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20 Aug 2013
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Join Date: Jul 2007
Location: No Fixed Address (formerly Toronto)
Posts: 1,847
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Updated from Jun 14 2013: Guatemalan Socialites
First things first: We're celebrating ONE YEAR ON THE ROAD!!!
Nothing says Party-Time like coconut cream cake. Mmmm...!
I think the cliched thing to say is that "It's hard to believe we've been traveling for a whole year", but it's not that hard to believe at all. We've seen and experienced so many different things in the last 12 months that it's quite the opposite - it's hard to imagine that it all fit in a year! Especially compared to our lives before, where larger-than-life adventures had to be shoehorned into 2-3 week boxes between the crates of sedentary working existence.
Marking the passage of time while outrunning the changing seasons also contributed to this very concrete feeling of time being a rushing wave that we were constantly trying to ride on top of or ahead of. I imagine if we were just traveling through somewhere tropical, our temporal senses may have been more subdued.
Ride all day, drink all night
Central America is a funnel. While travelers roam across the north or south continents, they may occasionally bump into each other at nexuses like motorcycle meets. But when the land narrows like an hourglass to the thinnest point in Panama, right in the centre, these traveling grains of sand start bumping into each other as they line up single file to hoist their bikes onto sailboats or pack them into cargo containers to fly between one side of the hourglass to the other.
We've been keeping in contact with other travelers online and while we were in Antigua, we met up again with Andi and Ellen, the Two Moto Kiwis from New Zealand. We originally met at the Horizons Unlimited meeting in California last October. We also spent the evening with Phil and Jayne, from The Ultimate Ride, the brother and sister motorcycle duo whose goal is to play Ultimate Frisbee everywhere they travel. We ran into them briefly last December in La Paz, Mexico at the ferry docks crossing to the mainland. Also with us that evening was Julio, AKA GauteRider, an Austrian ex-pat who now lives just outside of Antigua and plays host to pretty much all the motorcycle traveling grains of sand that trickle by his front yard.
Having dinner with Andi, Ellen, Phil and Jayne was a riot of a time, comparing stories of our adventures. We all started about the same time last year, taking very similar treks from north to south and while other riders race towards the Antarctic for December 2013, we joked that our three teams were in a much different competition against each other: To see who could ride the slowest down to South America! Poor Andi and Ellen have been besieged with breakdowns and injuries and Andi was actually laid up in Antigua mending a broken rib. As for Phil and Jayne, they meander and dawdle worse than we do! All of them accused us of cheating because we had actually made it to South America, but then took a detour through the Caribbean to end up back in CA again! I guess you don't technically lead a slow race if you lap someone...!
Ellen and Andi on the right teaching a local restaurant owner how to make sushi
Ellen's sushi is famous amongst motorcycle travelers, she makes it everywhere they stop for hosts and friends
While Phil and Jayne didn't stay too long in Antigua, Andi and Ellen are spending a month here so we hung out quite a bit, getting to know them. They are a very friendly and genuine couple, and it was really nice to be able to celebrate and commiserate with folks going through the exact same things we were going through.
Two Moto Canucks!
Other than trying to reach certain destinations, we've been without a true quest our entire trip. But Andi gave one to us. Fetch his motorcycle from Guatemala City, where he left it after his crash last month. He couldn't ride it back himself because of his broken ribs. GC is only 45 minutes away, and we needed to get Neda's bike serviced anyway, so with a little help from Julio, we managed to do all this in a single trip.
Andi and Ellen have got a beautiful KTM 950SE that they've nicknamed Maya. I make fun of KTMs all the time, but I used to have a KTM dirtbike and Neda and I spent many weekends on the trails around Ontario, roosting each other and crashing into trees. Thankfully the road between GC and Guatemala is very twisty and I got a chance to test out the 950SE. It's comparable to the F800GS, similar weight and power but the SE sounds a heck of a lot nicer and felt more flickable than the Beemer. It's very much a hooligan bike, I liked it a lot!
Que es el problema, Maya? No se...
I know from personal experience that KTMs are very finicky and maintenance-intensive. So it wasn't too much of a surprise when riding back from GC, Maya's rear brake seized, forcing us to pull over in heavy traffic. We couldn't pull over safely for quite a distance and when we finally stopped, the rear pads were smoking more than Neda did in Cuba.
I txted Andi to ask him if this was normal. There was a bit of confusion over the phone. Apparently, New Zealand English and Canadian English are not the same, so I pulled out my Google Translate and sent him a Canuck-to-Kiwi translation:
Quote:
Croikey dick, the rear brake's done near knackered! I give the old gal a bit of a kick and whadayaknow, Bob's yer uncle and everything's a box of budgies! I'm feeling pretty chuffed and Neda piped up with an ole, "Good on ya, mate!" so hooray to Guatemala City! We spent a few moments dodging lorries on the roadway, had to tella few to "NAFF OFF" but we got to Antigua all home'n hosed and just in time for tea! Phew, I could really go for a vegemite sarnie, right about now!
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To my surprise, Andi understood that perfectly!
Wheeling in Maya into Andi and Ellen's hostel
We had Andi, Ellen, Julio and his wife Luisa over for dinner where Neda cooked up some yummy Croatian dishes.
Something happens when you stay a while in one place: you start growing roots. Our social calendar was getting booked up with people that we met, dinner with a Japanese couple, Miwa and Kohei, who opened up a B&B in Antigua, and hanging out with Andi & Ellen and Julio & Luisa, who hosted quite a few get-togethers in their beautiful home just outside of town.
Julio use to be a chef and cooked up some amazing plantain flambe
Luisa is an amazing hostess and quite the avid gardener
Chilling at Julio & Luisa's
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27 Aug 2013
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Registered Users
Veteran HUBBer
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Join Date: Jul 2007
Location: No Fixed Address (formerly Toronto)
Posts: 1,847
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Updated from Jun 30 2013: Vacation-time!
Living on the road for an extended period brings up a unique set of issues, mainly around the issue of residency and citizenship. By now we've figured out the monthly duties like paying credit card bills, but annual chores like filing taxes and renewing licenses and passports present new challenges as we've got to figure out how to do all this while being out of Canada.
Maya and I made a friend outside the Canadian Embassy
Neda's passport was due to expire, so when we picked up Andi's bike In Guatemala City, we also paid a visit to the Canadian Embassy to renew her documents. During our time in Antigua, we would regularly travel back and forth on the scenic and twisty road to the capital city. And all of this before 2PM, as we try to complete all our errands before the daily afternoon tropical rain showers.
Well traveled (and divided) road between Antigua and Guatemala City! W00T!
We've been feeling burnt out from our travels for quite some time now. The month-long Internet-isolation in Cuba exacerbated our weariness and half-way through our stay in Antigua, we decided to take a short vacation from our travels to visit family and friends back in Toronto. Our spur-of-the-moment decision complicates things a bit - Neda's passport is in transit somewhere between Ottawa and Guatemala, so we've got to wait for it to be processed before we can empty our Air Miles piggybank for the flight back.
To add to it, our month-long rental came to a close and we are once again semi-nomadic.
Breakfast at our temporary B&B accommodations
Guatemala belongs to the CA4 (Central America-4) Border Control Agreement, a recent act which allows free travel for visitors between Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras and Costa Rica on the same Tourist Permit without having to apply or renew at each border. This added a bit of a complication because we wanted to visit Toronto right near the expiry period of our current permit. Which meant we had to renew our CA4 permit *AND* our vehicle permit before we left Guatemala. Otherwise our expired permit prohibited us from entering the CA-4 zone for 90 days.
However Neda's passport still had not arrived from Ottawa...
Every step required time - 21 days for the passport, 4 days for the tourist permit renewal, and a separate trip for the vehicle permit. And we had already booked our plane tickets! Uh oh. Because of our lack of planning, if everything went according to the official timeline, we would not get our tourist and vehicle permits renewed until after our flight departure date, which meant delaying our plane ticket ($$$), or we could bypass the the 4-day Tourist Permit processing by riding to the Guatemala/Mexico border, getting a Mexican TVIP again (more $$$), spending a night at the border, canceling the TVIP and then re-entering Guatemala.
My head hurt thinking about the logistics of that one. So in the meantime, we went for a ride with Julio, Luisa and Andi. No passport or tourist permits required for this!
Andi and Maya on the left, Julio and Luisa on the right
Group ride through some of the small towns around Antigua
Morning fog hugging the hills, lush scenery all around us
The early morning weather felt a bit cold and iffy, but we decided to chance it and braved the damp roads and ominous clouds overhead. We were still without riding boots, which made me a bit nervous! Julio took us through some very scenic routes through the hills surrounding Antigua, capped off with an brunch with a great view of the volcanoes and rolling hills around the area. We scurried back home to escape the looming afternoon rains.
Brunch and a view
Trying to beat the rain home
Twisty mountain roads on the way back
Things fell into place for us in the end. Ottawa sent Neda's passport back earlier and we had plenty of time to make another trip to GC to extend our tourist visas and vehicle permits. We were allowed in the CA-4 zone till November! Wow! When we asked Julio for some storage facilities in the area, he graciously offered his own garage for the time we were away. We are constantly blown away by the kindness of people we are meeting along the way.
Julio and Luisa took us out for our farewell dinner in Antigua. So nice!
And we're off on summer vacation!
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16 Oct 2013
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Contributing Member
HUBB regular
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Join Date: Mar 2013
Posts: 34
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Quote:
Originally Posted by lightcycle
Updated from Jun 14 2013: Guatemalan Socialites
First things first: We're celebrating ONE YEAR ON THE ROAD!!!
Nothing says Party-Time like coconut cream cake. Mmmm...!
I think the cliched thing to say is that "It's hard to believe we've been traveling for a whole year", but it's not that hard to believe at all. We've seen and experienced so many different things in the last 12 months that it's quite the opposite - it's hard to imagine that it all fit in a year! Especially compared to our lives before, where larger-than-life adventures had to be shoehorned into 2-3 week boxes between the crates of sedentary working existence.
Marking the passage of time while outrunning the changing seasons also contributed to this very concrete feeling of time being a rushing wave that we were constantly trying to ride on top of or ahead of. I imagine if we were just traveling through somewhere tropical, our temporal senses may have been more subdued.
Ride all day, drink all night
Central America is a funnel. While travelers roam across the north or south continents, they may occasionally bump into each other at nexuses like motorcycle meets. But when the land narrows like an hourglass to the thinnest point in Panama, right in the centre, these traveling grains of sand start bumping into each other as they line up single file to hoist their bikes onto sailboats or pack them into cargo containers to fly between one side of the hourglass to the other.
We've been keeping in contact with other travelers online and while we were in Antigua, we met up again with Andi and Ellen, the Two Moto Kiwis from New Zealand. We originally met at the Horizons Unlimited meeting in California last October. We also spent the evening with Phil and Jayne, from The Ultimate Ride, the brother and sister motorcycle duo whose goal is to play Ultimate Frisbee everywhere they travel. We ran into them briefly last December in La Paz, Mexico at the ferry docks crossing to the mainland. Also with us that evening was Julio, AKA GauteRider, an Austrian ex-pat who now lives just outside of Antigua and plays host to pretty much all the motorcycle traveling grains of sand that trickle by his front yard.
Having dinner with Andi, Ellen, Phil and Jayne was a riot of a time, comparing stories of our adventures. We all started about the same time last year, taking very similar treks from north to south and while other riders race towards the Antarctic for December 2013, we joked that our three teams were in a much different competition against each other: To see who could ride the slowest down to South America! Poor Andi and Ellen have been besieged with breakdowns and injuries and Andi was actually laid up in Antigua mending a broken rib. As for Phil and Jayne, they meander and dawdle worse than we do! All of them accused us of cheating because we had actually made it to South America, but then took a detour through the Caribbean to end up back in CA again! I guess you don't technically lead a slow race if you lap someone...!
Ellen and Andi on the right teaching a local restaurant owner how to make sushi
Ellen's sushi is famous amongst motorcycle travelers, she makes it everywhere they stop for hosts and friends
While Phil and Jayne didn't stay too long in Antigua, Andi and Ellen are spending a month here so we hung out quite a bit, getting to know them. They are a very friendly and genuine couple, and it was really nice to be able to celebrate and commiserate with folks going through the exact same things we were going through.
Two Moto Canucks!
Other than trying to reach certain destinations, we've been without a true quest our entire trip. But Andi gave one to us. Fetch his motorcycle from Guatemala City, where he left it after his crash last month. He couldn't ride it back himself because of his broken ribs. GC is only 45 minutes away, and we needed to get Neda's bike serviced anyway, so with a little help from Julio, we managed to do all this in a single trip.
Andi and Ellen have got a beautiful KTM 950SE that they've nicknamed Maya. I make fun of KTMs all the time, but I used to have a KTM dirtbike and Neda and I spent many weekends on the trails around Ontario, roosting each other and crashing into trees. Thankfully the road between GC and Guatemala is very twisty and I got a chance to test out the 950SE. It's comparable to the F800GS, similar weight and power but the SE sounds a heck of a lot nicer and felt more flickable than the Beemer. It's very much a hooligan bike, I liked it a lot!
Que es el problema, Maya? No se...
I know from personal experience that KTMs are very finicky and maintenance-intensive. So it wasn't too much of a surprise when riding back from GC, Maya's rear brake seized, forcing us to pull over in heavy traffic. We couldn't pull over safely for quite a distance and when we finally stopped, the rear pads were smoking more than Neda did in Cuba.
I txted Andi to ask him if this was normal. There was a bit of confusion over the phone. Apparently, New Zealand English and Canadian English are not the same, so I pulled out my Google Translate and sent him a Canuck-to-Kiwi translation:
To my surprise, Andi understood that perfectly!
Wheeling in Maya into Andi and Ellen's hostel
We had Andi, Ellen, Julio and his wife Luisa over for dinner where Neda cooked up some yummy Croatian dishes.
Something happens when you stay a while in one place: you start growing roots. Our social calendar was getting booked up with people that we met, dinner with a Japanese couple, Miwa and Kohei, who opened up a B&B in Antigua, and hanging out with Andi & Ellen and Julio & Luisa, who hosted quite a few get-togethers in their beautiful home just outside of town.
Julio use to be a chef and cooked up some amazing plantain flambe
Luisa is an amazing hostess and quite the avid gardener
Chilling at Julio & Luisa's
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Julio & Luisa stayed with us in Lethbridge, Alberta on their trip north to Alaska. Great people. It really is a small world.
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Check the RAW segments; Grant, your HU host is on every month!
Episodes below to listen to while you, err, pretend to do something or other...
2020 Edition of Chris Scott's Adventure Motorcycling Handbook.
"Ultimate global guide for red-blooded bikers planning overseas exploration. Covers choice & preparation of best bike, shipping overseas, baggage design, riding techniques, travel health, visas, documentation, safety and useful addresses." Recommended. (Grant)

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Ripcord Rescue Travel Insurance™ combines into a single integrated program the best evacuation and rescue with the premier travel insurance coverages designed for adventurers and travel is covered on motorcycles of all sizes.
(ONLY US RESIDENTS and currently has a limit of 60 days.)
Ripcord Evacuation Insurance is available for ALL nationalities.
What others say about HU...
"This site is the BIBLE for international bike travelers." Greg, Australia
"Thank you! The web site, The travels, The insight, The inspiration, Everything, just thanks." Colin, UK
"My friend and I are planning a trip from Singapore to England... We found (the HU) site invaluable as an aid to planning and have based a lot of our purchases (bikes, riding gear, etc.) on what we have learned from this site." Phil, Australia
"I for one always had an adventurous spirit, but you and Susan lit the fire for my trip and I'll be forever grateful for what you two do to inspire others to just do it." Brent, USA
"Your website is a mecca of valuable information and the (video) series is informative, entertaining, and inspiring!" Jennifer, Canada
"Your worldwide organisation and events are the Go To places to for all serious touring and aspiring touring bikers." Trevor, South Africa
"This is the answer to all my questions." Haydn, Australia
"Keep going the excellent work you are doing for Horizons Unlimited - I love it!" Thomas, Germany
Lots more comments here!

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