About Pav-Way

Geoff Pavey and Cindy Conaway have been chasing back roads, trailheads, and campsites since 1999. From a year spent tramping through Central and South America, to two years volunteering in Mombasa, Kenya, to a season living out of a car across the American West. This is where we keep the stories.

When we started traveling, the world was a simpler place. Not simpler in the sense of easier. Simpler in the sense of fewer options, fewer safety nets, fewer ways to know what was coming next.

There were no cell phones. Many places didn't have internet at all, and the ones that did meant tracking down an internet cafe and paying by the hour for a connection that might drop halfway through your email. You navigated with paper maps, the kind that got soft and torn at the folds. Lonely Planet and the Rough Guide were your bibles, thumbed through so many times the spines cracked. And if you wanted news from other travelers, actual firsthand accounts of what was happening down the road, you found an internet cafe and pulled up the Thorn Tree, and read.

Credit cards were often useless. You carried local currency on you at all times, because you never knew when you'd need it and there wasn't a card reader to bail you out.

You generally had no idea where you'd sleep that night. You'd step off a bus into a crowd of touts, all pulling in different directions, all pushing their guesthouse or their cousin's hotel. Sometimes you fought through them and asked a cab driver to take you to a place you'd circled in the Lonely Planet, one with decent reviews, if you could call three sentences from a few years back a review, and if the edition you were holding was even current.

Travel was done by the seat of your pants. You went to the bus station or the train station and looked at the board, or asked around, to see what was leaving and when. You listened to other travelers, people you'd met an hour ago in a hostel courtyard, and you had them scratch out a route for you on the back of a matchbook. Yes, matchbooks still existed. You really just winged it.

And when you landed somewhere the language wasn't yours, finding anything, a bathroom, a bus stop, a decent bowl of noodles, turned into a game of Pictionary. Pointing, gesturing, drawing in the dirt with a stick. It worked more often than you'd think.

That world doesn't really exist anymore. Now everyone has a phone with a map, reviews, translation, and a way to book a bed before you've even left the bus. Some of that is a good thing. Getting lost is harder now, and so is the particular kind of luck, or trouble, that used to find you because of it. This blog is a record of those trips, back when the not knowing was just part of how you traveled, and half the reason you kept doing it.