Blimey O’Reilly! How the devil did it come to this? One minute it’s social distancing and hand-washing, next minute… the world shuts down. Like everyone in these strangest of times, we’ve had some decisions to make. Somehow, we ended up in the Yukon. But first let’s wind back the clock just a few weeks, to very different days, when we arrived from the USA to start overlanding Canada.
The Pacific North West USA is a ‘great if you get the season right’ kind of place. Somewhere behind all the murk that we saw, is a stunning countryside just bursting to get out and show us its stuff. But are we moaning? Noooo. Despite the murky weather we found whilst overlanding the Pacific North West, we had a great time. We had glimpses of scenic fabulousness, alpacas, huskies, snow, cool cities and… errrrm… a bit of mechanical work required on Cuthbert.
Everyone knows California, don’t they? It’s pretty good at self-promotion and has a familiarity acquired from decades of movies and TV. There’s the odd ‘nugget of wonder’ to be found, but overlanding California isn’t really a surprise. If we have one Top Tip for California it’s ‘winter’. In winter we find crowd-free parks and coasts. We also find hippy-nirvana in the desert, TV sets, elephant seals, a super-cool city, very big trees and a winning streak at the casino!
It’s 2020. Blimey. How did that happen? We end 2019 and kick-off 2020 in the south US desert with some expensive food, a piece of England, a biosphere, a nuclear missile, a war hero, many overlanding snowbirds and two new Mexican crowns. Howsaboutthat for variety?
The parks of south west USA are splendid things. They conserve spectacular natural treasures and this place was certainly at the front of the queue when it came to dishing-out spectacular natural treasures. This part of the world has more than its fair share of spectacularity (okay… I made that word up, but I think it works). Park-life in south-west US is excessively spectacular; around almost every corner is some kind of awesome park, each with a ridiculous number of wow-factor views. So after the alien-geekery of New Mexico, we thought we’d better get exploring the south west’s park-life.
Aliens, space and rocket-geekery is a thing in New Mexico. We decide to investigate. But there’s much more to overlanding New Mexico, so we do check out a bit of the other stuff too: some sand, a Chloride time-capsule, a ‘Truth or Consequence’ and some wolves. But for us in New Mexico, geekery is where it’s at.
Dashing from east to west across USA we have acquired new knowledge. We learned that not everything that looks like space-junk is actually space-junk; there is such a thing as too much steak; and there is no Forrest Gump bench in the Savannah square. We found no yellow brick road in Kansas and not even a lineman in Wichita. We did however, find the Choo choo in Chattanooga. At some (undetermined) point we were 24hrs from Tulsa, and someone did show us the way to Amarillo, so it’s not all bad, going west.
From around the world people flock in their millions to Florida, or Orlando to be more precise, to visit The Mouse (or The Duck, or the Frozen girl, or whatever this week’s Disney-fad happens to be). That’s all rather splendid, but we’re here to visit friends… friends we haven’t seen in a loooong time! We love life on the road but if there is one thing we miss, it’s spending time with old friends. Florida is our rare chance to put that right. And as we happen to be in the neighbourhood, we thought it would be remiss of us not to do a teeny bit of Florida overlanding stuff too. So we explored the ‘panhandle’, kayaked the creeks, saw some space stuff, some race stuff, and turned north at America’s bottom.
For some, the Deep South USA conjures-up images of cotton plantations, white mansions and big dresses (as in… ‘Frankly my dear… I don’t give a damn’). Or maybe some thing jazz and blues marching street-bands. For us, it turned out to be lots of great creole food, some ‘fake-news’ Tabasco sauce and failing miserably with a GPS and fake American accents.
Howdy Texas! What an absolutely amazing start to the USA ya’ll have been. When we crossed the border a month ago, we knew Texas overlanding would be a huge change from Mexico, but this Lone Star State has delivered waaay beyond our expectations. We saw cool scenery, wildlife, cities, space rockets, history, politics, long-horns, money-printing and a rock-star. We won an award and we saw (a lot of) stuff fried. But by far the best thing has been the people – Texans are just the best!
The Wall loomed at the top of Mexico. Crossing the Rio Grande into the USA felt like a mahuuusive milestone in our travels. Not merely the end of Mexico, but Latin America too. Almost exactly four years after we hopped on the ship in Germany to sail to Uruguay, we ended our Latino trail entering the Lone Star State of Texas. Yes, we were absolutely looking forward to greeting Uncle Sam, but our crystal ball predicted change… big change. Some good change, some bad change, but definitely change.
You know what…? Even after a year around Mexico, this place never ceases to amaze us. Not many overlanders tour north east Mexico, they usually dig the western delights of Baja California and Copper Canyon. We did those too, they’re great, but we wanted to start USA in Big Bend National Park. It made sense for us to exit Mexico on the eastern side into Texas. Leaving San Luis Potosi, we steeled ourselves for some long days of tedious driving to the border. But Mexico had a few final tricks up its sleeve. Who knew that north east Mexico had some real little gems???
What with over five years on the road, 46 countries, 180,000km ‘n all that… we think we’ve seen a fair chunk of the world. But rarely have we come across an area so jam-packed with things to see and do as middle Mexico. Around almost every corner is a new chance to marvel, sense, taste, smell, gawp, laugh or smile. I hesitate to offer one of those ‘we went here, then we did this…’ list-type blogs…. but here’s a teeny little insight into our whirlwind of activity…
“Those Mexicans are out to hi-jack your car, steal your dollars, poison your tortillas and eat your Hershey’s”. To some, merely popping over the border to order a taco in Chihuahua amounts to ‘Operation Certain Death’. We could not agree less with that particular approach, but we’d be a bit naïve to not recognise some travel risks. To cope, we’ve developed our own finely-tuned BSMS (Brave-or-Stupid Monitoring System). Every overlander has to tune their own personal sense of ‘brave or stupid’ and Copper Canyon posed a small challenge to ours.
Baja California might reasonably be accused of having a slightly mis-leading name. It’s not actually California at all. In fact, it’s not even part of the USA. It’s the 1,500km long, thin sticky-out bit of land dangling down the Pacific side of ‘mainland’ Mexico. We explored its beaches, kayaked the coastline, drove some remote 4×4 trails, ate too many fish tacos and discovered the new nation-state of the USG. And it turned out to be whale-shark season, so we went for a swim with them too!
Durango. It’s a town, it’s a state of Mexico, it’s one big wild-west movie set, it even lent its name to a movie, and there’s a notorious John Wayne connection. There are few places more ‘cowboys and indians’ than Durango. There we were… just moseying-on through, minding our own business when the whole wild west ‘thing’ just grabbed us by surprise and got us to hang-out for a few days. Why, in the name of Duke’s boots, had we never even heard of this place before?
Driving in Mexico City is a doddle any time… any time that is, provided it’s a Sunday. After our drive up to central Mexico from Acapulco, we shuffled our schedule to drive in on a Sunday, mooch around the capital and see the legendary Lucha Libre fight-night. Then we went to see where a man tried to plug an erupting volcano – how do we think that worked out, eh? We saw a few ‘Magic Mining Towns’ and… oh yes… we also got lost underground!
Okay, sorry… we’ve been slack on the blog-front recently. But in our defence, we’ve been busy doing stuff. And ‘stuff’ includes cruising down to the Pacific Coast for some kayak action and marvelling at the fearless cliff-divers of 1960s hot-spot, Acapulco. But before all that… our doing ‘stuff’ involved having a windscreen fitted!!! Yes, you read that correctly… a windscreen fitted! We now have a clear view all the way to Acapulco!
The key to successful overlanding… meticulous planning? Or just getting lucky? Maybe a bit of both. The real answer is ‘flexibility’. You never know what’s around the corner. Maybe a happy-thing, maybe a snagette, but you’re onto a loser if you can’t flex to deal with it. One sunny day in Belize, we suffered a badly cracked windscreen. We knew instantly that we had a bit more than a snagette on our hands. Here… is a ‘bad news – good news – bad news’ story of overlanding flexibility.
Central Mexico, mid-late winter… it’s the baffling Monarch butterflies migration season. No exaggeration… millions of them. These little chaps are a Mexico bucket-list item for us and a prime example of the inexplicable natural world. In any case, we’ve got a bit of time on our hands still waiting for a new windscreen, so we do a 1,500km loop to see them. While we’re at it, we include a short volcano crater hike at over 4,200m asl (breath-taking in more ways than one) and we follow the trail of Mexican revolutionary hero, Emiliano Zapata.
