In the US choices are fairly straightforward depending on how you want to travel and park for the night. Campgrounds with electrical water and sewage hookups are common and roads are smooth enough that to hang utilities under your van, propane water or sewage tanks for instance, need not be very limiting. Even in Mexico you can expect to find campgrounds that offer these facilities, more or less efficiently across much of the country. Argentina is famous for inexpensive, $5 -$10 a night full service municipal campgrounds as Argentines love to camp. So in some places you can camp in organized campgrounds but these facilities are rare.
Part of the pleasure of RV travel is the independence it confers, the ability to carry your customs and your preferred foods and culture with you instead of having to adapt to hotels and public spaces all the time. But to do that you need to find the correct balanced simplicity and ease of maintenance. We do it by eliminating potential sources of friction.
Instead of convenient inline water filters we use a clunky but effective Berkey water purifier with long use charcoal filters that can be scrubbed clean from time to time. It requires us to transfer water back and forth but it needs no frequently replaced filters. We fill our 30 gallon (105 liter) water tank with potable water which we usually have to pay for but we still run it through the Berkey before drinking it.
But as usual the ideal energy solution doesn’t exist as we require huge amounts of electricity to operate our home on wheels. Lithium batteries help as they store lots of energy but generating electricity requires an expensive grid to keep our home powered. That’s one reason we have modernized and expanded our solar panel capacity, but that alone isn’t enough.
We have a second alternator to charge our house batteries while we drive, an addition to the van that has been nothing but trouble for us constantly requiring repairs. I regret the $4,000 installation every day. Even now our new Brazilian replacement is holding us up as the mechanic struggles to align the new alternator with our house batteries. I would never do this again preferring to generate less from our main alternator but not having to deal with this bogus installation from Nations in Missouri.
The third choice to charge our batteries is plugging into shore power, which you do in the States at a campground without a second thought. In Latin America campground shore power is available but usually it’s pretty crappy and the reason is campground owners don’t take it seriously and spend no money to install decent systems. In the photo taken in Chetumal I have deployed our home made ground to allow our system to work, as grounding in Mexico tends to be a rather vague concept. The 15 amp plugs are your basic household outlets. I checked this outlet and the meter showed no ground so I plugged mine in. The outlet under earth would take our power cord.
Forget 30amp plugs as outdoor installations will melt if you try to run an appliance off a campground system. Early on in our travels we naively tried and piped circuit breakers everywhere. In one campground in Nicaragua we actually melted a plug. Grounding will be sketchy and wiring is frequently too wispy to carry amperage. Here in Argentina I had our portable voltage converter and protect it from the rain in Jujuy Province.
I know the engineers who seek perfection in all things will dream up circuits and systems to overcome but every single thing you bring will break. My goal is function through simplicity. Thats one reason we have no water heater. If you want hot water aboard GANNET2 use the electric kettle to heat it. We have no shower preferring to use an outdoor camp shower or a campground shower or a gas station facility. Our van has never had signs of damp mold or condensation inside. Ever.
One other thing about shore power is that southern South America uses 220 volts. Once you leave Ecuador it’s 220 volts all the way south, so we have had an automatic voltage converter installed. Using an adapter we can plug into any outlet now and the magic box will control the input to the charger.
Lastly the toilet, the subject never brought up in polite society. Skip this part if you get queasy as this is all the details you may not want to hear. We love traveling with our Thetford Curves porta potty as it saves us using public facilities which range from weird to revolting across different countries. In decent hotels and in shopping malls and upscale restaurants toilets are as you find at home but in gas stations and roadside restaurants they can be and usually are fairly disastrous depending on how developed a country you are in (Brazil Chile and Argentina are mostly very good) but having your own loo is best I’m sure you’ll agree. We also like having a compartment for all that we have been married for three decades. Shitting in your living room does not make a camper can feel like home in our opinion. Your may vary but that’s up to you, so you will get more space in your camper if you don’t have a dedicated compartment.
The first rule in Latin America is put the toilet paper in the trash can provided. (Suriname was the only country that flushes toilet paper that we have come across). Toilet paper is never flushed! Critically important! A free public dump station in Wisconsin:
The second rule is don’t expect many dump stations. They exist but are rare. Intercity bus depots have them if you have a dump system and can get permission to dump there but having a black tank in Latin America means you’ll be dumping roadside which is gross or bucketing the contents of your black tank by hand into campground toilets (please separate your paper!). Either way I prefer a five gallon porta potty for ease of emptying at campgrounds or in roadside toilets. Wild camping I have dug holes to empty it but it takes an awful lot of digging and very slow pouring to leave no trace. The perfect solution in Nicaragua, a vault toilet in an outhouse:
I am not a fan of composting toilets for Latin American travel because you aren’t composting you are simply shitting in a bag and then dumping a bag into a dumpster or trash can to be disposed of by a fairly chaotic trash collection system. Furthermore you will not find dedicated compost bags, coconut coir or other fancy supplies required to operate fancy toilets. Some people do it bystopping at sawmills to pick up sawdust or buying kitty litter as best they can. I like simplicity and my porta potty with no paper in it will clog no toilets.
Bahia Tenacatita Mexico:
Argentine beach at sunset:
