Heidi and Jens, full-time overlanders for 15 years, are the real deal. They’ve crossed rivers in Mongolia, the Canning Stock in Australia, and the salt flats of Bolivia. Jens boasts a Unimog tattoo from a parlor in Shanghai; Heidi cooks Kashmiri curry and speaks five languages. We met in Oaxaca, Mexico, in one of those…
Want to Write for Expedition Portal and Overland Journal? Here’s How to Submit the Perfect Pitch.
Photography by Jack Mac By the time the most recent issue of your favorite magazine graces the newsstands or appears in the post, its pages were already well-imagined, copyedited, laid out, and finalized many months in advance. If we board our time machine, traveling to a time well before the issue was put together, we…
Get Out There and Travel
“Get out there and travel”. It’s a seemingly simple statement, but it takes a lot of courage for many women to take the leap, whether they are single, a wife, and/or mother. I know because I hit the road hard more than a decade ago and have never looked back. Well, to be honest, after…
Humanity :: A Christmas Miracle in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico
Photography by Richard Giordano Perhaps one of the most luxurious gifts an overlander can receive is a (fully paid for!) apartment rental for the holidays. In December 2013, we parked our little 1990 Toyota Pickup on the curb, excitedly hauling our belongings up several sets of stairs to a cute apartment in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico….
Humanity:: From Russia with Love
Inside the world’s largest country, you’ll find elderly ladies baking bread in wooden houses with painted window frames; large, prosperous cities and honking horns; children riding bicycles on gravel roads, and some of the most industrious, approachable people on the planet. Russia scares many travelers. Bad things happen there, just like bad things happen in…
Humanity :: Pay It Forward
My family has been on the road for a long time now, almost a quarter of our adult lives and the majority of our children’s lives, through thick and thin. There has been an abundance of spectacular thick and inexplicably regular suffering of thin. You soon realize as you travel to foreign continents far, far…
Humanity :: Kindness of Strangers
Clouds of dust drift away as I sit up and take off my helmet. My bike stretches out across the Trans-Labrador Highway on its left side; its wheels still spin, but the engine has stopped. Something is wrong. But I don’t know what. My heart races as my brain takes inventory. I’m breathing. I’m in…
Humanity :: Those Idahoans
Two weeks into a two-year motorcycle adventure around the world, I’m cruising along the St. Joe River on the Idaho Backcountry Discovery Route. One mile remains on the trail before my boyfriend and I will connect with a paved road leading into the endearing hamlet of Avery. I spy a boulder the size of a…