For Twelve Years, We Traveled the World
We are Rick & Kathy Howe and we have been living life on the road since 2001. For twelve of those twenty-three years we traveled around the world in our Tiger Overland Vehicle. We shipped our Tiger seven times and lived and traveled in it in sixty-five countries on six continents. During our travels we learned a lot not only about the countries we visited and the people we met, but also about ourselves.
A village in Malawi, 2019
We gained respect for ourselves and our own abilities as we overcame challenges of all sorts; from mechanical problems to difficult roads, border crossings, paperwork issues and the odd territorial dispute (typically with an elephant or two) over who has the right of way on a given stretch of road.
We also gained a tremendous amount of respect for our Tiger and Chevy truck as we drove it on roads rougher than any we had ever seen in North America. Mostly though, we fell in love with the people of the countries we were able to visit.
We’ve been fortunate enough to gather a lifetime of wonderful memories of the places we’ve been, sights we've seen, people we've met, and experiences we've shared with each other. Since 2008 we have been happy to be able to share all of these things in the pages of this website, which we have always published in hopes of offering encouragement to other travelers or those who dream of seeing the world on their own; with their own schedule and in their own time.
In doing so, our motto has always been to:
Explore Experience Learn Share Encourage
So here we go...
Africa 2018-2019:
As such things always do, our time in Africa came to its end all too soon. We toured eight countries in Southern Africa between July 2018 and November, 2019, when we dropped off our Tiger in Durban, South Africa, for shipment back to the US. Fortunately for us, this brought us home to the US just before the onset of the coronavirus pandemic. The trip home from Durban was La Tortuga’s seventh voyage on the high seas and completed his around the world circumnavigation. Following earlier voyages to and from South America and to and from Europe, between 2017 & 2020 he has sailed from California to Australia, then on to Africa and continued around the world back to the US. We've posted two stories wrapping up our sixteen months in Africa: Memories of Africa and its companion Overland Travel in Africa. These should provide you with lots of insight into what we enjoyed and what we learned from our travels on this wonderfully varied continent. For much more detail and variety we invite you to read each of the seventeen earlier stories we wrote covering our time in Africa, and of course we hope you will enjoy our pictures from Africa on our Photo Page.
Australia & New Zealand 2017-2018:
Before arriving in Africa, we enjoyed a wonderful year wandering all over Australia, spending lots of time in the Outback and especially enjoying Western Australia with its unique sites and open spaces. We posted nine stories from OZ along with a tenth, Out, Back, and Around as a summary and you can find all of them on our Australia Page. We also invite you to visit the Photo Gallery from OZ on our photo page.
While our Tiger was on his way to Australia back in March and April of 2017, we enjoyed a fantastic ten-week visit to New Zealand. We spent their Autumn with the Kiwis, enjoying amazing fall colors all the way through our visit, and were very happy to be touring NZ in the shoulder season. We posted four messages from our time in New Zealand along with a bunch of beautiful photos on our Photo Site. For anyone interested, we’ve also written up our experience in Renting a Van for our New Zealand tour.
How do we find the great places we get to??
Well, the main reason is Kathy, sitting in the navigator’s seat of the Star Ship Tortuga doing all the research she does. Rick is much more ‘seat of the pants’ oriented when it comes to planning and deciding, but he admits that he can only get away with that because of the time Kathy puts in with her books, maps and online resources.
In 2016, with our Tiger back in the US after a trip to Alaska, then an eighteen month tour of Latin America and six years of travel in Europe, we completed a comprehensive program of maintenance and refurbishment of La Tortuga's living quarters and running gear. At over 180,000 miles (290,000 km), our 2007 Chevy Tiger had continued to serve us extremely well, but as we looked ahead to what we hoped would be several more years of overseas travel, we felt some preparation was called for. You can read about the refurbishment of the living quarters and systems of our Tiger by going to 2016 Tiger Refit 1, and a full report on the mechanical work we had done can be found in 2016 Tiger Refit 2.
Europe 2010-2015:
In 2010, our Tiger arrived in Belgium on April 1 and we began our European tour with a month in that beautiful country. Each year from then through 2015 we spent around eight months in Europe and during that time we visited forty countries in Western and Eastern Europe, North Africa and West Asia. Go to our Europe Page to link to all the stories of our travels there. Then, for an informational wrap-up on the ins and outs of traveling in Europe in a motorhome, go to our Europe by Motorhome page and read all about budgetary and other considerations involved in our journeys. We have six full seasons of expense information for you to peruse. Despite varying fuel costs and exchange rates we continued to be able to travel throughout Europe within the budget we set when we began.
Central & South America 2008-2009:
In 2009 we completed our first international trip in fine style. We had a wonderful experience and will enjoy reliving the memories of places seen, people met and lessons learned for a long, long time. From Colombia in the north to Patagonia in the south, we were just over a full year in South America. The continent opened itself up for us in a wonderful way, and the countries of Central America were equally amazing in their color and diversity. You can go to our South America or Central America pages to enjoy our stories and photos from these wonderful places.
North America 2001-2007 and 2020-present:
Our first six years of full time travel, from 2001 to 2007, were spent in North America, which is also where we have been traveling since 2020. To check on our earlier stories visit our US & Canada and Mexico pages. To see what we’ve been up to in more recent times, go to A Return to North America, which covers our first three years back from our overseas adventures but still traveling in our Tiger in 2020-22; and Opening A New Chapter, in which we continue our wandering life in an older and much larger motorhome from 2023 on.
Site Info:
To access any of our stories from the road, just go to the top of any page of this site and use the drop down menus. You can also use our Alphabetized Country Index, while if you are primarily interested in pictures, you can go straight to our Photo Home Page on Smug Mug or use the Photo Albums Menu at the top of any page. Two different routes to the same destination.
As you have time, we hope you’ll explore the rest of our site, including our Vehicle pages, which continue to expand with added technical information as we gain experience. Our Information section also continues to grow with articles on Shipping, Safety & Security and Storing your Vehicle, and you can find connecting links to other travelers’ sites you might enjoy on our Links Page.
You can access our photos in many ways: from any narrative page, from the Photo Album Menu, or directly from each of the main regional home pages; Europe, South America, Central America, Mexico, United States & Canada, Australia & New Zealand, and Africa. You can also go directly to our Photo Page on Smug Mug. For photos of our vehicle, go either to the Our Vehicle page, or directly to Tiger Photos in the Photo Album Menu.
Finally, for fellow travelers, we’ve posted detailed Camping Logs for Central America, South America, Europe, New Zealand, Australia and Africa. You can visit these pages to see where we’ve stayed and to get detailed information on fuel costs, exchange rates, propane availability and other things for each country we’ve visited. Even as this information inevitably ages with the passage of time, we think much of it will continue to be useful.
We hope you enjoy our travels, and your own as well!
Dayat Aaoua, Morocco
"Once again we are reminded that our travels are made up of encounters, not only with things that can be read about and planned beforehand, but with those serendipitous kinds of things that just happen for no good reason. One thing leads to another, to another, to another, and there is nothing that says the first experience has to have been planned - or even be a positive thing in and of itself. The very wandering nature of our travel leads us to the meetings and encounters and experiences that together form the fabric of our memories"
~ Rick Howe, from Welcome to Wandering
It always starts with people. Faces seen along the roadway; men and women working, carrying, buying, selling, chatting and laughing with each other. Children running and playing, but also taking care of each other, with older ones holding younger ones’ hand or carrying infants, and also working: carrying water and firewood, or small bundles from the market. People of all ages who turn to watch us passing by; the look on their faces asking who are these people and why have they come here. Sometimes they wave at us first and sometimes we wave and smile first and they respond in kind.
Best of all are the ones whose expression as we approach seems hopeful, seeming to ask to be seen, noticed, acknowledged; and then when we do see them and wave to them their faces just explode with delight; laughter and joy and wildly waving hands. Acceptance, welcome, friendliness, connection; all contained in a smile and a wave.
~ Rick Howe, from What We’ll Remember from Zambia
For more travel quotes, visit our We Are page
Website created by: Rick Howe, Text and photos by: Rick & Kathy Howe