UT GRADS PEDAL FOR 14,000 MILES
Now back in Austin after quite a pedal, they’re busy creating documentary film and books about the adventure.
Four bicycles. Fourteen countries. More than 14,000 miles.
When Thomas Allison, Dyar Bentz, Riley Engemoen and Ricardo Palomares dipped the tires of their bikes into the ocean at Ushuaia in Tierra del Fuego on March 18, it marked the end of a 21-month adventure that took them from the edge of the Arctic Circle to the southernmost city on the planet.
Along the way, the four University of Texas graduates and storytellers survived armed robberies, slept anywhere they could pitch a tent or hang a
hammock, ate hundreds of cans of refried beans and, one sleepy morning, woke up in the middle of a Zumba exercise
class in Guadalajara. Now they’re creating a doc- umentary film and two books
about their adventure, which they dubbed Pedal South.
Bentz, 27, rode a bike from Austin to Anchorage, Alaska, in 2010 as part of Texas 4000, a group ride that raises money for cancer research. He wanted to make a film about life on a bicycle. He met Allison, 27, Engemoen, 26, and Palomares, 34, through a documentary-making program at UT called Students of the World. Together, they hatched the idea of a self-supported cycling trip that stretched from Alaska to Argentina.
They raised $43,000 through a Kickstarter campaign, landed
another $20,000 in corporate sponsorships and gear, and collected $12,000 in donations from social media followers. They pitched in about $10,000 of their own money, planned a rough route and packed their camera gear and notepads. On June 12, 2014, in Prudhoe Bay, Alaska, they took the first pedal strokes on heavily loaded Surly Long Haul Trucker bicycles.
Those early weeks took a toll.
“Ricardo and I struggled the most at the beginning,” Engemoen said. “We didn’t train at all. At the very begin- ning, we had this moment where we said, ‘Did we (mess) up? Is this a bad idea?’ It took a couple of days to settle in.”
Early on, they slogged down rugged gravel roads as the
occasional passing truck sprayed them with mud. The sun shone all night, but they crawled into their sleeping bags after pedaling all day, exhausted. The days started rolling over on themselves.
Some nights, they slung their hammocks from trees or rocky cliffs, or laid tarps down in the dirt. Before the trip ended, they’d slept in fire stations, churches, schools, train stations and abandoned buildings, beneath bridges, on a soccer field, in a hospital visiting room and inside the interrogation room of a police station.
They pushed ever southward, averaging 50 or 60 miles a day. On their longest day they covered more than 100 miles; the shortest ended at 10 miles, in a sandstorm.
In Canada, bears tore their food supplies to shreds. In the United States, passers-by threw stuff at them as they pedaled past. Their hair grew long, their beards scruffy. Showers were few and far between. Palomares is from Mexico and speaks Spanish; the others learned it as they went.
Each had a favorite moment.
For Palomares, the expedition’s film producer and filmmaker, it came in Chile, amid the vastness of the Patagonia region. He remembers a town next to a lake, surrounded by volcanoes. “The greenery. I’ve never seen anything like that,” Palomares said. “And all the virgin, untouched land. The people are so nice and hospitable. The way of life is slower.”
Engemoen, also a filmmaker, puts British Columbia at the top of his list. “It felt really empty,” he said. “You could look out on all sides and see no houses, no development — like Colorado but wilder. Wildlife, rivers, pine trees — and 15 bears a day.”
Bentz, the expedition’s writer, liked Costa Rica the best, and can’t shake the image of falling asleep in a hammock strung between palms on a hidden beach. He woke up as moonlight sparkled on the ocean, which had risen with the tide around him. “The water was six different kinds of blue, with giant waves and rocks,” Bentz said.
Allison, the expedition’s still photographer, remembers camping on a beach in southern Mexico and waking at dawn to snorkel with locals who ran an art collective. “More than anything, it felt like this cool cross-cultural experience of meeting like-minded people,” Allison said.
All four reported harrowing, near-death experiences, too.
A bear rushed Palomares in the Yukon Territory. Allison hit a patch of gravel and crashed badly while speeding down a hill in Peru, then spent several days recovering at a hospital. Teenagers wearing bandanas pulled knives on the group and stole their camera equipment in Nicaragua. Armed highway men pulled a gun on Bentz in the deserts of Peru.
“Every day is a huge experience,” Palomares said.
The cyclists pedaled through dust storms, blizzards, blazing sun and pounding rain. They tried to live for less than $10 a day, subsisting on the cheapest food they could find and relying on the help of strangers. They suffered from digestive ailments, too.
Often, they’d separate by a few miles as they rode. Once, at the end of the day, Engemoen couldn’t find the others. They were dependent on each other for team supplies, so he had no food, water or tent and just 2 pesos in his pocket, on the coldest night of the year. Frost formed on his bike, and in the morning, a nearby shop owner gave him a bag of tacos. Someone else brought him coffee as he sat shivering on the side of the road.
“It was always when you truly needed it,” Engemoen said.
Their finish in Tierra del Fuego, so many months after they started, didn’t match what they imagined.
Thirty miles outside Ushuaia, at the tip of Argentina, a snowstorm kicked up. Fifteen miles from the finish, the rim of Engemoen’s bike wheel splintered. He used duct tape and zip ties to hold it together and wobbled in. They made it to the industrial port town, though, and ceremoniously dipped their bike tires into the ocean and toasted with champagne in what they described as a “weird and surreal” end to their adventure.
Back in Austin, they have 1,600 hours of film footage and about 60,000 photographs to weed through as they piece together a 90-minute documentary and two books — one about the adventure, and one featuring photos of places they woke up each morning.
They hope the project, which they plan to wrap by mid-2017, will capture the essence of what it’s like to cross the Americas on two wheels, convey the stories of the people they met along the way and illustrate how the experience changed them physically and mentally.
Then they’ll hit the road again — but not on bikes — to take it to festivals, theaters and backyards in the countries they crossed.