Newonda Rife

Patience leads to virtue they say, or in this case, our car! After a lounging weekend of watching 3 or 4 world cup games, and exploring the underbelly of Guayaquil to find the cheapest food possible, we returned to the hectic shipping ports of Guayaquil, Ecuador. Having a pretty solid idea of what was to pan out for the day, we used our taxi driver Marlo again, to chauffeur us around, from port to port and weasel our way into people´s lunches to get our paper work signed, copied, and handed over to the right people. Our mission to get our car would require all the copies we had, and in addition, getting some of them stamped by the head Aduana office at the principle port of Marítimo. Then and only then, could we utilize ... read more

For those of you attempting to cross the Earth´s greatest short cut by means of the World´s longest highway, you must first unfortunately wait until it is completed. The Darien gap spanning more than 250kms, may be passable by some means of transportation, but none of which we had at hand. Aside from that, we had also been deterred from this path by several ominous stories of FARC gorilla awaiting passing tourists. Abandoning our roadway campaign we searched for a shipping company that would assist us in our long journey to La Patagonia de Argentina. Hamburg Süd shipping was the ideal company for us, as its prices were the lowest and they had a ship that would take our car down to Guayaquil, Ecuador the soonest. We had the option of going up to Cartagena, ... read more

First off, we would like to thank all of those who have been reading our blogs, and leaving messages for us. If you have not already, you can subscribe to this blog and have automatic updates sent to your inbox when we have updated our blog in anyway. Guatemala: We left off in Antigua, Guatemala with a broken window and little knowledge of how and where to replace it. Deciding to have a change of scenery we headed up to a hostel that rested on the edge a moutain, which over looked the city of Antigua and the active volcanos in the distance. This was a Canadian owned hostel called Earth Lodge. We took this time to relax and prepare ourselves for what was ahead in our journey, starting off by setting up our tent and ... read more

Hey everyone... bare with me, this is the first blog i have ever written and if I do say so myself... i have my work cut out for me. As you can tell it is clearly going to be a blog with very little editing (sorry Bump). Also a word to the wise, i may / carl may write in spanish and any given point through this road trip. So with that said, lets put'r in gear and get this show on the road. count down = -3 dias Bags are packed.. again.. Car is road worthy and humming to make the journey. ... read more