We came across a lot more hurdles than we expected when it came to planning the technicalities of our trip.
Even before we got to things such as insurance, flights and shipping, we had a hard enough time trying to figure out the logistics of what we were doing.
The first mission was the bike, but we’ll save that for another post! When we sat down to plan we thought we had the start and end point all figured out. But the more we looked at our route, along with the time we had and our budget, the more we realised it was unrealistic.
Our original plan was to start in San Francisco. Head south through California, visit Yosemite, Las Vegas, the Grand Canyon and then head south into Mexico.
While this sounds pretty amazing and would’ve meant we were riding through all of the Americas, it would have taken up a month of our precious four months, and a reasonable chunk of our budget with western prices of the USA.
Combine that with the worry that comes with crossing Mexico, and we had to have a little rethink.
While we know that Mexico is beautiful, often a lot safer than is made out, and that a lot of adventure riders have traversed it without a single problem, we decided that in light of our time, budget and the fact that this is our first adventure motorcycle trip, that it would be best to start further south.
So we will be starting in Cancun, Mexico, where we will meet our bike, and travel south into Belize. We will use the Pan-American highway for a rough guide of our direction, and travel south through Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras (briefly), Nicaragua, Costa Rica and Panama. We’ll hop on a boat (with our bike) to the north of Colombia, and head down the west side of South America, heading east at the bottom of Chile into Argentina and up into Brazil.
While it’s a shame to be missing out the USA, we have years ahead where we can return and road trip the states, and we have both in fact been to many of the places we had planned to go before. For us this trip is about the unknown, countries and cultures we have never experienced, being totally self-sufficient in getting from A to B and overcoming the challenges that we’ll come from being on the road for so much of the time.