You are about to read the story of young man who spent 8 months traveling on a motorcycle from the top to the very bottom of South America. There are countless people, all with their own stories, who have done the exact same thing. Undoubtedly, there will be many more.
But this is my story.
Before diving into the journey, it’s important to understand how I even ended up in Bogotá, Colombia to kick off my 11,000 mile motorcycle journey.
It was a wild ride and in hindsight, arguably just as formative as my journey through South America.
I Lost My Job
In August 2012, I was fired from a job that I hated at a Seattle-based start-up company that was spiraling downwards. It was a massive blow to my ego. I had never been fired before or since and this was completely out of the blue.
But once the sting wore off, a sense of liberation and confidence began to creep back in. I no longer had to stare at spreadsheets all day. I no longer had to deal with a passive-aggressive boss. I was no longer wasting days of my life in a windowless office.
As the next few months passed, I tried to figure out what my next steps were. I wanted to travel again but I was broke after spending my savings to survive (rent, bills, groceries, etc.). Through time I was able to pick up one side job after another. Eventually I had five separate bar/nightclub jobs as a bartender, barback, server, and security.
With a misplaced need to get a more stable job, I applied for several corporate sales jobs in the hope that one of them would take a chance on me; a 24 year old with a college degree, little white collar experience and a general disdain for corporate America. In few timelines is that a good match but we pressed on.
During this period, I watched the film 180° South and the famous TV series Long Way Round. The former is a documentary retracing a famous journey to Patagonia and in turn it becomes its own epic journey. The latter is a show that followed the famous actor, Ewan McGregor and his actor friend, Charley Boorman, as they rode their BMW motorcycles from London to New York.
Ever since returning the year before from a 9 week backpacking trip through Europe and Morocco, my desire to keep traveling could not be turned off. Now, with the adventures of 180° South and the Long Way Round bouncing around my mind like a pinball caught between bumpers, it became incessant. I couldn’t switch it off.
But again, I had no money.
I tried to convince myself that I could save up a decent chunk in a couple of years if I worked hard at the hypothetical sales that I didn’t yet have. And perhaps I could have. But that was so far away that it seemed unreachable. Frankly, I didn’t want to wait that long.
Big Decisions
And then one December morning I made a drastic decision.
I woke up to go to my third and final interview for an outside sales job selling payroll and tax services to small businesses. No disrespect to those sales people, but the job sounded about as exciting as listening to a math lecture in a foreign language on the radio. If anything, I give them more respect for being able to tolerate it.
But I couldn’t do it.
Instead of getting dressed and heading out the door, I called the office, thanked them for the opportunity, and told the rather surprised secretary that I wasn’t coming. I knew that within a couple of months I would be completely miserable. It was not for me and I didn’t want to waste anyone’s time, particularly my own.
But now what? What the hell was I going to do? Keep living paycheck to paycheck while working 6 nights a week? Maybe. I was happier. But I knew it wasn’t sustainable and I still desperately wanted to travel.
Despite my economically logical decision thrown out the window, I still felt a weight of expectation lift off of my shoulders. It granted me freedom and space to make more drastic decisions. To act upon ideas that were generally out of bounds to most.
Then it came.
It was mid-December of 2012, a week after my 25th birthday. I made the decision that I was going to ride a motorcycle through South America. And I was going to start in January of 2014. Which I knew was sooner than it sounded.
That’s a nice idea but again, how am I going to pay for this?!
Through enough online research, I had determined that my quickest route to traveling would be seasonal work. I had spent weeks researching options, timelines, locations, earnings potential, but it was just a jumbled mess of information. However, it was as if I simply needed to make the decision first and then the path would reveal itself. And it did.
My plan became the following:
- Work my 5 bar jobs until summer (January – May)
- Hop on Alaskan fishing boat and work the salmon season (June -September)
- Sugar beet harvest in northwest Minnesota (September – November)
- Commercial Christmas tree decorating in Omaha, Nebraska (November – December)
- Fly to South America (January 2014)
Commercial Salmon Fishing
I will do my best to keep the story of my Alaska fishing adventure to a short synopsis, as the detailed anecdotes and hairy details are too many for this introduction and will come in later writings.
In brief, despite being a land-legged greenhorn, I survived four harrowing months on one of the fastest, hardworking boats in the entire fleet – during a record year. It was manic.
Hired as a deckhand and the cook, I was tasked with preparing three meals a day, including all clean up and buying of food and supplies when back on land. Many a days were spent running between the galley and back deck, putting my fishing gear on, hauling in a load of salmon, taking off my gear, and resuming my cooking duties; only to be repeated over and over and over until it was all done for the day.
Add in the daily jelly fish stings to my eyes and face, vitriolic yelling from the captain, 15-20 hour workdays, trying to work while seasick, splitting my face and head open several times, neuropathy in my hands and feet, and you begin to flirt with the breaking point of your mind and body.
But I never lost sight of why I was out there.
Part of it was to experience the wild of Alaska and live out a misplaced childhood fantasy of Alaska’s Deadliest Catch, but most of it was so that I could pay for my adventure through South America. Each time I felt the walls of the experience closing in on me, I would picture myself riding my motorcycle through the Andes or the Bolivian salt flats or some other exotic conjured up image.
And it helped.
It still completely sucked at times and I wanted to go home, however, my purpose would become clearer again and my chosen reality accepted as the process to get where I wanted.
Eventually, I made it through what is still the hardest and most dangerous work I have done to date. I had a check bigger than my entire previous years earnings and thus more than enough to fund my South American adventure.
Would I do it again? Yes, but for a different captain; someone less of a insecure sociopath. And perhaps if my body wasn’t already such a mess from rugby injuries and over-training.
Sugar Beet Harvest
Admittedly, albeit not surprisingly, after a brutal season as an Alaskan fisherman, I wasn’t all that thrilled to go straight into six weeks of working a sugar beet harvest in the farthest reaches of northwestern Minnesota. But I was committed to it.
I wanted to pad the bank account a little more, gain another novel experience, and follow through on my word to my friends and now workmates, Tommy and Joe, who were also preparing for their own international adventures to southeast Asia and New Zealand, respectively.
In late September, the three of us arrived in Crookston, Minnesota towing a 1978 Mallard 5th wheel camper behind a banana yellow Jeep Wrangler that rode like a boat under the weight. The camper was rented from a local Fargo man who had affectionately labeled the camper “The Pussy Catcher.” The sugar beet administrators ordered us to put “The Pussy Catcher” in the large public park – alongside a dozen other rigs that were housing seasonal workers.
With the harvest running 24 hours a day, we were given the unpleasant 8PM-8AM shift. To prepare our sleep cycles, we played countless games of Catan, the famous German board game.
Once the harvest started, our job was to direct the trucks, take samples, and help run the massive, mechanical dragon-like creature that received the loads of beets and then shot them up a conveyor belt and onto the biggest piles I had ever seen and were only getting bigger by the day.
The job was significantly easier than commercial fishing in Alaska but it was still dirty and a little dangerous with so many trucks, moving machinery, darkness, and flying beets (thus the hard hats).
With our latitude so far north, the cold, wet, and blustery autumn weather came sooner than expected. With about two weeks remaining, mud, rain, and lip-chapping wind arrived as the newly changed leaves seemed to rush to the ground. The dusty existence became an untenably muddy one. Trucks were getting stuck in the fields and our morale was slumping down with them.
Eventually, the migrant laborers (us), were released from servitude. The weather was too foul for this many people on the payroll and the local workers were all that was needed.
While thankful for such a strange inclusion into the American sugar industry, we were giddy to get out of the stifling little town of Crookston and no longer live in the ailing “Pussy Catcher.” With a leaking roof and faulty heater, our humble abode had become burdensome and we wanted out.
“Glad to have done it but I won’t be back” exclaimed Joe, as we rode like a boat back to Fargo.
“Yeah no chance,” Tommy and I agreed.
Commercial Christmas Decorator
I was back to work within days of getting back from the sugar beet harvest. This time as a commercial Christmas decorator – a job I had worked once after finishing university.
It payed decently well, the hours weren’t outrageous, I could stay with my family, and I went home with glitter on my pants rather than fish parts or mud. Better yet, my sugar beet brethren, Tommy, got a job with us. And on occasion I got work with my mom, as she was a landscape designer for the same company.
Starting in early November, we decorated malls, banks, insurance companies, and an array other large businesses. The job was straightforward enough regarding the construction of the fake trees. The larger they got, the more complicated and time consuming it became – fluffing and installing hundreds of branches and then lighting it proportionally took a different sort of effort than the previous two jobs.
The actual decoration of the trees was the fun part. It’s an art. And not everyone is good at it. It takes an eye and an understanding of some general principles but once you get them down, it can be a gratifying practice. That’s if there are enough functioning decorations left. At times we were doing our best just to keep a large turd polished.
By the time December came around, every decorator was over Christmas. I mean how could you not be? It’s too much Christmas cheer for too long. Adding to that, the fake trees produced lots of little scratches on your hands and arms. Not all that big of a deal in itself, however, the trees were sprayed with anti-mold chemicals before being shipped from China and it caused rashes on most everyone.
The irony of the experience is that even though I don’t practice any religion never mind decorate my own Christmas tree, I have strong opinions on Christmas decorating. Bad lighting, no flow, poor color schemes, and mindless placement of decorations all agitate me needlessly to this day.
The Obstacle is the Way
It was late January 2013 and my insane idea to ride through South America was about to be actualized. There were still loose ends to tie up but the work was done. A year of utter grinding in some of the most dangerous, extreme, and absurd conditions paved the way to my dream adventure.
Through this process, I expanded my skillset, made new friends, explored new territories, and gained a deeper understanding of different industries and their supply chains.
Would I do it all again? Probably.
Would I have preferred for someone else to pay for it? Sure. It would’ve been a lot easier and way less dangerous and degrading.
However, it was worth the struggle. The adventure through South America was that much more special because I earned it. I needed to pass through moments of hell to live a dream.
And that dream was about to start…
