
This unwillingness to deliver bad news can be lethal when mixed with the Latin American sense of punctuality (ie there is none). Ask someone when something will be ready, and – if the true figure is too unpalatable – they’ll give a more agreeable, but fictional, assessment eg ‘half an hour’. If you actually return in half an hour, you’ll be met with an astonished stare.
We try not to be all European about these things, but in all cultures, habits are hard to break.

PEOPLE ARE GOOD

Our travels only ever serve to bolster our conviction that the vast majority of people in the world are decent and kind.

DRINKING IN PETROL STATIONS IS JUST WRONG

Try to find a road map in a petrol station here and you’ll be laughed out of the place. But if you want to stock up on cold beers, there are hundreds to choose from!
This we find disconcerting enough. But when the gas stations provide tables and chairs so their customers can sit there and drink their beers before they set off again… well that’s just truly frightening.

CHILDREN DON’T HAVE TO BE IN CHARGE

It is an exceptional thing here to see a child really whining or having a tantrum. On the rare occasion that they do, they are totally ignored.
Now, we have been warned by friends with children that offering any theories as to why this may be so would almost certainly alienate every parent in western Europe and the US, and probably beyond.
So let’s just leave it there as an indisputable fact.

MENUS ARE MERELY INDICATIVE

Deciding what you are going to eat based on reading a menu or sign at a roadside stall, cafe, or restaurant is a fool’s game.
It is quite possible here to walk up to a stall which proclaims ‘we sell tamales’, only to find they only make them on Thursday and Sunday afternoons.
Or sit down at a ‘grilled chicken’ cafe, to be told there’s no chicken.
Not only that, when you ask for the advertised item, you are often met with total bafflement from behind the counter.

INDICATORS ARE INDICATIVE OF NOTHING AT ALL

When someone indicates here, it can mean may things. However, it’s very unlikely to mean “I will imminently be turning left, or right.”
A left indicator may mean “you can overtake me safely now”, or “you cannot overtake me safely now”. Equally, it could mean “I forgot to turn my indicator off and it’s been going for several hours” or “I am, in fact, turning right”.
Hands are a more direct form of communication. We have had to suppress our terribly British manners and learn that if we want to nudge into a line of traffic, indicating and waiting is pointless. Far better to lean out of the window and assertively gesture to the person behind to let you in.

THE INTERNET IS BOTH A BLESSING AND A CURSE

It helps us stay in touch with family and friends, and the world news, like never before. It helps us organise the trip, and to record it on the blog. It helps us stay entertained with new music, podcasts and films.

Wi-fi, check. Sunset, check. Beer, check.

It’s also a complete pain in the arse. We often wonder about the amount of time wasted looking for decent wi-fi, waiting for stuff to download, waiting for stuff to upload, shouting ‘can you hear us?’ to our parents via Skype…
And on the rare occasion that we stay in a hostel, we notice that travellers don’t make friends like they used to. (Sorry to sound so old, but it’s true).
Is it worth it? Only if you maintain a balance between experiencing the trip, and recording / planning / looking towards home.

SLEEP IS GOOD FOR YOU

Once you remove work stress and hideous working patterns from the equation, the body gets a chance to tell you that it likes to sleep for about 9 hours a night. What a revelation.

ROAD SIGNS ARE JUST EXTRAVAGANT

Doing a road trip through a region with a road sign system that is at worst non-existent and at best sporadic, incomplete or illogical, is a challenge. And we rise to that challenge! We will not be defeated.

PANIC-BUYING CAN BE JUSTIFIED

It’s not an attractive human trait, but we’ve noticed that the more we become accustomed to one country, the more uncertain we become about the country that comes next. Perhaps understandably, when we left the US we stocked up on a few food treats that we thought might not be so common in Mexico. By the time we left Mexico, three months later, we were panic-buying again: “We better get some decent chilli sauce before we go to Guatemala, it’s probably crap there. And what if they don’t have red wine?! Better get some more…”

SELF-CENSORSHIP IS INEVITABLE

We try not to complain too much about the rainy days… or crow about the sunshine

In this age of blogging we often debate the nature of our own blog, and that of others.
What we most want is to be truthful – warts and all – whilst aspiring to entertain and to put down a record of our trip for ourselves.
But we do censor ourselves – at both ends of the scale. We have been painfully aware of how difficult things are for many people, and how lucky we are to be in this position. We are often travelling through areas of abject poverty. And while the economic problems of home cannot compare with the deprivation around us here, the issues at home are real and grim for many people.
So it’s probably true to say we try to avoid being smug about all the good times we have. Conversely, when we were feeling fed up about being stranded in Honduras, we felt we didn’t have the right to complain about just how down we were some days.
If anything, we possibly over-egg the problems, without emphasising enough that they are all just part of a road-trip like this. We do not have to work, and sorting out the logistics of this journey is – for now – our ‘occupation’.
The thing is though, the bad stuff is just funnier…

JUST BECAUSE IT’S LOUD, IT DOESN’T MAKE IT GOOD
Very loud, bad pop and rock music is part of the fabric here. Luckily we spend most of our time away from urban areas, but when we do stay in towns we are often baffled that people seem to put up with noise levels that would have the inspectors calling back home.
If there are any noise nuisance rules, they are not enforced. This means nightclubs can play music so loud it is massively distorted, often in the open air or without sound-proofing.
Many shops – and, inexplicably, pharmacies – set up PA systems outside with distorted tunes crackling out of them. They seem to be under the impression that this will attract customers.
And one of the worst culprits are evangelical churches, who bellow out tuneless hymns at all hours.
On beaches that are popular with locals, one has to camp with some trepidation if it’s the weekend. It is normal and acceptable here to pull your car up right next to someone else and crank up the stereo to levels that make the sand vibrate. Ouch.

WATER AND POWER ARE PRECIOUS
We’ve never claimed to be doing this trip for any lofty environmental reasons. I’m not sure driving 40,000-odd miles would really qualify anyway…
But one of the by-products of doing a journey like this is that we’ve become very aware of what we are consuming, because much of the time we need to be self-sufficient when we are camping.
We can only carry so much water, and we can’t always be sure there will be running water in every place we camp. Likewise, we only have a limited amount of power in the van, to run lights and re-charge appliances, if we are stopped for a few days and have no outside power sources. And we cannot store loads of unnecessary perishable food.
Of course, if we do need those things we can up sticks and move, but sometimes we don’t want to. So we have to think about what we most need, and prioritise.
Before we left home I don’t think we gave a moment’s thought to how much water we really needed to boil two portions of pasta. But we do now.

FAMILIARITY IS COMFORTING

Yay! Nearly time for the next episode of Danny.

Some people rely on spiritual comfort to get them through the hard times. We just need Danny Baker on Radio 5 Live.
We don’t mind admitting that among the things we miss about being away from home are the familiar cultural references and shared sense of humour you have with people from your own part of the world.
We feed this hunger with radio podcasts and a few TV series that we watch on the laptop.
If the BBC’s Danny Baker could see us dancing about in the van to his show’s theme tune each week, we think he’d be quite tickled.

Thanks for following the journey so far. See you in a few weeks.

Take a brake

Panama City, Panama
by Jeremy

Central America. Tick. At the end of a month in Panama, it was with a sense of achievement (not to mention a dodgy oxygen sensor and a pair of pliers where our right front brake should be) that we rolled – well, limped really – back into Panama City a few days ago.

One of the more pleasant roads to navigate in Panama City

Our city camping spot, Balboa Yacht Club, is legendary among road trippers – there’s free camping on the shaded streets around it, it has toilets and showers, the cheapest laundry in the Americas and a superb view of the marina, where dozens of tiny yachts bob around the bay, dwarfed by massive cargo ships entering and leaving the canal. And a bar.

It is the perfect place to sort out all the paperwork needed to ship your vehicle from Panama to Colombia. Yes, someone rather inconveniently left a 30-mile roadless, jungle-filled, malaria-ridden, drug-gang and guerilla-controlled area without a road between the two countries – meaning the only option is a cargo ship. In our case, it was the perfect place to sort out storage of the van for our impending trip home to see family and friends, and to get the budget back on track. (Although the fish tacos are putting a hole in it and may soon require an extra hole in the belt!)

And we weren’t alone at Balboa. There were young German surfers, retired Swiss RV-ers, travelling Peruvian clowns (I’m not making this up you know…!) and dozens of bemused Panamanians looking on as we each popped our tops, cooked our dinners and got our deck chairs out at the side of the road. In Britain we’d have been run out of town as undesirables. Here we made friends.

To think it’s come to this… living on the streets in Panama City.

Although we had much to do our wanderlust once again got the better of us. At Soberanía National Park, as dark descended and a group of research students returned from a bat-hunting excursion, they called us over to point to a fer-de-lance slithering into the bushes. Once they’d left we looked up this notorious viper – responsible for most fatal snake bites here – in our book. It got many mentions but none actually said anything other than things like – “top of your not-wish list” or “not to be messed with”. I’m not going to bloody well mess with it, but what if it messes with me? What do I do? At this point the only people within miles got in their car and drove away with a cheery “goodnight”.

Relieved to be alive the next morning, and accompanied by toucans and the deafening sounds of howler monkeys, we hiked four hours through the national park before we headed northwards – trying to avoid the rough city of Colón. We didn’t. We got lost and ended up there. Twice. Eventually we made it to Portobelo and Puerto Lindo – fascinating Caribbean coastal towns and home to the forts and customs houses which defended Spanish imperial rule and acted as the gateway for the theft of gold from across the Americas.

Next it was time to get up close and personal with the canal. The Miraflores locks are a bewildering engineering achievement (especially for someone who failed physics at school) but it was at Gatun locks you came to realise the full wonder of the Panama Canal as an engineering feat, albeit it one with a dreadful human toll – tens of thousands of workers were sacrificed in its building and a virtual apartheid existed between black and white workers. It was also for so long a symbol of rapacious US foreign policy in Latin America. Now the new world order is being played out as visitors look on from just a few feet away. Trade with China now dominates.

Now that’s good steering. Miraflores Locks, Panama Canal.

At Gatun we were able to drive across the lock – we did – and back again, this time with the camera. We stood just a few feet away from a massive cargo ship as it steered, laden with hundreds of massive containers – with just a few inches on either side – through the locks. And paid $392,000 for the privilege. The ship, not us. We paid $5.

From the locks we headed to Gatun Lake and the village of Escobal – pretty much at the end of the paved road – in search of a lakeside campsite we’d read about. Before we reached the end of the road..SCREECH, CLANK. We stopped immediately. Panicked. Got out the van and crawled underneath. Nothing obvious. As so often happens in these situations a family – this one on their way to church – pulled up, offered help, rang a mechanic and before we knew it we were pulling in to his yard.

He said if the work took a while we could camp at his house. An hour later he had whipped off our completely bare brake pads and, given it was Sunday night in a small village, clamped the brake fluid hose shut with our pliers, took off our brake calipers and told us we could go – con cuidado. With care. With three brakes…

It’s not all shiny skyscrapers. A house in Panama City’s old town, Casco Viejo.

Relieved, we thanked him for the offer of camping at his place but said we were looking for Senora Tuñon’s house, as we heard we could camp there. He said “she’s my mother, her place is there”. He pointed next door to a massive, grassy lakeside plot with amazing views. Er, thanks, we said, rather bemused. First we couldn’t believe the coincidence – we’d driven an hour to get to this village in the hope of finding this spot, only to be helped out by the mechanic whose mother owned the site. Second, we couldn’t believe he suggested we camp in his tiny, scrappy mechanic’s yard when next door there was a beautiful camping spot.

So here we are. At the end of another road. It’s strange to have a sense of achievement when we haven’t even got near reaching half way to Argentina. But Panama City always seemed like a key point in the journey. The tip of Central America. A break in the road. So it’s our turn to take a ‘break’.

The paperwork is sorted. The van is in storage. And now we’re looking forward to a few weeks of warm beer and mature cheddar.

Days: 341
Miles: 11,348
Things we now know to be true: You just don’t mess with the fer-de-lance.

—–

MORE PICS MORE PICS MORE PICS:
We’ve published a few photos from Costa Rica on Flickr. Click here for part 1

—–

The very hungry caterpillar

San Jose, Costa Rica
[by Paula]

Fiery skies at Playa Maderas, Nicaragua

None of our trips are complete without Jeremy getting bitten on the neck by some wierd tropical insect. And who knew cute furry caterpillars could abseil from trees, land on your shoulder and sting you?

As I watched the inch-wide rash blistering and swelling before my eyes, I calmly suggested he sat down and stayed still while I kept an eye on him. Inside I was wondering how quickly one might get to a hospital from an island in the middle of Lake Nicaragua. We described the perpetrator to someone who worked at the finca we were camping in, and luckily were told it was not dangerous. Another crisis averted.

Given recent events, the fact that a mildly aggressive caterpillar is the worst thing we can report from the last two weeks says something about the blissful time we had in Nicaragua. As well as being many other fabulous things, it is camping heaven. Just the tonic we needed after so long without the van.

When leaving Honduras, bound for Nicaragua, we whizzed through the border in record speed. As we signed the last piece of paperwork the Nicaraguan customs officer high-fived me.

‘Yep, I’m going to like this country’, I thought.

View of bubbling mudpools and volcanoes from our camp spot in San Jacinto, Nicaragua

Western Nicaragua is pretty much a massive ticking time-bomb of fuming volcanoes. So first stop was the ‘ring of fire’ – an area with a chain of 12 active volcanoes. We drove along an impossibly straight and flat road with the most sublime view of the volcanoes ahead.

In the tiny village of San Jacinto, we’d hoped that the hotel there might have room for camping, but it looked closed. We were just dilly-dallying about, wondering what to do, when we noticed lots of people waving and pointing towards what looked like the end of a dead-end street. “What are they waving at? They don’t even know what it is we’re looking for,” huffed Jeremy (and I mean huffed!).

Wrong. As we drove slowly towards them, nestled in the corner just before the end of the street was the most perfect little shaded campground, called Rancho Las Hamacas. It had a platform overlooking natural bubbling mud pools, sulphurous steam rising from them against a background of two spectacular volcanoes.

We climbed the very active Volcan Telica the next day – a fairly tough three-hour hike up that ended with peering over the rim of the steaming crater and listening to the monstrous grumbling below. Eek.

With aching muscles, we set off the next day to the left-wing city of Leon, a key hub of Sandinista support, and to the tiny museum of ‘heroes and martyrs’, which is maintained by a committee of mothers whose children were killed during the conflict in the 1970s and 80s. The town is also peppered with feisty political murals and memorials.

Sandino’s image is everywhere in Nicaragua, not least in the leftie city of Leon

On the way out of the city we were pulled over by the police for driving the wrong way down a one-way street. After much discussion and pointing it looked liked we were going to get away with it, but one of the officers kept leaning in the window and mumbling something about buying a drink. I didn’t even have to play the dumb foreigner – I really didn’t have a clue what he was talking about. I said, “I don’t want a drink, thank you’” and we drove off. As we did so Jeremy said: “He was drunk, he wanted us to buy him a drink!” Oh.

And that comedy of errors was the closest we’ve come to being asked to bribe a police officer in 9 months of driving through Mexico and Central America.

A few miles down the road we camped behind a hotel on the Pacific at Las Peñitas, and ate fresh fish with coconut, and the best fries we have encountered in a long while. The owner – a French woman – invited us to join her and a bunch of local surfer dudes who were driving back into Leon in a truck for the evening, to watch an open-air concert organised by the French embassy. That sounds civilised and cultured, we thought. At 4am the following morning we finally dragged her, blind drunk, out of a night club and back into the truck.

There was more camping utopia at the volcanic crater lake Laguna de Apoyo, where we swam in the pristine water, with howler monkeys bellowing in the trees above. In the gorgeous colonial city of Granada, we met up again with my former BBC colleague Lynda, and after lunch walked past a bar just in time to glimpse England losing to Italy on penalties in the Euro 2012 quarter finals.

While there we camped in a slightly weird lake-front ‘tourist centre’ – basically a strip of bars and restaurants along the front. It seemed like the only feasible place near town, but felt a little bit sketchy. We asked one of the wardens about camping safely, and she radioed her security colleagues, telling them to meet us at the car park. As we drove up they were waiting to guide us into a space, and then more or less acted as our personal security guards for the rest of the night. One guy slept near the van with a dog for the whole night – now that’s service.

The pure joy of discovering raspados con leche – shaved ice with a gallon of condensed milk poured over it.

However, it turned out the innocuous-looking restaurant next door was actually a dance club – so with music blaring till 3am we had a fairly poor night’s sleep. We headed off early next day towards the port of San Jorge, via another very active volcano, Volcan Masaya. It’s one of the only volcanoes where you can actually drive to the rim, but we’d heard it was closed due to excess activity. We turned up to find it had just been re-opened but officials had limited the time you could spend at the top to just 5 minutes, for safety reasons. So worried are they by the threat of an explosion or rocks being hurled from the crater that you have to park facing outwards so you can make a rapid escape!

We ended up running over our time, because at the top we spotted two other road-trippers from Germany who were driving a big truck – Sabine and Thomas – and had a chat with them while the steam belched out of the volcano behind us.

Back down in San Jorge we bought a ticket for the next day’s ferry to Isla de Ometepe – an island on the lake that is made up of two massive volcanoes – and then slept on the beach next to the port.

We had lovely memories of Ometepe after visiting 10 years ago, and it was just as spectacular as we remembered. We had a good long stop at a wonderful finca/hostel for 5 nights. Finca Magdalena is an organic farm, at the foot of Volcan Maderas, which is a co-operative owned by several families. We camped next to their stunning garden which was constantly full of butterflies. A little deer wandered around wearing a red neckerchief – very communist! At night the fireflies took over from the butterflies and lit up the trees in their hundreds.

A little slice of camping heaven at Finca Magdalena, Isla de Ometepe, Nicaragua

On the second day, we saw two very tired people returning with bicycles, with one of them saying: “that was the hardest cycle of my life”. ‘What wimps’, we said, with a smug little smile. However, we did wimp out of climbing the volcano, which was a fairly horrid 6-8 hour muddy climb into the clouds. We decided to cycle the 35km road around the base of the volcano instead.

It was the hardest cycle of our lives.

Six hot hours of up and down on a ‘road’ made up of jagged boulders and slippy stones. Ouch. But what scenery. We stopped for a fried fish lunch in a little bay with a view of Volcan Concepcion, one of the most iconic views in Nicaragua. Can’t grumble really.

While there I was busy writing a couple of articles for the BBC Travel website [an online commercial venture that's not accessible from the UK, I'm afraid]. A piece on camping in Mexico & Central America and a related photo slideshow. Thanks to our fellow road-trippers at Life Remotely, Earth Circuit, Apollo’s Journey and From A to B for their help with it.

Early morning cuppa at Playa Maderas, Nicaragua

Our last two nights in Nicaragua were spent on the gorgeous beaches north of San Juan del Sur. Surfers flock here for the fabulous waves – it was the most tourists we’d seen in one place for a long while. While there we bumped into Sabine and Thomas again. We camped in one surf camp that had howler monkeys living in the trees above us. The cacophonous sound they make can be quite disconcerting when it wakes you up at 6am.

But at least they’re not as scary as caterpillars.

Days: 276
Miles: 9,287
Things we now know to be true: Howler monkeys make very effective alarm clocks.

Honduras – we love you, we hate you…

Isla de Ometepe, Nicaragua
[by Paula]

We got the van out of Honduras last week, and I have to say we didn’t even give it a cursory backwards glance as we gleefully skipped southwards over the border. We’ve since been busy loving Nicaragua – the gorgeous camping spots, volcanoes and lakes galore, and the (mostly) blissfully smooth roads. Yes, now that we are sad little petrol-heads, things like smooth roads get us very, very excited.

We are, frankly, relieved to be here. We had a bit of a rocky relationship with Honduras and gladly decided to go our separate ways. It was for the best.

It didn’t help that our ‘back-on-the-road’ celebrations earlier this month were somewhat marred by a couple of things.

Can’t move for volcanoes in gorgeous Nicaragua.

We picked up the van on a Friday afternoon, and took it back to the hostel we were staying at in San Pedro Sula which – we may have mentioned before – is a very dangerous city. The murder capital of the world, in fact. For this reason we did not go out after dark on any of the previous 10 nights we’d stayed there. But this night Honduras were playing Panama in a World Cup qualifier, so we arranged to go to the game and the co-owner came along with some of her friends, leaving her sister in charge.

We were having an amazing night. Tens of thousands of people stood to sing the national anthem, the beers were flowing, everyone was really up. The guy sitting behind us had just returned to Honduras for the first time in 20 years, after living in the US, and was beside himself with excitement. We both said later that it was one of those moments – and there have been a few, despite everything – where we thought, ‘aw, Honduras is lovely, Hondurans are lovely people, maybe it ain’t so bad after all’…

Then at half time that all came crashing down. We got a call to say there was an armed robbery at our hostel. Two men with guns had ambushed six backpackers as they arrived, burst inside and robbed them and another guy already inside. Some of them were left with nothing but the clothes they stood up in – passports, money, cards, whole backpacks, everything gone. Thankfully no one was killed or injured. As the locals reminded us later, not all robberies in San Pedro end the same way.

As we were driving back there from the game we were really terrified. The phonecalls from the hostel were increasingly frantic and confused and at one point it sounded like we might be returned to a siege, with the gunmen still inside. But when we arrived they had gone, and the police were there. Jeremy and I had spent the intervening half an hour trying to face up to the possibility that we might have lost all our stuff too – as all our valuables and car keys were upstairs in a bedroom and we didn’t know if the whole place had been ransacked.

It hadn’t, and our stuff was still where we’d left it. The van was safely parked behind a solid gate next door. More importantly, we realised how lucky we had been to pick that one night to go out.

No one blamed the hostel, who handled the situation brilliantly. Sadly it’s not unheard of for tourists to be followed to their hotels, or jumped when they arrive somewhere. Often the taxi drivers are directly involved or tip people off. Most hotels – as this one does – use taxi drivers they know, but in this case the travellers had turned up on spec.

Honduras has some cool and unique stuff, like this pink boa (I know, it looks white, but it is called a pink boa..)

No one got much sleep that night. In the morning we helped the people that had been robbed as much as we could, with spare clothes and use of our Skype account etc, before heading off to Lago de Yojoa, south of San Pedro. Two of the victims – young Danish backpackers – decided to come with us as they couldn’t replace their passports until after the weekend. We bundled them into the van with what was left of their belongings. They were still shocked after what had happened, but remarkably philosophical.

As we drove along one of them said: “We’re so glad we met you. Proper grown-ups who are responsible and know what they are doing.”

We just looked at each-other, silently thinking: “Holy shit! What makes them think we are grown up and responsible?!..”. We felt so old, but then realised we were actually old enough to be their parents.

We were absolutely desperate to get them there safely, and pulled into the lake hostel a couple of hours later, very relieved.

However, on the way, we’d heard a disturbing new noise coming from the van. It didn’t sound healthy at all, although the new transmission seemed to be performing fine. We pushed it out of our minds temporarily and set about enjoying our first night camping in months.

Camping again. Heaven.

We slept in a beautiful coffee finca, teeming with birds and amazing bugs, and so tranquil and dark at night. We’d missed the van so much – every little task, no matter how mundane, felt exciting. It was just brilliant to be independent again.

While there we talked to a Honduran woman, from San Pedro, about our feelings for the country. She had just returned after spending five years in Italy, and was shocked to see how violent her city had become. People hide in their cars, behind high walls and razor-wire fences or in soulless shopping malls. Many use drive-thru shops and banks instead of walking around and there are armed guards everywhere, even on some residential streets. There are many people who will try to defend it as an okay place to live, but to us this is not an acceptable way of life.

We told her: “One minute we warm to Honduras, we see its good side, and then the next we are really scared.”

She said: “I’m from here, and I feel exactly the same.”

We’ve tried hard not to be too negative. We wanted to love the country, not least because we had bad memories of a previous visit 10 years ago, when Jeremy was very ill there. This time we met lots of wonderful people in Honduras, and saw a tonne of natural beauty that is hard to beat. We tried to recognise that being stranded somewhere can give it a sinister feel that is partly imagined, because you feel trapped and are no longer staying out of choice.

Our Honduran mechanic, Ivan, must have been very glad to see the back of us.

After a couple of nights at the finca we decided to drive-test the van, to try to work out how serious the noise was. We drove up and down the nearby hills – scratch, scrape, scrape. It was still there. Much as it was truly the last thing we wanted to do, we reluctantly accepted we’d need to head back to the mechanic in San Pedro Sula to get it checked out.

We pulled in that afternoon. I’m sure he was as depressed to see us as we were to be there. Even the security guard had a face that said: ‘oh hello, back again (sigh).’

After much thought we decided to go back to the same hostel – what happened was not their fault, we still felt safe there and we wanted to support them. And it turned out others had made the same decision and gone back too, which speaks volumes for the wonderful owners, who helped us beyond measure during our many stays there.

The mechanic said he’d found a damaged wheel bearing, which might be the source of the noise. But he wasn’t sure if he’d be able to get the right part to replace it in Honduras. I stopped listening then as I was too busy hyperventilating into a paper bag.

The upshot was, we were stuck in San Pedro for another, very very long five days. Thankfully a new wheel bearing was found and ordered, and arrived the next day. But the noise was still there. The mechanic wondered aloud if there might be a problem with the new transmission. Our hearts sank again. Finally, another problem with the brake calipers was found as a possible source. They thought they’d sorted it, but the noise remained.

On the final day, when we went to collect it, our mechanic – usually a sharp, clean-shaven, tidy kind of guy – had a five o’clock shadow and tousled hair. We felt partially responsible. Had we broken him too?

It’s behind you! Another spectacular smokin’ Nicaraguan volcano.

He trudged out to the reception area and said: “There’s nothing more we can do. We’ve fixed everything but the noise is still there sometimes,” and concluded that it was nothing serious, that we could safely drive it like that and just live with it. Of course, we haven’t heard the noise since.

We drove off, happy and excited again. Nicaragua awaited! We headed south and looked for somewhere to camp near the border. We pulled into what we thought was a church with lots of land and asked if we could camp there. The man very kindly phoned to ask his boss, and then gently told Jeremy that the answer was no – it was a youth rehabilitation centre and they didn’t think it would be appropriate. Oops. Now that would have been a weird last night in Honduras.

We eventually camped up in a basic little deserted turicentre, with rooms and a slimy swimming pool. The owners, an old couple, had their house in the grounds and we parked up under a tree in front of it. She cleaned up a toilet especially for us but said there would be no access to it after midnight. We told her we’d be leaving early for the border.

Next morning she got up early and shuffled out to our van in her nightdress. She said she’d opened the side door to their home and we were welcome to go inside, wash and use the loo. For about the millionth time on this trip, we wondered if we’d find such hospitality and trust in our own part of the world.

Other than border officials, that old lady was the last person we saw in Honduras, and for that we are very glad.

Days: 268
Miles: 9,003
Things we now know to be true: There’s a fine line between love and hate.

Part Two: Mission Impossible?

JD, Lago de Coatepeque, El Salvador

The clue should have been in the name. “Dondé es el parque nacional El Imposible?” we asked out the window for what seemed like the hundredth time that day. Never heard of it, it’s left, it’s right, it doesn’t exist, it’s back the way, it’s straight on. No-one knows. Even our maps had three different marked routes, none of which actually seemed to lead there. At one point a very drunk man crossed his arms and suggested we go in two directions at once, and then asked for money for his help – we almost followed his advice!

The guided tour of the van didn't take long...

Having spent our first few sweaty hours in El Salvador with our new-found friends and fellow road-trippers Zach and Jill (yes, they’ve had all the jokes) looking for El Imposible, we gave up – temporarily. After driving in to a small ditch – unintentionally – we camped out together at a small coffee finca. Well, it said it was a coffee finca and a camping site on the sign – but when we knocked on the locked gate the man who answered told us they had no coffee and we couldn’t camp. Our powers of persuasion, coupled with our lost foreigner look, prevailed and before long we were set up and toasting our arrival in El Salvador with a well-deserved beer, while daring each other to brave the massive spiders in the toilets.

The next day got worse before it got better. More determined than ever, we set out again for El Imposible and met the same confused responses until finally we got two people to agree there was a way from the town we were in, Tacuba, but only in a 4×4. We don’t have one – but that hasn’t stopped us up to now and we followed Zach and Jill along a frightening but ultimately rewarding trail. Before long we were grinding up an impossibly steep cobblestone drive to a small bare patch of ground a family had invited us to camp on, next to their shop and the local church.

No sooner had we parked than we became the main attraction for not only the family but everyone for miles around, it seemed. Children, adults, dogs all wanted to peer into our vans, watch us cook, eat, set up the bed, chat and share the hottest afternoon and evening so far with us. We must have seemed very odd to them – playing cards and drinking a beer round our camping table in the middle of their football pitch, just one of a series of things that greatly amused them.

If they thought us odd they hid it well, and they could not have been more generous – providing us with camping space, security, water, bringing us chairs to sit on, creating some shade for us with sheets and then bringing us tortillas. We were then invited to take part in their Semana Santa procession. They had nothing but were willing to share it all.

And then, finally, El Imposible! Up at 5am to join our local guide, Clementino, for a punishing 11-mile hike. But wow. From the summit we had sweeping vistas of the Pacific Ocean in one direction and an exhilarating panorama of mountains and volcanos in the other. Suddenly all the hardships were worth it. Impossible? Huh. Seven hours later, with limbs aching, we had conquered it.

Rooms with a view

A quick al-fresco jungle shower and then on down the Ruta de las Flores to Juayua and the weekend food fair – which because of the elections had just finished. Bugger! But that wasn’t the end of our bad luck. With voting the next day the sale of alcohol was banned for 72 hours. It was a heavy price to pay for democracy and we retreated to our ‘campsite’ – a cul-de-sac at the edge of town – and with Zach and Jill set up our table and chairs in the street, literally, before finishing off the last couple of tepid beers and the remains of the warm white wine. For the next 48 hours we were reduced to putting triple sec in hot chocolate to get our kicks. What a desperate bunch.

With our limbs barely recovered we headed for Parque Nacional Los Volcanes and, after a beautiful and spectacular drive, camped in the national park and watched the sun set behind the perfectly formed crater cone of Volcan Izalco.

Donning the hiking boots once more we headed out to tackle the summit of neighbouring Volcan Santa Ana – an amazing walk up to the crater with incredible views across Lago de Coatepeque and right across to the mountains of Guatemala.

Talking of Guatemala, when we last posted we were still there – and now we’re not. So to recap. After saying farewell to Brian and Christine at the airport we headed to Valhalla – not literally the viking hell, but a picturesque macademia nut plantation on the outskirts of Antigua, where we spent two peaceful nights getting used to life in the van again before heading for the Atitlan nature reserve. Then it was back to Xela for a bit of work (and the chance to catch another football match) and then on to the coast – and the steamy beach town of Monterrico.

Don't tell the insurance company about our ferry journey

The drive there was uneventful enough until a few miles short of the town we reached the ferry port. I say ferry, what I mean is effectively a dug-out canoe-thing, a sort of raft with sides, onto which we had to drive the van and float – ok we had a tiny engine – but you get the idea. This was NOT, I repeat NOT a ferry. On the 30-minute journey through the mangroves it creaked, leaked and listed each time another boat passed. I’m sure our insurance company would have said “you did WHAT?” if something had happened.

But it didn’t, and we found yet another odd camping spot in the car park at Johnny’s Place – a beachside hotel and restaurant where we had the great fortune to bump into Zach and Jill. The odd part of it was we had camped in the sandy parking lot, right outside the manager’s cabin and wondered if we were being a bit too cheeky. The manager turned out to be Tony – a Glaswegian hippy who took to the road in the 60s and never quite made it home. After watching a fiery red sunset from the never-ending black sand beach it was easy to see why he chose Guatemala over the Gorbals.

And so back to the present – and future. We spent the past couple of nights, again with Zach and Jill, camped on the shore of Lago de Coatepeque – enjoying the amazing views, swimming, playing cards, laughing at each other’s strange expressions, putting the world to rights, celebrating the end of prohibition with a few (is 45 still a few? – ed.) cold beers and again becoming the centre of attention for curious locals. Zach even managed to be recruited to star in a commercial!

Whipping up a feast with Zach and Jill

Yesterday we said our goodbyes (or we hope our ‘hasta luego(s)’) as we headed to Santa Ana and they to San Salvador. I’m sure the four of us will share a few more beers and strange adventures over the coming months. We hope so – they’ve been great travelling companions and kindred spirits.

For us, it’s time to meet up again with some old friends we haven’t seen for far, far too long – a shower and a washing machine. Hola, mucho gusto.

Days: 163
Miles: 7368.2
Things we now know to be true: Nothing is impossible

In case you missed the latest pics on Flickr, here they are again: Flickr pics: Xela, Guatemala