Life in MAGIc Land

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…

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…

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.…

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…

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,…

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…

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…

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…