A tale of two walls
AKA Journey Dispatch #7, from the USA 🇺🇸 to Chiapas, Mexico 🇲🇽
Just under a year ago, Polo and I stood roadside in Western France, thumbs extended to catch the first in a series of rides that would take us to the Arctic Circle. It was a moment we’d prepared for with uncommon rigor considering we were hitchhiking: departure photos taken, emergency contact info laminated, every piece of gear weighed to the tenth of an ounce. After years of dreaming of a trip around the world, the only thing that stood in our way was getting that first ride. Our spirits were high, a perfect departure painted in our imagination. A short wait, friendly drivers, straight on the Autobahn to Berlin, and maybe some free pretzels.
And then.
We waited for two hours under looming gray clouds, meeting the eyes of hundreds of drivers barreling past. We found ourselves half-joking, half-serious as we talked about returning to Polo’s childhood home and camping in his mother’s garden.
It all turned out OK, of course. Just before rain started pouring, a stoic constructeur named Mirza pulled over, and we were off. But that first roadblock still looms large in my memory, and I inevitably find myself tracing a winding path back to the outskirts of Nantes, reliving those first moments in an attempt to make sense of the 24,600 miles that followed.
And yet: memory is a fickle thing. It doesn’t quite capture the odor of Mirza’s chain-smoking as we hurtled towards Paris or the constant gnawing I felt in my stomach during those first few days of asking strangers for rides. It exists in picture and words but not sensations — memory can’t bring back the feel of damp grass at a campsite, the taste of a gas-station croissant, or the startling sound of a wild bison tramping through the Polish borderlands.
Those things, like an infinite loop of other moments, are better captured in the jumble of journals I’ve kept over the last year. Flipping back through pages and documents, I see moments of joy, wonder and progress. Optimism about the planet’s future and awe for the individuals and organizations who are driving change. But I also catch moments of my own sickness, disappointment and doubt. Inner turmoil interspersed with the warning signs outside: temperature rise, cracking desert sands, a trickling Albanian river choked with plastic.
A step back: for the last month, Polo and I hit pause, returning to my parents’ house via a thirty-hour Greyhound ride for a few weeks. We played hosts instead of guests, welcoming friends new and old to Texas, developing new routines, and slowly gaining back fitness lost after five months at sea. A much-needed cycle of desk work and predictable weekends briefly replaced our wandering lifestyle.
I won’t lie; it felt good to fall back into my past-life habits. The temptation to slip back to who I was before we set off — hit harder than it ever has. Among the digital nomad / long-term travel set, there’s a term called ‘the wall’ — which describes the moment where a once-in-a-lifetime adventure just turns into everyday life. A fellow Wahoo, Sean Rumage, wrote about The Wall a few years ago far better than I can at the moment.
If I’m being honest, my personal wall slammed down somewhere in the middle of sailing through the Atlantic Ocean, and I’ve been searching for a way around, over, through, or under it ever since.
But returning home to Texas also served as a stark reminder that even when my personal motivation wanes, the planet continues to warm and the places I know as familiar warp as much as those that are foreign. During a girl’s trip in Austin, my friend Grace and I hiked down the Barton Creek Greenbelt, a stretch of public land I’ve returned to countless times over the years. During Summer 2020, I spent almost every weekend here, walking miles into the Hill Country brush, music blasting, seeking refuge from the crazy world in the Greenbelt’s cool waters.
These days, it’s almost totally dry.
And so, on April 19, we boarded another Greyhound for a 48-hour, 3-bus journey to San Cristobal de Las Casas, a charming mountain town tucked in the Central Highlands region of the Mexican state of Chiapas. From there, we started a southward sprint to Nicaragua and Costa Rica, where we’ll be spending the next month tackling a new visa for Polo, investigating a few stories on off-grid solar projects + regenerative agriculture, and working remotely on our projects for the coming summer — while still making time for reunions with family and friends, old and new!
Thanks for sticking with my attempts to wax poetic. Keep reading for the basics, and I’ll see you next week.
💡🌳 Solution of the Week: Vote on Climate
2024 is the Year of the Election, and climate is on the ballot worldwide. From India to Mexico to the USA, more than four billion people across 50+ countries will be heading to the polls. At stake? Clean energy goals and net-zero targets.
Election fever was running high as we bussed through Mexico. From highway medians to village fences, public spaces were plastered with reminders to vote and candidate campaign slogans. In Chiapas, we saw tons of signage for Claudia Sheinbaum, the candidate for MORENA, or Movimiento Regeneración Nacional. She’s a scientist + energy engineer by training, and an IPCC contributor. Pretty cool!
📣💚 Shoutout to: Perfect Public Transport
We’ve been on a LOT of night busses at this point, from Portugal to Hungary to Miami (at some point, I’ll total them all up). But for those of you who may be skeptical about choosing land-based transport in Central America, I can confidently report that the buses in Mexico seriously take the #1 spot on our 35+ country journey so far. Forget FlixBus or Greyhound; ADO and Sedna, the two bus companies we road from Nuevo Leon all the way down to San Cristobal de Las Casas took first prize. The best part? Reclining seats that were so comfortable, we almost slept through a transfer…
❌ 🎒Travel fail: Bumbling at the border
Here’s the story of the second wall: the Texas-Mexico border. Given political rhetoric, it was easy for us to project that the crossing itself would be long, fraught and intense, but in actuality, it was very smooth. The Greyhound pulled over the Rio Grande via the McAllen-Hidalgo International Bridge at about 5 PM, our bags were searched, and on we went into Mexico.
Missing something? No one stamped our passports. Polo and I stood, befuddled for a minute, before asking the conductor: ¿Necesitamos obtener sellos en nuestros pasaportes?
His response: Salimos en 30 segundos.
So we naively brushed it off, thinking our short transit through Mexico maybe wouldn’t merit a stamp — after all, up until then, we’d been mostly traveling within Schengen, where borders blip by as mere highway signs.
We realized the gravity of our error when the time came to cross from Mexico to Guatemala. Without stamps or tourist cards, we only had bus tickets to prove we were in the country legally. Big mistake, very green, and really underscored our passport privilege that we didn’t push to inquire further when we left the USA.
In the end, we were able to explain our circumstances at the Southern border and made it out of the country with little more than a slap on the wrist. I am positive that if we didn’t have French and American passports (2nd and 7th strongest, respectively) the situation would have turned out very differently. The experience served as a stark reminder that while borders — like climate change — touch us all, we feel their severity very differently.
📸 Photo of the week: Eclipse Chasers
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