The Route

I'm not going to bore you with the exact details of our planned route, for the very good reason that we haven't planned our exact route. What I can tell you is that we are starting at the top of Mexico, crossing from Yuma, Arizona into a small town called Los Algodones, and from there we are heading south, in keeping with the journal title, which I have already thoroughly explained, until we reach Santos in Brazil. The reason for this destination is that there is a cargo ship regularly sailing across the Atlantic from Santos to Dakar in Senegal, ultimately offering us a route back to Europe without the use of any planes. I don't use planes, you see, they go too fast and too far above the earth for my taste. In fact I only ever go anywhere using either bicycles or boats, one of my funny little quirks, so don't expect to be seeing any cars or trains or buses in this journal. Apart from in the background of some of the photos, they'll probably be there. Anyway, here is a pretty rough guess as to what our route will be:

I imagine for many of you your eyes will have been drawn to that big squiggle in the middle as our red line makes an unexpected deviation through the Caribbean. Exciting, isn't it? There is a good reason for it. I once wrote down a list of seven things that I wanted to achieve on my travels. For the full list you'll have to buy my books (I did mention my books didn't I? I did, yes, good), but for the purposes of this journal really the only crucial one to know about is my goal to try and cycle in 100 different countries. As things stand, I've only managed 63 prior to crossing into Mexico, and getting to the magic 100 is a tough task on our planned route. After much discussion between Dea and myself we eventually decided that the best solution to the problem would be for me to go alone through the Caribbean, island hopping my way to as many United Nations member states as I can, while Dea, who was never really into the idea of Caribbean island hopping herself, takes some time out in Colombia. Depending on how well that goes, I may or may not decide to dash out to Guyana and Suriname as well. So I'll be going all over, taking in just about all that Latin America and the Caribbean has to offer.

In order to kick-start the Caribbean detour I've already booked my passage on a cargo ship from Colombia to Dominican Republic for the middle of May. That gives us a pretty leisurely six months to saunter on down through Mexico and Central America, which is nice. We are planning on starting with Baja California, hope to get to Mexico City in time for spending New Years with some of Dea's friends from home, and her parents are planning to fly out and visit us somewhere in February, but other than that our route and schedule remains uncertain and flexible, like an indecisive gymnast. Which is just exactly what we like.

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