Careful what you say around the campfire!

Dejected, I leant on my crutches and scanned the bookshelves through the tears that were beginning to well. I'd like to think that I gravitated toward the travel section in a show of defiance that this recent development would prove but a minor setback in my quest to reach South America. The reality was more likely a distraction tactic from wallowing in self-pity at the news I'd just received.

23 years old and fresh out of uni, I had been working in a bar, saving cash in the hope of realising my dream of travelling across South America. With the memories of my Erasmus year in Italy still vivid, having had a taste for the exotic, I was now resisting the urge to follow my peers into “a proper job”. My Italian had gotten pretty decent too and I was set on affording my Spanish the same possibilities, albeit Spain and Spanish culture now seemed a little too accessible. I longed to experience a world entirely different to the one I knew and where day to day life would really push the boundaries. South America held the key!

Things were going to plan until a ‘straight leg, studs up’ type of tackle snapped my tibia in two. And now, two months on, I was stood in an Ayrshire bookshop processing the news that I would be kept in a plaster cast for a further two months, visualising my dream ebbing further and further away.

“The Trail to Titicaca” by Rupert Atlee was what caught my eye that morning and the book which served as the spark to rekindle the burning embers of that dream. It tells of three friends from England who cycle from Tierra del Fuego, on the southernmost tip of Argentina, to Lake Titicaca which straddles the border of Peru and Bolivia. I was captivated by their tales of chance encounters and heart-warming hospitality as they traversed the barren Patagonian wilderness and zig-zagged back and forth across (and not to mention up and down!) the Andes mountains. The more I devoured the book, the more engrossed I became. The thought of cycling across a continent, with your whole life attached to your bike, the sense of unadulterated freedom on the open road, in some of the most sparsely populated regions of the planet, set the cogs turning. "Maybe one day," I remember thinking to myself…

I’d probably moved onto my second Cristal beer when Meg from Wisconsin moved the conversation towards cycle touring, as we chatted round a campfire in Pisco, a dusty desert town on Peru’s Pacific coast. We’d just finished a day’s hard graft at Pisco Sin Fronteras, a disaster relief NGO founded by local pisqueños in response to the devastating earthquake which destroyed much of the town in 2007. Five years on from my book purchase, and having succumbed to the world of the “proper job”, I’d finally made it to South America and, after months of backpacking and volunteering, was well and truly living my dream.

The unique energy at PSF owed much to the positivity and camaraderie of the volunteers - there was such a willingness from everyone to get stuck into the work which, much of the time, amounted to gruelling manual labour in the scorching desert heat. This energy transcended to the evening campfire where the volunteers would gather for a sing-song and a few beers after a hard day’s work. It was on one such evening that I found myself chatting cycle touring with Meg from Wisconsin and, specifically, about her dream to cycle from Alaska to Argentina. The conversation triggered memories of the book I had read five years previously and elicited the, rather flippant, response, “I feel like I have something like that in me one day.”

Such was the intensity of the shared experience among the volunteers, the concept of “PSF time” was well known to us. Fully immersed in the work and, naturally, the play, the day-to-day lived experience had us all stepping off the world for the duration of our stay and existing in a parallel universe on Peru’s Pacific coast. As such, deep and lasting friendships were forged in lightning quick time though, even by the PSF metric, the four days between my arrival and Meg’s departure was no time at all!

Meg stopped by Glasgow for a weekend, a year after meeting in Pisco, while doing some backpacking in Europe. Sandwiched between wanderings along the Clyde, a jaunt to a sun-drenched Largs and an impromptu gig at Nice n’ Sleazy’s, Meg dropped into conversation that she’d be graduating in three years’ time and, recalling my response around the campfire in Pisco, asked if I would like to join her on her Alaska to Argentina adventure. I was more than a little taken aback by the question, though, no less intrigued at the prospect of adventure. I remember asking for some time to think about it while reiterating, “This is certainly not a no.”

Eighteen months later and with t-18 months until Meg’s departure, she was long overdue an answer. Surely it was crazy to think that two people, who’d spent the sum total of seven days (albeit four of which existed in the parallel universe that was PSF) in each other’s company could take this on? Leaving the physical challenge aside, we were committing to a reality of living in each other’s pockets and sharing a tent for the best part of two years! After much pondering, deliberation, convincing myself one way and then the other, my decision essentially bore down to one simple question: Could I conceivably sit at my desk job watching Meg posting updates from this incredible adventure, knowing that I could have been part of it? In the end, the answer was simple.