I love reading of journeys - international, intercultural, personal - as long as it is well-written and interesting, I'm in! I recently found an incredible site that documents the journey of Benjamin Harlow and Jennifer Leslie on their motorcycle, from the top of the US to Argentina. It is a well-documented trip, with a plethora of photos that just invite you to dig in (and travel, yourself).  The site? Jen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance!  Their travel enthusiasm is infectious, as well as reading of their difficulties (with encountering Swine flu, motorcycle breakdowns, and more). I am so impressed with their journey that I was delighted to be able to interview them for our Wandering Educators. Here's what Jen and Ben had to say...

WE: Please tell us about your site, Jen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance...

Jennifer: Short and sweet, our website is a repository for our trip from Seattle, WA down to Ushuaia, Tierra del Fuego, Argentina on Ben's 1976 Yamaha XS500 motorcycle. The idea was conceived to start blogging (and twittering, too) as a joke, so that my mother would always know I wasn't dead or lost at any given time, but it is obviously much more than just a glorified GPS tracker or an answer to the question, 'Where in the world are Benjamin and Jennifer?'

But what is truly important about our blog is that it gives people, and ourselves as well, numerous ways to interact, participate, remember and live vicariously. Folks can get e-mail updates, read it directly from Blogspot, in a news aggregate like Google Reader, follow our Twitter updates, see our photos in Picasa, and watch our videos on YouTube. We try to take lots of photos everyday, of where we're going, and what we're doing. We try to blog regularly, too, but trying to upkeep any interface regularly is difficult, so we try our best to create some sort of new content everyday.

Our site is also a place for us to collect our memories, so the metaphorical slideshow photographs don't get mixed up in their box and we can remember what we were seeing, feeling and experiencing in any given place.

Benjamin: One of the sections of our blog titled, 'Roadside Mechanics,' is a collection of simple lessons I have learned while working on the motorcycle. In these blog posts I try to explain our motorcycle problems and process it into useful information about the troubles I have run into, how I solved them, and how I can avoid them in the future. As this section grows it will become my guidebook for future repairs, and through the blog I get to share with others the wisdom I gain about working on old motorcycles. I want to include the most relevant and useful information so it is easy to understand the problems I have and the solutions I come up with.

In another section of the blog is a map of our travels with highlights about the places we have visited. We are using a Google map so we can continuously update our route, and add new points of interest. The map creates a timeline for our stories and photos and the distance we have traveled.

Jennifer: There's quite a bit on the site; check it out and explore around. You can spend quite a few hours just looking at all the photos.

Las Pozas

Las Pozas

WE: What was the genesis of your bike journey?

Jennifer: A desire to go, travel and discover. We planned it in less than a day and Ben went up to Oregon, where the bike was stored, to work on it for a week before I met him in Seattle. I think if you were to look at the political, social, cultural, etc. environment that we were in at the time, it would also provide some of the backstory as to why we made the choice to go: I had just graduated from college and was having a difficult time finding a job considering the current state of the economy and Ben had just lost his scholarship funding to go to college because of the same economy problems. We love New Orleans, too, but New Orleans was getting smaller and smaller--few opportunities and options in contrast to a shining opportunity to travel: we had no real obligations at the time and few roots.

Benjamin: In New Orleans I had been tinkering around with a neglected 1981 Honda CB450 motorcycle that had been given to my roommate and I. It was a bike to learn on, and I never expected much out of it due

to the negligent upkeep it had received before it was given to us. I kept telling Jen that once we got it running we could use it to travel beyond our normal bicycle routes and explore more of southwest Louisiana. After nine months on the project the only results I had was a hard reality that a bunch of work and money still needed to be put into on the bike.

Jen and I asked ourselves if we would ever get anywhere on that motorcycle, and if we had the time to wait for it to be ready. As the reality set in we decided to abandon the Honda motorcycle project in New Orleans for a Yamaha 1976 XS500 motorcycle I had stored at my parents house in Medford, Oregon. It only took me a week to get the Yamaha running. I met Jen in Seattle, and we headed for New Orleans. Through persistence and patience we have kept moving on our vintage motorcycle. The Yamaha has required its share of work, but it took us across the States, and brought us to central Mexico.

Texas into Louisiana

Veracruz and Tampico

WE: What challenges have you run into, on this journey?

Jennifer: There's been a lot, and I'll let Benjamin explain the mechanical challenges we have with using an old, fairly small motorcycle for the trip, which most people take on a new or nearly new motorcycle with an engine at least twice or even three times the size of our motorcycle.

What we face everyday is trying to negotiate our world experiences. Human beings are so very similar but so very different and finding common ground is one of the biggest, but most rewarding challenges.

Basic necessities, like shelter and food, can become an entire day's worth of planning. It's fairly easy to travel if you're willing to spend money to stay in hotels every night, but then you lose the pleasure and cultural exchange of interacting with other people. We tend to Couchsurf a lot and that takes a good amount of planning to be successful. And then, when you get to a host's house, you need to negotiate the space--are you allowed to use the towels? Is it ok to use their sugar, but not their vegetables? Would they like it if you made them dinner? Are they shy or outgoing? Do you have something in common or are you struggling for something to talk about?

Benjamin: I jokingly say that I put in about forty hours a week of work into our motorcycle. The challenge of maintaining a vintage motorcycle on this extensive of a journey has been my main project. Regular maintenance of a motorcycle can be accomplished with relative ease, because you are not dealing with unidentified problems. The skills that I will walk away with from this trip reflect the challenges of identifying small problems and keeping them from becoming catastrophic. This sort of proactive maintenance can only be learned over time and is a part of the journey. I have also faced many challenges of fixing our motorcycle while on the road. The parts that I have access to are often not supplied by the manufacturer. In these situations I seek creative solutions to our motorcycles problems. By the end of the road we will be riding a motorcycle that is almost completely different and made up from new and previously used parts from all the different countries we've visited.

The latest challenge we have run into is the Swine Flu pandemic. One day we were hanging out with our Couchsurfing hosts in Mexico City in the Coyoacan neighborhood. The city was vibrant and full of life,

and we were planning our upcoming activities to visit Teotihuacan and soon afterward the Yucatan. Then the news of people dying from influenza broke. We were shocked, and along with a city of millions of people, we shut down overnight. We put ourselves into self-quarantine to avoid being exposed, and remained isolated as we left the country. The decision to leave Mexico was last resort, but required when our Couchsurfing support network was seriously threatened and crippled by the outbreak of influenza. At first we moved out of Mexico City, to Boca del Rio, next to the capital city of Veracruz. We watched and waited as the virus made its way around the country and killing unsuspecting people. As we were preparing to head to the Yucatan Peninsula, our hosts further south in Villahermosa, Tabasco wrote to us and informed us that their current guest was sick, and they were rushing her to a hospital. Due to the possibility of exposing us to the virus, they said they were not going to be able to host us. With this news we started to search for hosts along an route to the north. We began receiving responses from potential hosts, informing us that they would not be able to invite us into their homes due to fear of contamination from either side, but especially because we had been in Mexico City, where it had all started. They didn't want to expose us to the virus, and risk the possibility that we were carriers of the virus. We left the country in two days, about 650 miles, only stopping for one night's rest in Tampico, Tamaulipas.

Jennifer: It was a difficult choice to make, but we couldn't go anywhere--to museums, to cultural events, even to restaurants or bars, and countries in Central and South America began shutting their borders to travelers coming from Mexico. We didn't want to be semi-permanently stuck in Mexico without a place to stay, without contacts, without jobs and without the ability to really travel anywhere within the country itself.

Veracruz and Tampico

Tlanchinol in the morning to Mexico City

Tlanchinol in the morning to Mexico City

WE: What have been the best parts of your journey?

Benjamin: The best part of our journey is the part that our blog doesn't accurately reflect. This is the part that we can only tell in words and even then it is hard to get it right. The photos describe the amazing places we have seen and passed through, but photos and captions are only memories of what looked right at the exact moment the picture was taken. Our true journey is in the long days and nights of riding through the States, when were running on blind faith. When we had to believe that we could do something, and we were rewarded with the strength of believing in ourselves everyday.

The U.S. segment of our trip from Seattle, WA to New Orleans, LA was rushed. When we left for the motorcycle we still had a lease on our house in New Orleans. We didn't let it stop us. We planned and executed the U.S. in 45 days, including three weeks of maintenance and upgrading our motorcycle, Bonnie Bonita, throughout the trip. On the side roads that wind throughout the United States, we would often ride until two in the morning, only pulling over to find a place to camp when we both felt we were going to fall asleep on the motorcycle while hurtling through space. Our campsites varied from state parks, soccer fields, highway pullouts, and little dirt roads that deadend on the bayou. These campsites supply me with my fondest memories. As the day broke and the cloak of darkness over the campsite faded into morning light, we only then really saw a place for the first time.

On these days we make coffee and breakfast on our camp stove, and settle into our temporary home for breakfast. We make our plans for the day every morning, we realize how far we have gone, and we set a new destination. Planning each day is what makes this journey amazing. We base our everyday decisions on advice we receive from the people we meet. When we visit somewhere recommended and beloved by someone, we can really connect with their stories and their identity. In that space, upon the motorcycle, exposed to the whole world we really get to know somewhere and someone; even if it is just long enough to take the perfect picture.

Jennifer: Living it. For a while I thought I could "see the world" through all the media available to us these days--internet, blogs in particular, television, travel magazines, and so on. It dawned on me recently that that is really impossible: While on the motorcycle I try to take lots of photos of the actual traveling itself: the motorcycle, Ben at the helm, and the view from my seat. But the photos, even the little videos are just not accurate depictions of the expansiveness, especially in Mexico and in the Southwest of the United States To see how big the world is, to just be awed by the distances that

people travel and how humans have made such massive impacts on their earth: ancient pyramids on the precipices of mountains, dams holding back millions of gallons of water, fields that are so big they extend past the horizon. I have always lived at or below sea level, where things seem enclosed and small and it is unbelievable to be able to comprehend such magnitude of scale and beauty.

 
San Miguel de Allende, Guanajuato MX

 Guanajuato

WE: What have you learned, interculturally, from going through so many different places?

Benjamin: The most important realization I have experienced over and over in my travels is that all people are inherently good. This seems simple, but is very easily forgotten when confronted with a difficult situation. The key is that everyone was born with the capacity and desire to be liked and to do good. For travelers who meet people from diverse cultures this is a very important human quality to remember.

Everyone has dreams, goals and desires. All humans have desired for something, or worked towards a dream in their lives. This can be the love of a girl, the fame and fortune of movie stars, or to simple be accepted by one's peers. When I share my dreams and goals with those I meet, I establish a connection and others will share their desires with me.

In my travels I have helped many people, and I have been helped in return. These opportunities have come from trusting that the people I meet are good and communicating our life stories to one another. The most important intercultural lesson I have learned is that everyone will help you fulfill your dreams if given a chance.

Jennifer: No matter where you go, everyone is the same at a core level. When traveling, you will meet people who embody the things you love about and remind you of your mother, your sister, your best friend.

So many Americans are afraid of traveling because of what they read and see on the news, but if these people exist, these folks who remind you of the people you love and care for, any place can't be much different than the one you are from. The reality of what people and lives are like in a different country, versus the "reality" that is projected in the media is very different. I think this branches off from Ben's theory: humanity really resides everywhere that people can be found, and you can't judge a place by the crimes of a few bad apples, so be open and you will never be disappointed with the people
you meet, because generosity of the heart and spirit are the same everywhere.

 Guanajuato, Graveyard

Zacatecas

WE: Is there anything else you'd like to share with us?

Jennifer: Go out on a ledge even when you're afraid and know that part of traveling is learning to become flexible. If you aren't willing to compromise, you'll get nowhere, fast. Going to a new place can be very isolating for a lot of people and I suspect that is why when people do travel, they tend to close themselves off from the culture they are visiting, whether it be by staying in a resort, by taking guided tours, an unwillingness to try street food, staying only on the highway or any number of ways to ignore what's really going on.

Benjamin: Write about your travels. A picture can tell a thousand words, but only words can express what you feel in the most important moments. Write in a personal journal where you can confide your struggles, or on a blog where you can connect your experiences and your digital media with family, friends, and those you want to meet while you travel. Just remember to always write for yourself. In the end you are your best audience, and the memories you are making matter most to you.

 Kingsville, TX & broken down outside Falfurrias

Zacatecas, climb to  La Bufa

WE: Thanks so much, Jennifer and Benjamin! Your travels are so very inspiring. Those most important moments are truly the ones that change us.

For more information, please see:
http://jenandtheartofmotorcyclemaintenance.blogspot.com/

Real de Catorce, San Louis Potosi, MX

All photos courtesy and copyright of Jen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. All rights reserved.