After surviving a tsunami in Peru, crossing the Pacific with a stop in Hawaii, discovering the pleasures of free-camping and cold (for Janna, or no, for me) showers for a month in New Zealand, cuddling koalas and shooting kangaroos (or was it the opposite?) on the East Coast of Australia… we are now in Kathmandu, and soon heading for Delhi, so as to enjoy the springlike temperatures in Rajhastan, 47°c to 50°c…
To make up for the little activity on that blog for the past few weeks, here is a wide and eclectic selection of documentation: a movie about a bit of Panama, Colombia and Peru, and some pictures of Australia, and of our 12-day trek to the Everest Base Camp.
We hope you’ll forgive us for the inconsistency… and enjoy the selection!!
We sold the caaaaaaar!!! After 3 or 4 painful weeks in Panama City, a fair number of repairs, a sh**load of paperwork, 175 interested callers and 37 last-minute-no-go-buyers (“Mira, el caro era para el primo de mi novio, pero el dinero … Continue reading →
All right, we’re late… but we have an excuse: we’re lazy!… And we even have a better one: all of our video equipment got robbed…
Apart from that, it’s all good. We drove easily through Belize and its 16,000 inhabitants capital, avoided the Guatemalan highway robbers, survived the Honduran “Road of Death”, named after local colleagues of the Guatemalan highway robbers and some carjacker friends of theirs. We got pulled over 167 times by Nicaraguan police and didn’t pay a single bribe (just talk to them in German, they get scared…). We spent Christmas on the beach in Malpaís, Costa Rica, got stuck between two countries one night – easy to do, just cross the Costa Rican border and 17:55 and enter Panama at 18:05, they won’t let you into Panama because immigration is closed and won’t let you back out because you’ve crossed the border barriers and they’re now closed…
We had flutes of Balboa beer and toasts of fried plantain on New Year’s eve in Santa Catalina, Panama. And we are now in Panama City, enjoying a couple of days away from the daily surf/ rice/ beans combo and back to something closer to civilization with a daily (yes, daily…) mall/ Mac Donald’s/ movie combo.
We only need to sell our car to continue our trip to Colombia. Piece of cake, it’s a marvel of Japanese technology with just under 170,000 miles, no Aircon, no radio, a dent in the trunk (palm tree attack, nothing we could do about it), and weakening breaks. Anybody interested?…
Anyway, there’s more in the movie than this very quick summary (6 countries in 10 lines, I’ve always had a gift for synthesis…). Enjoy it, and send us some news!
Before you can watch our clip, and share the “blissfulness” of our trip, let’s share a bit of our (rare) miseries…
The Mexican police is a pain in the ass!!! As Paul, our host in Mexico, puts it: “They keep changing the driving regulation. They’re changing it so quickly that not even the cops know which rules are in place.” The upside is that they can always come up with the proper regulation infraction and fine amount for you, and they even have the proper freakin’ regulation book to show you they’re not making anything up, never…
For example, at the time we were in Mexico City, it was apparently not allowed to drive between 5am and 10am in Mexico City and the state of Mexico (editor’s note: our tourist guide said there’s one day per week when you can’t drive, depending on the last figure on our plates – ours said we can’t drive on Thursdays)… And the fine is 100 days of minimum salary, something like 7,000 pesos or 700 USD. It kind of feels like the fines are established so as to encourage corruption. What incentive does the average Mexican driver/ tourist has to pay 7,000 Pesos when he can get away with it for a 200/ 700 pesos bribe?… No, it’s definitely too expensive to be an honest man. We got away with it for 700 pesos…
At the time we were in Mexico, it was also apparently forbidden to drive without papers for the vehicle and without your driving license!! All right, maybe that’s probably always the case, but we screwed it. After the worst negotiation we’ve ever been through (the Moroccan police, for those who’ve been there, is easy as a pie in comparison): crappy scrap yard, bad-ass cop, threats to go to jail, etc. We got away with it for 900 pesos…
At the time we were in Mexico, there was even a “proper way to cross speed ramps”, which could be “evaluated by the authority witnessing the said crossing”. Never contesting the usefulness or existence of the regulation, just pleading for half an hour that we’d abided by this core rule of the Mexican driving regulation, because the car is so slow anyway that we couldn’t have done anything wrong, and because Janna’s foot hurt, and because her guinea pig died crossing a speed ramp too fast… At long last, we got away with it for… nothing!
Anyway, after an express trip through Belize, we’re safe and sound in Guatemala, drinking happy hour daiquiris with a view on the Lago de Izabal… Let’s not complain too much, and let you watch this clip!
