Category: Roque Gerald

Two months ago, we left Washington, DC on the first leg of our 24+ hour travel to Bangkok. Based on advice from many sources, we keep our first stay in Bangkok to 3 days – long enough to decompress from our travel, catch up on our sleep and begin to marvel at the strangeness of our new surroundings. We knew we would travel back though Bangkok again and so we keep our touring to a minimum and spent most of the 3 days just trying to acclimate.

Now that we are a third of the way into our time here in Southeast Asia, it is time to share some reflections and thoughts with you about our time here and the style of travel we’ve embraced along this trip. So, in no particular order or rhyme or reason, here goes —

Status Update

Since leaving Panama, we have been traveling for 73 days, visited 20 places and traveled 17,368 miles. As the map shows, we traveled from Panama to the US and then to Bangkok (via Atlanta and Amsterdam). From Bangkok, we flew to Bali where we split our time between Ubud and Seminyak before flying to Surabaya on the Indonesian island of Java. From Surabaya, we traveled by train across Java, spending time in Yogyakarta, Bandung and Jakarta after which we flew to Singapore, followed by Kuala Lumpur and Penang in Malaysia. We then returned to Thailand, visiting Phuket and Bangkok and are currently in Chiang Mai in northern Thailand.

We left on this trip with an outline of places we wanted to visit based on our research and as we did when traveling with Wolfie through the US into Central America, we collect advice and recommendations along the way. Because we not driving ourselves and are at the mercy of public forms of transportation, we’ve had to modify travel from time to time because one mode or another proves difficult or cumbersome. So far, we have traveled by plane and train. Soon, we will add bus from Chiang Mai to Chiang Rai, Thailand and we will splurge on a river cruise by slow boat on the Mekong from the border of Thailand to Luang Prabang, Laos. Within towns and cities, we have used local taxis, Grab cars and taxis (the local version of Uber), tourist tour boats, Hop-On-Hop-Off bus tours, tuk tuks, moto-rickshaw type vehicles and minivans and motorbikes.

Plane travel within the various towns and cities of Southeast Asia is extremely easy and inexpensive. We have booked flights as few as 2 days in advance, flown hops between 1 and 4 1/2 hours and spent no more than $120 a flight per person (Bangkok to Bali) and have spent as little as $20 on flights such as those Kuala Lumpur to Penang. We even flew on a Thai Air 747 from Phuket to Bangkok where our fare of $44 per person bought the flight, checked bags, seats and a meal. (The same trip by train, which necessitated at least one taxi and ferry in addition to the train, would have cost more). Not only is air travel affordable here, we have never spent more than 20 minutes from door to gate at any airport, including all bag claim, immigration, customs and security clearance processes (except for one 30 minute queue leaving Penang, Malaysia for Phuket when we were waiting to drop our bags). Even more astonishing is the on-time record of our flights: we have actually departed and arrived early on at least 3 occasions using a small, budget, no frills airline called Air Asia.

Our accommodations have been varied and universally good. We have stayed in 9 different hotels (several within the Hilton and Marriott brands and several independents), two separate private pool villa hotels on Bali and have had long stays in two AirBnB condos. We have used online booking tools such as booking.com, Agoda.com, Traveloka.com, AirBnB.com, Hopper, Kayak, Skyscanner and Skiplagged.com. We rely on a variety of internet and book resources for travel and touring information including Fodors, Frommer’s, Lonely Planet, Rough Guides, TripAdvisor, Culture Trip, and Triposo. And of course, we just ask people about their recommendations.

After our time here in northern Thailand, we will cross into Laos and ultimately into Vietnam, Cambodia and travel to Hong Kong and then see where we are. After we visit the “must see” places on our list, we will then revisit countries and travel to places where we haven’t been or those where we may want to return. We figure we have plenty of time remaining for all that is on our list and if we end up spending more time on various beaches before we leave Asia, well, we know worse ways to spend our time.

So, How’s It Been?

Here are some of your FAQs and some of our answers —

The Language Obstacle

In short, there has been no language obstacle whatsoever. English is clearly the universal language in this part of the world and nearly everything is signed in English as well as the local language. Many people speak at least some English and it is widely spoken or written where it matters the most: airports, train stations, SIM card kiosks, restaurants and the like. Grab, the local ride-hailing app (like Uber) has been incredibly easy, useful and inexpensive. It links to Google maps and allows for instant translation when drivers and riders text each other, extremely helpful when we have tried to explain where we are waiting for the car. English is used not only by locals but also by travelers as the universal language. In airplanes, the safety instructions are spoken in the local language and again in English. The same is true to road signs, menus, airport pick up zones and more.

On the rare occasion when our spoken language and hand gesturing doesn’t work, we pull out Google translate, share our translation with a local, have them type his or her answer and it is usually good enough to muddle through.

Eating Out Morning, Noon and Night

Does it get old? Well, we will let you know when it does.

When we drove from the US to Panama and crossed into Mexico, it became clear that it would be as inexpensive to eat lunch and dinner “out” as it would be to buy food to make our own meals. Since we had cooking facilities, we regularly prepared breakfast in Wolfie but enjoyed the fresh, delicious and inexpensive food of Latin America for other meals. We enjoyed it and returned to our cooking life once we got settled in Panama.

Here, we are enjoying the local cuisine options and find that it is easier and often less expensive to eat out than to cook in. Even when we have some kitchen facilities, the kitchen are usually not well provisioned with decent knives and cookware to say nothing of soap, sponges and towels (or spices). So while we could make a pretty basic egg-and-bacon-and-bread breakfast of some sort, even relying primarily on a microwave oven, cleaning up after requires an investment into products that we would rather spend on food. Or liquor. Or tours.

Meals in Asia for us are often very simple affairs such as a bowl of noodles or a papaya salad. Most local food is tasty and flavorful but is not protein heavy. Servings are adequate but not monstrous and costs are extremely affordable.

And when we’ve really just wanted to eat in and be super lazy, Grab has a food delivery service.

It’s Just Another HooDoo

Followers of this blog may remember a post from 2017 when we traveled to the national parks that line the southern border of Utah and into Colorado. During that time, we described the phenomenon of becoming immune to some of the natural beauties surrounding us because we had seen so many of them. Once, when we closed in on something we’d seen from a distance, we saw that it was just another hoodoo, the stone formations for which Bryce Canyon National Park is renowned. The saying has become our catch phrase for things that become old after you’ve seen them over and over again.

There are a lot of hoodoos in life – the sights of the sunset over your nearby body of water that you barely take notice, or the rainbows, sometimes doubles during the bajareque season or the view of the ocean or the mountains as you crest the same spot on the road you drive home from work every night.

We have them here and we have them at home. Everyone does. So, what we are trying to do is to maximize the specialness of each place we are visiting by not overdoing things. People have shared with us that have these rules they follow when they travel such as “one cathedral a day” or “one art museum a city.” We think these travel rules make sense. Along the Pan American highway drive, Overlanders talk about being “ruined out,” after visiting Aztec and Mayan civilization ruins in multiple places and everyone acknowledges the need to curate some of these experiences. Just 2 months into a 6 month trip, we’ve already been to the largest Buddhist temple in the world, the spectacular Borobudur, to Hindi temples on Bali that are over 1000 years old, seen multiple golden Buddhas (some sitting, some reclining), visited sacred monkey forests and temples, and toured the palaces of Kings and Sultans in multiple locations and multiple countries.

Do the memories of each lose their specialness because we are visiting so many special places in a condensed period of time? We don’t think they do – we remember with clarity the amazing places we loved in the more than 50 US National Parks we visited along our way to Panama and are still awed by the memories of the ruins at Teotihuacan and Palenque. We know from our conversations with friends and family that their memories of Notre Dame Cathedral, or the Galapagos, or Machu Pichu, or Angkor Wat or the Louvre, or their visit to the Grand Canyon or their view of the first whale they spotted off the coast of Alaska/Mexico/Antarctica, remain unique and wondrous even from decades past. Our hope, based on our own and others’ experiences, are that our memories of this place will be the same.

Home Sickness

We left for this trip just 9 months after arriving in Panama. People wondered why we decided to take such a prolonged absence from the place we’d only recently made our home and built community. Among the things we missed most when we were on our road trip was our sense of community — in Boquete, we quickly built meaningful community with a sizable group of diverse, interesting, and stimulating people. The “why now” question was a valid one.

There were a number of reasons why it made sense to take this trip at this time. The timing was good because we had settled our “affairs” in Panama, having obtained legal residency status, completed necessary paperwork for the importing of Gertie and Wolfie, obtained drivers’ licenses and similar sorts of things. We secured a multi-year lease on a really nice house in a safe community. We had tenants in our home in the States that extended their lease term for another year, allowing for us to leave the readying of the house for sale to next year. The window of opportunity seemed good.

We had always hoped to make our home in Panama and then to use it as a base for further travel. Because Southeast Asia is so far away from Panama (and the US), we thought that it made sense to try to visit here for one (or maybe two) longer trips to minimize the expensive, lengthy, exhausting flight half way around the world. And we figured that travel to SE Asia was likely to be among the more arduous trips on our bucket list and the longer we waited, the older we will get and the harder this kind of travel will be for us.

All of this pointed us in the direction of this trip at this time.

Six months is a very long time to be in travel status. Shortly after we arrived in Bangkok, after 2 weeks visiting with family and friends back in the US and preparing for this Asia trip, we wondered if we had made a massive error in judgment. We missed the cool weather of Boquete. We missed the quiet and peaceful routines we had in our home in Panama. We missed our new friends. We were in places that were so unfamiliar to us in so many ways that we could hardly embrace the excitement for all the strangeness. Everything felt unfamiliar – language, alphabets, time zones, driving patterns, currency, manners, demographics, foods, religious and national holiday celebrations and more.

There were more than a few times during the first couple of days — perhaps weeks — when we talked about the possibility of ending the trip early. Within the first two weeks of the trip, we traveled into two countries (Thailand and Indonesia) and 4-6 different locations, depending on how you count it. Because Indonesia is a country made up of 17,000 islands, many languages and varied religions and cultures, even the differences between the islands of Bali and Java were enormous. At moments, it felt like we were being constantly jolted and having to adapt to something new with a constancy that made us feel very unsettled.

At some point, we were reflecting on what gave us our “wow” moments along the road trip to Panama and largely, those wow moments were experienced in places of great natural beauty: mountains, waterfalls, glaciers, deserts and forests that became the most vivid memories of the road trip. But we also had many wow moments in the cities of Mexico, the towns and lakes of Guatemala, and the beaches of El Salvador and Costa Rica.

In Asia, we haven’t had the kind of daily natural beauty experiences we have had elsewhere (other than the verdant green of the rice fields through which we traveled in Indonesia). Similarly, we have not been wowed by the beauty of the cities or towns in which we’ve stayed or through which we have traveled. Undeniably, there are sites that have left us with amazement – the ancient temples, the enormous Buddhas, the intricate carvings of the temples, the splendor of the royal palaces and the extraordinary modern architecture.

Because we are not driving ourselves, as we have on most of our travels over the past 6+ years, it is more difficult to get off the beaten track, avoid the throngs of people, motorbikes, cars and trucks that clog the roads and streets everywhere we’ve been in Asia so far. So, we realized that we were going to have to find other ways to find the kind of centering and peace that restores us when we are surrounded by natural beauty.

We are still experimenting with this as of this writing. Our stay at resort-style hotels in Penang, Malaysia and Phuket, Thailand were very restorative. Taking some time to do nothing after weeks of touring was great and gave us the energy to move to the next touring location. Opting to stay in a couple of condos rather than hotels has given us some space that allows us to have a place for retreat to do some non-touristy things like laundry, writing and reading. Staying in touch with friends and family by email, telephone calls and messaging has been a lifeline and helps us feel connected and grounded. And slowing down our travel has also helped.

All of this has helped with restoring a little “normality” into our touring existences. Like our 20 month road trip, some of our time was spent being tourists and some of our time was tending to the details of life that keep the wheels spinning: paying bills, doing laundry, getting hair cuts and teeth cleaned, celebrating anniversaries and birthdays (here and elsewhere). The same applies here.

Like on our road trip, we are finding that our initial reactions to the strangeness and unnerving transitions of new places and new cultures begins to subside as we get our “sea legs.” No doubt, we will become unbalanced again, perhaps many times still. If so, we will find some air conditioning, a cold drink, and adapt again.

573 days en route; 208 places stopped overnight

Map points created by Tripline

We arrived in Panama on July 21, drove to the town of Boquete, parked Wolfie at Malu, a beautiful full service campground downtown, and nearly immediately located a house to rent as of September 1. When we took possession of our rental house at the end of August in Hacienda Los Molinos, just to the south of Boquete, we began what is our longest time in one spot since we left the US in 2016. As we approach the 2 month mark in our house, we are sharing here some of our reflections on how it feels to be still in one spot.

First, let’s put Panama in some perspective —

With a land mass of about 29,000 square miles, this country is roughly the size of the state of South Carolina. With a total population of approximately 4 million people, it contains as many people as Oklahoma or Connecticut. The vast majority of Panama’s population lives in Panama City. Panama is the only country in the world where you can see the sunrise over the Atlantic and see it set over the Pacific from the same spot and it is the only country in the world where the capital city contains a rain forest within it. The country boasts of 1500 miles of beach on both Pacific and Caribbean sides and the town where we are living — Boquete — sits at an elevation high enough to allow for spring-like temperatures year round (60-80F daily) and has access to either coast within a 2 hour drive in either direction.

Panama is a country of huge population diversity with 67% of its population being mestizó (mixed indigenous and European) and 16% being Afro-Panamanian or mixed Afro-Euro. It is the only country outside of Israel that has elected 2 Jewish Presidents in the 20th century and boasts of a sizable Jewish population, mostly located in Panama City (where there are two large kosher grocery stores). Its population diversity is immediately apparent when you enter the country and is unlike what we observed elsewhere in the portions of Latin America in which we traveled. These were some of the reasons why we were attracted originally to Panama since we wanted racial, ethnic and religious diversity and acceptance.

This backdrop is important to the story of our journey because it shares some of the characteristics of the country that drew us here and against which we evaluate our choices. We have friends or know people who have expatriated from the US or left their homes upon retirement that chose to live elsewhere within the US or outside the country and they, like us, have made their lists and checked off those factors and characteristics that are the most important to them. When we met up with them along our travels, we always asked them about their choices and what drew them to their place. Through this, we saw the obvious: there’s a seat for everyone’s tush and beauty’s in the eye of the beholder.

It is clear from the the conversations we’ve had, the blogs we’ve read, and the stories we’ve heard that the decision to expatriate is often very difficult and becoming acclimated to one’s new home can be challenging. It is not uncommon for people to re-patriate to the US for numerous reasons. Still others, having once left the US to live abroad, expatriate from their first new home country and move on to another. Among those expats from the US, many places rise to the top of the popular expat location list: San Miguel de Allende, Mexico; Medellin, Columbia; Quito and Cuenco, Ecuador; and San Jose, Costa Rica to name a few. The conventional wisdom of expats we’ve met believe that if you pass the 5 year mark in one location, there is a good chance you will stay.

So, our 2-3 month mark shows that we are in the infancy of our expatriation process and we are sure that our preliminary reactions will change over time. However preliminary, we wanted to share some with those of you who have followed our journey because, if for no other reason, we will enjoy reading this post in the future to see how far we’ve come. In no particular order:

Panama is an Easy Place to Live

Whether because of the influence of the US during the Panama Canal years, whether because of its prosperity relative to other Latin American countries, Prosperity Index, whether because of the economic interests outside of Panama in maintaining safe transit through the Canal or other factors, life in Panama resembles life in the US in many favorable ways.

Most of Panama’s major roads are good, modern and free and are well patrolled by traffic-rule enforcing police. Panama’s electricity, water and communications infrastructure is also (mostly) modern and similar in quality to that of the US. (Fussier expats might object to this description for various reasons but in our travels throughout the US, we learned that US infrastructure differs significantly depending on where you are.) We’ve been told that because of the expense of building a telecommunications infrastructure that involved installing land lines for telephones throughout the country, Panama (likely like other developing countries) largely skipped over this process and migrated more toward spending its money on erecting cell towers and creating wireless communication networks. Consequently, free wifi is often available in town centers and other open space areas within Panama and the costs of phone and data is much lower than in the US. We are now using Panamanian SIM cards in our iPhones and are paying half the cost of our former US plan for the same service (unlimited data, texts and phone calls) and friends here who arrived several years ago are paying even less than us. Credit cards are widely available here and can be used nearly everywhere and most household bills can be paid online (at least for those who live in Panama City according to my immigration attorney).

For such a small land mass, Panama boasts of enormous and ecologically important biodiversity as well as geographical and temperature diversity. It has mountains, rain forests, cloud forests, beaches, cities, island archipelagos and vast tracts of undeveloped land. It is a beautiful country with views that often change from one minute to the next, where hummingbirds can be seen at our feeder as well as in our lime trees and our heliconias.

While Spanish is the official language, many Panamanians speak English and while we believe that learning the local language is important, many might not think it terribly essential. Health care is reputed to be good. Many streets and major roads are lighted at night and major brands with which we are familiar are widely available, as are mail and shipments from the US, organic food products, some of the world’s best coffee and beautiful, lush gardens.

City versus Country

Panama City (simply “Panama” to locals) is a major metropolis that buzzes with energy and activity at all hours of the day and night. Its breathtaking skyline is remarkable for a city of its size, with more skyscrapers than a city of equivalent populations in the US, a broad and actively used waterfront walking/biking/skating/running path called the Cinta Costera, a charming old town (Casco Viejo) with hip bars, restaurants, hotels and clubs, a huge banking center, many malls and shopping centers, a modern (and expanding) subway system as well as many traffic jams. Panama is filled with residential areas mixed with retail and commercial businesses, with huge and stately single family homes and towering condo and apartment buildings.

Once outside Panama, the country becomes a string of smaller towns that mostly lie along or near the Pan-American Highway or, as it is known locally, Ruta 1 or the Interamericana. Developed or developing beach communities such as Nuevo Gorgona, Coronado, Santa Clara and Rio Hato lie along the Pacific Ocean and are an easy driving distance from the city (an hour and a half or so in non-rush hour traffic) and many expats are drawn to these communities for their proximity to the city. Costs of living in the city can be fairly high, not only relative to the rest of the country but compared to many areas within the US. Costs in the interior and western areas of the country are less and draw expats who are looking for affordability and more quiet than the city affords.

Boquete has become popular with expats for many reasons – many are drawn because of the abundance of outdoor activities and its natural beauty. Expats who love to garden find Boquete to be a gardening nirvana; those who hike and bird can fill every hour of the day with only these activities. There are more clubs and organizations here than you can count and one can play golf, or bridge, or pickle ball, or learn to knit, participate in animal-rights related organizations, help teach local children English, spend time with the local photography club, or local playhouse, join an drum circle and more. There are coffee plantations and honey bee farms to tour, a weekly farmer’s market to visit, and cinema clubs to try. It is a town of roughly 30,000 residents spread out through a mountainous area that includes something like 18 micro-climates over a number of communities where most of the homes sit perched on one of the incalculable breathtaking vistas for which the Boquete area is known, many accessible only on nominally improved, impossibly steep, winding mountain roads.

One friend describes this area this way: where can you live in the quiet mountains with incredible vistas of mountains, rivers, tropical foliage and fruit trees and be a 10 minute drive from a store with caviar and champagne? Another US expat friend exclaims that this area allows for a sense of community for a person with any interest imaginable, where you can build a beautiful home with a modest sum of money and thereafter live on just one’s social security benefits. To be clear, there are communities here that are host to homes costing $750,000 and more and we’ve seen more than a few properties for sale that exceed $1.5 million, many with guest homes, swimming pools and more. At the other end of the spectrum, there are apartments here to rent that could house a couple comfortably, even if modestly, at monthly rentals below $500. Most expats here fall somewhere in between these two extremes.

What you cannot find in Boquete can likely be located in nearby David, the capital of Chiriqui Province, with an urban feel and a population of about 150,000. But to experience a major city, one must travel about 6 – 7 hours by car (or the local plane shuttle from David to Panama).

It’s hard to beat the climate in Boquete. And where in the world can you find spring-like temperatures all year round, micro-climates that allow for homes to be surrounded by coffee plants, hummingbirds, heliconias and lime trees within a 2 hour drive of tropical beaches on either the Caribbean OR the Pacific? But, if you are a city person, or if you are the kind of retiree who longs for hours of access to lifetime learning opportunities at a local college or university, Boquete will not likely be the place for you.

It seems to us that life in Boquete will largely be what we make of it. This doesn’t mean that we need to create things from whole cloth but it does mean trying things on for size, joining clubs or activities or groups that are engaged in things that appeal to us and searching out people or things that call to us. And all of this requires time, and patience and sitting still for a long enough time to listen to our inner voices.

When we were on the road, every day allowed for endless stimulation. Even the sameness of the road yielded to differences in views, cuisines, climates and populations. While on the road, it was far more frequent that we would have to admonish ourselves to slow down and to spread out the experiences we wanted to have so we wouldn’t burn ourselves out. Now that we are in a home, we have to begin the task of slowing down in a different way. We need to commit to learning more about this new place in the way of a resident rather than a tourist and to take stock of the way we may want to live as expat retirees.

The busyness of the 19+ months on the road did what we wanted it to do when we began our retirement: it allowed us to go from the fast lane of our career and working lives into the slow lanes of retirement without a jarring, screeching stop and to transition into a new budget and lifestyle change in a gradual sort of way. Upon arriving in Panama, the need to start the immigration and importation processes (tourist visas for people and vehicles are of limited duration) caused a mini-frenzy that involved trips back and forth to the city but resulted in progress on both fronts. Now, we can begin the task of settling in finding routines that work, rejecting those that do not and discovering ourselves in our new home in a way that will help guide us here and elsewhere.

A Very Special Place

This week, by pure chance, we ended up stopping at an ecolodge in a somewhat off-the-beaten-track location en route from the town of Bacalar to Valladolid. The ecolodge, Selva Bonita in Spanish (Beautiful Jungle in English and Kiichpam Kaax in Mayan), turned out to be a very special place. The lodge sits on property owned by a Mayan family that has been developed, over the course of the last decade, into a beautiful eco retreat, containing a restaurant, a number of cabins, swimming pool, nature trails and more. Selva Bonita’s website describes it as a “family run co-op centre, commited to the rescue and care for culture, nature and family relations of our community . . . to share with our visitors a new type of experience in which they will be able to interact with nature through a sustainable type of turism with activities that promote respect to the environment and Mayan cultural identity.”

We arrived, hoping for a meal and a place to park Wolfie for the night. We left with a greater understanding of Mayan culture, considerable appreciation for the enormous work and dedication that the family — Damian, Margaret and Juanita — has put into developing Selva Bonita, and an enormous respect and admiration, nearing awe, for the traditional beliefs of the Mayans. For the 48 hours of our stay, we were a part of this family. And these 48 hours exemplified, perhaps more than any other experience we’ve had in the past 16 months, the reason for this road trip.

During our time at Selva Bonita, we spent a day on a “tour” of the jungle, oriented toward identifying the many plants that the Mayans use (past and present) for medicinal purposes – plants used for venomous snake bite antidotes, for the treatment of asthma, diabetes, dysentery and more. We saw monkeys, turtles, the web of a tarantula, and more birds that we can mention. We tasted bark of various trees and several types of flowering plants. We saw how the Mayans harvest the chicle from the sapodilla tree from which chewing gum is made and tasted natural chewing gum made with this chicle. We learned of the predictions of the ancient Mayans of many things that are occurring to our natural world now and their philosophies concerning stewardship of the earth and conservation of natural resources. After our time in the jungle – a long, hot, sweaty 5+ hours of walking – we visited several traditional Mayan homes owned by relatives of Damien including a home owned by his aunt who, at age 72, boasts of a marriage of nearly 60 years, since she was married at 14 to her husband, who was 15 at the time. Under the protection of a traditional Mayan “palapa-style” roof, they sleep in hammocks and raise most of their own vegetables. Their home is equipped with electricity and they do enjoy modern conveniences such as a refrigerator and television (for watching telenovelas, Damian’s aunt confessed, with a twinkle in her eye) but their lives are simple and humble. They shared stories of their grandparents and of their culture; of the Mexican government banning Mayan language books from their schools and of bullying by others for being Mayan. And so it ultimately came as little surprise that Damian and family have dedicated their lives and their work toward sharing their Mayan cultural identity with others.

Our tree climber learned to climb at age 11. He’s now 77.

Margaret and Julia, a work away volunteer from the Basque region of Spain

Damian’s aunt’s home

The flowing chicle

During our time in Mexico, we have visited many Mayan archeological sites and spent many hours combing the exhibits of museums dedicated to the history, culture and lives of the Mayans, past and present. but nothing compared to our experiences with the owners of Selva Bonita. It was the kind of immersive, albeit short, experience that sets apart the way we are traveling with the kind of vacationing we have done in the past. Of course, the two styles are not mutually exclusive. At Selva Bonita, we were joined by a French couple on their honeymoon who were on “vacation.” We learned that they sought out Selva Bonita because they wanted to experience an ecolodge environment. We are fairly certain that they, like us, learned that they had little idea of what they were about to experience. It is likely that they, like us, left Selva Bonita as changed people.

Another Very Special Place

The Selva Bonita experience made us want more of the same and we were fortunate enough to find another unique eco camping experience near our next stop in Valladolid. At Ecocamping Valladolid, our host, Ramon, has created a self-sufficient, eco campground that he built from scratch, including several VW Beetle “bedrooms,” solar powered electrical systems that run his refrigerator, water heaters, lighting systems and more. We are awed by his ingenuity and continue to discover his various inventions throughout his campground. Ramon boasts that everything thing in his campground was created of recycled items that he (later joined by a few friends) created from the ground up.

We know that sleeping in the cavity of a vintage VW Beetle or in a cabin in a jungle rich with Mayan traditions and culture is not necessarily for everyone. But we are loving these experiences and have added these to the very top of our “favorite road trip experiences.”

Nature or Nurture?

Both Roque and I come from families who valued travel and what they learned through their travels and it is possible that we would not have considered a lengthy road trip such as this had it not been in our “familial DNA.” No doubt that our exposure to travel whetted our appetites for the kind of exploration we are undertaking. As a bit of an aside, this is particularly noteworthy given our families’ modest backgrounds. In both of our families, neither Roque nor I have a single grandparent who attended college – in fact, we are not certain that any of our grandparents even graduated from high school. And nearly all of the miles traveled by our grandparents in their lifetimes were used in traveling from their countries of birth to the United States when they emigrated. Yet in the single generation between our grandparents and us, all of our parents not only graduated from high school and college, but also earned graduate degrees as well. Both of our families demonstrate some of the best of what was possible for immigrants to the US in the 20^th century including home ownership, educational advancement, financial stability and securing enough free time to be able to vacation and travel.

We are fairly sure that we never really spoke to our parents about the value of “recreational” travel to them but from their examples (and the thousands of slides that we watched upon their return from their travels), we inferred that their lives were enhanced from the knowledge they gained from their travels. Clearly, we grew up wanting some of the same (as did our siblings as well).

We’ve given a fair amount of thought and more than a few hours of discussion to the subject of the value of travel in our lives – particularly in the style of this epic road trip.  Our experiences this week have reinforced many of these thoughts and while there’s more that we will learn as the lessons percolate through us, we share some of them with you:

Travel Provides Understanding

We travel because we don’t want to just observe the lives of others – we want to experience and understand as much of the lives of others as we can. Entering cathedrals in every city exposes us to architecture and history but walking through a local shopping mall exposes us to manners of dress, and how people spend their consumer dollars and how they behave. We have watched how families in Mexico honor family — bringing elders and youth with them everywhere they go. They sit in multi-generational groupings in restaurants and parks, in theaters and at swimming pools, taking turns caring for those who need care and seemingly never getting ill tempered or impatient with each other. We have listened to the cacophony of car horns blasting the instant a light turns green but nary a sound when a man is helping his elderly mother (or mother-in-law) across the street. Shopping at the markets exposes us to the kinds of foods they eat and the way they shop. Eating at small roadside stands allows us to create a list of favorite foods that include things we couldn’t even (accurately) understand through Google. There are a thousand and one similar experiences and we haven’t even experienced Central America yet!

Travel Provides Perspective

Whether within the US or outside, we have learned that not all “universal” experiences are universal. We’ve learned that it is customary to tip the grocery store bagger and the gasoline pump attendant in Mexico because often they are not paid and rely exclusively on tips. We’ve learned that sometimes, U-turns are made from the left lane and sometimes, the right and sometimes, there are dedicated “returno” lanes for just this purpose. We’ve come to understand that traffic rules are largely unenforced throughout all of Mexico and yet traffic accidents are remarkably rare. While waiting to see a doctor, Mexicans always allow the elderly to advance to the head of the line and rarely are prescriptions necessary to refill maintenance-type medicines largely available at prices that are cheaper in Mexico that standard prescription insurance co-pays in the US.

It’s unusual for a week to pass – throughout the US, Canada and Mexico parts of our travel — where we don’t see something that makes us say “wow – wish we had THAT back on the East Coast or in the US. ”  This is part of the reason for this trip – to see the US and our lives there through a different lens, for better or worse.

Travel Provides Insight into Ourselves

Living on the road requires us to live outside our comfort zone nearly daily. The challenges we’ve faced have made us recognize that we are stronger and more resilient than we may have thought, and that we possess the ability to make decisions that require us to trust ourselves in ways we have not tested before. We have kept ourselves safe and we have overcome fear and learned that challenge is healthy. It keeps us aware and alive and alert, constantly resourceful. We have experienced simplicity and the beauty that comes from it. Along the road, we have finely tuned whatever patience we previously possessed, and have become people with infinitely greater abilities to see beauty in seemingly mundane experiences and things. We have become grateful for tiny things and have fewer expectations than in the past.

Simply put, our travels have humbled us and permitted us to become more accepting, particularly of ourselves and our limitations.

Some of all of this is summed up perfectly by friends of ours, Vanamos, who recently moved from the Washington, DC area to Mexico, following a year of overlanding travels from the US to Panama and back. In Vanamos’ blog post called “Our Mexican Revolution,” Paul wrote that:

When we told our friends and family that we were packing up the homestead and moving it south, we heard a lot about how brave we were.  We discounted that sentiment.  When we thought about what it means to be brave, we considered feats of strength and courage on the battlefield.  Quitting a six-figure job, uprooting your family, and voluntarily leaving a country where you can safely drink the water from a gas station lavatory wasn’t brave, it was slightly irresponsible and dumb.  But in a way we’ve come around to the idea that we are brave.  Having made the move overseas we realize that brave doesn’t have to mean a tally of how many men we’ve killed with our bare hands.  It can mean having the courage to change the path of your existence from a fine and comfortable but less than fulfilling lifestyle to something that is uncertain and sometimes difficult, but, hopefully, better.

Vanamos.net

Reading Vanamos’ blog was an “aha” moment and helped us understand more about the significance of the decision we made to move to Panama and to take this path there. Our lives were rich before we left on this trip but they are richer for having followed our dreams. And we believe that living a life knowing that dreams can come true gives us purpose and hope. Everyone deserves this and we are grateful for these opportunities, over and over again, to experience these lessons.

Eco Camping’s cochinita unearthing

The cochinita just before serving

Dancing in Vallodolid’s Plaza Principal

Ramon and fellow campers in the cave

Ramon’s secret cenote

Roque and Ramon were BOTH fencers and Olympic alternates!

It seems that most Pan American Highway overlanders officially “count” the start of their trip when they cross from the US into Mexico – likely, there are a number of reasons why this is the case, among which are the costs of US/Canadian travel and visa restrictions. Whatever the reasons, we, too, felt that the Pan American part of our trip started when we crossed the border into Tecate, Baja California at the end of November.

Our original plan called for us to cross into Mexico from San Diego and travel through Baja before crossing by ferry to the mainland. We chose this route because we wanted to visit Baja and camp on beaches on both sides – the Pacific and the Sea of Cortez – as well as due to general concerns about safety. There are so many US and Canadian snowbirds and others who visit Baja, we thought that entering through Tecate into Baja would be sort of “Mexico-light” or “Mexico 1.0.” And because most of the areas of safety concern are supposedly the border areas from Texas and Arizona, we thought that Baja would be a safer place to cross. While we won’t know what we would have experienced had we chosen a different route, the one we took proved to be what we hoped it might be – easy, safe and definitely a “Mexico-light” kind of experience.

We also had a hunch that once we crossed into Mexico, we would begin to meet other Pan Am Highway travelers (we will call them the Travelers from this point forward). No doubt that Travelers were hiding in plain sight in the US and Canada so we met relatively few of them amidst the very large number of North American RVers we saw in every place we visited. Pan Am travelers are often traveling in rigs that are much different than North American RV-type vehicles: many are in modified vans or trucks and still others are in European camper vans (caravans) that are distinctively different than North American RVs – usually smaller and more rugged and/or sleek in terms of design. There are other identifying characteristics of a rig headed for Panama or Argentina such as roof tents, rigs loaded with gear inside and out, gas and water canisters mounted on the rigs, etc. It also helped when we spied a European license plate or a URL emblazoned across a rig with a foreign country domain name.

Here are some examples of what an Overlander’s rig might look like:

Or like this:

If you see one of these, get outta the way (or ask for a tour inside)!

When we spot such a rig, we invariably assume that these travelers are headed for Panama or Ushuaia, Argentina. On multiple occasions, we have pounced on and started peppering them with questions. What we learned from these initial conversations is that there are a number of Europeans who ship their rigs to North America because the cost of shipping can be absorbed over several months of travel when compared with the expense of hotel costs in the US and Canada. We also learned that while not all of these Euro campers were headed for Panama or Argentina, a large number of them intend to do some portion of it, at least until their money or time runs out.

Once we hit Mexico, however, it seemed that the majority of campers we’ve met in Baja campgrounds are headed for some destination along the Pan Am. And on Baja, where there is really just one highway and a series of towns with just a few campground options, we started to encounter some of the same travelers over and over again, in a leap frog kind of way: one day, we might be a day behind someone else and then we would be riding bikes in town and we would literally bump into someone we met 2 towns ago. Our list of Baja friends included Diana and Santiago from Brazil/US and Columbia, Fritz (Austria), Mike (Montana) and Bill (Scotland), Josie and Rob (the Netherlands), Jerry and Bonnie (British Columbia), Ben (Switzerland) and Rachel (US/Switzerland) and others. All had different destinations, different rigs and different stories. We enjoyed them all.

The beauty of this gift of nearly endless encounters was the joy of arriving in a place and seeing a friendly face, often at a particularly fortuitous moment. One such case was after we left the town of Todos Santos, a small artsy community about an hour and a half north of Cabo San Lucas on the Pacific side of Baja, and while looking for a possible beach camping location, we became stuck in the sand in an arroyo. Folks walking along the beach approached with offers of help (one couple were camping with us in Todos Santos, as it happened) and together, we unhooked the truck from Wolfie, extracted first the truck and then camper from the sand, and high-tailed it out of the arroyo before the high tide arrived. (Turned out that the debris showing the tide line was left over from the Super Moon’s high tide earlier that week and we weren’t in jeopardy of a floating Wolfie after all.) While in the middle of attempts at extricating the rig from the sand, we looked up and saw Fritz and Bill, who happened to arrive at the very same location at the exact right moment in time. We celebrated the liberation of Gertie and Wolfie with beers and a shared meal later that evening, grateful for our rig’s safety and the generosity of our friends’ help.

Earlier during our time in Baja, just as we entered the town of Santa Rosalia, we had a similar gift of an encounter with wonderful people when one of Wolfie’s leaf springs broke, causing the trailer to collapse onto the axle and prevented further movement. A local man, whose name we never knew, stopped and jumped into action, sliding beneath Wolfie, working alongside Roque, as both tried to both diagnose the problem. By the time additional help arrived (we never discovered who called the Aguilar brothers to help with repairing Wolfie), our unnamed local man had dirtied his clothes, sustained a minor injury to his hand, and worked tirelessly next to Roque for more than an hour by the time that a temporary solution was devised to allow us to pull Wolfie to the shop for repair. While we gave him money to show our gratitude for his help, we know that when he stopped to help, being paid was not his motivation.

As we near the first anniversary of our time on the road, the gift of endless encounters with kind and lovely people, everywhere we’ve visited, has enriched our experiences, enhanced our understanding of the world, and provided us moments of social interaction and a sense of community that our solitary kind of travel often lacks. And in this time when the US media, social and otherwise, portrays the US as a place of great division, anger, and more, we can share that this is not what we have experienced along the road, whether in the US, Canada or Mexico. We have felt safe. And welcome. And accepted.

And for this and more, we are grateful.

Wishing all of you happiness and joy during this season of celebration.

Our route through Baja to the Mainland, as of today:

The Newsy Stuff

We wrote this post from Montana, our last US state before we crossed the border into Canada for the long drive through Canada to Alaska. We crossed the border just to the northeast of Glacier National Park into Waterton Lakes National Park in Alberta, Canada. The two parks form the Waterton-Glacier International Peace Park and it was amazing to sit in our campground at Waterton Townsite and face the back of the mountains that framed the Canadian border from the US side. Glacier is dramatic and the middle portion of the famous Going to the Sun Road within the park remained closed, since it is still being plowed out from the 30’ – 60’ (yes, feet) of snow that has fallen or drifted or avalanched (if that is a word) during this past winter. Fascinating photos of the plowing can be seen here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/glaciernps/sets/72157682348882366 and older YouTube videos show just how difficult an undertaking the plowing can be: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M-9l1PojA6Q.

Waterton Lakes National Park is also a beautiful park and there is a small village within the park called Waterton, complete with campgrounds, a few shops, restaurants and more. The glacial water in Waterton Lake and in the rivers and creeks within the park are stunningly lovely as is its Red Rock Canyon. Waterton provided us with up close views of mule deer and big horned sheep grazing within our campground, as well as a black bear (the photo below shows that not all black bears have black fur) and a moose that galloped away before we could take its photo.

As of this posting, we are happily sited at Bow Rivers Edge Campground in Cochrane, Alberta, on the outskirts of Calgary, where we will spend the next several days before traveling to Banff and Jasper National Parks before heading to Edmonton. From Edmonton, it will be about a 2-day journey to travel to Dawson Creek, the official beginning of the Alaska Highway (also referred to as the ALCAN Highway). With Wolfie in tow, we typically try to limit our driving days to 4 hours of driving per day because towing Wolfie, particularly when it is windy (a near constant condition here so far) is more difficult than when driving without her. We are figuring on a couple of weeks on the Alaska Highway and have allowed plenty of time to travel, sight see, and for detours between here and Alaska. The miles between here and Alaska seemed like a lot when we first considered this trip but after 20,000 on the road so far, that number is much less daunting now.

When we started to think about this blog post, we were in western South Dakota. We arrived there believing that we would spend 2-3 days in the area and within a half a day of arriving, we swiftly realized that we would need a full week to explore the sights on our list. South Dakota was amazing and we packed a lot into our time there – the Badlands National Park, Wall Drug, the National Grasslands Visitor’s Center, Wind Cave National Park and Jewel Cave National Monument, Crazy Horse Memorial, Mt. Rushmore, Custer State Park, including the Needles Scenic Drive, visits to Deadwood, Sturgis (home of the famous Sturgis Motorcycle Rally and the Motorcycle Museum and Hall of Fame), Spearfish, Spearfish Canyon, a historic fish hatchery, Devil’s Monument in Wyoming, Rapid City and more. We drove hundreds of miles touring the Black Hills area and loved each and every minute of it.

We left South Dakota and headed toward Montana to avoid heavy snow forecast for Wyoming on our way to Yellowstone and the Grand Teton National Parks. We were lucky to avoid snow along the route but not so lucky when we arrived in West Yellowstone – the next several days were characterized by snow, below freezing temps, lots of road closures within the park and much larger-than-we-expected crowds. We have a fair amount of flexibility to come, go or stay longer or shorter than people constrained by airline tickets or school vacation schedules but still, we cannot just stick around a place indefinitely, hoping that roads will open or crowds will diminish. And so, like everyone else in similar situations, you just roll with it.

Our drive through Yellowstone to the south entrance to visit Grand Teton when the road finally opened was enhanced by an amazing audio tour on an app called Just Ahead that we learned about while in Yellowstone. The app allows one to download a guide to a single park or to subscribe for year to access guides for additional parks. Regrettably, when we downloaded the Yellowstone guide, we were unaware that the south entrance road had reopened toward Grand Teton (even though we were monitoring road closures on the Park’s telephone info line) and when we entered Grand Teton, we were unable to load Teton’s guide due to cell service. We LOVED the Just Ahead audio tour and took advantage of many suggested stops along our route. Sadly, we didn’t know about Just Ahead until after we visited many of the parks for which audio guides were available but we have the app now, complete with yearly subscription, ready for audio tours of parks that we will visit when we return to the lower 48 from Alaska.

At a later date, we may attempt to list the places and routes along our travels that were our favorites. While it is premature to do so at this time, we can confidently report to you that among the places we will highly recommend are western South Dakota/Black Hills area and the drive from Yellowstone to Helena, MT along what we later learned was called the Paradise Valley (287 to 69 to 15 along the Madison River). The name says it all.

Here’s hoping for drives ahead as memorable as Paradise Valley – it proved that all roads along rivers and mountains are not just other hoodoos. (See previous bootsandcoffee.com blog post for explanation about hoodoo reference.)

The Nosy Stuff

Perhaps because our Facebook postings take the form of mini travelogues, filled with photos and videos but mostly devoid of personal reflections, we realized that this blog has become the primary (written) way for us to share our more inward thoughts about our life on the road and just how we are doing now that we have nearly 5 months (and 20,000 or so miles) under our (fan) belts.

Let us start by saying that we are good – individually and together. Let us follow by saying that the trip has had its challenges. All things considered, the challenges have been relatively minor – weather obstacles, regularly reaching our roaming data limits WAY before the end of our cell phone billing cycles, repairs needed for Wolfie’s roof and tire are just a few examples. We have learned that researching campgrounds along the road has taken a fair amount of time and energy and that the differences between campgrounds in state parks are interestingly startling. For instance, prior to reaching Colorado, nearly every state park visited had campsites for RVs with electric and water. From Colorado north, state park campsites rarely (if ever) supply water at the site – probably because state parks do not want to deal with the possibility of maintaining water pipes after long winters with many below freezing days. In Montana, few parks with RV sites provide a dump station for black or gray water – nearly unheard of in other state parks where we have stayed where dump stations are the norm. In some state parks, reservations must be made 2 or 3 days in advance and in others, one can reserve online on the day of arrival. Some parks have fees for residents and different fees for nonresidents; some states require daily entrance fees to be paid in addition to campsite fees (which, believe me, can really add up). Some states sell yearly park passes that eliminate the daily entrance fees. In short, it takes a lot of reading fine print to ensure that one is aware of the total cost for a campground stay and what amenities exist. (Here, in Helena, we are in a lovely lakeside campsite at Black Sandy State Park where we have electric at the site but no water and there is a dump station within the campground. There are restrooms with flush – versus vault toilets – but no showers anywhere in the campground. The nonresident campsite fee includes the daily entrance fee but we had to read the fee schedule at least 3 times before we figured it out. We arrived early enough to secure a first-come-first-served site, thankfully, because we missed the 3 days in advance online reservation window. Get the picture?)

All of this is to illustrate that it’s not so easy being foot loose and fancy free when it comes to securing a safe, affordable and comfortable place to place Wolfie for a night or so. On the other hand, it would have been completely exhausting to have made advance reservations for all of the myriad places we have stayed within the past 5 months to say nothing of how pressured we would have felt by such a tight and inflexible schedule and how little flexibility it would have afforded us. Good or bad aside, it has been a challenge to do this research along the way. And we think that it might get worse – in that we are already discovering that some Canadian campgrounds are not even reservable until the middle of June or later!

While we have met a large number of people, most of our encounters with others have been relatively brief – imagine our life as being one really long cocktail party filled with “camper small talk.” The “what’s your major” for us has morphed into a story of our journey and how we started in a tent before we acquired Wolfie, blah, blah, blah. It is a fun and interesting story to tell and we have developed story-telling skills that allow for a Mutt-and-Jeff routine and fellow campers are filled with interest and often provide us with great ideas and hints about things to see and routes to take, to say nothing of the valuable guidance we have received on maintaining Wolfie. Still, there are times we long for a good debate about current events, or about great movies seen or books read. Recent political events have left us with no lack of great articles to read and fascinating news to absorb as we travel but the 24 hour news programming gets old when we are on the second or third repetition of the same story even if it is a different newscaster/host and at times, listening to the news can be so disheartening and distracts from the beauty all around us.

There have been constant challenges with cell signals, Wi-Fi, TV stations and technology in general. We have hinted at this before and could write a book on how many issues we have confronted and our (mostly) botched solutions. In short, we have found nothing that consistently addresses our interests in having cell signals, adequate Wi-Fi and some access to TV – whether for news or entertainment. Most of the time, we have at least 1 of these (cell or Wi-Fi or TV) and sometimes we have none. At one point, we “voted” for choosing Wi-Fi over TV/cable when we researched campgrounds, believing that we could always stream news or Netflix, etc. We pretty quickly realized that nearly all campground-supplied Wi-Fi was not only inadequate for streaming purposes, it was barely adequate for email or web browsing/research. We have left a campground on more than one occasion to travel to Starbucks, McDonald’s or something similar just to use the Wi-Fi (such as we are doing at this moment). We have had issues with roaming data limits (even though our Sprint and T-Mobile plans have “unlimited” data – hah, a story for another day) but, fortunately no problems with our phones once we crossed the Canadian borders on either Sprint or T-Mobile. The data has been important not because we are unable to sit quietly and simply read a book or magazine, but to navigate, research, download books, news articles and the like. So far, we can mostly locate Wi-Fi in town and try to do what we need to do from those locations. It’s likely to get worse as we continue toward Alaska but the trade off is that our coping skills continue to improve.

One of the most difficult issues has been to embrace Wolfie and the trip as our way of life rather than one extended vacation. This little <100 square foot trailer is our home and it’s been a challenge to figure out how to make our life on the road comfortable at times. We are grateful for the inside kitchen but challenged by the limitations of its tiny space, tiny fridge, tiny sink and lack of oven. Our countertop measures about 2’x2’ and the workspace doubles as dish drainer where our tiny coffee maker and small 3 pot herb garden also resides. The dinette banquette that faces the TV is small and while we can both cram our butts there for short intervals, it is not accommodating for very long. It took a while to get comfy with Wolfie and living in this way – getting the storage cabinets arranged in a way that didn’t require removing everything to get to the spices, learning how to make the bed, figuring out how to keep sufficient pantry items on hand to allow for varied dinners . . .

It is worth noting that we have truly felt comfortable and have not perceived any real discomfort due to race or religion or the inter-ness of our mixed status as a couple. As we enter a new town or city, we usually read about the place, its history and its demographics. As we move westward, we have moved into areas with less racial and religious diversity but the lack of diversity has not signaled any lack of civility, cordiality and friendliness. If anything, it has improved. Universally, we have appreciated the friendly way we have been treated everywhere we have been.

Even with all of this, we can happily report that we are enjoying each other as much as we thought we would and have not tired of having each other as our primary companion. The trip has solidified so many of the things that we shared before we left and improved upon our collaboration in many new ways. And we are happy to also to report that naturally, without a great deal of conscientious work, we have started living more in the moment. The “can’t wait until” has been replaced, more often as not by “should we stay here longer.” Each day, there is more and more comfort in seeing what is in front of our eyes rather than what lies ahead in our journey.

Red Rock Canyon, Waterton Lakes National Park, Alberta