Source: Taylor Daily Press
Taylor businessman travels to South America by motorcycleTaylor citizens may know Josh Richards as the owner of the Woodsman tree cutting service, a business that has enjoyed local success since it was established in 1984, but less known is his nomadic side.
Richards, 38, is arguably one of the most well-traveled citizens of East Williamson County, having taken last year a road trip by motorcycle nearly 13,000 miles through 12 countries in Central and South America.
While Richards took the occasional break from his excursion, returning home to check on his business, his wife and son, the trip took a total of about three months to complete. Riding a BMW GS 1200 with only the barest essentials on the rear seat and in his saddlebags, Richards traveled south through Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Panama, Columbia, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia and Argentina.
Richards didn’t make it a personal goal to go all the way from Texas to Argentina by land, but rather just had an itch to explore, he said.
“There’s a lot of countries down there I hadn’t seen, like the places I went to look at in Mexico and Guatemala,” Richards said. “I had spent a lot of time in South America on the Amazon anyway.”
Richards grew up with, and still has a passion for the Amazon rainforest. He keeps a boat on the Amazon River and visits from time to time to simply tour its tributaries.
“Just the mystique of it, from being a kid, I just never did get over that interest in it,” Richards said. “I just go exploring around. I run my boat until half my gas is gone, and turn around and go back.”
A self-proclaimed loner, Richards enjoys the remoteness of the rainforest as well as viewing the primitive way of life in which people live, he said.
“The farther you go back into the tributaries, the more primitive the people,” Richards said. “In some places, they have about zero possessions. Their one possession might be a bucket, and they’ll be floating down the Amazon on a raft with their family, with a fire on the raft and bananas and stuff.”
Richards’ trip by motorcycle was a different beast altogether. The weather, as well as the scenery, was always different, he said. In the heat, the cold or the rain, Richards was out riding in the elements.
Still, he saw a “tremendous amount” of the countryside, he said, and met some of the friendliest people he has ever seen.
“I rode through everything — deserts, mountains, tropical rainforests,” Richards said. “I saw a lot of ancient ruins; in Peru, the desert.”
In the rain forest, Richards saw tall bromiliads and orchids riding on the road above the clouds, in near silence.
“You can’t see anything forever it seems like,” Richards said.
The most interesting part of his trip was dealing with the Darien Gap, an 80-mile stretch of undeveloped rain forest and swampland between Panama and Columbia.
“There’s no way to get there by land to Columbia,” Richards said. “That’s the one place I had to put my bike on an airplane and fly to Columbia. That’s the one place you couldn’t go. There’s supposed to be drug runners and bandits in the forest.”
Still, in spite of Columbia’s reputation in the U.S., the country was full of the friendliest people he had ever met, he said. Even the military and police in Columbia were not only tolerant of his presence, but interested in his life in America and his trip.
“The police would pull me over just to talk to me,” Richards said. “I stood out like a sore thumb. The areas that I was interested in were the undeveloped areas, and the more primitive the people were, the more I stood out (with) all the bags on my motorcycle. They wanted to know where I was going, what I was doing, how I got my motorcycle over there.”
Richards stopped at hotels when he could to stay nights, he said, but sometimes he had to rent out rooms in the smaller villages, and once he slept out in the desert.
“It was fine for a while when the sand was still warm, but it got cold about 3:30 a.m. or so,” Richards said. “I just put all my clothes on, my rain suit and everything.”
His wife and son both support his desire to travel, and during his trips he calls home as often as possible. While some might regard Richards as crazy for going to such lengths to take a vacation or to see something new, Richards thinks quite the contrary of his desire for travel.
“It’s hard for me to understand why everybody isn’t doing it,” Richards said. “Standing up on the mountains in the clouds, you thank God you’re able to see this. I’m almost driven to it. It’s not so much a choice.”