I started getting drawn into Latin America after living in Costa Rica. Beginning Spanish from broken sentences and slowly being able to talk with locals, the scenes that tourists miss began to surface — the fruit stand at the back of the alley, beans-and-rice from a market stall, the rainy-season blackouts, the dogs that come over when you walk past at night. The texture of daily life builds up, and a country's outline finally appears. I started this blog to keep some of that.

"Camino Libre" is Spanish for "free road." Trips that follow a free, unplanned route — rather than a fixed itinerary or checklist — tend to bring something back with them. Tourist sites are great for what they are, but I want to also keep what's between them on this site: small eateries, snippets of conversation, the shape of a mountain seen from a moving bus.

From Costa Rica as a base I've covered nine Latin American countries: Nicaragua, Mexico, Panama, El Salvador, Belize, Chile. I spent two weeks circling Mexico to walk the ancient Maya sites, and stayed with a local family in revolutionary Nicaragua. In Asia I've covered Taiwan, and in Japan I keep riding — Hokkaido three times by SR400, car and XSR900, totaling 2,400 km. Coastal roads, mountain passes, straight roads that seem to go on forever — there are sights you only catch by riding through them.

This site is organized into four big strands: ① Country journals (9 Latin American countries, Hokkaido, Taiwan), ② Gear notes (touring, camping, long-haul flights, hotel-stay tips abroad), ③ Drinks log (sake, whisky, rum), and ④ Latin America news (commentary centered on health, welfare and social protection, grounded in local primary sources). Travel and life come only from places I've actually been to, gear I've used and drinks I've had; the news is built on facts and sources rather than translation — a line I try not to cross.

"Trips you don't over-plan tend to be the most interesting ones" — that's roughly the philosophy underneath this site. If any of it gives someone's next trip a small nudge, that's plenty.

While I was living in Costa Rica, I had the chance to work with stroke patients whose walking ability was impaired. The local hardware stores didn't carry orthotic parts, and a publicly funded brace took half a year to arrive — that reality became the starting point of my research. After returning to Japan, I researched the public funding system for assistive devices (the mechanism by which orthotic and prosthetic devices are made available to those who need them) and earned a PhD in Health Sciences. The years I spent in clinical practice as a physical therapist, and the view of disability policy that comes into focus through a concrete object like a brace — that perspective probably colors this blog too. The brace I built by hand in that small town is described in Costa Rica Stories #8. That same lens — assistive devices and disability policy — runs straight into the Latin America news commentary I recently started, on themes like disability pensions, health systems and national care systems.