March 9, 2019 – March 11, 2019
Iberá Provincial Reserve is a little visited, remote area located in the Argentinian province of Corrientes. The reserve is a mixture of swamps, bogs, lakes and lagoons, and, of course, the associated wildlife, and is about 13,000 square kilometres in size. We headed to the small town of Colonia Carlos Pellegrini, where we camped for the night before hiring a small panga to take us out into the waters of the reserve for a safari, Argentina style.
Continue reading
September 18, 2018 – September 20, 2018
Although we really enjoyed the city of Arequipa, we were happy to be back out in the countryside again. We were driving to the Colca Canyon, which is only a hundred or so metres shy of being the deepest canyon in the world, and more than twice the depth of the Grand Canyon in the United States.
We drove past this erupting volcano on our way to the Colca Canyon
July 25, 2018 – July 27, 2018
We had decided in Quito, after much discussion, that we would not make the side trip out to the Galapagos Islands. Friends we had met on the road had offered to watch Piper for us if we went, but we decided that if we did go we wanted to do it on a 7 or 8 day cruise, plus maybe spend some time on one of the islands, and that it could quickly become a 10 or 12 day trip. That’s a long time to leave Piper, and we would have to find a place to stash the truck. In addition, the trip would easily cost or $8,000 Canadian dollars, and when Derek calculated how many kilometres we could drive for that much money (a lot!), we decided that the Galapagos would have to wait.
April 13 – April 14, 2018
We headed back to towards Lago Cocibolca (Lake Nicaragua) to take the ferry to La Isla de Ometepe. Ometepe consists of two volcanos, the active Concepcion (which hasn’t done anything in probably about 70 years) and the inactive Maderas, which ages ago became joined to form a single island.
April 1 – April 3, 2018
We were happy to be back on the road and after a few hours of driving on good roads we arrived at our campsite at Somoto Canyon. We parked in a green field next to the river with a great variety of birds, including the national bird of Nicaragua, the Guardabarranco, which looks like this, I have yet to get a good picture of one, but, as you can see, they are pretty gorgeous. Feathers like that and you may imagine that this beauty lives in an elegant nest, surrounded by eider down throw pillows and firefly lanterns, but no, they live in a hole in the dirt banks alongside roads, trails and rivers (thus the name which translates to the guard of the bank). Could be quite nice inside I guess….
We crossed into Guatemala, worried that we would struggle with our spanish after having been in english speaking Belize for two weeks, but the words came back to us and the border crossing went very smoothly.
We headed towards Caracol, the largest Maya site in Belize. The road is rough and slow, so we planned to camp half way and then get to Caracol early the next day. Before setting up camp, we stopped at Rio On Pools and played in the water for a few hours.
We had, yet again, been having problems with our fridge when using it on propane. Derek worked on it near Bacalar, but we just could not get it to stay lit and we had run out of tricks. The plan had been to visit the beautiful multi-hued lake of Bacalar, but instead we decided to head to Chetumal where we had a larger town at our disposal and better internet to troubleshoot the issue.
The road to Guacamaya took us through some of the most spectacular jungle we have ever driven through. The wide valley below us was cultivated, every inch covered in a different colour of green. Above us the cliffs became almost vertical but were dripping with an astounding variety of vegetation…palms, vines, plants with leaves the size of beach umbrellas… At one point I looked below us to see a scarlet macaw soaring, silhouetted against the vibrant green of the valley below. It was breath taking. And we only have theses pictures, as we had an epic dash cam fail that day…very disappointed. I didn’t take photos in the most pristine places we drove through, foolishly relying on the dash cam, so these photos really do not do it justice, but it gives you a bit of an idea of what we were seeing.