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(CNN) He’d longed for years to embark on a “crazy adventure,” and as Liam Garner’s high school senior day approached, the teen was more determined than ever to escape.
A veteran cyclist, Garner, who hails from Long Beach, California, had previously cycled from Los Angeles to San Francisco and realized he could cycle across the continent without much difficulty if he wanted to.
After reading a book by adventurer Jedidiah Jenkins, who had cycled from Oregon to Argentina, Garner decided to travel from Prudhoe Bay, Alaska, the northernmost point in the United States reachable by road, to Ushuaia, Argentina. the southernmost point of South America.
And while many of his school friends were preparing for college, Garner was preparing for the adventure of a lifetime.
Epic adventure
Liam Garner was 17 when he set off from Alaska on his mountain bike in August 2021.
“I spent the whole month after graduating getting my gear and then I left,” Garner tells CNN Travel. “It was really quick. It wasn’t very well planned from the start.”
Garner was 17 when he set off on a KHS Zaca mountain bike with just a tent, a sleeping bag, food and water for about a day, some portable batteries, a medical kit and extra parts for his bike.
On August 1, 2021, he began his journey on the Panamerican Highway, a road network that stretches across America.
The teenager, who had already amassed a sizable following from his TikTok video series after his trip to San Francisco, decided to document the journey, which saw him pedaling through 14 countries including Mexico, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Colombia, and Peru Chile and Argentina.
“There is an official route and then there are unofficial routes,” he explains. “I basically made my own [route] when I went. As long as I drove south every day, I knew I was going in the right direction.”
Garner admits his parents, who are separated, weren’t particularly thrilled at the prospect of their teenage son riding all the way to South America on his own.
He says his mother refused to believe him at first and went through “probably eight months of terror,” while he only told his father after he left because he was so sure he would be against it.
“He called me when I was in Alaska and I told him where I was,” Garner explains, before adding that both are now his biggest supporters and eagerly follow his progress.
cycling advantages
The teenager reached the Chilean Carretera Austral at the end of 2022.
Although Garner originally took up cycling because he didn’t have a car, he now thinks it’s the best way to travel and wouldn’t have wanted to make this trip any other way.
“It’s the most intimate way to travel,” he says. “You drive so slowly and you have to use physical effort to get to places. This is how you really bond with the most random little towns and curves in the road.
“It has something to do with being self-sufficient and knowing that you’re on your own somewhere. I feel like sometimes when driving or flying it’s like just teleporting to a place. you weren’t outside It was you. You didn’t smell things. You didn’t touch anything.”
The teenager spent around four and a half months cycling across Mexico and describes the experience as one of the most important of his life.
“My whole family is from Mexico,” he explains. “I grew up on the go [to Mexico] but I never learned the language. So it’s one thing to visit every year and it’s one thing to live there.
“That’s why it was so important to me to cycle across the country and reconnect with my culture, stay with my family and learn the language in the place my family is from.”
Unfortunate setbacks
Garner, seen in Salar de Uyuni, Bolivia, says he was robbed five times during the trip.
Garner left California with very little money and says he survived on a budget of about $430 a month.
He notes that he’s heard people comment that he can only do what he’s doing “because he’s a straight, white, rich guy,” pointing out that that’s just not the case.
“I’m a first-generation Mexican immigrant. And I’m not rich,” he says. “It was self-sustaining. And it really doesn’t take that much money to do that.
“I don’t want people to think that you have to be rich to ride a bike. I’ve met people from all walks of life.
“People can do it and stay in hotels every night and I’ve seen people literally just have trash bags on the back of their bikes.
“I’ve seen people of all ethnicities in every country I’ve been to, alone and with partners. And I’ve met so many incredible, inspiring women. It really is available to everyone.”
Garner had a riding companion named Logan for about eight months. However, he departed when they reached Colombia, and Garner traveled alone for the remainder of the voyage.
Of the many countries he cycled through, he was particularly surprised by El Salvador, which he describes as “one of the most peaceful, beautiful and tranquil countries”.
While the journey was filled with incredible highs, Garner also experienced some crushing lows throughout the journey.
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He says he was robbed at least five times and spent a month in hospital after falling off his bike and landing on his head in Colombia.
“The idea that you could get hurt and something really terrible could happen is in your head when you travel so much,” he says, before explaining that he received about 40 stitches and had plastic surgery, to fix his ear and sew it back together.
“But it wasn’t really a reality until I got injured in Colombia. I blacked out for about 15 minutes and it was a couple of hours before I could even speak.”
Garner decided to write a will after the incident and says it cost him dearly to remain silent for weeks.
He admits he briefly considered quitting at a particularly difficult time after being robbed in southern Mexico and struggling with extreme heat.
“For about two and a half weeks, my partner Logan and I were completely disconnected from the outside world,” he explains.
“We didn’t have cell phones. The weather was difficult. It was over 40 degrees Celsius every day. During this time I became ill.”
According to Garner, the two were only able to ride their bikes for a few minutes before being forced to stop because of the heat and discussed whether they could catch the bus home once they reached Central America.
“There’s no point in torturing yourself,” he recalls saying at the time. “This is not fun.”
Luckily the weather was much cooler when they reached Guatemala about a week later and they decided to hold on.
Final spurt
Finally, on January 10, 2023, Garner reached Ushuaia, Argentina.
During the last month of his journey, Garner thought of little else but his “bike crossing the last inch of the pavement” and at times became so emotional that he “started crying on the bike for no reason, although it hadn’t happened yet.” “
He finally arrived in Ushuaia on January 10, after cycling 32,000 kilometers (nearly 20,000 miles) in 527 days.
However, Garner, now 19, says the moment he’d spent so much time imagining had felt a little disappointing.
“It [Ushuaia] was a very touristy city and there were so many people there,” he explains. “I couldn’t really have time to myself. And I was a little disappointed.”
Slightly depressed, he decided to head to a national park for a few days and spend some time reflecting on his time on the road.
“I realized I didn’t care what the last city was,” he says. “It was just here. And I know it’s very cliche, but that’s really what I came to do.”
Garner was soon joined by his partner Chloe, whom he had first met during his trip to San Francisco and with whom he had stayed in touch.
He says the two were just friends at first, but their friendship grew into something more when Garner was away.
“Over the course of my journey, we did long-distance travel for about a year,” he says.
The couple are now backpacking back to California, taking pretty much the same route Garner took on the way there – he shipped his bike to a friend in Chile who will ship it to Long Beach for him.
“We were hoping to make it home for the summer in July,” he adds. “But it’s open. We’ve got about four to five months left, and that’s plenty of time to backpack home.
“It’s really nice for me to see the places again before I move on to normal life.”
inspire others
Garner’s video series documenting his journey has been viewed hundreds of thousands of times.
Once he returns home, Garner plans to write a book about his journey, hoping to inspire other young people to embark on a journey like this one.
He says he regularly gets messages from people who have seen his story on Instagram or TikTok and felt compelled to do something similar.
“I’ve actually gotten so many more messages than I ever thought I’d have,” he says. “And people really do.
“I’m following some of the people who messaged me and they’re actually cycling from Alaska to Argentina now.
“It’s an amazing feeling knowing I’m getting more people into it because there were people responsible for getting me into it. And it makes me feel great to do the same.”
While he’s very much looking forward to meeting his family and friends, some of whom have been busy studying during his absence, Garner has absolutely no regrets choosing a different path.
“If I had stayed home and gone to community college or something like that, would I really have been a better person than I am now?” he asks.
“Would I really be as open-minded as I am now? I strongly think I wouldn’t be. So I think this was the most competent decision I’ve ever made in my life. I’ve never been more confident about anything I’ve done.”