You can find all sorts of guides and how-to websites on preparing for a road trip down the Panamerican Highway. Some will remind you to forward your mail to a relative’s address. Others tell you how to learn basic Spanish in the space of three weeks. Still others give you solutions for all the bathroom-related problems that will surely present themselves along the way.

In a dream, the perfect picture of the Panamerican road trip features you lounging in a hammock, tied between your spectacular van and a palm tree overflowing with coconuts. Your beautiful bikini-clad girlfriend turns you on…

After ten months of life in a campervan, the Rainbow continues to drive through Ignacia’s dreams. Throughout the first week in our new home in Southern Utah, she woke up again and again, bewildered and to be honest a bit saddened. It is quite surreal to end such a journey this way, in uncertain times under the threat of a deadly virus. Now this wild adventure is behind us, and she feels lost when she doesn’t wake up in a random town, in the middle of the Andes, or in the fog of the Atlantic, or looking down a rocky…

I woke up in the Patagonia National Park looking out over the kitchen counter through the back window of the campervan. I saw gray clouds roll over the high peaks spreading across the morning sky. After dozens of mountains in eight countries, the Andes still appear as a canvas of romantic art, a place we urban dwellers come to soak our senses in the harshness of awe. To get here, we drove two days along rutted roads past Lake Chelenko and down the famous Baker River. We were hundreds of kilometers from a gas station, never mind a city.

These…

I always dreamed of being able to speak several languages and move effortlessly from one to the other, code switching in everyday conversation. So I studied languages in university, and by the time I got to Barcelona, I could do this (quite well) with Marcelo, one of my best friends at the time. With three languages between us, we simply blurted out the first word that came to mind, sometimes in Spanish, or German, or English. Out of our mouths we flung phrases full of American and Spanish slang, and we used our German to send a quick message that…

We signed up for a rafting daytrip with a couple of Chilean river guides who won the women’s national rafting championship two years straight. In the summer, they guide rivers for adventure tourists like us traveling up and down the Carretera Austral.

The Baker River is Chile’s largest river in terms of volume, and one of the world’s last, large rivers flowing along a completely natural course with no stops, no hydroelectric dams, none of man’s hindrances (thank you Patagonia sin Represas!).

Before we jumped into the raft, she reminded us that the Baker is not pronounced Baker. You say…

When Elisa gets fussy about hiking a trail, one of our favorite methods of distraction is storytelling. Somebody starts off telling a story, and then we take turns, picking up where the last one ended. The other day hiking around Futaleufu she weaved a terrific story, with a few queues from her mother, and took creative storytelling to a new level of understanding. So we decided that this is something special I have to document.

“ There was a frog who lived in a pond, he was pink, light green, and light blue in color, and all the other frogs…

Penguins are loyal. I remember reading a news story a few years back about a penguin who went to Brazil every winter, to the same spot of shoreline, where a man waited to feed and love him over the course of a decade. Finally, one unusually warm winter, the penguin didn’t show up, and that was that. An emotional news story.

No doubt, penguins are an impressive wonder of nature: a bird that can’t fly, hunts fish, and lives in a hole in the ground. And the fact that its unusual behavior all takes place in some of the world’s…

The kids say something different each time I ask. Sometimes it is chocolate or lollipops, donuts are a crowd favorite. And cake, can’t forget cake. Ignacia needs avocados and an infinite supply of orange juice, nothing more, nothing less. My list is made of honey, peanut butter, and bread, for there is but a few things that are just as good separate as they are together. Elisa also likes this list, but would add banana. She says banana is her favorite, so I offer her one. She declines.

A campervan is not quite a deserted island, though it often feels…