OffMap celebrates one year!

We're looking back and ahead

As OffMap Media – which was born with the start of our trip in December 2024 – turns one, we are looking back on a first, successful year.

In the past twelve months, we rode thousands of kilometers through Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru. We crossed deserts and jungles, and camped many cold nights high up in the Andes.`

We also interviewed hundreds of people, from coca farmers and social leaders to zoo directors and militiamen. We spent countless hours with bureaucrats in hot, humid offices cramped with piles of documents, and as many hours getting our boots dirty in fields or forests, trying to ask the right questions while under attack by mosquitoes.

When we started this project, we thought that few of our ideas would get picked up by established media outlets and that OffMap Media would be the home for much of our work.

But we’ve been caught off guard (pleasantly) by how often editors said yes to our pitches. Sometimes this happens at the last minute, when the story had been slated for you, meaning we had to pause the trip and write a new piece to meet our self-imposed weekly (later biweekly) deadline.

We also learned that this rigid approach was hard to combine with cycling up a mountain every other day.

Publishing on a fixed schedule put us at the mercy of an internet connection, forcing us to hurry through beautiful wilderness to stay longer in dreadful hotels, recommended only by their slow and unreliable (but essential) WiFi.

Then too, we’ve realized that the kind of article that’s right for Al Jazeera or the Guardian, may not work for you. Over time, we’ve seen an OffMap Media reader emerge: someone who wants a first-person story of adventure that also explores broader themes of politics, security, or culture.

We love writing these. They challenge us to reflect and be vulnerable in a way that our work for traditional media does not. But they take time and, often, lead us down rabbit holes of research and debate that we pursue to ends really only reasonable for writing a book.

In other words, as we like to say, this year we realized we’re the kind of people who “slaughter the pig, to only use the tail.”

It’s a terrible business model. And it often results in our best work. We have no intention of changing it.

We can only work like this because of your support.

This year, we used your contributions to cover upfront costs as we reported and wrote. We also invested in a domain name, a camera lens, photo-editing software, and stickers (lots of stickers). Every dollar we got (and much more) went back into this project.

Going forward, we won’t compromise on the depth of our reporting, but we will make some changes in how we publish.

We’ll continue to bring you “Special Reports” – our takes as political and security analysts in the field on big events in the region (like protests protests in Ecuador and the fall of Peru’s President Dina Boluarte). We won’t react to every big piece of news. Rather, when something significant happens in the region, and we can really add to the conversation, we’ll weigh in.

We will also share articles published elsewhere here when they’re out. Everything else we’ll publish in seasons. One per country or region.

The backbone of these will be The Bicycle Diaries, but we’ll also continue to publish interviews in our “In Their Own Words” category, OffMap’s Guide to Camping Cuisine; and exclusive reporting for The Field Dispatch. We’ll also publish more photo series. We invested a lot of time and resources in our photography and photo-editing, and are excited to share more of the final product with you.

Seasons will allow us to maintain the chronology of our trip in connection to what we think are the most important, interesting, and underreported topics in a region. Publishing in seasons means we can focus on reporting when cycling, and on writing when spending longer periods off the bike.

Many of you supported us from the start one year ago, and we are immensely thankful for that. It made this mad project real.

If your annual subscription is about to expire and you want to keep supporting the project, we are very grateful, but we also understand if you can’t. In that case, make sure to actively downgrade your subscription on the Substack website. If not, the paid subscription will renew automatically.

Our upcoming two seasons will focus on Ecuador and Peru. We hope you’ll join us for the ride!

Happy holidays, Anastasia & Douwe