An Interview With A Wet Explorer Traveling Reluctantly on Amazon Tributaries.

Interviewer (INT): Well, you have just spent seven days traveling in the Ecuadorian and Peruvian tributaries of the upper Amazon basin. What would you say is your first impression? Wet Explorer Traveling Reluctantly on Amazon Tributaries (WET RAT): It’s really wet. Int: Anything else? WET RAT: Probably too much to describe. There is so much […]

A Quick Update (with some plans for the next couple of weeks)…

I don’t want to take a bunch of time on this one, but, I wanted to post something about what we have been up to, what we are about to be doing, and when I may actually get some new posts in here. To start with, as you may know, we are in Quito, after […]

In Quito! (Exploring And Freezing To Death).

We made it to Quito! We had a ten hour ride up from Ayampe, straight from sea-level to ten thousand feet. It took a couple of days to acclimate to the altitude (we have been at sea level for nearly a decade), but we are feeling better now. The headaches and mild nausea are gone. […]

A Rant About Ayampe

We left Ayampe after two and a half months. I can’t really say that it was terrible, and I can’t really say it was great. It was a strange place. Let me just start by saying that I loved the locals. Every morning I would take a stroll down to the beach to check the […]

A While Back In Boquete

Back in December, in between Surfing in Bocas Del Toro and Exploring the remote Caribbean Coastal town of Calovebora and the Santa Fe National Park, we stopped for five days in Boquete. Oh, yes. This was in Panama… It’s a really heavily touristed town in the Northern Central Highlands of Panama, at an elevation of […]

This Little turtle

This post will come with a bit of a disclaimer: I don’t normally intervene in wildlife-related situations that I come across unless I know there are professional people around that are trained in how to rescue/rehabilitate that particular type of animal. It is too easy to make mistakes, or have a negative effect, if we […]

A Day In The Life… In (and around) Ayampe!

We have been in Ayampe over a month now. Life has settled into a regular rhythm for us here. It’s a pretty chill little place. We have a great little house, plenty of food around (with lots of fresh mango, passionfruit, papaya, and bananas), and it generally only ever rains at night. The days are […]

Surf

I am laying here, still awake, in the nearly-complete darkness of five o’clock AM, listening to the sound of seventeen rhythmless four year-olds playing death metal ballads on the metal roof of our bungalow with rubber mallets. It has rained — jungle rained — all night, and for some insidious reason the architect of this […]

A surf video… From Last Year.

Since I am so good at keeping up with things on this blog, I figured I would post this video from Kwajalein. It was made up of bits of video taken throughout the winter last year, so it may not be the most relevant to our current travels. The upshot of living in a tiny […]

Ayampe!

After a month of hectic travel around Panama, moving every one to seven days, driving for four to eight hours between spots, and then flights to Ecuador (and another rental car and a four-hour drive up the coast), we finally made it to Ayampe. This is the spot we have chosen to settle in for […]