I’m Simon Jackson, a traveller and writer with family roots in Colombia and Central America. Over the years I’ve combined long journeys — from the Pan American Highway to Brazil’s World Cup — with diary moments and deeper reflections on the places and people I’ve encountered.

At the 2014 World Cup in Cuiabá — Colombia v Japan, with borrowed hats and flags from Colombian fans.

About This Blog

This blog began in 2018, when I travelled for a year through South America. At first it wasn’t designed for the wider world at all — it was a diary so my father could follow our route while caring for my mother, who had dementia. He kept a big map pinned to his door, tracing our journey through Patagonia, the Andes, and beyond. The posts gave him something to focus on and gave me a way to share each step of the road.

The 2018 trip was also a turning point for me: a career break after a major project delivery, and a chance to fulfil a lifetime ambition of travelling the Pan American Highway overland. We rented our house to help fund the year (though taxes and storage quickly ate into the budget). Overland, we completed the stretch from Ushuaia at the tip of Argentina to Cartagena in Colombia — deserts, mountains, rainforests, and everything in between. Since then, I’ve continued northwards, covering Panama City to Mexico City, and the ambition remains to complete the route in full.

But my connection to Latin America goes back much further. My mother was born in Bogotá, and her parents lived for many years in Colombia, El Salvador, and Guatemala. Family stories — of border crossings, political upheavals, and natural disasters — were part of the backdrop to my childhood. My mother’s older sister often spoke of Hurricane Hattie in 1961, which devastated Belize and nearby regions, a story so powerful that even my wife’s mother remembered it. My grandfather is buried in the Central Cemetery in Guatemala City, alongside his second wife — a lasting marker of how deeply my family history is tied to the region.

When I first travelled to Colombia in 1989, visiting Bogotá, Cartagena, Popayán, San Agustín, and the road south to Ecuador, the country was scarred by violence, often tense, but unforgettable. That journey left me with a grounding that later visits could build upon. There were other visits along the way, including Brazil during the 2014 World Cup, when I reached Brasília, Rio de Janeiro, Salvador, and even Cuiabá. Later, in 2018, I added São Paulo, Curitiba, Porto Alegre, Belém, Recife/Olinda, and the beaches near Natal and Fortaleza, returning also to Rio, Brasília, and Salvador. By then I had visited almost every World Cup host city — a rare claim. Combined with two visits to Rio Carnival, it gave me a unique cross-section of Brazil’s vast geography and culture.

Later travels built on those foundations. I returned to Colombia in 2022, Mexico in 2023, and Central America in 2024 and 2025. Not every journey was overseas: in 2021, just months after my father died and as England emerged from Covid lockdowns, I walked the Pilgrims’ Way from London to Canterbury. A private blessing in the Cathedral crypt — though I am not religious — was unexpectedly moving, a reminder of how travel, history, and loss often intersect. In 2025 I also returned to the Southern Cone, revisiting Patagonia’s glaciers and trekking routes, circling back to Rio, and spending time once more in Buenos Aires and Santiago — a loop that reminded me why these places remain endlessly rewarding, but also how visible the marks of climate change have become on the landscapes.

By 2024, hosting costs and tired formatting meant I had to choose: abandon the blog or reinvent it. I chose reinvention. I began rewriting and restructuring, creating broader theme pages — on colonial cities, archaeology, treks, rivers — that pull the diary entries into something more lasting. Along the way I learned the nuts and bolts of SEO and design and reshaped the site into something that could stand up in the wider world of travel writing.

This isn’t a guidebook or a checklist blog. Its purpose is to share experiences with those who are interested, and to support my son as he builds his own online language business. What sets it apart, I hope, is not just the routes or the photographs but the attempt to understand what makes a place tick: for example how Mayan women in Guatemalan markets make ends meet, why colonial cities reflect both splendour and inequality, or how politics and economics shape daily life. My background in finance and interests in history and politics helps me connect cause and consequence, past and present.

If no one reads it, then what’s the point? But if even a few find value in seeing travel as part of a larger story, then it’s worth every word.