Esteban Cairol

8/11/2026

Bringing an Old Travel Blog to WordPress

When I was 21, I set off on a backpacking trip through South America with a friend from my neighborhood. Part of that trip was spent with an educational and cultural expedition called Ruta Inka.

To help me remember the trip (and to keep my family updated on how I was doing) I kept a blog along the way. Even though many of the towns we passed through had no internet access, as soon as I managed to get online I’d upload photos and a summary of the places we’d been.

It was funny that by the end of Ruta Inka, quite a few parents were reading my blog, along with friends and family of my own.

That trip changed my life, but the blog just sat there, untouched since 2008, probably without a single reader left. I didn’t know about WordPress back then, so I wrote everything on Blogger, but for the past few years I’d been meaning to migrate it.

Recently, someone from Ruta Inka reached out to me. As part of their Historical Memory Recovery Campaign, they’re looking for “ex-ruteros” willing to share something about the expedition they took part in: videos, documentaries, photos, news clippings, or any material that could contribute to the campaign.

So I decided this was the right moment to finally migrate from Blogger to WordPress. And while I was at it, I took the opportunity to do something else I’d wanted to do for years: vectorize the posts from my trip, so I could ask questions of this blog full of memories that aren’t always so clear to me anymore.

Fortunately, most of the work was already done. A few months ago I’d built a plugin for one of Team51 partners that lets you vectorize posts and interact with them through a chat block.

For now, since I’m not yet sure what the costs will look like, /chat isn’t available from the menu 🤫 however, the new blog is fully migrated and up and running here: https://rutainka2008.wordpress.com/

Spoiler alert: it’s all in Español. Hehe. But translating the content into English is next on my list.