sumec champey pools taken by a shaky handed aussie girl or maybe we´re super fast. all these little pools sit calmly atop a raging class IV river. im sure there is a life lesson from a van fleet mom in there somewhere.
our san pedro, lake atitlan horseback riding guide swinging his golf club at his bit of pumice set atop a makeshift tee between laughing his ass off and doing it again. he was amazing. and the pumice floated so he could point that his went farther then ours did.
yeah. thats pretty nice. veiw from a kayak on the lago
some more hitchikers... these ones mayan who barely spoke spanish but smiled alot and handed us tasty treats as we drove through little towns... quite a sight. gringos with mayans waving and smiling atop tremendo.
one of hurricane stans victims
atop a volcano near antigua. it was quite hot and hard to pose for a picture. it was active and spewing heat and hot gases out of crevases and cracked in the hardened lava.
notice im wearing flops and these little buggers each grabbed a leg and held me down while they shined them and then went through my pockets looking for money... i lifted one up in the air. ed laughed and ran away
more to come..

nuestros amigos

all ye travelers and friends.. we would love to know of plans for your own travel in the coming year. one of the many nice things about having no plans whatsoever is that we can adjust our complete lack of plans to make sure we cross paths in various incredible spots around this world of ours.. so the moral is let us know where you are going, perhaps some sort of general timeline and what color shirt youll be wearing.. throw a little comment on here or just email us... feliz viaje mi amigos

The Yucatan, ruins, and donkeys

spent a day wandering around the ruins of monte alban and watched the sun set over one of the great zapotec cities then cruised a most chaotic mexican market for some grub for about a dollar. another night in the great city of oaxaca with some new friends. after a nine dollar bottle of tequila was consumed in full we were somehow convinced to go salsa dancing. wow. spun some ladies around and tried to look as foolish as possible.

san cristobal next via the first forged river for tremendo, the new name for nuestro coche, by blue agave fields as far as you can see used for making mezcal, tequilas big brother which packs quite a punch. north of town we visited agua azul. below the tourists taking pictures we met some friends camping, joined them with our harmonicas and the next morning swam, jumped, climbed and tumbled own river. swung on vines, jumped off trees and watefalls, slid down water slides and pounded our chests like tarzan. what a blast.

did some splunking at misol-ha a huge waterfall with a hidden cave nearby. got about 200 feet in climbing up waterfalls and into rooms filled with bats and huge stalags. amazing.

our first mayan ruins at palenque with a night on hammocks in the thick of the jungle. so powerful to be among these huge ruins poking out from the middle of the thick jungle. more mayan ruins at chichen itza and uxmal that were at times crowded and at times deserted. the yucatan is so flat and the pyramids they built so tall that you can see forever. threw the football around during a heavy rain in the monsterous stadium at chichen itza and imagined the echoes of the crowd and the king cheering for us. watched the buildings lit up at night in brilliant colors with a big powerful voice speaking spanish.

one of the thousands of donkeys that line the roads of mexico. definitely the prefered mode of transportation on many of the mountain/jungle roads that we took tremendo.

the highlight of our time in belize - making pasta with the JVIs from belize city. for a country we had planned on spending as much as a month in belize turned out to be a major dud, but fortunately it´s only the size of massachusetts. we were in and out in two and a half days.... more to come soon from guatemala.

more baja brilliance

after visiting eric and the fam in san felipe we meandered washboard roads south through some of the more deserted and deserty areas of baja. little beach towns, little islands, lots of jumping fish, coyotes and quicksand. this is where you disappear from the law for those of you looking for a good spot.

met Coco a loco man on the baja 1000 route south who fixes bikes, buggies, keeps a most artistic guest book about six inches thick, collects girls underwear that they leave, builds beer can castles and has a fridge with nothing but stacked mexican beer inside. quite a sight. he gave us a good spot to camp southward and we hit it at sunset pulling clams from the flats, steaming and feasting on them, drinking tecate and watching thousands of frigate birds fly by silhouetted in the colorful sky. found an "unlocked" cabana right on the beach to poach and then paid off the mexican dude in the morning for the cabana and the sea kayaks to cruise around the laguna.

baja gets better as you go south. oasis cities, loreto, la paz and everything in between.. amazing. we took time to install our little seniorita and pick up a hitchhiker named bruno who knew augusta was the capital of maine. crazy.

ferry to mainland mexico greeted by a dead battery and a push start down the ferry ramp to get her going. we are in oaxaca now and headed to some ruins. more to come...

paradise found

stumbled upon paradise one evening as we drove down the coast looking for a playa to crash on. its beaches are nestled between rocks to climb and caves to explore, lined at night with glowing phosphorescent waves that light up the horizon in a most unbelievable color, sea turtles bobbing around in the wake and crawling up the beach to dig holes and lay their eggs, mexican girls who are amazing at american football, palapas to camp under for less then the cost of a slim jim, cervezas, fish and mota for the change you find in the couch. its somewhere between two big pacific resort towns though it is untouched by anything tourista. the indigenous folk wont let anyone purchase land around it and the result is absolute paradise. we keep its location secret though if you email us we´ll let you know how to get there and who to track down once you do.

the 87 plymouth horizon went from baja to bitch edition before we got out of oregon. grinding noises in the transmission got worse and worse and about 2 hours into the trip it would barely do that whole moving forward thing that was rather important to us. took a couple days to regroup due to the need to get drunk and forget her and to find a new baja edition for the first leg of the journey. the result is below... perched along cali's highway 1 and ready to tackle the pot hole-y roads of mexico and perhaps be traded for a sailboat in belize if she makes it that far