Omnipotent Ali vs The Muppet

Cancun to Quito. It rolls rather wonderfully off the tongue (that’s alliteration for you). Mexico to Ecuador. A to B. The bookends of this trip are a succinct and pithy way of articulating our journey quickly - however, what really matters is the stuff in between and that means plotting a route to take us through all the intermediate destinations, adding kilometres where the riding may in itself be stimulating or stunning and generally minimising them where it isn’t. This particularly focuses on avoiding the Panamerican Highway, a brute of an arterial road that runs all the way from Mexico through to Panama City, is home to a plethora of articulated lorries and is often too narrow for them and us. Sadly, in many places it is the only paved option and is often far more direct than any alternatives.

We typically start by thinking where in a country we would like to visit. We then use our 1:300,000 paper maps (how quaint!) to work out a rough route (meaning a vague route - we endeavour for it to be as un-rough as possible) that stitches these places together and takes in some of the potentially more scenic and quiet roads. However, these two qualities are rarely discernible from a map, which often fails to give much of a clue as to where a road is a dirt track or a paved duel carriageway, and so a good deal of guesswork and a growing sense of intuition and experience are also heaped in.

Omnipotent Ali with the map

In order to make life easier, we can then use a Garmin SatNav with which we pre-plot a route on the internet and load it on for the specifics; although this has been increasingly challenging as our electronics are slowly but surely falling victim to sun, sand and sea salt. As well as this challenge, our internet connection has generally been slow and frustrating and so we do the plotting at quite a zoomed out level, tapping on the map every 10km or so to create a waypoint and the website/Google/internet-pixies do the rest, filling in the route in between. Occasionally my big fingers don’t quite tap exactly on the highway, creating a little detour off the main road and back onto it. This manifests itself a few days later when we are following the pre-planned route and the Garmin tells me to take a right into someone’s chicken coop. I feel the presence of a big, omnipotent Ali who has preordained our fate, casually and lazily tapping on a screen, defining 10km of our lives in a matter of seconds with a couple of presses of his finger. Then there is the little marionette Ali, following this purple line on the Garmin screen, where 10km takes thirty minutes of his life, wondering if big, omnipotent Ali really meant for him to take a detour to collect those eggs or was just being errant with his fat finger. The fact there can be as much as two weeks between the plotting and the execution can create a real sense of Master and Puppet. Or Muppet. I’m not sure which.

Little Ali, the muppet

Whilst most of the navigation is straightforward, literally, the Garmin and Google Maps are especially helpful in towns and cities, where the sudden glut of left and rights can overwhelm our one-dimensional sense of direction. As we mentioned in a previous post, Google Maps rarely ceases to amaze us with its level of detail. We were chatting to a software engineer the other day who told us one element of how it works - if someone walks a route with their phone on, and Google Maps installed, it is logged. If ten (or so) people do this, it automatically assumes there is a path there, which is then marked onto Google Maps for all to see. This also means that in places with lots of smartphone users (such as Vietnam) the intricacies of the little paths marked is phenomenal. It has been a mixed bag here - Guatemala had no detail whatsoever; Costa Rica had loads. Not much of a surprise there. This distance mapping is one explanation as to why the algorithm does not necessarily determine what state or form this path is in, meaning we sometimes find ourselves in situations such as “Crocodile River-gate”, simulatenously yearning for Google Street View to have reached this far, thus avoiding such potential peril, and conversely loving the fact this helps us know we are on an actual adventure.