Riding towards Guayaquil to get our flight to the Galapagos saw our first real problem with the AT. Every 3 miles the bike would sigh and roll to a stop. A mystery. OK, so it was over 30 degrees and I know I get weary in hot weather, but we could measure the distance exactly and quite frankly, the old bike should be able to do more than that! With over 100 miles before we reached the airport and the stress levels rising, the bike limped along at under 40mph, with...

We had a great week in Puerto Vallarta, chilling, trying to learn Spanish, scuba diving and not riding much, just as well as James almost got a police ticket for turning left at some traffic lights. He managed to charm them with his cheeky gringo ways and was let off scott free. As our ticket for the Stahlratte sailing ship is on 14th November from Carti, Panama, we're having to scoot through Central America and the rest of Mexico. We got caught up in the madn...

Obviously all came good in the end! The intrepid PieRats decided after much deliberation to ride back up Baja, sampling fish tacos in Guerrero Negro and dodgy quesadillas at Mana Espinosa's in El Rosario, some mega stop off for the Baja 1000, on the way back to the border. Ridiculously, it took only a short while in Tecate (home of the beer) to sort all our documents, no questions asked! We celebrated our non illegal alien status by finding one of the many auto/...

Hearing tales of border madness, we hit Calexico fairly early, and happily found the whole road leading to the border lined with brokers selling auto insurance and money changers. How easy! Sitting in an air con office we get a goodly 3 months for US$114, which is just as well really as there isn't a border! No passport control, no papers, nothing. All most odd. How do we get our TIP and FMT? Even the guard was vague when I asked him, and he waved us through, sa...