At the recent (September 2016) 10 year reunion of my MBA class in Oxford, I was asked to give a “TED-style” talk about our trip. I’ve turned the slides and the script I used into a PDF document to share it here.
Tag Archives: Van
Living in a Yellow Van: A TED-style talk given to the reunion of my MBA class
Lima: A six day foodie splurge
We wouldn’t exactly describe ourselves as foodies, but we do like our food and enjoy eating out regularly. Learning about and trying the different foods we have, and are yet to, encounter on this trip is an important part of the travel experience for us and we suspect we are choosing to spend more of our budget on dining out than many of the other overlanders we meet on the road. Given that, we arrived in Lima (on Tuesday 16th February 2016), dubbed the food capital of South America and one of the world’s great dining destinations, with high hopes for some gastronomic experiences. But a good meal (or two) every day for six days was more of a splurge than even we had anticipated! Continue reading
Filed under Postcards
Canyon & Carnaval: Adventurous driving in Peru part 2
This blog describes the second of two exciting mountain drives to and fro across the Andes of Southern Peru, taking in two of the deepest canyons in the world, Colca and Cotahuasi. This drive took us from the historic city of Arequipa, through the remote Cotahuasi canyon and over one of our highest passes yet, to join the major road to Ayacucho, arriving just in time for the start of its carnaval on 6th February. Continue reading
Filed under Postcards
Bolivian Highlife: In and out of La Paz
It was perhaps appropriate that our arrival in La Paz, a city of dramatic geography, caught us out with its crazy topology. We arrived on November 21 2015 from the south, having driven for a few days up across the flat “altiplano” (high plain) that sits at around 3,800m, pausing on route to look for the recently disappeared Lake Poopo. We based ourselves on the outskirts of the city, coming and going from trips out to see the beautiful volcano Sajama on one side of the altiplano to the west and, to the east, the steep, lush Yungas mountains.
A dip into Brazil: The glorious Pantanal
Hycinth Macaws asking us to turn the heat down
September & October 2015: They say, if you want to see jungle, go to the jungle, but if you want to see animals in South America, go to the Pantanal. Although South America doesn’t have the chart topping diversity of big animals that some other continents have, the Pantanal displays what it does have in glorious quantity and boy does it make up for it in diversity of bird and insect life.
Continue reading
A year in the van in review
A year ago today, the van was pushed out of it’s shipping container, given a push start by a fork-lift truck and then made it’s first journey on South American soil straight to the nearest VW garage! A year later, these 12 pictures are our highlights of our first year on the road in Latin America, along with some reflections…. Continue reading
Filed under About
The winding road to Santiago – part 2: Southern Chile
Buying blue (and other) potatoes on Chiloe
On our route north to Santiago we a zig-zaged, to and fro across the Andes, between Argentina and Chile. The Argentinian sections are in the accompanying blog here. Our Chilean journey started with the wild Carretera Austral in far south. We then detoured back east into Argentina, before a final leg back in Chile from the largest island in South America, passing (and narrowly missing) active volcanoes all the way up to Santiago.
Continue reading
Filed under Postcards
About the Yellow Van part 1: Sourcing & Preparing
Picking the van up from Hastings
While preparing for the trip, and since arriving in South America, we’ve had a number of questions about our van: why did we ship a vehicle for our trip out from the UK rather than get one out here; why a van; what have we done to prepare it for the trip etc.? So this post is a description of how we sourced and prepared the Yellow Van and the subsequent one is about fitting it out ready.
Continue reading
Filed under About
About the Yellow Van part 2: Fitting & Kitting
At ActionVan’s workshop – partway through fit out
By June 2014, we had a vehicle that met our specs and was ready to convert into a simple camper van to be our home for the trip. Given that we were planning to be away for so long, we wanted something that had the potential to feel like a home, as well as be practical for long term living.
Continue reading
Filed under About
“We travel not to escape life, but for life not to escape us” – unknown
We are Bruce & Rebecca and The Yellow Van. We had been married for 15 years, living ordinary professional couple lives, but, for the last 10 of which, we had cultivated a dream (frequently feeding it with good bottles of wine) to take time out for an epic road-trip. In the summer of 2014, we turned the dream into reality, giving up our “good” jobs, getting rid of most of our accumulated stuff (putting the rest in storage), renting out our house in Oxford and moving into our converted yellow VW T4 – “The Yellow Van”. In October 2014 we shipped the van from London to Montevideo, Uruguay, for the start of our overland adventure in Latin America. You can see where we’ve been on our route map page and read our postcards home, accompanied by lots of photos. There are more frequently posted Facebook updates here. We are also doing occasional blogs on some themes of the trip (such as wine tasting, rock climbing, …) under the heading topics. Having been all the way south to “the end of the world” (Tierra del Fuego) and on to Antarctica, our original idea was to drive all the way to Mexico, but we slowed down as we travelled and took our time to enjoy what we were seeing and experiencing. Over time, it became less about going somewhere and more about being somewhere. So we finished our driving trip with a long exploration of Colombia and returned to the UK from Cartagena in January 2017. The picture above was taken in front of the Torres del Paine in the far south of Chile in January 2015.
Filed under About
Yellow Van Days 