How much better has all this been than lounging in comfort at home - Robert Falcon Scott

Two hours & two buses, rather than a day & a half of cycling, brought me back to Panama’s Caribbean coast. I arrived in Por­to­belo in search of a boat to take me down the coast towards Colom­bia. The town was named by Colom­bus, who passed this way on his 4th & final voy­age to […]

Although the Panama Canal was only com­pleted in 1914, its fate was, to all intents & pur­poses, sealed when an expe­di­tion led by Pedrarias Davila suc­cess­fully crossed the isth­mus from the Caribbean Sea in 1519. Once the Pacific Ocean was sighted by a Euro­pean for the first time, the set­tle­ment that the Span­ish built there […]

Another cou­ple of cyclists, Rus­sell & Lorely, were in town. We’d agreed to meet up that evening, as they were fly­ing to Carta­gena, Colom­bia, the next day to con­tinue their trip south towards Argentina. Over pizza & a few beers, they told me that they hadn’t fixed Ushuaia, the world’s south­ern­most town, as their final […]

I woke up to a front wheel punc­ture. An extra half-an-hour fix­ing it meant the sun was already high in the sky when I left. It was an easy, quiet 20km through cat­tle coun­try to the cross­roads of the Panam High­way. This was equally as quiet. For a while, I won­dered if I was on […]

Another beau­ti­ful stretch of road took me out of Almi­rante towards my last big climb­ing of the trip. It was also the most deserted stretch of road I’d seen since Canada. There was noth­ing apart from an iso­lated house at the side of the road, some of which were in prime real estate ter­ri­tory, except […]