El Chepe - the train that runs through Mexico's Copper Canyon.

It’s time to reveal my tentative travel itinerary. I say tentative because I never really know what my route will be. Some places, I definitely want to visit; others are potential destinations and still others are only “if I have time.” I generally have a hotel or hostel reserved for the first few nights, but after that I just  go where the wind blows me and figure out travel arrangements as I go.

Sites that are high on my priority list this time around are taking the train through Copper Canyon (Barranca del Cobre) to spend time among the Tarahumara Indians and visiting the Yucatan capital of Merida, both in Mexico, as well as hiking the Inca Trail to Macchu Pichu in Peru, and visiting the Galapagos Islands in Ecuador.

Several of my fellow digital nomads will simultaneously be doing long-term travel in South America and/or Central America and I hope to cross paths with some of them along the way; there’s even talk of a meet-up at Macchu Pichu. Since my plans are fluid, I’m open to any suggestions you may have for places along the way that are worth investigating or should not be missed, or any comments with regard to my schedule (if, for instance, a particular plan to go from one place to another by bus would be too long for a single day’s trip).

• Fly to Mazatlan Mexico (5 nights)
• Ferry across the Sea of Cortez to Baja; stay in La Paz and Todos Santos (6 nights)
• Ferry back across the Sea of Cortez to Los Mochis (1 day, stay overnight)
• Take the Copper Canyon train from Los Mochis to Bahuichivo (4 nights)
• Get back on the train to Divisadero, perched on the 9,000 ft. high rim overlooking Copper Canyon floor. Tarahumara Indians live all through the area. Women and children can be found at the train station fixing gorditas and burritos on steel drum stoves and selling handicrafts at the station and the hotels. Solitude, great hiking and breathtaking views. (2 nights)
• Get back on the train to Creel. Day trips to an Indian reservation containing a rock formation called Valley of the Mushrooms, the tiny village of San Ignacio with a 400-year-old mission and Lake Arereco. (2 nights)


Wildlife of Galapagos Islands

• Side trip to Batopilas, an 80 mile drive south of Creel. The area is inhabited by Tarahumara indians living in small cabins and caves in the surrounding mountains. With the Rio Batopilas flowing right through town and steep mountains along both sides of the river, there’s room for just one narrow street, made of cobblestones and lined with old stores and houses. About 1,000 people live here. Highlights include a five mile trip to to the small town and lost mission in Satevo, the ruins of the silver mining operation that dominated the region before the Mexican Revolution and the chance to walk deep into the mountains through old mind shafts nearly 100 years old. (2 nights)
• Possible side trip to Basaseachic Falls within Basaseachic National Park, which covers a spectacular part of Candameña Canyon. The Basaeachic Cascade is the second highest waterfall in Mexico and the 28th in the world. (3 nights)
• From Creel, make my way by bus to central Mexico via either Chihuahua, Hidalgo de Parral, or Cuauhtemoc to Zacatecas. (2 nights)
• Aguascalientes (maybe), Ganajuato (definitely), San Miguel de Allende (definitey), Queretaro (definitely). About 2 weeks in central Mexico.
• Bus to Mexico City, side bus trip to ruins at Teotihuacan; check to sees if it too late to see Monarch butterflies (3 nights)
• Bus to Cordoba (overnight)
• Bus to Xalapa/Veracruz, (2 nights)
• Bus to Coatzacoalcos (overnight)
• Bus to Palenque & ruins (thru Villahermosa) (2 nights)
• Bus through Campeche, then divert inland to Uxmal Ruins 2 (nights)
• Bus to Merida, tour Chichen Itza ruins and Il Kil Cenote. A little further east at Valladolid, see Cenote Zaci, Dzitnup Cenote, & Ek Balam. (4-5 nights)
• Bus to Cancun, tour ruins & see the local side of the island, 3-4 nights at CasaMagna Cancun Marriott Resort. Possible side trip to Isla Mujeres. (4-5 nights)
• Bus to Playa del Carmen; side trips to Tulum ruins & Cozumel. (3-4 nights)
• Bus into Costa Maya, visit Sian Ka’an Biosphere Reserve, Majahual, Quintana Roo, Bacalar & Lake of 7 Colors. (5-6 nights)
• Bus to Chetumal, overnight
• Hire taxi to cross over into Belize to Corozal, bus to Belize City. Visit Altun Ha ruins, cave tubing, Cockcomb Basin Wildlife Sanctuary (world’s first jaguar preserve). (4 nights)
• Ka’ana Resort & Spa, western Belize. (4 nights)
• Overland to Flores, Guatemala to see Tikal Ruins (2 nights)
• Fly to Guatemala City, onward to Antigua (4 nights)
• Fly Guatemala City to Cusco, Peru; stay 5 nights to acclimate to altitude before hiking Inca trail to Macchu Pichu for 4 days
• Train to Nazca, Peru, air tour to see the Nazca lines. (2 nights)
• Bus to Paracas, Peru, see natural bay known as Galapagos of Peru. (3 nights)
• Bus to Lima. (4-5 nights)
• Fly from Lima to Tumbes, Peru. (4 nights)
• Bus from Tumbes, Peru to Loja, Ecuador. Take pick-up truck taxi right from the bus terminal or off of the main square to Izhcayluma Eco-Hotel in Vilcabamba. (3 nights)
• Fly from Loja to Guayaquil, Ecuador (2 nights)
• Fly to Galapagos Islands. (2 nights)
• Return to Guayaquil and fly home

Photo credits: Copper Canyon: einalem; Macchu Pichu: Brad.Stevens

Travel Tips

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I let my shadow lug around my backpack while I relaxed on the beach in Byron Bay, Australia

Some people have itchy fingers. I have itchy travel feet. Since returning from my six-month round-the-world (RTW) trip in 2007 I’ve continued to travel in the U.S., staying on the road more than 50% of the time. I’ve been longing to strap on my backpack and head back out for another round of international travel but the timing just didn’t seem right. Last year was especially difficult; I finally had to tell the bank to take back a property I still owned in North Carolina, because I could no longer pay the mortgage. It was a gut-wrenching decision, fraught with irrational fears. After a lifetime of building up sterling credit, how would I live once it was ruined? Could I ever obtain another credit card or qualify for a car loan? Would bad credit keep a potential employer from hiring me? What if I settled down in one place – would I be able to rent an apartment? Even worse, I felt like a bad person, a lowlife, a loser. I had never even paid a bill late, much less default on a loan contract.

Things got worse. The bank decided to sue me rather than foreclose on the property. I won’t bore you with the gory details, other than to say my attorney is still battling this in court, but the whole experience has elicited yet another shift in my ever-evolving view of life. It all began in December of 2006, when I walked away from a successful career. For the previous ten years I had been selling real estate. I had no passion for the job, quite the opposite: even though I was a very talented Broker, I hated going to work every day. Deep down I knew I was selling my soul, yet I plodded along because it paid the bills and gave me the resources to travel a month each year. I never considered that it took every last day of those month-long vacations to regain my sanity, and that with each ensuing year my stress level ratcheted up and my ability to recover declined.

A combination of stress and illness finally brought me to my knees. For weeks I crawled between bedroom and bathroom, too exhausted to go to work and too disheartened to care. Bedridden and seriously ill, I was granted the one luxury that had eluded me over the past ten years: time to think. I realized that I could die and all the money in the world would do me no good. In that instant of crystal clarity, I knew my life had to change. I had to stop worrying about what my family would think, about letting my co-workers down, or about what society expected of me, and instead be true to myself. I decided to pursue my true passions of travel, writing and photography, regardless of the financial consequences. A year later, despite being unable to sell my house, I hit the road for my RTW trip.

By the time my trip ended, I knew that returning to corporate life was not an option. I resolved to pursue a career as a travel writer and photographer, despite being told (endlessly and insistently) that it would be an impossible undertaking at age 55, with no portfolio and not a single published clip to show. Those naysayers didn’t know me very well. Looking back, they probably did me a huge favor, since my reaction to being told I can’t so something is to do it, just to prove I can. Not only have I built up a substantial portfolio of published travel articles over the past three years, Hole In The Donut is now one of the top travel blogs in the world.

Challenges, however, persist. Because travel writing pays very little, I’ve had to make significant changes in my lifestyle. My house finally sold a couple of years ago – at a loss – and I have slowly sold or given away most of my material possessions. Letting go of my “stuff” has been a freeing experience; I now realize how much it was weighing me down. Thus unencumbered, it strikes me that there seems to be an inverse relationship between money and happiness. I have often noted that people in third-world countries, who have little in the way of wealth, seem to be blessed with an abundance of happiness. And so it is for me. I wake up each morning eager to write, to meet new people, and to learn about new cultures; for the first time in my life I am truly happy.

Occasional cryptic comments about how I am wasting my talent, or about how much money I could be making if I would just return to corporate life make it clear that not everyone approves of my choices, and it is sometimes hard to stay strong in the face of these not-so-veiled criticisms. But when I waver, I need only recall how miserable I used to be and how joyful I am today. And so, in ten days I will take another leap of faith and embark upon a four-month trip through Mexico, Central and South America. Budget being a major consideration, much of the time I will be staying at hostels or Couchsurfing and writing extensively about this mode of travel, which is becoming quite popular with the baby boom generation (after all, we invented backpacking). However it won’t all be budget; on occasion I will be hosted by upscale luxury resorts and I will be reporting on my experiences at these properties as well. I hope you will join me as I blog and tweet my way through five intriguing countries. Where, specifically, am I going? Check back on Tuesday, when I’ll be divulging the specific destinations I plan to visit.

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Often, my strong urge to travel has to do with seeing something before it disappears. For years I felt that way about going to Africa; I wanted to go on safari before it was too late to see the animals in the wild. I was painfully aware that in many areas of Africa where ecological consciousness is non-existent, poaching and loss of habitat have resulted in animals being added to the endangered species list, if not brought to the brink of extinction. Thus I was delighted last year to discover that the animal populations in Africa seemed to be thriving, at least in the areas where I visited.

I feel the same way about the shrinking rain forests around the globe. Researchers now tell us with certainty that climate zones will shift and some climates will disappear completely by 2100. Tropical highlands and polar regions may be the first to disappear, and large swaths of the tropics and subtropics will reach even hotter temperatures. I sometimes feel desperate to visit the great rain forests of the world before they are gone and so I was most interested to read about a project of the Boyce Thompson Institute for Plant Sciences at Cornell University that is attempting to restore the tropical rain forest ecosystems in Costa Rica.

Incredible biodiversity exists just ten short years after restoring a tropical rainforest on a parcel of played-out pasture land in Costa Rica (image courtesy of Cornell University)

In 1993, researchers began replanting a parcel of worn-out pasture land. For 50 years the soil had been compacted under the hooves of grazing animals and its nutrients washed away. They trimmed away the pasture grasses so that the trees could take hold and planted mixtures of fast-growing local tree species, collecting seeds from native trees in the community before hungry monkeys beat them to it. After just five years, averaging about six feet of growth per year, those first trees formed a canopy of leaves that shaded out the grasses underneath. Ten years after the initial plantings, the species of plants growing in the shade numbered more than 100 in each plot and many of the new arrivals were also found in nearby remnants of the original forests.

The benefits of the project are more wide-ranging than just restoring a beautiful tropical rain forest. The process also helps to control erosion and improve the quality of life of the local people. Researchers point out that drinking water becomes more readily available when forests thrive because tree roots act as a sort of sponge and prevent water from running off hills and draining away.

Fully rescuing a rain forest may take hundreds of years, but the mere hope that we may be able to accomplish this restoration gives me tremendous hope that it is not too late to save our fragile and beautiful Mother Earth. Perhaps I have a few more years to visit the rain forests of the world, after all.

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