🚌 Four friends plan to set a world record by being the first to drive a US School bus the length of the American continents (Alaska to Argentina) - along with a bunch of strangers from around the world!
Max, Becca, Joel and Nik have been organising fun and chaos-filled road trips for their friends and strangers for years. They once drove a £75 car around the entire world through 46 countries! Now they’ve sourced an old US School bus to take on this new adventure of a lifetime.
To help the project, they asked strangers from around the world to join them on this unique intercontinental bus journey to share the vehicle costs, the living costs and what will surely be the emotional cost of living on a bus with 14 strangers!
Follow the bus's current location at www.globalconvoy.com/bus#track
+ 458 others joined this month
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This is going to be our biggest adventure since our RTW!
For the past 6 years we've been running an online travel community (Global Convoy) that encourages strangers from all over the world to collaborate, explore off the beaten path and have life changing adventures together.
After watching a 75 year old documentary about the first vehicle to try and attempt this journey from Alaska to Argentina, we were inspired to not only attempt the challenge ourselves, but to document our experiences and compare and contrast them with what travel in these areas must have been like all those years ago.
Setting off from Alaska in August 2023, the journey to Ushuaia (the Southern tip of Argentina) will take about 7 months!
This overland challenge will require all individuals involved to work together to face fears, build their resilience and overcome obstacles as a team.
👋 If anyone is on our route please reach out as we would love to hang out!
You can follow our current location at www.globalconvoy.com/bus#track
Sounds like quite the adventure! How are you going to deal with the Darrien Gap?
I think I spotted a little "blue hop" for the ferry on their itinerary
There is no car ferry from Panama to Colombia and I think the bus is too big to fit in a regular shipping container. There are other options but taking a vehicle that size sounds like a bit of an ordeal so I’m curious how they are going to navigate that little obstacle.
Interesting!
Hey Brad, we will be shipping the bus from Panama to Colombia.
There is the option of shipping on a roll on roll off ferry so we will be using this option to get around! We’ve shipped using containers before so this will be a new challenge for us.
Cool, I thought that might be the case. I'd double check the bus will fit as I know there are height restrictions and your bus is pretty huge!
I have gone from Vancouver to Ushuaia mostly by land but mainly catching buses. Getting around the Darien has always been a nightmare with limited options even without a vehicle. Hopefully it has become a little easier! I've heard of people having to wait days to get their vehicles shipped even with pre-organised shipping. Hopefully it all goes smooth enough!
Are you docking in the north somewhere around Cartagena or in the west in Buenaventura?
Yes so we’re taking a ‘month’ break to hopefully compensate for the shipping time. Estimations on the shipping websites say 2 weeks, but from our experience it is never this simple or the time they say, it’s always more!
And yes our bus is about 40 feet so she pretty big! But we’ve got a couple of quotes from companies willing to take it. I guess we won’t really know until we are there, but that is part of the adventure 😀
That’s awesome that you have travelled the route before. It’s certainly an epic journey. When did you go? The last time we drove from Vancouver to Uruguay was in 2016-17 so I expect a lot has changed.
Amazing! Can we follow in real-time with content too — perhaps on tiktok/instagram?
So we have our Polarsteps which we will be updating on the link above. (We’ve just been in Yukon Canada with little to no service so we need to catch up), but yes our Instagram is the most updated, and you can find us at Globalconvoy: www.instagram.com/globalconvoy/
This is a very cool and unique adventure, thanks for sharing with the Travel Massive community! I’m looking forward to following along.
Is this the original documentary that inspired the trip?
Yes, when we were researching the idea to see who had first traversed the ‘road’, we came across this and we have been deep diving into the topic since, learning about other peoples attempts and journeys along the Pan American Highway.
Epic road trip! Good luck on this adventure.
Thank you! We’re super excited to be doing a long distance trip again 😀
What an epic trip this will be. I hope you have a successful and enriching journey!
Thank you so much. We’re very excited to be doing this and fingers crossed we make it!