A Letter From Some Dudes Who Are Cycling From Alaska to Ushuaia

Traveling is a great way to detach from the ordinariness of regular, boring life; but there’s a huge difference between laying on the beach while sucking coconut juice through a straw, and risking life and limb to go on an unbelievable, globetrotting adventure. My friend Kevin Gridley—who is essentially from a bygone era, and had completed mountaineering school in India by the time he was 23—and his brother Patrick are not the resort types. They’ve spent the last 15 months or so cycling from Alaska to the southern-most part of Argentina, just to say they did it.

It’s been quite a while since I’ve talked to him (unfortunately, Kevin’s bicycle isn’t fitted with some kind of mobile WiFi receiver—not that he would want one if it were a possibility), and frankly, I thought a bear or a wildebeest might have eaten him while he was changing his brake cable, or bike chain, or whatever else on a bike tends to break and snap off after cycling across the entirety of North America. On a whim I Googled “Kevin Gridley Bicycle” and thankfully found this photo blog, which appears to be entirely the work of his brother, who has been documenting their travels for a modest audience on Tumblr. I was incredibly relieved as it was definitive proof that a wild animal had not devoured my good friend, but I was also a little bit pissed off that no one told me about it earlier.

Anyway, I emailed Kevin and Patrick and asked them a bunch of questions about their trip. Below is a slightly edited letter that Patrick wrote to me while they were somewhere in Argentina. It’s an exhilarating read.

If you’re looking to scratch your adventure itch, you should enter this Costa Rican getaway giveaway we’re putting on with our friends at Cayman Jack.

Riding through the countryside around Medellin.

Patrick,

I am lucky to be writing this to you less than twenty-four hours from my last shower. That’s an uncommon situation for us, and I would have to admit that we average about one shower per week, sometimes less than that. I must say, we look and smell the part of the traveling cyclist most of the time.

Deciding to do this trip was pretty simple. Kevin and I went on a bike ride together about four years ago, from Buenos Aires up to La Paz, Bolivia—which is a roughly 2,800km journey. It was great fun and it was also really easy and straightforward. Since then, we have wanted to do something bigger, and what we are on now is the longest overland route in the world. About two years ago we spent Christmas together, saw we might have the money and the time to do Alaska to Ushuaia, shook hands, and that was that.

When we talk about this to people, they usually respond in one of two ways. One group says we’re crazy. The other is very interested in the workings of the trip: the logistics, time, money, bike issues, etc. What we try to get across to everyone, regardless of how they feel about the journey, is how relatively easy it is to do something like this. You need a little bit of money, a chunk of free time, a bike, a tent, and the desire. It’s a beautifully simple way to get from one place to another, and part of the reason for us doing this is to demonstrate that, to ourselves and hopefully to others.

The biggest challenge would have to come down to crossing the Darien gap. It’s the only point on this trip where there is no road, so getting from Panama to Colombia required some creative thinking. We began by taking an eight-hour ride down the rugged, isolated coast of Panama, to the last town in the country.  Our target was Cartagena, Colombia, but first we had to get from one country to the next. The boat ride the next day was not long, but it was wet. The boat, loaded insanely with people and gear (and our bikes on top of everything), was in perpetual danger of being swamped—but eventually it got across the sea to the first town in Colombia.

Capurgana, a quiet border town, was said to be a port where people could head out to many other points on along Colombian coast at all times—but the instant we arrived, we were greeted by a fellow telling us we wouldn't be leaving for at least a week. No one was going anywhere. This was hard to believe, but apparently a strike had begun hours before we arrived. The people of this area were petitioning the government for reliable water and electrical access, and they were doing so with a very effective blockade. Hundreds of tourists were trapped alongside us. It was difficult to even find food, let alone get messages to the outside world or imagine getting ourselves out. But we heard of a town over the hill where sailboats sometimes left for longer runs, to Cartagena and the like, so we hiked across and talked to anyone we could find about any boat that might be going anywhere away from our strike-ridden purgatory.

In the end, we got word of one tiny sailboat leaving in a few days with just enough space for us. We had hoped to get out earlier, but wound up taking the boat when it appeared to be literally the only way out of Dodge. No form of transportation was leaving from our town, so we had to manhandle our bikes and our gear up over this incredibly muddy, slippery trail to get onto the boat. It took about five hours to move our stuff.  As if that wasn’t shitty enough, a bunch of locals pulled up and said if we left before an agreement with the government was reached they would respond severely, by burning our possessions and whatnot. It was the most upfront threat that we witnessed throughout our time on lockdown—otherwise the strike was peaceful, with a noisy, party-ish air. Clearly, the mood had changed.

A few hours later, word came down that we could head for open water. The crossing took a couple of days, and it was choppy in places… but immensely enjoyable. Getting between these two countries, and back out to a place connected by road with the rest of the world, was the only situation in which we didn't feel in control of our own destinies. Every other point on the journey is simply a road that needs riding.

A great thing about traveling in this way is meeting a whole range of people, from all walks of life. Way up there on the interesting scale was Klaus, a German dude we met in the middle of the Salar de Uyuni. He’s out riding on the umpteenth cycling trip of his life, doing Alaska to Ushuaia and taking the scenic route along with that. He has ridden practically all over the world. Russia, Europe, North and South America—I cannot recall all the places. Many of the cyclists we’ve met on our trip make a great first impression, but this guy was extra special. He rides with a fold-out chair and a bottle of fine rum. He has piles of gear, is unconcerned with speed, and loves meeting other cyclists. Klaus is funny and speaks great English. He works as a computer programmer in the banking sector and apologized for the financial crisis. He slapped a sticker with his website onto my bike, has a license plate from Alaska on the back of his bike, and considers himself a "professional" rider—in that he's on the bike for eight or more hours a day. Great fun, great guy. We may run into him again farther south; I certainly hope so.

A coffee break on the Oregon Coast.

The scariest incident occurred when we were riding around a city in Ecuador. The hills in the Andes are intense, to say the least, and we were just about to head down about a two-kilometer downhill in heavy traffic when Kevin's brakes broke. At that point, we were surrounded by concrete, pavement, and metal, with no way to stop—while increasing speed all the time. The hill in question is bigger, steeper, and longer than anything in Toronto. What happened next is a fantastic example of quick thinking—Kevin crashed his bike on purpose.  The harm done was surely far less than it would have been at the bottom of the hill.

The times we feel like giving up are few, and generally fleeting. It happens sometimes that you just have about five problems with your bike in an hour or two. So you have to stop, and fix, and stop, and fix, and you have so much to time to think about how much fun you are not having. But thankfully this hasn’t happened too often, and once things are back to normal and the world is flying by under your feet, all the reasons we're doing this come flooding back.

At this point, my legs are strong enough to go more than 200 km in a day on a heavy bicycle, but the rest of my body is good for almost nothing else; running, jumping, climbing stairs, playing sports. The only thing I'm in shape for is biking.

Our timing and journey has been flexible to say the least. We have been lucky to meet up with our family a few times on the trip, but otherwise have had no appointments we've needed to keep. This is a great way to travel in general, and on the bike it is almost a necessity, since one aspect of traveling this way is that it’s incredibly difficult to say how long it will take to get from A to B. We ought to be able to make it to the bottom of Argentina in January or February. It’s both exciting and sobering to realize that our goal is so near.  For ages, it’s been little more than a concept; now that we’re in Argentina, it is very real.

I absolutely would recommend others to try an adventure like this. One of the things we are trying to show, to ourselves and whoever else will listen, is how easily one can get around under one's own power. It’s easier than you think.