Rule No. 1: there is no plan. There are no must-sees for us or a bucket list that we want to tick off. We also don’t aim to see as many countries as possible or try to optimize for the best blog content (sorry!).

With the opportunity of having a full year of travel time available to us, we don’t want to limit ourselves to our imagination. We want to take spontaneous decisions, stay at places that we like, and leave the ones we don’t. We want to follow the advice of locals and get inspired by the places we are instead of looking too far ahead.

That said, we of course got some ideas that will guide us. I’m writing this post on the plane to Panama City where our journey will start in about 10 hours. We aim to keep this the only flight of the trip until we head back. Which implies that we will be “limited” to Central and South America. I’m putting limited in quotes because it’s a vast and diverse continent where we have no doubt we could spend well more than a year.

The single most influencing factor for our journey will be paragliding. Katy and I started to learn to fly together in 2018. Since then it has grown to be a very important part of our life. Important enough to even delay this sabbatical in order to learn to fly safely in foreign paragliding spots (in hindsight a great decision since the journey would have been stopped pretty abruptly by the Corona pandemic in 2020).

We are very excited to visit a variety of paragliding spots, connect with the local pilots, expand our skills and experience the countries from a perspective only a few have the chance to. You also see this priority reflected in our equipment where the paragliding gear is taking up about two-thirds of our luggage.

One thing that I quickly realized during my six-month trip to Africa in 2015 was that you can’t be constantly on the move. For once, it’s getting really exhausting and you have a hard time taking in new impressions. Secondly, the places where I stayed longer were often the ones I have the fondest memories of. You have a lot better chance to connect with the local community and experience the place on a different level. It’s actually one of the big benefits compared to “normal” vacations. So that’s something that we will definitely keep in mind.

All that said, not everything can be decided/booked spontaneously. That’s something we got reminded of before even leaving Europe behind. Traveling south, which we consider our general direction for now, you need to get around the Darién Gap. That’s ~100km of jungle that no road passes through and is mainly crossed by smugglers. Instead of taking one of the speed boats, we figured out that we could also take a sailboat that even visits the beautiful San Blas islands across a 5-day journey.

We booked this crossing a few days ago but only got a place on our preferred boat on the 20th of February. That’s longer than we think we want to stay in Panama where there are no great paragliding spots to our knowledge. So according to rule no. 1, we are now looking into visiting Costa Rica in the north before heading south. Let’s see where we end up 😉