I'm Amy. I'm Matt. This is Jagger and that's Blue Beauty.
We were living in Maui, Hawaii. Matt and I met in Nicaragua working at a surf camp.
I lived in Oregon he lived in California when we weren't traveling and we decided
to move to Maui Hawaii and basically as soon as we started to set up our lives
we were like, "well, we gotta go traveling, that's what we do." We put together a list
of all the places we wanted to visit, talked about like why we wanted to go to
those places. It kind of just was natural for us to say, "well like, let's do a big
road trip." We both like to surf. We like beaches. We like warm weather and we
decided that we were gonna go do the rest of the Americas in North America so
drive down to Panama and back. We don't have a lot of money. We saved and worked
for about three and a half years but it was important to us to not spend all of
our money on a vehicle. Our main requirement was to be able to
sit up inside the vehicle as well and Matt was insistent that we keep the
surfboards inside hoping to not draw too much attention to us and hopefully keep
them from theft. I picked the Toyota T 100 because I knew that we could get parts
all through Mexico and Central America. It's kind of like a random mashed
together of different trucks that Toyota came out with. The whole suspension is
the same as the Toyota pickup or Toyota Hilux. That's probably the most popular
vehicle throughout like Mexico Central America
and then the engine and drive lines all the same as the generation one Tacoma
which is also pretty popular down there. It was offered in Crotteaus which
their market here is the Land Cruiser hundred series.
This is Blue Beauty. She is a Toyota T 100 four-wheel drive. These are the solar
panels. It's 300 watts of solar power. We intentionally did not mount them to the
roof because we wanted to be able to park in the shade as much as possible
while we were traveling through Mexico and Central America. And over here we
have an ARB awning and this is basically our kitchen and our living room. It's
like having a studio apartment. We've got a king camp table and even
though it is like a little tricky to set up it's really sturdy. We've used it for
over five hundred six days and it's still holding up just as strong as the
day we got it. We have a Camp Chef Everest model stove
and it's been great it still works although all those days on the ocean
have rusted the hinges apart so, you know it still does its job.
And then we have two boxes that consists of everything that you would
have in a kitchen. This is our pantry and it's well stocked right now because we
were planning for five days out here in Joshua Tree. This is everything else and
the stove does fit in here. It's all of our pots, pans, coffee makers, silverware,
everything. We purchased these boxes at the Container Store and they are
waterproof and they are ant proof, unless you leave them open and then they're not ant proof.
We actually leave all of this stuff outside I'd say 95% of the time. We have some locks
that we string through the boxes and then we string it through the table and
through the stove and our propane tank and then that way when we go to sleep at
night, we don't have to worry about somebody
coming by and taking something from us. Our propane tank is a 10 pound propane tank
so that's half of the normal size and it lasts us on an average of two months. We
have these chairs. I love these chairs. They're the old
Hillman Ox the original folding chair and they fold into this little tiny bag.
We installed a light here and this runs off of our battery and solar power and
this is our outside kitchen light and inside here is the switch and we
designed it so that if we did hear something in middle of the night we could
just turn it on from inside the camper while we're sleeping and fortunately for
us that never happened except for some pigs one time. We did modify the tires. We
bought some new ones on the road. We got a flat and we knew we needed some
all-terrain so they're BFG all-terrain tires. This is also hooked up to our
solar power but these are two twelve volt outlets so we call the truck Blue
Beauty but I call the camper specifically Frankenstein. She is a
regular camper shell that we cut the top off and then bought five millimeter
plywood and fiberglassed it to the top of it. Alright this is the extended cab of
our T 100 and it's really hard to find these things with bucket seats. We
actually had a bench in here to begin with and it was a split bench so this is
the stock side of the seat over here. This is out of some random truck. A
friend of my brothers gave it to us so I made some mounts and kind of made it
work and then we made our own center console and the whole idea is really
just to maximize storage so in our center console we take a folder this has all
our documents and stuff we need for the truck and for us and for the dog for
crossing borders or if the police pull us over. There's a pretty solid tactic
that we used for not paying bribes and it's
understanding what the actual law is and in most of these countries they're going
to take your driver's license and I think that that's very scary for most
Westerners. They're supposed to take the driver's license to a police station you
go to the police station or a bank that the police station tells you and you pay
that fine and then you get your driver's license back. It's the law.
So if a police officer tries to pull you over and tell you how bad you are for
whatever you supposedly did you just have to insist that they write you a
ticket. It sounds weird to beg a cop to write you a ticket but we never got a
ticket written. When you insist on that ticket they give up. The last time I got
pulled over he asked for 2,000 pesos. That's over a hundred dollars. Fines are
not that much down there. Now he is in a situation where he can't write the
actual ticket because then we would know he was trying to bribe us so they try to
say that you just pay the fine there but that's not true. So if you want to get out
of bribes do it legally. We got seat covers with pockets in the
back so you can just shove stuff in there. So we have like our shopping
bags that we reuse. Amy's got her raincoat in there. TP gotta have that
handy. Most of the toilets down south don't
have toilet paper in them so you stop at a gas station or something you've got to
have your own. These are road triangles. Legally
required down south so you have to have them handy for when a cop stops you
you can show that you have your triangles. This is just a cooler so we
actually make ice in our freezer which we have back in the camper. All my tools
are actually underneath this seat. There's like a stock storage space down
there that I chose to leave. Fire extinguisher ready. That's
also legally required down south so you gotta have one of those and then this is
the dog bed. We removed half of the bench seat that's
normally in the back of the extended cab and built this box and inside there we
got a bunch more storage. We got our first aid kit, toiletries, and our
computers and games and stuff in there. We have a little separated compartment
and that's where we keep our batteries so we have two optima yellow top 75 amp
hour batteries wired together. The 150 amp hours is sufficient when we're in areas
like this where it's not as hot. When we were down south the fridge runs a lot
more and so we were like constantly monitoring it trying to like make sure
we had enough and it was still enough if we had good Sun. If we had like a cloudy
day or something we'd end up having to run the truck so I have the
alternator wired into the house batteries as well so we have that backup
option. So this is our indoor living space basically consists of a bed. The
majority of the space inside the truck we chose to use as storage. Up here we
have six surfboards. We got a little rack over here. I have a spear gun and a
couple of fishing rods. Just a dry bag up here that's kind of our clothes that are
handy and then we have another one that's our dirty clothes so the clothes kind
of come out of here into there and our fan which plugs into our outlets that we
have down here along the fridge. One thing that we did that's handy is the awning
on the outside. We attached it and put a bunch of caulking in the seam so it
works kind of like a gutter so we can actually leave this window open even if
you have heavy rains. We left the majority of our space for storage and
everything that we have set up all goes down here. We also have 15 gallons of
water that are stored in three separate jerry
cans. This one is our main Jerrycan. It's a lifesaver and it has a built-in water
filter so you pump it up to pressurize it and then you can fill things up with the tap
down there so we filtered all of our drinking water while we were down south.
We've got a Lug Loo that's our toilet if we need it but we don't really use it that often.
We're generally either somewhere that has facilities or we're far enough
removed that we just dig a hole but that we use it as storage mostly. Great for
cooking on top of campfires and this is what we call our toy box so we've got my day pack
pack for hiking, the rest of the spearfishing and snorkeling gear. Basically just all
the stuff that we like to do. Keep it all in plastic bins so it's easy to like
move around keep organized and because we do a fair amount of four-wheel
driving and stuff it helps keep things clean like if we cross a deep river or
something that'll actually get water into the bed through the little like
drain holes so this way stuff still stays dry. This is our refrigerator and
freezer and I built a slide for it so it can come out and that way it's easily
accessible from our kitchen space.
This side is our freezer. This side is our fridge and it's the combined space is a
66 liter. This little section this slides out and that's where we keep the bulk of
our clothing. We have this thing which is pretty handy
it's a ARB mosquito net and it just slides right into the awning. It's a
little bit of an extra set up but it can make the difference between liking the
camp spot and needing to leave. This is my side of the bed so when the fridge
slides in
kind of becomes part of my bed so this is my space.
Amy gets to have the nice cushy bed keeps her happier.
We started out by getting a book, this was a game changer for us, called 'Don't Go There You'll Die'.
They have done the entire pan-american and the first series is Mexico and
Central America. The word Overland was also a game changer. We didn't realize
that we were gonna be overlanders. That's I guess what the rest of the
world calls people who drive across multiple borders for extended periods of
time. Other resources that I learned along the road was there's Facebook
groups so if you just type in pan-american into Facebook Google you
can ask to be invited into the groups and they talk about crossing the
Darién Gap, current information on borders, and then you have the app
iOverlander and it was developed by the same people who wrote that book.
Everything from borders, campsites, where to get water, where there's propane
refill stations. It's an incredibly helpful app and people are constantly updating
it. WikiOverland that's a site online that you can go and check border
crossings, the paperwork you need, how long are you allowed to keep the vehicle
in, how long is your visa permit gonna be, that kind of stuff. When I use Expedition
Portal, it's a forum. It's a lot of Americans on it but there is like a decent
international group I felt like I was getting alright information from there
as well. With all of it you have to kind of find different sources and
cross-reference things. Less is more. Less stuff equals more space and it's nice to have extra space.
I hope you enjoyed this week's episode.
If you did be sure to LIKE comment and subscribe. If you'd like to join us on
our travels through Mexico and Central America you can head over to our YouTube
channel The Traveling Together Journal. You'll also find links there
for our Instagram and Facebook pages. Thank you.