The worst has happened. Well, getting into an accident and injuring ourselves or rendering the bike permanently useless would be the worst. So then I guess I should say the second to worst has happened: our rear shock has broken and now we are stuck in Ecuador without a motorcycle until it can be fixed.

But let me start at the beginning.

After our brief venture into the Amazon, we took a route through southern Ecuador to get to Peru, a route that would pass through some recommended towns. And the first of which was Baños.

After staying with our friends Court and Sylvain at Ecuador Freedom Bike Rental to get our bike fixed (now it has new fork seals / bushings and is as good as new), we wanted to take a quick detour into the Amazon before leaving Ecuador and going to Peru.

The thing about the Amazon rainforest is that rivers have always been its main artery for transportation, and they are a much better way to get around than roads which can destroy the forest itself. This makes getting to the Amazon on a motorcycle a bit of a challenge, but there is a town in Ecuador that is the last outpost for land-bound vehicles and the beginning of the true Amazon, a place called El Coca. Since we knew we wanted to go there, we plugged El Coca into our GPS, and headed out of Quito.

Tim and I often find ourselves alone on the road with only each other to talk to, but for the past two weeks we have had the pleasure of traveling with fellow motorcyclists. After leaving Quito, Ecuador, we have now spent half a month coming full circle, going in a great loop around the coast and mountains of Ecuador. And we were able to experience it all while being in the company of other travelers, which is a real treat for us.

We left the Horizon's Unlimited Event in tow of two other motorcycle couples, all of them coincidentally from Melbourne, Australia, and also riding two-up on their bikes like us. It was somehow fateful and perfect that we had all met up at in the same country and at the same time.

We left Ibarra, Ecuador and headed toward the country's capital of Quito, knowing that we would have a few days to explore the city before our Horizon's Unlimited meeting was to take place. This HU event would be a group of fellow motorcycle travelers meeting up just outside of Quito for three days, and we had been preparing two speeches to give at the conference (we were extremely excited). What we didn't know was that Tim was harboring some nasty tropical disease within him, and this sickness was going to change everything.

This blog post is something new that we're trying out as we start combining our updates with shorter posts every week or so. We will also be doing our much larger country profile blogs with videos, and those will be named after the country without a date in the title. So I hope you enjoy the first of our mini-blog/updates.

Yesterday we crossed from Colombia into Ecuador. It was hard saying goodbye to Colombia, a country that we have grown to love over the past two and a half months. The colorful villages, the green mountains, the welcoming smiles, the typical platter of rice, fried plantains, and meat that we've come to enjoy called bandeja, oh and the free motorcycle lane to skip right through tolls... we will certainly miss Colombia.

But we must head on, especially since we will be presenting at the Horizon's Unlimited event in Quito, Ecuador on July 20-22, which we are very excited for. 

Since Panama was our last stop in Central America before heading into South America, and because Tim and I were so excited for the vast stretches of pure nature that South America had to offer, we may have not experienced Panama for what it’s worth. We rode through pretty quickly on the Pan-American highway and spent much of our time doing customs paperwork to get the bike into Colombia. In many ways, we were mentally checked out of Central America and already thinking about what was to come, and so for those reasons we did not take our time to appreciate Panama as we could have.

​Before visiting Costa Rica, I had high very hopes for it. This was due to the fact that a number of my college friends went there and came back raving about it, several of whom had life-changing experiences. Their stories of colorful reefs and thick rainforests, their pictures of sloths and parrots, and those smiles that lit up their faces every time they thought back on it, it all made me think that Costa Rica was a safe, clean paradise of ecological wonders in the Central American region.
 
But that was a while ago, and I also heard more recently from fellow travelers that Costa Rica has become insanely touristy, extrmely expensive, and so overrun with wealthy Americans, that some people I'd talked to actually left the country early.
 
So when Tim and I rode our motorcycle zig-zagging across Costa Rica, I wasn’t quite sure if I was going to fall in love with it, or hate it.

There are many things we have learned along the way and I would like to share what are my top ten travel tips.

​The border between Nicaragua and Honduras took a little longer than average, along with a dose of some of the hottest temperatures we had come by so far. All we needed was just a little patience, and I was continuously thankful that Marisa is fluent in Spanish.
 
When we cross borders throughout the Americas, the form always asks for my nationality. I have to ask myself: “What am I?" We are in the Americas, so American doesn't really specify where I am from. I think it is kind of ignorant to hijack an entire continent and say, “You know, I'm from the America where we play football with our hands."
 
So, I put down USA... but that's not right either. No one says, “I am England" or “I am South Africa." It is English, South African, Asian, or Irish and so on. I thought about writing down USAish or USAian, because I didn't want to write “A Citizen of the United States of America," but figured that would add to the confusion.
 
#IamUSAian

About ten years ago, I had a friend who said he visited Nicaragua while studying abroad at a university in Costa Rica. He only crossed the border into Nicaragua for a day or two, but when he told me this, I thought he must have either been the bravest, or stupidest, person in the world. Visions of communist jungle guerrillas trafficking cocaine flashed through my mind: men wearing green uniforms and fully equipped with both Kalashnikovs and machetes. I wondered why my friend would go to such a place and I remember thinking, “Good for you, but I wouldn’t go there.”
 
Of course, if I could go back in time and tell myself that not even a decade later I would be traversing this country by motorcycle for over a month, I probably wouldn’t have believed it. And Nicaragua turned out to be nothing like my imagined doomsday exaggerations. It is actually an incredible place full of friendly people, breathtaking views, and the most dangerous thing we encountered while there were its fire-breathing volcanoes.