Last week we started the bike after it had been sat in heavy rain for a couple of days and the motorbike did not sound good. It would not tick over, it sounded very rough and it struggled to make it from one side of Cartagena to the other. I found water in the spark plug chamber and inside the…
If a friend of mine knocked on my door in the UK at 10am, and asked with a big smile on his face if I wanted to go get some charcoal with him, I think I could be forgiven if my imagination turned to sizzling steaks and cold beer. Johny, our Ecuadorian host here in Yalo tapped on our door…
In the morning November 18th before we could leave for the our next border crossing from El Salvador to Honduras at El Amatillo, Lars needed to fix his clutch cable. We had breakfast and realized that the Austrian couple Elisabeth & Walther we met two nights before was also at the same hotel, staying in the parking lot ……
BUGGER! BLAST! DAMM! International relations totally suck. Libya are ‘not ready’ to issue visas yet and Iran will not. No viable route across the Med. Thanks a lot world. YOU SUCK! Tigger…
My wife and I just quit our jobs. In three weeks we’ll be homeless, at least in the conventional sense. We’re about to set off on a multi-year around-the-world overland road trip in our 1984 Volkswagen Vanagon. For the last two years we’ve been plotting our escape, counting down. It didn’t seem real at the beginning, but we kept putting…
By Paul Archer Angkor Wat Since we had left Europe five months previously, we hadn’t really drunk alcohol nor had much contact with Westerners. Eastern Turkey, Iraq, Iran and Pakistan were dry countries, and aside for a small handful of evenings in random places in Nepal and China we hadn’t partied much all that time. Now we were entering the…
Sunday 4th December 2011 Doddinghurst, England to Lille, France. 167 miles. We awoke earlier than our light alarm very excited about setting off and last minute mental to do lists running through our minds. Amazingly we managed to squeeze everything we’d packed into Bluebelle, though there will have to be some reorganisation on the road. It definitely took longer than…
Well, it’s the end of our second week in Yalo in Ecuador. We’ve continued negotiating the sending of replacement parts for Paul to rebuild our Transfer Box. A bit disappointing we’ve not heard from the UK company we expected to help but expect our US contact to be able to provide what we need. Menu. On Monday (28th) we got…
New Suspension makes the truck TALL! Yes, we’ve been silent since the big 11-11-11 launch party and I apologize for that. It is not because we’ve not had any adventures, because we’ve had plenty. It’s more that we’ve been living a life that I’ll sum up from a Roger Staubach quote by saying, “there are no traffic jams along the…
CAMBOJA Apesar de ser uma cidade agradável e simpática, com região central bonita, repleta de bares e restaurantes modernos e com arquitetura preservada, as maiores atrações de Siem Reap (pronuncia-se “simm-rip”) não estão dentro dela, mas ao seu redor. São as ruínas de uma das mais poderosas civilizações que o mundo já conheceu, a Khmer, que dominou a região entre…
Times have changed when Chris Scott offers a book as a Kindle edition. It’s not as though the desert travel veteran is un-tech-savy—his authoritative Sahara Overland Forum has been on the Web for what seems like eons. But Chris’s participation in threads there always had sort of a message-from-the-wilderness mystery to it—one imagined him typing on a gritty Panasonic ToughBook…
Photos by Tom Riles and Brian Nelson If it’s Tuesday, it must be Timbuktu! by Ken Freund Reprinted with permission, RoadRUNNER MagazineYamaha has been selling this new Super Ténéré adventure-touring model in Europe for several years now and is finally bringing it to North America. Ténéré (pronounced like “tay-nay-ray”) is the word for “desert” in the language of the Tuareg tribe…
Editors Note: this is part 3 of a ten part series we are doing on overlanding advice. Future PanAm overlanders this is for you. They post each Sunday. Determining a long term budget for a trip like the PanAm is certainly the crux. Before this, our PanAm trip was still a wavering fantasy. Staring at the carefully crafted numbers was…
Rough starts to Ethiopia but things are looking up now. I am currently in Bahar Dar, after visiting Gondar and the Simian Mountains. I found a little piece of paradise at a camp named Tim & Kim on the banks of Lake Tana. A Dutch couple who started this camp some years ago after backpacking through Africa. It is…
by Roseann Hanson When I was little my family had a chuck box for camping. Most of our camping was with the Boy Scouts, for whom my father was a Scoutmaster. His name is Charles, and friends called him Chuck, so I always thought it was his box, spelled with capital letters, as in “Chuck’s Box.” My mind and heart…
Entering into our second month in Mexico we made our way inland from the Pacific coast towards Guadalajara. The next phase of our trip brings us through the most densely populated section of Mexico, thus becoming increasingly cultural with more cities, more museums, and more history. Having already sensed that my brain may have shriveled a bit from the weeks…
Glad to be leaving Las Vegas, it was a dull day down the interstate to the California border. From there, we cycled through the Mohave desert, crossed old Route 66 and then crossed the Joshua Tree National Park. The last stretch took us along the Salton Sea, on a blustery day thanks to the yearly [...]…
Whichever kind of outdoor type person you are there is one thing that brings us all together, the need to eat. Because you need to eat, you’re probably going to need to cook, and it’s difficult to cook without good cookware, but where do you begin? Step #1: What’s Your Type? Let’s talk first about the types of outdoor enthusiasts…
The weather was nice at Bahia de LA but we wanted more – every mile South is a mile into better weather in this part of the world. I’m sure we’ll get fed up with the heat before too long but at the moment we are seriously craving it. So from Bay of LA we drove South on Mex 1…
The weather was nice at Bahia de LA but we wanted more – every mile South is a mile into better weather in this part of the world. I’m sure we’ll get fed up with the heat before too long but at the moment we are seriously craving it. So from Bay of LA we drove South on Mex 1…