• Birkenhead,  British Columbia (and nearby),  Hiking & Scrambling,  Trip Reports

    Twin Lakes: Crystal, Elliot and A Problem Marmot

    I am drawn to places that are hard to get to, and visited by few. Yes, it’s harder to find information about these places, they require more effort and sometimes planning, but they offer solitude and an authentic experience. I like to think that there’s a “marginal effort principle” at work: if you put in just a bit more effort than most people, you get a substantially higher reward. This is applicable to many fields, including, for example, blackberry picking. You want to pick ripe, plump berries that are oozing with juice, right? Reach slightly higher, scratch your arms and legs in an effort to go deeper into the thorny…

  • Central America,  Cycling & Cycle Touring,  Overseas,  Travel,  Trip Reports

    Belize: Small Country, Big Attractions

    Bang! The boat jumped into the air and crashed hard again. The ocean was rough, the waves were huge and we were going at full speed. We had arrived to Puerto Barrios, Guatemala that afternoon after a pleasant ride from Honduras and were surprised to discover that we could still catch a boat to Belize that day. We left late and the captain was in a hurry. As we were leaving it started raining hard and we were given black plastic bags to cover ourselves. When the rain stopped I peeked out and saw the most beautiful double rainbow, and I thought that maybe I died and arrived to heaven,…

  • Central America,  Cycling & Cycle Touring,  Outdoor Recreation,  Overseas,  Travel,  Trip Reports

    Honduras (Part 2): A Five Star Country

    In the end, we barely cycled in Honduras, this time around, despite spending three weeks of our cycling trip there. The first hurdle was that I got dengue fever in Copan, soon after leaving Guatemala. The blood test was a bit of a scare, when my blood just wouldn’t come out, and eventually a thick black liquid was drawn. The other hurdles, a short volunteering stint and a scuba diving vacation, were planned by us, so I can’t exactly complain. We usually find it extremely tiring to spend a day exploring ruins, but the Maya ruins of Copan were on our route, so we made an exception. We arrived early,…

  • Central America,  Cycling & Cycle Touring,  Overseas,  Travel,  Trip Reports

    Guatemala: or Should I Say Guatemaya

    It all started with a long and steep uphill, after an easy descent from El Salvador. I could hear Maya muttering under her breath: “I hate Guatemala”. After all, no other country we have visited on this trip dared to serve us roads with grades of up to 20%. We often found ourselves pushing our bikes uphill, and in some cases downhill. On one occasion I could smell our brake pads roasting, and got a small burn from passing my finger too close to the disc. Several times in Guatemala we exclaimed: “we’ve arrived to a different country”. After the intense uphills of the mountainous highlands, arriving to the flat…

  • Central America,  Cycling & Cycle Touring,  Overseas,  Travel,  Trip Reports

    El Salvador: A Country Off the Beaten Track

    I never thought I would spend a night at a police station. But life has a tendency to surprise you, especially on cycling trips, when in the morning you never know where you will spend the night. Sometimes you end up in a beautiful garden surrounded by mango trees, sometimes in a sex hotel and sometimes in a police station. We crossed the border from Honduras at El Amatillo, entering an extremely poor area of El Salvador. We passed through desert like scenery with not much on the side of the road. There were no towns with accommodation in sight, so when we passed a small village we asked some…

  • Central America,  Cycling & Cycle Touring,  Overseas,  Travel,  Trip Reports

    Honduras (Part 1): Border to Border in Less Than 48 Hours

    It’s impossible to capture a country in only two days, and what we’ve seen from Honduras is only a corner, the tip of the iceberg. Although speaking of ice in Honduras does not describe our experience in the country. Our experience was a hot one. We crossed the border from Nicaragua through the surprisingly quiet border at El Espino. We had spent that day in the Canyon de Somoto, still on the Nicaraguan side. We arrived to the border in the late afternoon tired and sweaty after a long climb. A Canadian couple crossed on foot just after us. While they waited for the bus from the border, we cycled…

  • Central America,  Cycling & Cycle Touring,  Overseas,  Travel,  Trip Reports

    Nicaragua: In the Land of Revolutions

    Everything changed when we crossed the border from Costa Rica to Nicaragua. For one, Nicaraguans are adept at squeezing as many people into each vehicle, be it a bicycle, motorbike, car or truck. A bus drove past us, a group of people on the roof and a man hanging on to the back. A pickup truck was full of people, many of them with half their body outside the vehicle. I began noticing people carrying buckets and boxes carefully balanced on their heads, and everyone seemed to be carrying piles of wood, for their wood cooking stoves. The buses are old American school buses, many sporting Christian quotes on the…

  • Central America,  Cycling & Cycle Touring,  Overseas,  Travel,  Trip Reports

    Costa Rica: The Beauty and the Beast

    Costa Rica has a problem. It is too beautiful, too attractive, and too peaceful, attracting millions of tourists each year. Its fitting image of paradise on earth is one of the “problems”. We strategically avoided staying in touristy areas, preferring the less known places, small towns or villages, and they do exist in Costa Rica, even though we’ve heard that “tourists are everywhere”. By doing this, what we discovered is indeed a beautiful country, in both landscape and people. We crossed the border from Panama at Paso Canoa and it took us a while to figure out where to get our passports stamped and so on. Welcome to Costa Rica!…

  • The road to Santa Catalina, end of the world feeling
    Central America,  Cycling & Cycle Touring,  Overseas,  Travel,  Trip Reports

    Panama (Part 2): Backroads to the Mangoes

    We left Ocu after resting there an extra day and befriending a group of seniors that took excellent care of us. We returned to the Pan American highway just 11km from where we had left it a week earlier, completing a loop in the Azuero Peninsula. This time the road had wide shoulders, clear of the common glass shards, not much traffic, and was a joy to ride. We passed through Santiago, the third largest city in Panama and took a quick look at the “parque” – the main plaza. We left the highway once again to cycle towards Sona, pronounced like the word for prostitute in Hebrew, which we…

  • Central America,  Cycling & Cycle Touring,  Overseas,  Travel,  Trip Reports

    Panama (Part 1): From the Busy City to the Quiet Countryside

    We could finally relax. We were at the gate waiting for our flight and there was nothing else to do. After a week of being on the go all the time it felt nice not to think about the next errand, or packing or making another trip to the storage unit. We were both fast asleep before the plane even took off. The three hour flight to Las Vegas seemed too short. In Las Vegas we were stuck with our two huge bike boxes that we had to keep with us till the next flight. The options were spending about 11 hours in the boring airport, or going out to…