Leaving our mark
“Immortality is living your life doing good things and leaving your mark behind.”
Most folks want to leave their mark on this world. Not always in some grand society-changing way, but often in the simple manner of “I was here’’.
This, coupled with knowing that we won’t be here forever, has had me chasing increasingly eccentric adventures for the last eight years. It has led me (along with the incredible people I get to work alongside) into some of the craziest, most fascinating, and most outlandish adventures I’ve honestly ever heard of, our latest being driving a classic American School Bus down the full-length of the Pan-American Highway.
A gorgeous sunset, high up in the Peruvian mountains
As with most of our adventures, one of the main goals of this particular expedition was simply to see if it could be done - nothing leaves a ‘mark’ quite like being the first to achieve something. And indeed, extremely few school bus conversions have made it up and down the Dalton Highway in Alaska to reach Prudhoe Bay, let alone down into Central America. Then, the number of them that make it from Central America to South America just falls off a cliff. We only came across three other confirmed school buses that had made it to South America, and two of them had been shipped directly from the USA, not driven down.
So we had the challenge set up, but where did we get this ridiculous concept from in the first place?
One of the higher border crossing we took, from Argentina into Chile
We’d been inspired by a 75-year-old documentary about the first people to attempt to drive the Pan-American Highway. Filmed so long ago that many of the roads we would drive weren’t yet built, the majority of ‘historic sights’ that we’d see were still buried underground, and indeed, long enough ago that being such an outlandish adventure, they received help from the Chilean Navy… there would be no such luck for us!
But alongside the challenge of ‘can it be done,’ we always wanted to experience as much as we could with the limited time we had, resulting in many varied and unusual experiences along the way. From ‘Volcano-boarding’ down the side of an active volcano, exploring ancient temples, seeing a glacier fall apart before our very eyes, and inhaling every traditional food under the sun, we truly had a lifetime of bizarre and beautiful experiences in just two-thirds of a year… But one stands out to me the most when it comes to leaving a mark: the 9000-year-old cave paintings of the Tehuelche Indians, and their ancestors, which we came across in Argentinian Patagonia.
Probably the oldest ‘marks’ we’ll ever see in our lives
Past the obvious, ‘I wonder what life must have been like back then’ that is instantly inspired within any viewers, it really did imprint on me the idea of ‘what will be left behind’ when we’re gone? Statues are built, but statues decay (or are torn down), and every famous example of architecture is one natural disaster (or war) away from becoming history rather than art. While countless other tribal hand prints around the world have been destroyed by the sun or washed away over time, these prints and their story got to live on. They were made to let others know that this is our tribe: “We did this. We were here.”
And then it struck me: we were doing the exact same thing!
Since we began our Pan-American overlanding expedition, we had been marking places of interest and of friends we made by leaving our brand’s stickers - a prevalent practice for overlanders in general, but especially so on the Pan-American highway, where you’ll find effectively all customs official’s offices adorned with myriad different stickers, from the serious to the silly, from hard-core offroad bikers to luxury campers.
Haleigh ‘leaving our mark’ at ovver 5000m altitude
Our expedition’s official start date was the 6th of August 2024, when we set out from Prudhoe Bay, Alaska, having splashed some Arctic water on our skoolie. This was where we left our first sticker of the entire expedition, stuck alongside the ‘marks’ of those who had come before us and to now bear witness to the many that will come after.
As we navigated our 20,000+ mile journey South, we would look out for ‘familiar faces’ in the stickers we saw on the way down, at certain famous road signs, landmarks, and, of course, at each border crossing between countries. We’d get excited seeing how far certain ‘comrades’ of ours had made it on the journey down or feel a curious mix of pride and loneliness when we hadn’t seen any that we’d recognised for a few weeks.
Eventually, we reached the finish line: The very end of Ruta 3, the last step of the Pan-American highway, just on the other side of Ushuaia, Argentina in the Tierra del Fuego National Park.
By this point, our teammate Haleigh had become our official sticker giver and always gave each freshly placed sticker a couple of ‘good luck taps’ after assigning it a new home. For our final ‘mark’ of the expedition, we expanded this ritual so that each member of the trip, in turn, gave this final sticker their own couple of good luck taps.
The team at the end of the Pan-American Highway in Argentina
And just like that, our eight-month adventure from Alaska to Argentina in a school bus had finished. But what would remain was our winding trail of ‘we were here’ stickers dotted along the entire Pan-American Highway and all the strange odds and ends we ventured off to along the way.
Between wear and tear, weather, and other factors, some of our stickers will understandably last longer than others, but on a journey of such magnitude (and with the constant risk of a catastrophic breakdown), it’s hard not to celebrate each milestone or hurdle overcome. And each mark of celebration echoes the same message we read in the 9,000-year-old tribal handprints: “We did it! We were here!”
And in case you were wondering:
We got our stickers from Sticker Mule! They were the best value we found in our research and they shipped the stickers with a free bottle of hot sauce! So if you fancy your own stickers for your next adventure, give them a look: Sticker Mule
