Flavors and Silences Along the Way

The Kitchen Travels With Us

Today I want to answer a question someone recently asked me, one that perhaps you’ve wondered about too: “So, what do you eat while you travel?”

Food has been an important part of planning our Journey from the very beginning because both Martín and I love cooking and good food. As you know, I love stories, and today, when I sat down to write to you, I found myself wondering how far back I needed to go to remember when I first started cooking.

I don’t come from a family of cooks. I wish I could say that I grew up cooking beside my mother, but she hated cooking!

She always told me she cooked because she had no choice, but from a very young age I discovered that my friends’mothers actually cooked, and each of them had special dishes to prove it. My mother, on the other hand, was an expert at opening cans. Of course, she would scold me every time I made that comment. I should clarify that we never went hungry under her care, but she never made anything more sophisticated than spaghetti with tuna or a bread-and-egg casserole.

When I left home at twenty-two and began living on my own, I felt an urgent need to learn, and I have never stopped learning… until now, when Martín has taken over.

I have always loved experimenting, trying new recipes, inviting friends over, and cooking for my family. I use social media almost exclusively to look for recipes. Martín grew up beside me in the kitchen. I put a little stool there so he could reach the counter, and that was where he learned to explore the aromas of spices and how to season food.

From the time he was little, I repeated to him, just as I had with his older siblings, that the only way to eat really well was to learn how to cook. His path was similar to mine, and when he left for college, he had to prepare all his own meals.

Living in a city as diverse as New York allowed him to explore the cuisines of many different countries, and he also began cooking for his friends.

Our Kitchen on Wheels

One of the first checklists we made was for our kitchen. Cooking at home is very different from cooking over a campfire or on a gas stove. Over the past six years of my nomadic life, I’ve gradually learned to adapt. However, I generally cooked in Airbnbs and prepared enough food to last several days.

Here’s a video I made in 2021, when the pandemic had just begun and someone asked me the same question: “What do I eat on the road?”

But back then I traveled alone and, to tell you the truth, I ate very simply. For Martín, every meal is a special occasion. It deserves to be celebrated, even if it is something as simple as an arepa.

Before beginning this Journey, one of the first things we did was buy a cast-iron skillet and a gas stove, which became the centerpieces of our kitchen. We carry a wide variety of spices, seasonings, and oils, and little by little we have equipped ourselves with the essentials that fit the limited space we have.

Martín, Camp Chef

On the days we don’t cook, we look for food that can compete in quality and flavor with what we prepare at camp. We generally look for our favorites: Asian food for Martín and seafood for me.

At camp, I now hold the honorable title of “kitchen assistant” and chief dishwasher, which, although not particularly glamorous, is indispensable. In many of the places where we camp, there is no potable water, and sometimes no water at all, not even of questionable quality. So we have to carry it with us or filter it and, above all, guard it as our greatest treasure.

All these limitations require organization at every level: food preparation, waste collection, and washing pots and utensils. Rule number one is: nothing gets wasted. And rule number two: not even a single grain of rice should be left on the plate. We cannot dirty the forest or leave food traces that might attract animals. So, half jokingly, I tell the boys, “Around here, you’re allowed to lick your plate.”

A Kitchen Between Forests and Highways

Refrigeration, or the lack of it, determines how much food we can carry. If we know ahead of time that we will spend several days without leaving camp, we begin with the most perishable food: fish. Next come vegetables and fruit, and finally the nonperishables, including cornmeal for our arepas, rice, lentils, beans, and pasta.

So far, we have eaten wonderfully well. However, we generally try to combine our meals and eat only twice a day instead of three times because it saves us time preparing food and cleaning up. When I get up before sunrise, I have a piece of fruit and a cup of tea.

We Arrived in the Desert

This week we arrived in Southern California on one of the hottest days of the year, when the thermometer reached 48 °C (118 °F) and the air conditioning could barely keep up.

For the first few days, we stayed inside, giving our bodies time to adjust and resting after two and a half months of setting up and breaking down camp almost every day, driving long distances, and discovering extraordinary places. Our Atlas also needed a complete checkup after the nearly 24,000 kilometers (15,000 miles) we have traveled since beginning this Pan-American Journey.

For a few days, I worked on my watercolor of the páramo, hoping somehow to receive a little coolness from the Andean mountains. We turned into nocturnal animals and ventured out of the house only at night to get food. When the temperature finally dropped to a “comfortable” 35 °C (95 °F), we emerged from our dens and began exploring the desert.

Our first expedition was to watch the sunset from the summit of Mount San Jacinto, at an elevation of 2,596 meters (8,516 feet). To reach the top, we took the aerial tramway, whose circular rotating car gave us a 360-degree panorama as we climbed. Although it was over 30 °C (86 °F) at the base, the summit was 10 °C (50 °F), with winds so strong it was difficult to stay on our feet. Fortunately, we brought plenty of warm clothing and enjoyed an incredible view over the valley.

Joshua Tree National Park

Martín and I visited the park on the same day, although at very different times. I left before dawn and arrived at 5:00 a.m. to photograph the sunrise. Martín went around midday and stayed until nightfall to see the Milky Way.

Sunrise

The excitement of watching the sky fill with color made my heart race as I drove along the park’s deserted roads. I had a very specific destination in mind: the Cholla Cactus Garden.

This cactus is commonly known as the “teddy bear cholla” because, from a distance, it looks plump and soft. But that softness is only an illusion. Its stems are covered by a dense layer of spines with an extraordinary design. Its segments detach extremely easily when they come into contact with something. When the spines penetrate the skin, tiny microscopic barbs grip the tissue, making them very difficult and painful to remove.

This mechanism also helps the plant reproduce, since the detached segments can take root and grow into new plants.

The Joshua Trees

Once the sun came up, I continued exploring the park to observe the Joshua trees. They look like trees, with their thick trunks and long branches crowned with leaves, but they are actually yuccas and are related to agaves. Their pointed leaves spread outward in rosettes, from which their white flowers and fruits emerge.

They grow very slowly. During their early years, they grow as a single stalk, gaining only a few centimeters each year. Branches begin to develop after flowering.

During my first visit to the park, in March 2021, I was incredibly lucky to find a Joshua tree in bloom. They do not flower every year and, when they do, blooming generally occurs between February and April, depending on factors such as rainfall and temperature. Cold winter temperatures also play an important role in the flowering process.

Of the countless Joshua trees I saw in the desert, only one had flowers. Now, in August 2026, the few flowers I found were already withered.

California Fan Palms

These incredible palms are also native to this region and grow in oases, where they have access to groundwater that rises through fractures in the Earth. They need a great deal of water and draw it from the reserves accumulated underground.

Their roots form dense networks around the oases. They can grow to nearly thirty meters tall, and when their leaves dry, they do not always fall away as they do in other palm species. Instead, they remain attached to the trunk, creating a thick skirt that accumulates as the palm grows.

When clustered together, they form veritable walls of vegetation, creating their own habitat and sheltering numerous species of birds, bats, and insects.

This layer of dry leaves provides shelter and insulation around the trunk, although it can disappear during floods or fires. Mature palms are surprisingly resistant to fire, and fires can even help their regeneration by removing some of the vegetation that competes with young palm seedlings for sunlight and space.

My walk through the desert was unforgettable. When I reached the oasis, I was surprised to hear birdsong for the first time in several months. Until then, all I had heard was the wind.

But there, I could feel life.

Joshua Tree at Night — Martín

When I think of stunning natural beauty, I often first think of the mountains. The lush rolling green mountain ranges of Colombia were the first mountains I have a memory of, so filled with life they burst at the seams. When I started traveling and exploring more of the world, the places I always dreamt of seeing were the wild jungles of central Africa and Southeast Asia, the rainforests of the Pacific Northwest, and the vast boreal forests of North America and Asia, however, the desert never really had much of an appeal to me when compared to all the other beautiful places on Earth. What is a desert if not the absence of life, an environment that punishes life for even daring to try? 

Arriving at Joshua Tree, what greeted me wasn’t the deadly sterile environment that I had imagined, but a grove of the beautiful California fan palms. Crowded together like ants converging over a fallen Cheeto, the desert oasis was the largest natural green space I had seen in Southern California. 

As I continued walking through the trail, what shook me was the noise, or the complete absence of it: not a bird, not a plane, not even another person passing by. Never in my life had I actually experienced what a true deafening silence was. Sitting by a shaded rock, below the blistering sun, the only thing I could hear was my breath, and that’s when I noticed, not a foot away from me was a little white reptile. Staring right at me was a zebra tailed lizard, a couple of inches long, and white like the rocks and sand underneath it, yet almost as soon as I had noticed it, it scurried away from sight.

Under another rock I saw some whiskers sticking out, only for a little desert mouse to poke its head out from under it. Much like your eyes get used to the light in a dark room, the more you sit in the silence and stillness of the Mojave, the more the lifelessness seems to be merely a front for the diverse ecosystem that calls the desert its home.

While in a forest or rainforest you can sit and practically watch a National Geographic documentary in every little corner, to appreciate the beauty of the desert it takes more patience and stillness. When you look up at the Mojave night sky, and let your eyes learn to follow the shooting stars, discovering the little intricacies of the cloudy silhouettes of the Milky Way, a desert requires dedication. Being in a seemingly desolate and arid landscape that bridges the heavens and the Earth, few places on Earth so effortlessly put you in your place. We’ve seemingly tamed nature but we are as frail as the desert mouse hiding away from the sun, both vulnerable to the tides and whims of the Earth.