Of course, I am aware that I am not invincible, despite the armor that I religiously wear—garments emblazoned with strange words like “Kevlar”, “Goretex”, “CE Level 1 (or 2)”, and “DOT Certified”. Like charms or tinkling milagritos, they enveil me in a story of protection. This helps me, because I am not brave.

And so it was that we snapped our last selfie along the PanAmerican highway at its official terminus, alongside boats that would be repainted and cajoled into service until their planks would seal out sea water no more. Someday, we would find the film we shot that on last day, when we hopped the watery gap between the deck of the Famiglia Santa and the dock once and for all, and heaved shut its “sliding” red door behind us.

“Our life together continued to be an exercise in the economy of movement. We sipped quietly from separate collapsible silicone cups, a luxury, but dipped our titanium sporks into the same cooking pot. We shared so much. Nearly everything.”

We had traversed Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, and Argentina without seeing a single one, as I had gone without the dark, shaggy anteater; as had Nathan without the python, except in a dream. For the most part, though, we had made our peace with the shadowy places in our imaginations where it seemed they would stay, lumbering, slinking, coiling and uncoiling, just out of sight.

The next day, we beheld the bubblegum blue of the glacier. We felt numinous and expansive in its presence—had we encountered any other blues in nature which could match its intensity? We counted off the resplendent quetzal, the blue morphos butterflies of Central America, and the papagayo feathers we found in Yasuní, the protected territory of Ecuador’s Amazon forest. Yes, there were a few solid contenders. But what a marvelous mental rolodex to carry around!

Ah! Now, look here, said the butcher. You want bife.

It would prove a vitally important term for us. Bife, though a thin and cheap cut, was also ridiculously tender and flavorful. As the butcher handed over my paper-wrapped bundle, his approval of our vagabond dinner plans was obvious—mere parody of the sacred Argentine ritual of parilla though they were. But it seemed to me our official welcome to the country.

We had grown so used to consequences that we no longer questioned choices made on a whim. And the open iOverlander app showed us the tantalizing coordinates of an azure-colored waterfall in the middle of this high elevation desert. The officer nodded, observing us amusedly.

Bueno. Just make sure you sleep on the Chilean side. Chuckling, he clomped back indoors.

The dirt roads had proven very manageable thus far. And we certainly could make it in the light we had left.

Our minds wheeled and sputtered in the blankness, on ground that was neither soil, nor sand, nor snow. The adjectives we had brought with us were not adequate here. Lunar. Martian. Salt of the moon. Salt of Mars. No, they would no longer serve us. For the salar has long glittered underfoot fantastic, yet fathomable creatures—elegantly proportioned vicuñas, fluorescent flamingoes. It has long been mined for minerals commonly used—salt and boron, and now, lithium. And so, somehow, this place was of our world also, of our home.

I was able to inhabit a space I literally had never imagined, and with that, was empowered to ask questions that had never occurred to me to ask. Certainly, it’s important to behave respectfully as you look, but choosing not to look away is equally important. Where one can afford the risk, it’s important to walk the muddy halls you are invited into, to eat the strange food shared with you, and to listen to the stories that people are willing to tell.

I looked ahead, over the handlebars I gripped slightly too tightly, over the analogue instrument panel and the black plastic fairing, over the dusty, unmarked, and unpaved tracks that snaked in a slow wave from the left to right to left to the horizon. There was no road there, per se, though thousands of people undoubtably made this punishing trip every year, each following his intuition or experience to point his Toyota Landcruiser with his six or seven cramped and nauseated passengers down this or that rut.

It has been a while since we put out a video. We have been shooting tons of footage, but in Peru and Bolivia and even Chile the internet was not great and we rarely stopped long enough to spend any time editing. But as we have been stuck in beautiful Mendoza, Argentina getting the bearings and forks and tires sorted out, I had time to put together a little visual update of the roads we have been riding. Enjoy!

The leathery swish-swish of padded, camel-like feet over cobblestones, of the alpacas led through colonial Plazas de Armas, adorned in tasseled harnesses of fluorescent yarn for photo-ops. An elderly man shuffling towards a marketplace, pausing in the street to shake and shush the old, chittering sack of rice he carried, which he has filled instead with indignant and bewildered guinea pigs. The scent of the earth snaking out from the dark mouths of the copper, silver, and gold mines that gape throughout the Cordillera Negra, telling such stories as So Many Millennia of Detritus and The Birth of Minerals. I am so lucky, I would think to myself, for I don’t ever have to embellish. I never have to cast a wide net. How completely these stories have floated down into my gloved hands, the work of them having already been finished.

He outpaced me. At my approach, he did not bark or chase me, as is the practice of his species. He did not nip at my boots as the fanatical dogs do. Instead, he shot off like a rocket on his four legs, quickly outpacing me down the mountain road. He sprinted without tiring until he was a brown and white speck barely visible in the distance. I regretted that I could not give him the competition he so clearly relished. He was a canine alone among sheep and llamas.

As we pitched our tent and lay out our belongings, we spotted the familiar apparatus of Amazonian ayahuasca ceremonies—a Jaguar skin hung on the wall, bundles of dried, raspy palm, a melodica and a drum, a tupperware container full of the dark ayahuasca extract—jumbled among stacks of beer bottles and other recycling, painting supplies, and an assortment of rubber boots for guided treks into the nearby subterranean caverns. For a moment, I had the sinking feeling of having peeked behind the red curtain in the Theater of Healing, of having seen the great and powerful Oz in all his disappointing smallness.

Sometimes movement seems like an end in itself. For the first time in months, I saw a highway stretch out flat before me, the wind lashed my face and tears welled up in my eyes, the needle on the speedo bounced up to 80 mph. We had chosen to cut Westward from Cajamarca, Peru to the coast where the roads are straight and flat, where we could make up some time by bypassing some noodly mountain roads. There will be plenty of mountain roads in the future, why not get a change of scenery. Change itself came as a relief. After several days of hard riding through unpaved mountain roads from Ecuador across into Northern Peru, up steep muddy climbs, through razor-sharp switchbacks, on cliff-edge trails, after dropping my bike three times, and almost running out of gas, the coast sounded like the break that we needed.

It begins again. After nearly six months in Colombia, Diana and I hit the road. It was bittersweet to leave Bogota, a city that we had come to feel was home, but we were excited to start traveling again. We arrived in Bogota feeling a bit battle worn. Horace, our trusty motorcycle, had just broken his flywheel in two and this after he burned a hole in the alternator stator in Guatemala, and, less severely, but still fatiguing, popped a tire in Nicaragua. Mentally, I needed a break. South America was a giant on the horizon, and I was doubting my abilities to face him.

Non-average apparel to fuel your adventurous spirit! I am excited to announce that we launched the Two If By Land store! From the beginning, I wanted to combine my two passions, motorcycling and graphic design, for Two If By Land. And here it is.

The constant juxtaposition of the old and the new here. Nuns in full cream and black habits glide past heavily graffiti’d walls. Hip restaurants, crowding in amongst the ubiquitous fruterias and salones de onces, offer Colombian interpretations of high-low cuisine—waffles, mac n’cheese, and artisanal burgers. At small batch coffee roasters, principled baristas proffer beans ground to order to your olfactory organ before brewing.

Three months after arriving in Colombia, we finally finished editing a short Central America video.

What do you need to know before pointing your tires towards Central America? Last summer, we scoured the internet for basic pertinent information on riding south of the border. We honestly didn’t know a lot about the area beyond the infamous corruption, crime, and poverty. While there are plenty of guides for backpacking travelers, there were a number of questions pertaining specifically to motorcycling for which we struggled to find answers.

From the moment the bike was announced, I was smitten. In its graceful profile I saw an unabashedly romantic motorcycle that embraced the aesthetic simplicity of the golden age of machines that hadn't yet been given minds of their own. It harkened back to the early days of adventure motorcycling, when BMW was just beginning to experiment with setting a big bike loose in the sand dunes of Dakar. Then, the motorcycle was a humble beast and the rider, her master.

Truth be told, women have long been rolling up their sleeping mats and climbing on motorcycles and bicycles and sailboats and airplanes and horses and pogo sticks and adding their voices to an adventure genre that is nevertheless dominated by the voices of men. I've had the honor of sharing coffees and couches and swimming holes and mountain roads choked with dust with many of these women. I live in awe of them, and I think it's fair to observe that they, along with most women, are accustomed to the act of keeping many spinning plates in the air.

Wasn’t this one mistake enough to worry about? And why had I come here if I had already decided that it was hopeless? There’s no way to talk about this without sounding cheesy. But it was true. There was no point in being there⎯⎯in putting a whole sea between myself and my companion⎯⎯if I didn’t manifest the belief, in my thoughts as well as my actions, that I would achieve my goal. 

I am currently slogging through our hours of footage from Central America. I hope to get a video together for your viewing pleasure in the next week or so. But in the meantime, I cut this short teaser of Guatemala’s Volcán de Fuego erupting.