The Long Way Out: An Introduction

Having spent most of the last two years in an office, and the years before that getting a degree that affords me the privilege of spending two years in an office, I have been itching for a bit of a change. This is a dangerous state to be in when Didier comes to visit you for New Year’s Eve. Or any Eve.

It only took a few hours before Didier and I agreed we should ride some mopeds down to a far place, mostly to keep cost down and because I’d never ridden anything other than a bicycle.

One thing led to another though and somehow I’m now 2 weeks away from doing a 2-month tour of South America with two of my best friends Didier and Alex, on some 250cc not-moped dirt bikes that are already waiting for us in Peru. Well we sent a man some money for them.

Ah yes, Alex. He was sitting next to me in the office while I failed to keep the trip a secret, and then invited himself. I said he should come, but bet him he wouldn’t quit his job for it. He handed in his notice the following day. But that was OK, because he met two important requirements for the trip: he doesn’t like offices very much, and there is a part of his brain that is a little bit unhinged.

So that was that, all three of us are jobless starting August.

We will be riding through Peru, Chile, Bolivia, Argentina and Paraguay, trying to cover some of the more desolate parts of the South American continent on bikes that, when you Google them, yield exactly one relevant search result.

The last few months have been spent becoming an expert in everything from arctic sleeping bags to aloe gel. It turns out that if you want to get the right gear without breaking the bank you have to spend literal days on every little bit of kit, reading forum after blog post after review. And then at the end of it the bank is still very much broken.

So we will do some posts where we go through the decisions we made on kit so you don’t have to. Unless you have slightly more or slightly less money than me, in which case everything we have done is irrelevant to you and you’re on your own.

We’ll also take you through the route planning so far (which is either over- or under- done, I’m not quite sure but it’s definitely one of those two) and I’m sure I’ll write at some point about how being able to drop everything to go on a 2-month adventure really is tough and don’t you feel sorry for me.

Anyway, back to the bikes.

The Cross Triton is not something Ewan McGregor would like to be seen on, but it is also not a moped. Toby, the guy who owns Around the Block Moto Adventures in Huanuco, Peru spends his days showing people around the incredible country by dirt bike. I’m sure we’ll tell you more about him once we’ve actually met, but one of the things he does is run a buy-back scheme on these cheap Chinese dirt bikes. You choose your bike, add any extras you want, and he’ll buy it for you, prep it to deal with an adventure, and then transfer it to your name on the day you get to his place in Peru.

The bike is then yours for as long as you want it, but if you bring it back to him in one piece he will buy the bike back off you for about 15 dollars a day depreciation minus damage. This concept, along with no visas or carnets to cross borders, was one of the main reasons we decided to go for the South America trip. It’s a great idea.

I’m going to leave it at that until we’ve actually seen the bikes, because at this point I could just be sending the internet to a man who is very good at convincing you to send him a couple thousand dollars on PayPal.

The Long Way Out?

Unlike almost anyone I meet nowadays, I grew up internationally. By the age of 17 I had lived in 9 countries in Africa, Asia, the Middle East and South America. The thing is, I thought that was normal. All the other kids that I met in the international schools I went to had very similar stories, and similarly adventurous family holidays.

When I lived in Egypt as a kid, we’d do trips in the Western Desert with a few other families on weekends and holidays. The desert gave me the bug for adventure, and I’m afraid this isn’t one you can shake off.

I knew it was a special life, but it never hit home just how special until I caught a glimpse of what most people in the West would consider a normal life. I had never paid a huge amount of attention to making sure I could replicate the life my parents had because I had lived that life without making any effort whatsoever. Of course we’re going to see some lions in the Savannah next weekend, what else would you do?

So I just focused on creating a career that matched what I was academically interested in. But I remember after my first internship in second year of University, alarm bells started ringing. Something was off. And now, four years later, it has hit home just how hard you have to push against the grain if you want to create a life like the one that my parents gave me when I was young.

Once you’re in the rat race that defines life in the West, it’s very difficult to see beyond it. And once you do, you realise you’re in much deeper than you ever thought. This, then, is the start of the Long Way Out.