We crawled along in the smoke. The road stayed good. The fire changed direction yet again and the highway was no longer under threat. Up ahead the border loomed in the gloom. A friendly official waves us in. We made it! We are finally here in Alaska!!! But we can’t see a damned thing with […]
Stampeded in Calgary
The border crossing into Canada was the most comprehensive crossing of the whole trip. Why are you coming into Canada? Where are you staying? What is your itinerary? Where you refused admission to any of the countries on your trip? Do you have insurance for your bikes for the period you will be in Canada? […]
Baja Races and The End in Latin America
We took the ferry from Topolobampo near Los Mochis to La Paz on the Baja Peninsular. It was a big modern ship and we had a smooth uneventful overnight voyage across the Sea of Cortez, trying to sleep in one of those uncomfortable airplane type recliner seats that permits adopting a comfy position for a […]
Fear & Loathing in Mexico City – The Adventurers Return
You don’t want to go anywhere near the place. It’s so very dangerous. People get mugged, robbed, raped, murdered or any combination of the above you care to chose from. Taxi crime. Only take cars from licensed taxi stands, otherwise you might be another victim dropped off dead or alive down a dark alley in […]
Heading Up Into the Yucatan, Bad News From Home, The End for 2004
So that was Central America and what a contrast to South America. The first thing that struck us was how close everything is. Gone were the big journeys in the saddle from our times in Argentina, Chile & Peru, where it could take days to ride from one place to the next. Central America is […]
Border Rip Off
In, Ecuador, way back in May, we bumped into Dan Walsh the columnist from ‘Bike’ magazine. We spent a pleasant evening drinking beer with him at the Turtle’s Head British Pub in Quito. Dan is riding an F650 Dakar from New York to South America, covering parts of our route in reverse along with his […]
An Unremarkable Road Leads To A Remarkable Place
We left Costa Rica on a Monday morning. Blue skies at Tamarindo gradually faded to grey as we rode into a heavy front of rainy weather. We stopped just on the edge of it to don wetsuits and rode the last 30 or 40 miles to the Nicaraguan border at Peñas Blanca in a downpour. […]
Enough of Panama, We Want To Be Somewhere Else!
Today we crossed our first frontier in Central America on the bikes and moved into Costa Rica. What a relief! At first all was confusion, with no signs to point out where all the various immigration and customs offices where (in fact we weren’t even sure where the actual border was) but we enlisted the […]
Trujillo and Chan Chan, Turned Away at Ecuador?
The Garua fog conditions would be with us now more or less until we left Peru. The ride north to Trujillo, our next stop, took us along more desert coastline mainly in light fog but with occasional excursions into the sunshine where the road climbed to crest headlands or coastal mountains. We spent a day […]
The Bridge At Ilave
We left Copacabana and Bolivia and rode the 8 miles to the Peruvian border. On the previous day we checked with bus drivers doing the Puno run as to the status of the blocked bridge at Ilave. Some good news! The passengers now had to decamp at the roadblock, then climb across the barricade to […]