Planning – Boots and Coffee

How We Roll – Part 2

Published on May 8, 2019May 8, 2019 by sbbenzil1 Comment

“There are no foreign lands. It is the traveler only who is foreign.” Robert Louis Stevenson

Today, we are traveling from Surabaya, East Java, Indonesia, by train en route to Yogyakarta, Indonesia. Nearly everything here in SE Asia is different for us here: the language. The terrain. The foods. The manner of dress. Right hand driving cars driving on the “wrong” side of the road. The prevalent religion(s). The architecture. The currency. The time difference.

We have discovered that our initial reactions to a place often focus on the things that are different. And then, there is this natural evolution that allows us to focus on the things that are similar to our prior experiences. As this happens, anxiety turns into excitement and concern melts into enlightenment and enjoyment. It is a beautiful process to watch as it unfolds and it convinces is that we can handle this. we just need to breathe and put one foot in front of the next.

When we made the 20 month road trip from the US to Alaska to Panama, we learned quickly that it would be impossible for us to fully plan a fixed itinerary for a trip of that duration. We opted to create a very rough itinerary of planned stops and when necessary, to pace ourselves accordingly. When we reached one destination, we started looking forward to the next one or two stops and made arrangements for that stop on the fly. This worked pretty well, with few hiccups along the way.

Emboldened with those experiences, we decided to follow a similar method of travel and planning for our time in Southeast Asia. In advance of our departure, we read about the region generally, focused a little on a general outline of places (mostly c) where we knew we wanted to visit, roughed out an itinerary along a general time line and began from there. We left the US with round trip tickets from Washington, DC to Bangkok, spaced 6 months apart, a reservation at a hotel in Bangkok and two accommodations on Bali, where we traveled first, choosing Bali as the place where we would celebrate our wedding anniversary. Knowing that we had 30 days to stay in Indonesia, we began to sketch out a plan for Indonesia that included the islands of Bali, Java and Sumatra as our primary focus.

On this trip to Southeast Asia, we decided to travel independently without our beloved Gertie and Wolfie or their local surrogates. While it is possible to overland in Asia, we wanted to try a different travel style and opted to travel using public forms of transportation, including planes, trains, cars and boats. (Due to motion sickness issues, buses are largely not an option for us). As of this writing, we have been able to make all of our travel reservations on our own, except for the train tickets from Surabaya to Yogyakarta where we relied upon help from hotel staff.

We believe that advance planning for a trip of this duration, like our earlier road trip, is difficult if not impossible. So, once we have landed in a place, we turn to many different resources to fine tune our experience there. We rely on traditional travel guides such as Lonely Planet, Fodors, Frommers, and Rough Guides. We use various travel apps and websites, travel blogs, hotel personnel, personal recommendations, travel magazines and more. We watch travel videos on YouTube and Travel Channel. We watch Anthony Bourdain. We always rely on professional tour guides when visiting places that benefit from detailed explanations, insights and decent English interpretations. We speak with taxi drivers, waiters and tour guides for recommendations. We try, when it is possible, to take people up on their offers of an introduction to their “sister’s-cousin’s-ex-stepfather-by-marriage who lives in (fill in the place).” We try to absorb it all and we try to know and honor our limits and our interests — just because a 28 (or 35 or 50) year old recommends a cave tubing trip or a wooden cable car over the ocean (Timang Beach Gondola) or a 6 hour driving tour to a volcanic crater to watch the sunrise doesn’t mean that we must do this as well. After all, we are 61 and 65. We live by a rule that it makes no sense to take on unnecessary risk, adversity, danger or physical rigor if it will jeopardize our trip, our health or our marriage.

Often, we have found that insights into a local culture come from unexpected things and places. Wandering a local shopping mall allows one to see how people dress, treat their children, respect their elders, and spend their shopping dollars. Eating in that mall’s version of a food court allows you to see how even US branded fast food restaurants are infused with local flavor. Going to the movies exposes you to movie trailers, commercials and public service announcements the likes of which you would never see in your home country and which shed light on local traditions. Riding on a local touring shuttle introduces you to local people who may exchange information in a more intimate and revealing way than you will ever get from a book or a tour operator.

We haven’t devised a term that really captures this way of travel — one of us refuses to call ourselves backpackers because we really aren’t traveling in the style that is often connoted by that term. Instead of hostels, we choose to stay in hotels and serviced apartments and villas. Our “budget” is lavish compared to traditional backpackers and yet we are cost conscious and try to stay within an amount less than what many on packaged tours would spend on a daily basis. While we like to eat locally, we haven’t eaten yet from a street cart, although that is certainly in our future. And while we have eaten burgers and one memorable special “high end” meal at Room4Dessert in Ubud, we have primarily eaten the cuisine of our host country. When we read blogs of travelers who have written of their time in (or about) Southeast Asia, nearly all of them are budget backpackers or high end tour and travel companies (and the magazine writers who travel with them). We fall somewhere in between.

Regardless of what name you give us, we can share that we love this way of travel. We also realize that we are among a small group of people who have the time, the resources and the inclination to travel as we do, meandering, absorbing, and taking home more memories than things.

It has been jarring and strange and a little scary at moments. In this part of the world, we are in the minority in many respects. When we hear English being spoken, more often than not, the voice is from Australia or India. We cannot rely on American sensibilities such as the rights of pedestrians, rights of way, or the right to free speech. Instead of being awakened by the crowing of roosters, the first sounds we hear in the morning, like the last sounds we hear at night, are the prayers from the local mosques during this month of Ramadan. Without Wolfie and Gertie with us, we do not have the respite afforded by being in our own space, where everything is familiar within even when everything outside is not. Here, we need to find our own space and the peace that restores us in different ways.

In the words of the Muslim scholar and explorer, Idn Battuta, “Traveling – it makes you speechless, then turns you into a storyteller.” When we realized that our stories were becoming stale, we knew it was time for an infusion of new ones to share and to cherish. So, off we went to travel again.

We look forward to sharing more stories here with you.

Tiles – House of Sampoerna, Surabaya

Even in Indonesia, we are reminded of Panama

Sacred Monkey Forest Sanctuary, Ubud, Bali

Golden Buddha Temple, Bangkok

Golden Buddha, Bangkok

Lumphini Park, Bangkok

Perfect Enough

Published on August 6, 2018 by sbbenzil4 Comments

Eternal Spring

Hola from Panama City, Panama —

We arrived in Panama 2 weeks ago and it’s been a busy time for us. Having established a plan to try various locations in Panama before we figure out where we might ultimately want to settle, and since we entered Panama from its western boundary, it made sense for us to start our residency in Panama in the area of Boquete in Chiriqui Province. Boquete makes sense for many reasons aside from the proximity — for starters, it is beautiful. Set in the mountains of western Panama, the Boquete area is very popular with expats (mostly from the US and Canada) because it IS so beautiful and because the weather is described as “eternal spring,” with temperatures between 60-80 degrees Fahrenheit daily, year round. It is a place of many micro climates and Boquete is where the country’s coffee is grown as well as where a large variety of fruit and vegetables thrive. Boquete also appeals to expats because it is a smaller town where people can develop a sense of community. It appeals to us for those reasons and more, not the least of which is the friends we made there 4 years ago when visiting who have been invaluable in terms of their support, their encouragement and the giving of their time and familiarity with the area. We might have survived without Holly and Scott (and Luana and Bond) but it would not have been as rich an experience.

Once we arrived in Boquete and rented a storage facility to use for the goods that had been piled in truck and trailer for the 60k miles of the journey here, we set about to lighten our load, repair things on the truck and in Wolfie, and to start to establish our first 6 months in Panama. We traveled to the nearby city of David to join the local warehouse club called Price Smart, traded in our “Central American” SIM card purchased from Claro in Guatemala for a Panamanian phone SIM card from the same company, purchased auto parts needed for brake work on Gertie, scouted out major grocery stores to get a lay of the land, took a road tour (led by Scott and Holly) of the various Boquete-area micro climates, celebrated Roque’s birthday, responded to real estate advertisements and after visiting several possible rentals, committed to a lovely single-story home in the community of Los Molinos in Alto Boquete for 6 months, had meals out in Boquete in restaurants and at friends’ homes, got the bikes repaired and more.

At the end of the first week, we had a 6 month lease in hand starting on September 1 which gave us several weeks to start the legal processes necessary to make Sharon, Gertie and Wolfie permanent residents and so, we headed to the capital city. We learned quickly what we intuitively believed before we got to Panama City: things take longer than we might have hoped and we needed to take things one little step at a time.

Patience is a Virtue

Here’s an example of one day in which we accomplished one tiny bureaucratic step toward permanent residence. To get the pensionado visa that Sharon hopes of have, she needs a FBI background check newer than 18 months old. Because of the 18 month requirement, we knew we could not bring an FBI background check along on the trip since it was likely to be “expired” by the time we arrived in Panama. Step 1 to obtaining the background check is to obtain fingerprints to send to the FBI (again, no older than 18 months). The good news is that we can get fingerprints done in Panama without returning to the US and we set out to do that on Tuesday but the long line at the DIJ (the local equivalent of the FBI) dissuaded us and we decided to return later. We couldn’t return on Wednesday and so we got up early on Thursday so we could arrive at DIJ before its 7 am opening time, at which point we were told to return at 8 when the fingerprinting office opened (the long lines being for other things that didn’t apply to us). When we returned and were escorted to meet the fingerprint tech, she asked if we brought the fingerprinting form we needed. Of course we didn’t have the form! (Later, it clearly made sense that we would have to bring our own form – how first world of us to thing that Panama would have the FBI Form FD-258 on hand). So, back to the hotel during rush hour we went – first to print the form and then to make sure that the form on plain paper — rather than the standard blue cardstock — was acceptable. We printed the form, traveled back to DIJ and were finished with the fingerprinting part of the exercise by 11:30. All good. Well, except that we cannot pick up the form until the Police Chief signs it and that will take at least 3 business days, taking us to Tuesday, at the earliest. Once the fingerprint card is ready for pick up, we must bring it to the Panamanian Minister of Foreign Affairs who can authenticate the signatures. Once this is done, we can then forward the card to the FBI and the process will continue from there. Thus, one set of fingerprints will take us about a week to accomplish.

This is not anyone’s “fault.” Had we known what we know now, we could have taken care of this on the first day we arrived in Panama City and likely, we would have accomplished this task by the time we were originally scheduled to leave. But, as many wise people have said before me, sometimes you don’t even know the questions to ask let alone how to get the answers that you need. Our story of the fingerprinting is like tons of stories that we’ve heard from people we’ve met along our travels such as people from outside the US who cannot get a “transit visa” to travel from Mexico City to Australia via LAX requiring rerouting around the world, literally, to get where they needed to go (a transit visa is a special visa required simply to enter an airport in the United States which, in this case, was denied to a Nicaraguan youth who was traveling to Australia to attend school); Europeans whose US visas would expire before they could drive from the lower 48 to Alaska and back (the visas continue to run while they are in Canada which makes travel to Alaska virtually impossible); a German couple whose German-prescribed medicine sat in Canadian customs for so long that the cost to obtain the prescription medicine (banned in Canada but legally prescribed in Germany) was greater than a trip back home to get more; a Dutch couple who had US permanent residency cards that they could NOT give back no matter how many US officials and offices they tried. Bureaucracies exist everywhere and we are pretty certain that all can be excruciatingly difficult and tedious.

Tiny but Mighty

Notwithstanding the small bureaucratic headaches that have been a part of our first couple of weeks in Panama, our time here has been wonderful. For such a tiny country, Panama has amazing diversity – of races, of religions, of cultures, of geography and biodiversity. There are many things here that are new to us (or new again) and that we like: cafeterias that serve a lovely and wide variety of Panamanian dishes at inexpensive prices; this delicious Panamanian fried bread called hojaldras; inexpensive bottles of wine; good (and free) highways; Aleve; Kosher grocery stores with speciality food items, potable water in many locations, really nice grocery stores with huge selections of local and international products; the best and fastest cell and data service that we’ve had on this trip; inexpensive cell data plans, places where you can literally see the Pacific Ocean and the Caribbean at the same time; the best bagels we have had outside select locations in the US; restrooms with both toilet seats and toilet paper, no headaches converting currency and discounts for jubilados (retirees) at museums, restaurants and more.

In Panama City, we have eaten Popeye’s fried chicken and Vietnamese pho and Japanese sushi and we just missed dim sum today by a half an hour. We’ve also had sancocho, and arroz con pollo, and ropa vieja and patacóns (the Panamanian version of tostones). And we enjoyed some of the most innovative cuisine of the whole trip at lunch on Wednesday at Fonda Lo Que Hay in Casco Viejo – a restaurant offshoot of Dónde Jose (where we dined 4 years ago) which is a funky casual restaurant where former local gang members are taught to cook and run a restaurant. Oh, and of course we’ve had great coffee.

We have seen many changes in Panama City in the 4 years since we last visited and have enjoyed exploring the neighborhoods of El Cangrejo, Avenida Balboa, Casco Viejo, Paitilla, Amador, Albrook and Costa del Este. We visited Roque’s home in Las Cumbres and the spot (now vacant) where his primary school was located and the Rio Abajo neighborhood that was home to family members when he was a youth here. We’ve walked the Cinta Costera for miles and enjoyed the incredible vibrancy of Panama City’s “malecón,” with soccer courts, weight lifting stations, bike paths and playgrounds – a sort of Venice, California meets GW Bike Trail meets Washington Square Park kind of place with huge sweeping vistas of the city from pedestrian walkways that cross from Avenida Balboa to the Cinta Costera.

We learned, at the Biodiversity Museum – a gorgeous Frank Gehry designed museum – that there is more arboreal diversity in 1 hectare of land in Panama than in all of North America combined and that the isthmus that is current day Panama was a literal land bridge that formed millions of years ago, closing the gaps that existed between the continents of current day North and South Americas, allowing flora and fauna to move north to south and south to north in ways that are unique on the planet. We also learned that Panama, in addition to being nearly hurricane proof is also nearly earthquake proof because of the way that the tectonic plates have formed around Panama.

From our friends who have expatriated to countries outside the United States, we have oft heard the mantra that there is no perfect place and we this has echoed in our heads as we have wandered along the 60,000 miles of this journey. In our earlier blog posts, we described why we decided to expatriate to Panama and what we hoped we would find there. Along the road, we evaluated spots in the US outside our last home in Washington, DC to see if there were places where we might enjoy if we decide to return to the US. Through Canada, Mexico and Central America, our antennae were tuned to signals that called out to us in a “pick me, pick me” voice. While our list of “must haves” was, in many respects, rather generic (safety, proximity to loved ones, stability of governance and economy, etc) we also had specific requirements that were more challenging to meet. Our comfort as an inter-racial, inter-ethnic and inter-religious couple who have retired from the work force is, we realize now, a profoundly more difficult thing than we might have thought when we set out 19+ months ago. For those of you who have ever watched the HGTV show called House Hunters, you know that when a family has 4 “must haves” on the list, it is inevitable that the family will find 3 but rarely all 4 of its essentials. Maybe that’s another way to describe the fact that there is no perfect place. A wise person once told us that one’s life is like a table and that the legs of a table represent various aspects of one’s life: one leg might represent career, and another might represent family with the other 2 representing social and health. A table is most stable with 4 legs but can stand solidly with 3. Fewer than that, the table topples. Maybe we can only ever get 3 out of 4 legs on solid ground but fewer than that, we know we gotta keep moving. The criteria are rarely literally limited to 4 and it is a more intuitive than analytical process oftentimes. But you know it when it’s there, when it’s solid enough, or when it’s not. And perhaps that will be our definition of “perfect enough.”

Stay tuned as we discover more about our new home and whether it will be our “perfect enough.”

Ah, the flowers (courtesy of Holly and Scott)

Driving to Panama City – scenery and great roads

Happy Anniversary to Us!

Published on December 26, 2017December 25, 2017 by sbbenzil2 Comments

Screen Shot 2017-12-25 at 10.33.33 AM

We are celebrating one year of travel on this road trip from DC to Alaska to Panama! On one hand, it seems like a million years ago that we packed up Gertie and left Maryland and on the other hand, it seems like it was just yesterday that we were posting our US-Canadian trip plan on Facebook. Just as many other things that we planned before we left our last permanent home, much has been altered, changed, and adapted since we started our planning and travel on this epic trip of a lifetime. Of our planned itinerary, we stuck mostly to the plan: we skipped some places we hoped to visit (Taos, for example, due to a major snowstorm forecast for our time there) and added a number of others (King’s Canyon and Sequoia National Parks, for instance). We did travel north of the Arctic Circle but opted to do this in Canada rather than in Alaska due to concerns about the Dalton Highway and truck traffic on that road.

Screen Shot 2017-12-25 at 9.51.54 AM — Our Original US-Canada-Baja Planned Route

We dispensed with sleeping in a tent, and added our beloved camper, Wolfie, to our gear list. We added a new bike rack but returned to using the one on the roof. We added electricity to our camper life with a generator and an inverter, learned that Netflix, Amazon Prime, cell phones and plans, credit cards and satellite radio function very differently north and south of the lower 48, and have learned to adapt to different forms of lemonade and iced green tea. We’ve met some amazing people and traveled with some of them — Tom and Stacy, Gayle and Bobby, Fritz and Bill, to name just a few — and have had the benefit of the wisdom of many Overlanders who we connected with before and during our trip. We visited with friends and family as we traveled and returned “home” to visit with other friends and family last fall.

We’ve taken thousands of photographs of the hundreds of geological formations, wildlife species, towns, and people along our way and added more than 100 stickers to the windows of Gertie. We have sustained some injuries to Wolfie and Gertie but none have delayed our travels or depleted our bank account significantly. We have spent a sum of money on camping fees and gasoline for the entire year that is less than our rent in DC for 2016. We have seen sunsets and sunrises over many bodies of water and rock formations and experienced 24 hours of sun for weeks on end this past summer. We have seen snow far more frequently than wished (or anticipated) and have experienced smoke from wildfires for the first time in our lives. We have camped in pretty much every environment — cities, parks, roadside rest areas, forests, deserts and more. We’ve learned endless amounts of information about rocks, mountains, tectonic plates, weather, volcanos, earthquakes, wildlife, the US National Park system, western Canadian provinces and territories and the portions of Mexico through which we have traveled so far.

Our experiences in the US and Canada have been extraordinary; our experiences in Mexico, so far, have been extraordinary AND eye opening. For us, Roque’s fluency in Spanish has been invaluable and it is difficult for us to wrap our heads around how Overlanders cope and deal with the myriad things necessary for road travel in this country if they do not speak Spanish. Even for us, adapting to Mexican-Spanish, which we have dubbed MexiEnglish – a different form of Spanglish — has been interesting and comical at times. Consider the word “roofo” that we have seen on stores advertising building materials (el techo is the Spanish word for roof or ceiling), or the term “se renta” on buildings that are available to lease (alquilar is Spanish for “rent”). This is often so confusing that Roque has to let me know when a word is the authentic Spanish word or a form of MexiEnglish so I won’t add vocabulary that will make me the laughing stock of Panama.

Adapting to other things-Mexican has been a bit of a challenge at moments. For example, consider our experience using a Mexican electronic toll pass that we purchased, believing that it would function, more or less, like the several other electronic toll passes we’ve owned in the past. A word of background on Mexican roads — Mexican has a series of toll roads that basically parallel the free (libre) roads. The toll roads are expensive, even by US standards and it’s not uncommon for us to pay several dollars for a segment of road less than 100 miles but they are tope (speed bump) free, generally well paved and can be driven at higher speeds. The local and free roads are, by comparison, replete the above mentioned dreaded potholes, pavement irregularities, topes and more. (The craziness of Mexican drivers is a topic for another day). We have opted to take as many toll roads as possible since the costs are well worth the ease of travel to say nothing of alleviating the wear and tear on our rig. When we purchased the electronic toll pass, we thought having it would save our cash (effectiva) for other essentials like gasoline and food as credit cards are not used in Mexico quite as extensively as in the US and Canada. A great idea that took no less than a week and many attempts to get it to work. First, we had to figure out how to load it with money (requiring stops at banks or stores to reload it with cash as only Mexican credit cards can be used – we think). Then, after going through several (5-6-ish) toll plazas without being able to use it, we learned that it needed to be registered. Roque then registered it through a toll station employee who warned him that even with registration, it might still need to be manually entered at each toll plaza as the pass needs to be separately registered at toll plazas to be recognized there. Oh my gosh. Since it was highly unlikely that we would pass through the same toll plaza more than one time each, it started to look dubious that this pass thingy would be of any use to us. Then, Roque was able to figure out how to register the device on the Mexican website, which required an address (we used that of the hotel which campground we were using in Aguascalientes) and voila, the device FINALLY registered at the toll plaza through which we traveled en route to Zacatecas.

Don’t get us wrong: there are a number of things that we have encountered here in Mexico that we think are really nice improvements over things we ever experienced in the US. Kisoks in every store that allow for the recharging of sim cards and payment of accounts. The purchase of cell data by the gig, untethered to costly telecommunication plans. Guard posts in shopping centers. Handbag racks next to tables in restaurants. Sloping escalators that allow shopping carts AND people to travel up and down together. Pharmacies that allow for the purchase of most medications without a prescription. And much more. And other things that we have loved that don’t fall neatly into any particular category: amazing street food that is healthy and tasty and cheap, even by local standards; warm, friendly and joyful people in every place; incredible architecture dating to the 16th and 17th centuries when the US was barely a “discovery,” fabulous tequila everywhere. We have loved seeing the Mexicans in down jackets, ear muffs, scarves and gloves here in Zacatecas when we are wearing shorts and the temperatures are in the 60’s. We have stared open-mouthed watching a father ride a bicycle holding his toddler in his right arm as he pedaled along. We have admired and photographed many beautiful doors and buildings that have no match in the US and that demonstrate a richness of history and love of beauty that is prevalent everywhere we have traveled in Mexico.

Zacatecas Cathedral

Zacatecas on Christmas Eve

It’s been a year on the road, 50,000+ miles traveled, and a million memories etched forever in our brains and our hearts. We look forward to the coming year and the experiences we have ahead as we complete the journey to Panama. Here’s wishing for a safe and memorable 2018 for our continued travels and wishes to you for a 2018 that is everything you want and need.

Trip Plan – Part I

Published on May 24, 2016May 24, 2016 by sbbenzilLeave a comment

One of the most challenging things for me has been trying to work on aspects of the blog BEFORE we leave on the trip. Road mapping? No problem. Making endless lists? No problem. Sorting through belongings in garage and itemizing for donations? No problem. This embedding of maps and way points – well, let’s just say that for me, it’s more difficult than mastering phyllo dough or organizing a party for 100 . . .

I have learned how to use Google My Maps to create layers and to show the way points planned for the trip – I even got as far as showing the driving route from DC to Anchorage. But alas, THAT map won’t embed in this blog, as far as I can tell (at least as of this moment). So today’s experiment is with embedding a map – next task is to learn how to embed a map with ALL of our planned way points and not just a portion of a trip.

Plain ol’ Google Maps will allow for a certain number of points to be shown on a driving map and this is what is displayed below. As I experiment, be patient. I continue to learn, whether about solar energy, satellite messaging devices, bull bars or bug net hats for Alaska. Behold the result of some of today’s lessons.