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Category: SnailTrails 2009-2011

Into the Jungle, November 2009

Into the Jungle, November 2009

As I’m writing this, we sit under a palapa (roof made of palm tree leaves) to protect the computers from the tropical downpour in the jungle surrounding the Mayan ruins of Palenque in Chiapas. The howler monkeys seem to have taken refuge somewhere as well, we can’t hear their Jurassic Park – style utterings any more. Typically for the Snailtrails team, we didn’t take the straight route from Oaxaca, where we spend a week-end witnessing the “Dia de los Muertos”…

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Dia de los Muertos, Oaxaca, November 2009

Dia de los Muertos, Oaxaca, November 2009

The days when the dead return… We spend the weekend of November 1 and 2 in the lovely city of Oaxaca (Oaxaca) where we take part in the celebration of the most important and at the same time most macabre ‘fiesta’ in Mexico: the ‘Days of the Death’ (Dias de los Muertos)… According to an old Indian legend the death is not the end of human life – but transfers the spirit to a parallel world. From there the deceased…

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Mexico City & Teotihuacan, October 2009

Mexico City & Teotihuacan, October 2009

Mexico keeps surprising us, and its capital was no exception. It was not without a certain amount of apprehension that we took a bus into one of the largest cities in the world, having been warned of traffic, crime, pollution and influenza… Mexico city probably has all of these, air pollution being the most visible.  Despite these characteristics, which are shared by many large metropolitan areas, Mexico is a very livable and diverse city with many decentralized neighborhoods, residential areas,…

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From copper to silver (Oct. 2009)

From copper to silver (Oct. 2009)

As our faithful readers know by now, this trip exposes the traveler to contrasts of many types. After many weeks in deserts and on Pacific beaches, we conquered the mountainous plateaus of the central Sierra (see our last post from the Copper Canyon) on our way to the colonial cities surrounding Mexico City. Our craving for “culture” was entirely satisfied by extensive strolls through the likes of Zacatecas, Guanajuato, Dolores Hidalgo, San Miguel de Allende, Querétaro, Morelia, with their elaborate…

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Barrancas del Cobre (Sept. 2009)

Barrancas del Cobre (Sept. 2009)

Our friends in the Luxembourg Land-Rover Club would be proud of us: after convincing us to make the trip in a Land-Rover and taking us to a few off-road training outings in and around Luxembourg, we felt ready for what was waiting for us in the Barranca del Cobre, the Copper Canyon National Park in Nort-West central Mexico. Usually, people take a posh tourist train from Los Mochis (Sinaloa province) to Creel (Chihuahua province): a feat of railroad engineering, it makes…

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Hola Mexico!! Sept. 2009

Hola Mexico!! Sept. 2009

This is our first post from “South of the border”, as the Americans like to put it. Despite all the reading about Mexico and all the discussions with fellow travelers and Mexican expatriates alike, there’s nothing quite like the actual thing: Tijuana immediately sucks you into a very different world, caracterised by chaos, unfamiliar sounds, smells and sights. General disorientation ensues, bienvenidos a Mexico!! After the initial shock, the Baja manages to soothe you quite quickly with its fine but…

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Archie ‘on the rocks’, August 2009

Archie ‘on the rocks’, August 2009

Archie ‘on the rocks’ Dark clouds signalize the approach of a thunderstorm in ‘Yellowstone’ which makes it easier for us to leave this magnificent park. Taking the north entrance automatically leads us into Montana and the names says it all: mountain ranges as far as we can see indicate that we have arrived in the ‘Rocky Mountains’. The lively town ‘Bozeman’ is almost an oasis amidst the impressive but sparsely populated scenery and we take advantage of it by eating…

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Into the Wild Wild West, July 2009

Into the Wild Wild West, July 2009

We are leaving wonderful Chicago and continue our way westwards. The 6-lane highway is getting narrower by the hour and even before we reach Iowa we are the only car on the road, surrounded by corn- and soybean fields. On narrow country roads, which are much more interesting than boring interstate highways, we proceed very slowly – but that is exactly the idea, isn’t it!? We cross the Mississippi river in a slightly deserted town by the name of Dubuque…

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New York to Chicago, July 2009

New York to Chicago, July 2009

There are a couple of posts missing in my archives, will insert them before this one as soon as I find them. Slowly but surely we move closer to New York City, and although the highway consists now of 6 lanes in every direction we get stuck in a traffic jam in the pouring rain. Everyone wants to drive into The City tonight which leads to a total traffic chaos. We thus decide to circumvent Manhattan on our way to…

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Halifax, 3 June 2009

Halifax, 3 June 2009

We are ready – may the adventure begin! After successfully putting the first 5000 kilometers behind us, we’re happily relaxing outside our little wood cabin with a few cans of  ‘Moose head’ beer. No surprise, the moose is a popular animal here as we have finally arrived in Canada, more precisely in Halifax, Nova Scotia. The flight from Frankfurt to Halifax was uneventful – probably the best one can say these days about a transatlantic flight. Apart from a non-stop crying…

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