He outpaced me. At my approach, he did not bark or chase me, as is the practice of his species. He did not nip at my boots as the fanatical dogs do. Instead, he shot off like a rocket on his four legs, quickly outpacing me down the mountain road. He sprinted without tiring until he was a brown and white speck barely visible in the distance. I regretted that I could not give him the competition he so clearly relished. He was a canine alone among sheep and llamas.

Sometimes movement seems like an end in itself. For the first time in months, I saw a highway stretch out flat before me, the wind lashed my face and tears welled up in my eyes, the needle on the speedo bounced up to 80 mph. We had chosen to cut Westward from Cajamarca, Peru to the coast where the roads are straight and flat, where we could make up some time by bypassing some noodly mountain roads. There will be plenty of mountain roads in the future, why not get a change of scenery. Change itself came as a relief. After several days of hard riding through unpaved mountain roads from Ecuador across into Northern Peru, up steep muddy climbs, through razor-sharp switchbacks, on cliff-edge trails, after dropping my bike three times, and almost running out of gas, the coast sounded like the break that we needed.

It begins again. After nearly six months in Colombia, Diana and I hit the road. It was bittersweet to leave Bogota, a city that we had come to feel was home, but we were excited to start traveling again. We arrived in Bogota feeling a bit battle worn. Horace, our trusty motorcycle, had just broken his flywheel in two and this after he burned a hole in the alternator stator in Guatemala, and, less severely, but still fatiguing, popped a tire in Nicaragua. Mentally, I needed a break. South America was a giant on the horizon, and I was doubting my abilities to face him.

The Darien Gap, “the world’s worst roadblock”, is sixty-six miles of untamed jungle isolating South America from Panama. Despite the continuous landmass that forms the American continents, only the brave and the foolish can cross it entirely by land and without the help of boats or planes.

The cause was unclear, but no sooner had we bounced over the tope fifty yards back than I felt the unmistakable sad slushy wobble of a deflated rear tire. An old man watched us blankly from behind a tumbling pile of scrap wood across the street. He didn’t strike me as hostile but there was nothing notably friendly about his behavior.

There are stories that I don’t want to be able to tell and already we had written the first line of it. ‘We went for a walk alone at night on the beach in Nicaragua…’

It wasn’t the first time that we have had bike problems—in fact, these setbacks have become somewhat endemic of our trip—but before now we had ample time to adjust our itinerary. As we approach Panama and our sail to Colombia, however, our time is becoming much more precious. There is no shortcut. There is no finely paved toll-road. There is no circumventing the time-intensive border crossings. We had to confront the fact that we were not visiting the ancient city of Tikal and we were not swimming in the natural jade-colored pools of Semuc Champey, we were headed to the clogged streets of Guatemala City.