The Plan
The Plan:
I suppose the best place to start is the plan and what this is all about. While it is constantly evolving, the high-level plan has been stable enough for long enough to commit to articulating it in writing. In short, it’s to drive from the top of North America to the Southern tip of South America in a four-wheel-drive.
The Route:
I’ve chosen to start the trip in Canada for a number of reasons, practical and sentimental. On the practical side, it’s an easy place to buy a car and use as base for my final stage of preparations. Having my sister and partner live there makes it that much easier and also provides me with a nice send off on my first day of the adventure. While Anchorage would have potentially made for a better story in terms of North-South distance, the higher prices of cars that I wanted and lack of friends there made it the less preferred choice.
From here, the route becomes somewhat self-evident. I’ll head south towards Patagonia sticking to Spanish speaking countries. This is largely because I’d like to commit to learning Spanish and complete immersion is the best way I can think to do it. I’ll also avoid a handful of countries because of the local unrest. El Salvador seems an unnecessary risk. Venezuela has political and economic problems that are worrying enough to strike it out as well. Otherwise, the plan is to see as much as I can on the way down. So, the route becomes:
Vancouver
West Coast USA, then inland to Tuscon to cross the border
Mexico
Belize
Guatemala
Honduras
Nicaragua
Costa Rica
Panama
Ferry from Colon in Panama to Cartagena in Colombia to avoid the impassable Darien Gap
Colombia
Ecuador
Peru
Bolivia
Chile all the way to very Southern tip of the continent
Paraguay
Argentina
Uruguay
Back to Buenos Aires to conclude the adventure
The Inspiration:
Inspirations for the trip are numerous:
Ewan McGregor and Charlie Boorman’s Long Way Round and Long Way Down adventures play a significant role. In fact, the original plan for the trip was via motorbike before considering how practical a car is over a motorbike.
I took a three-month trip to South America in 2009/2010 that gave me a real appreciation for the region and left me wanting more.
Hearing of my parent’s overland adventures from London to South-East Asia and London through Africa played a significant role. I’d grown with stories of passing along ‘the hippie trail’ through places like Afghanistan, Nepal, India and Iran and admired their boldness and sense of adventure.
I suppose a bucket list thing for me has always been to be fluent in Spanish and this provides me a great opportunity to get closer to that goal.
Che Guevara’s Motorcycle Diaries certainly contributed.
And finally, perhaps the biggest driver was a promise I made to myself when I was 23. After finishing up 16 months of study and travel through the USA, Europe and Asia with a great group of friends, I assured myself that I wouldn’t let work completely take over my life and that I would have many more big adventures.
Why now:
While there’s never a good time to pack up your life and embark of something foolish like this, the timing now is as good as it’s going to get for me. At 35-years old and single, I figure that it’s better to do now than a little bit down the track when (potentially) a wife and family makes the risks and time away insurmountable problems.
I also came to point with work that was better than it was going to get. After eight years building a series of businesses within the startup and venture capital space across multiple industries, most of them (including my primary role) had reached points of relative stability where there were colleagues that I trusted to continue on the businesses in my absence. I’d done as good a job as I could to make myself redundant and seeing my opportunity, I seized it and told my peers that they’d have to make do without me for a while.
Solo?
Everyone has asked me if I’m traveling solo. The short answer is ‘yes’. The longer answer is ‘not at all’. Within weeks of coming up with the plan, I had already secured my first partner for a segment – Hadyn, also my business partner in our wine business, who would join me from Costa Rica through Colombia.
I also hope that my sister and parents join me for the Chile portion of the journey from Santiago to Patagonia. Time will tell if they join, but I will see how persuasive I can be to secure their participation.
Otherwise, I suspect there are many others that will try to join once they learn of what I’m doing and those that I attempt to coerce into taking some time out to join me. I also suspect that there will be people I encounter along the journey that may want to hitch a ride in my travels south.
So in reality, I think that it will be a mix of solo travel and times where I can share the adventure with friends, old and new. In fact, I hope I do get some time to myself on the drive but I’m trying not to plan too far in advance
Where does it end:
As I write this, I don’t completely know where the finish line is. At the moment, my departure point is a flexible flight out of Los Angeles in the US about four-months after I start. As I see it, there are five options to conclude the journey:
Sell the car in a major city like Buenos Aires (potentially difficult given registration of the car in Canada)
Cross the continent again to Santiago and ship the car back to my sister in Vancouver (also difficult from early investigations into customs rules)
Decide to re-trace my steps and race the car back up to Vancouver to finish where I started (potentially more time consuming than I can afford)
Find a storage facility in Argentina and keep the car there, with a view to picking up this journey again down the track; or
Find some fellow adventurers wanting to do my trip in reverse and do a deal with them to get my car back ‘home’ to Canada
At this stage, I don’t need to decide but I’m happy to have options
