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When traveling by car in this part of the world, there are some apps that make life easier.
The first is of course the GPS. I don't know how they used to travel with maps and asking which way to go.
I suspect that a path that takes 2 hours would lose 4 hours of time.
With GPS, if we have internet, it's easy but sometimes we don't always have internet to download the way and plans change. We install HERE . It is a free app that allows us to download the map of each country we are going to visit. It is not 100% reliable. Sometimes there are silly things like making us cross a village in the middle because the path is shorter by 500 meters, than taking the national road which is more direct but passes outside the village.
That's how we got on a dead end road for our van, it was so narrow. To turn back we took 1 hour it had to be very DES-PA-CI-TO. The reality is that not even Google is very reliable in these remote areas. There are times when the road that sends us doesn't exist because the route is poorly drawn on the map. Still, it's better with Here than with a map!
The other essential app for us is called IOverlander
It works without internet, just with the gps, it is powered by travelers from all over the world. And it has everything: campsites, wild camping sites, road condition warnings, restaurants where it is possible to park, mechanics, corrupt police,… It already has a lot of places and has incredible tips. From laundries with excellent Wi-Fi, roads in the middle of resorts where you can even enter without paying, cafes with great prices and good food, free parking. And when using it, we can update with our comments and give some tips.
Third: Couchsurfing
Couchsurfing is a community I belong to since 2007, the first time I used it was when I went to study in Barcelona and I wanted to meet people but I didn't know where to start.
Then I received some Couchsurfers at my house and it was a unique experience. Until I got to Mexico and started using it to stay at people's houses. I've always been a bit wary of using it because I didn't want people to feel like we were just looking for a free place to stay! But on our trip we really wanted to meet people from the places where we were, we wanted the trip to be very rich and when we started to stay in couchsurfings we realized that it was the right way. Extremely friendly people, curious about the world, who share many ideals with us. Here just say where we want to stay, when, and in our case choose a place that allows animals. Read the profiles, choose the person we identify with and place the order. In Mexico it's been relatively easy, of course in some more touristy areas like playa del carmen it was more difficult but we didn't try too much in advance either.
Then the normal and that we also used: AirBnB, Booking and of course all the social media apps so we are always up to date.
