April 15, 2019 – May 12, 2019
Buenos Aires is often referred to as “the Paris of South America”. It is a multicultural city, full of parrillas (steak house), red wine, weekend ferias (craft/antique fairs), tango dancers and magnificent buildings.
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June 29, 2018 – July 2,2018
We got on the road about 8 or 9 am for the long slow drive along the back country roads from Salento to Ibague. We knew what the first 20 kilometres of so were going to be like, as we had ridden down it on a bike the day before with Doug and Lindsey, but we were excited to see what else the day would bring.
June 29, 2018 – June 30, 2018
The next day the four of us were up early for a bike tour…some, if not all, with a bit of brain fog from the celebrations of the previous night. We jumped in the box of a pickup truck and were driven out of town for about an hour, the fresh, crisp mountain air helping to clear away the cobwebs.
June 8, 2018 – June 12, 2018
We needed to fill our propane tank, and we had seen on iOverlander (we seriously use this app daily) that there were two places in the town of San Gil that other travellers had had good luck with getting their North American style tanks filled. San Gil was on our way….perfect. We tried both places, and they both refused to fill our tanks….we were not 100 percent sure why, but Derek thought that maybe they had said that the pressure levels and the fittings were different, making it impossible. We still had a bit of gas, so we decided to head on to camp and see if we had enough fuel to make coffee and dinner for the next few days.
April 20 – 21, 2018
We drove through the hills of Costa Rica towards Monteverde. The area has a high population of Quakers. Apparently a group of Quakers had been jailed in the US for refusing to fight in the Korean war. When they were freed, they started looking for a new place to live. They considered Canada, among a number of other countries, and finally decided on Costa Rica, partly due to the fact that Costa Rica had abolished it’s own army in 1948. The Quakers began cultivating the land and started dairy farms, but also wisely put aside a section of land for conservation. That land, today, is the Monteverde Cloud Forest Biological Preserve.
April 16 – April 19, 2018
The crossing into Costa Rica on the Nicaraguan side was chaotic to say the least. We had no idea where we were supposed to park, which building we needed to head to first and we were immediately approached by “helpers”, people who hang out at the border, walk you from one building to another and tell you what you need to do next, all for a propina (tip). We had not used one since we had accidentally used one when crossing into Belize (we thought he worked for the border agency and didn’t realize we needed to tip him until the process was almost complete).
We did manage to do one of the tours while we were at El Pantano, and that was the tour of Finca de San Antonio. The finca is run by four brothers and is home to them, their families and their 80 year old parents. Manuel, one of the brothers, picked us up at El Pantano and we began the walk from there to the finca. The dirt road was steep and the day, even at 8 am, was already hot and muggy.