All points south

A couple of people have asked about our plans after Hawaii, so here is a rough guesstimate...

We should be back in Palm Springs from Hawai'i in mid-January to pick up the car and say goodbye to Pris and Bill for a couple of days, then we will head south through Tijuana to Baja California and Cabo San Lucas. Lots of people have given us various places to see and visit on the Baja peninsular and sea of Cortez, so we will probably drive back up and round rather than taking the ferry across the Gulf of California - after all, the purpose is to see the actual country, right?

I'm sure there will be a few inland jaunts but generally I think we will follow the Pacific coast down past Mazatlan and Puerto Vallarta, then at some point head inland to Mexico City and then back to the coast at Acapulco to continue south through Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica and on to Panama City.

We do want to take some spanish classes once we have been in Mexico for a couple of weeks, once we have had a chance to listen to the language CDs a few times and for our ears to become accustomed to the accent, plus Mexico is probably cheaper to stay in than Costa Rica and others, so we will probably spend about 4 months in Mexico on the way down, taking us to around early May 2018.Then we will have 3 months to Panama and back up via Belize on the Atlantic coast. Then we will come back into Mexico to get up to Cancun for another couple of months around July/August. 

We will also try to get across to Cuba for a week or so from Cancun - there are some short, cheap flights and I would like to see Havana before the americans start going there again and ruin it.Thought after the Obama thaw in relations was announced it might be too late, but we'll give it a go now drumpf has put that on hold again. So, if anyone is planning Cuba or the Mexican gulf resorts for their next summer holidays let us know.

It looks impossible to sell a US vehicle in any of the countries we are visiting so we then need to bring the toad warrior back to the US to sell it, maybe around Dallas as its a flight hub and closer than driving it back to California, but we shall see - just need to leave it on consignment as we figure it will be almost worthless by then, if it even survives the other drivers...

We will then aim to fly down to Columbia to start the South American leg, sometime in September 2018 and work our way down the Pacific coast, with definite trips inland to Machu Picchu and LaPaz, and down to Santiago, Chile around christmas 2018. We've pretty much decided to skip trying to get across to the Galapagos as its so expensive, has to be booked so far in advance and we are not that much into small wildlife. Ditto with Patagonia (looks just  like Alaska) and Antarctica (saw glaciers calving in Alaska and penguins in Australia), so we will put the funds towards getting out to Easter Island (Rapa Nui) to see the giant heads for a couple of days - haven't worked out how to do the rest of the south Pacific yet, but very few cruises go to Easter Island so probably easiest to do it flying direct from Santiago.

Then across to the Atlantic coast at Buenos Aires, and up to Rio for carnival in Feb/March 2019. We will then have to work out how we are going to get up to the amazon and if we are going to do the smaller states like Guyana and Surinam. Definitely not going to Venezuela at the moment unless it changes dramatically in the next year....then home for mid-late April 2019 in time for our Mycenae Road tenants to move out and we can do some more maintenance and plan the next adventures.....

Of course if we get to Panama and there is a ferry across the Darian Gap to Columbia (there are no roads) that we can take the car on, then it may all change and we can drive the complete Pan American highway...