It was a few km to the Chilean border on a straight road, we could see the contours of the buildings already. After leaving the Salar de Uyuni and Bolivia we had a small snack on the side of the road. This appeared to be a good decision. You never know how long a border crossing is going to be. So far it usually had taken between 30 min and 3 hours, and nobody ever cared about Layla. This one […]
Our overlanding down days faded away in the Colombian mountains. Driving at night it came a little unexpected, when the road suddenly started climbing. Our navigation app Maps.me shows us a lot of information, but not the altitude. What Maps.me also didn’t show us, is that we were following the Venezuelan refugee stream as well.. As soon as we got to higher elevations, we were more in our element in the mountains, the surroundings improved massively and the temperatures dropped. […]
After a lot of back and forth about the shipping options we agreed with Einmalrundum to book the flat rack. We confirmed with the agent (Tea) that we’d been in contact with and we received the instructions on how to proceed. It was a relief having made a decision, but we weren’t completely confident, knowing some horror-stories from fellow overlanders. Not that we would have had many other options, since almost every company or agent we contacted didn’t respond (sufficiently). […]
All the options described before have some larger drawbacks. And for a long time (months) we’ve tried to organise this without these major drawbacks, a bit naive probably. In the end we did ship in a way not described in the previous blog, but some of the drawbacks still applied. We ended up booking a flat-rack, which is essentially a container without walls & roof and therefore not the size restrictions. Reason; We were within the 1cm range of fitting […]
The whole Pan American Highway stretches from Alaska to southern Argentina. Most people who are driving it, have their own variation. And this is how it should be, there are too many different routes possible, which is also part of what makes it so amazing. So do we have our own way, basically from British Columbia to Chile, and from there.. who knows.. But regardless of your route, everybody faces one mutual problem, roughly halfway down. The Darien Gap, where […]
After we made it to Panama, from where ship to Colombia, time to review. Due to time restrictions, and regulations around pets (Layla), we haven’t been to Belize and El Salvador. In the other countries we stayed 4-5 days each. Travelling through Mexico and Central America was great, where sometimes our expectations were met, but not always. We were most excited about… Guatemala. Definitely our highlight for sure! Here our surroundings became green and mountainous again. We found a nice […]
After a few great days in Guatemala we were heading for Honduras. Crossing this border we had a slightly different approach to the Guatemalan border with Mexico where we were crossing early in the morning and wanted to beat the heat. We failed hard and this resulted in being toasted and wasting half a day. We wanted to cross the Honduran border after sunset, when things cool down and when you don’t miss out on anything else. Ready to play […]
The moment we crossed the border with Mexico it felt like the journey had finally really begun. At first, the border was hard to find, mainly due to the overly complicated and badly signposted junction in Texas. But we managed to find the border, doing at first what everybody tells you not to do, driving through Mexico after dark, but we had no choice. We were asked what we were carrying and where we were going, but no passports no […]