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.
Read moreHome, Through the Latin Looking Glass
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.
Read moreThe Rattle of Saints and Miracles
“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.”
Read moreNorthward: Chile’s Tierra del Fuego
Mirador de los Condores, Parque Nacional Torres del Paine. Photo by Nathan Sharp.
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.
Read moreUshuaia: The End of the World or The End of the Road?
A street mural of the Selk’nam. Photo by Nathan Sharp.
While our bodies felt solid and were sensate to the warm, cheerful ambiance of the restaurant, our spirits seethed, frothed, pounded against the cracks of our beings. If we had somehow been made less substantial, we could be everywhere at once. We could roam without end. It was as if all the anguished whys and whats of childhood were close at hand; we guarded against the kinds of tears that adults learn not to shed. Why do I have to go to bed? Why can’t I live forever? It was hard not to look at each other in the eye, for we knew what we’d see there. I don’t want to go home.
Read morePatagonia, Argentina
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!
Read moreArgentina: one scoop or two?
Photo by Nathan Sharp.
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.
Read morePaso San Francisco: From Chile to Argentina
Photo by Nathan Sharp
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.
Read morePilgrims in the Desert: Atacama, Chile
Mist, color, and sea. Outside of Chañar, Chile. By Diana Juárez.
In all the llama skulls and seal scapulae, I've witnessed Nature allowed to take her full course, unabashed and without remorse. Sometimes—copper contamination aside—bones uncared for and un-grieved for are the closest one can get to beholding the pure wild, a state of being in which nothing can be considered lost and nothing can go awry. Everything that is goes it’s merry, frightening, harsh, nurturing, grotesque, and awesome way. And in these moments, it’s my own wonder, too, that I behold. Not the absence of an answer, not a faltering tongue in the face of the indescribable, but an invitation to be still, to receive, and to be filled. Nothing I behold in wonder gets left behind. And so, this is the relic—life, unrepentant life; my own, glowing back at me from the blue, porous bones. I curl my fingers around it.
Read moreEl Salar de Uyuni: Or, How I Became Our Lady of Salt
Photo by Nathan Sharp
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.
Read moreMy Nearly-almost, Big, Fat, Bolivian Wedding
Stop and Shred
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.
Read moreBolivia and the Lagunas Road: Beyond the edge of the screen there was a road we should have been on
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.
Read moreHighlights from Peru to Northern Argentina
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!
Read morePeru: On the Challenges of Travel and the Idea of Returning Home
Ancash region, Peru
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.
Read moreA race at 5000 meters in the Andes
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.
Read moreThe Garden of Earthly Delights
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.
Read moreHighway Zen and the Tattooed Lady of Cao
The beach at Pacasmayo, Peru
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.
Read moreViva South America!
Diana near Chimborazo at dusk
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.
Read moreWe launched a store!
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.
Read moreClose to the Sun and Always Wet: Snapshots From Bogotá, Colombia's Biggest, Baddest City
Calle 42, La Soledad, Bogotá
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.
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