In June 2006, 25-year-old Dominic Gill set out from northern Alaska on a tandem bike named Achilles and headed south. Way south. His goal: to reach the southern tip of South America in 18 months, picking up random strangers along the way. Armed with bear spray, a video camera and a questionable sense of sanity, Gill rolled out of Prudhoe Bay, Alaska and into the bleak tundra with a small British flag fluttering encouragingly behind him. He had just one rule: “I never asked anyone to get off!”
Along the 18,000-mile long journey, the youthful and tanned Brit was chased out of town by a man with a machete, pedaled through snow storms and deserts, encountered landslides and scorpion-strewn beaches and picked up 270 “stokers” who mounted Achilles’s open back seat to help him push. Generous volunteers, since Achilles and its trailer of provisions tipped the scales at 220 pounds.
“I knew this challenge would be tough. I knew I would see incredible places. I knew I would experience fear, sadness, loneliness and sometimes delirious happiness,” says Gill. “What I didn’t expect was to have my faith in humanity so massively reinforced over two years of trusting in people.”
The record of his journey is his documentary, Take a Seat, which was awarded the Special Jury Award at the BANFF Mountain Festival 2009. The film will show in Santa Cruz this weekend when the BANFF Mountain Film Festival rolls into town.
Born and raised in England, the self-proclaimed adventurer, climber and videographer dreamed up this human power journey after realizing his responsible nine-to-five desk job as an environmental consultant was sucking the life out of him. Tired of working with large corporations that weren’t interested in environmental improvement if it didn’t save them money, and in possession of a degree in biology and environmental studies that wasn’t being put to use, Gill left the world of business in search of something more meaningful. Drawn by the sprawling expanse of the American continents, he combined the three things he loved—adventure, video and physical challenges—into the adventure of a lifetime: a filmed journey down the entire western latitude of the Americas.
“This idea was conceived always with filming in mind. I’d be a fool to pass up an opportunity to document not only the places but the people I encountered while I rolled south,” he says.
Ed Stobart of Ginger Productions, a documentary film producer, liked Gill’s idea but asked him to add a twist to make it “crazy enough” to entertain viewers: do it on a tandem bike. Gill accepted.
As expected, the spare seat on Achilles added a dimension of unpredictable possibility—one that would alter his itinerary completely.
“After an initial plan of 18 months, I soon realized that rushing south was a waste of an opportunity to get to know people and places,” says Gill. He scrapped any sort of strict cycling regimen and slowed his pace to savor the scenery and the rich company of new friends.
“In a world where there is so much fear and you are encouraged not to even get involved with your neighbors, it was life-affirming,” he says. The journey swelled to 26 months.
Stoked
Who were the lucky (or unlucky) 270 that took a seat? All sorts of characters.
“Curious city dwellers who invited me to stay, tourists wanting to go anywhere, anyhow with a cowboy hat and a few bags of herb, or a Peruvian villager welcoming an alternative to the overcrowded and unreliable rural bus service,” he recalls. “In South America, kids would jump on whenever the hell they wanted.”
A number of people found him online before they found him on the roadside, like Jules Kresko, an American Airlines flight attendant from Colorado who overheard some people chatting about Gill in a bike shop. She rode with him for six weeks.
Yet two people on a tandem can be a hard lesson in patience. “As soon as they get a sore ass they start moving around and it makes for really hard pedaling,” he says. There were only a few stokers he didn’t get along with, and in such cases he found ways to trick his own system—not directly asking them to get off but using “hen-pecking comments” to inspire their fold. “I’m sure I was a really grumpy bastard,” he says, grinning.
The female-to-male ratio of guest riders was 60/40. “I guess something about tandems is particularly attractive to women,” Gill muses. Add a pair of tight bike shorts and a charming British accent to the machine and the mystery dissolves.
But it wasn’t all fun and companionship. Gill pedaled about 50 percent of the miles alone, enduring long stretches of loneliness. Like the day of his 26th birthday when he crashed Achilles in the middle of nowhere and later realized his wallet was missing. Or the freezing nights he spent in his tent waiting out the snowstorms in southern Chile, or the endless expanses of high-altitude desert in Peru. “It was like a scene out of a Dali painting,” he says of the landscape 15,000 feet above sea level, where night temperatures plunged to -13 degrees. Some of these moments are documented with raw honesty in Take a Seat, but his journal offered the real asylum. “Writing kept me sane,” he said. “It was constant.”
Border Bound
Gill rolled down the Northern California coast in October 2006, recording this in his blog:
“Through valleys of vineyards to the Californian coast, where the sea had been shrouded with a billowing blanket of cloud. Through giant Redwoods, along darkened forest corridors in which the air is guarded by trees and remains silent and still. Above the roaring waves of the Pacific, on hillsides void of anything but dry grass and turkey vultures circling on thermals in the cloudless sky. Through small communities with wooden shingled walls and weather beaten fences. And then on, over the Goldengate [sic] Bridge, glowing in the last of the sunlight that the dusk had offered up.”
He picked up his first bona fide surfer in Santa Cruz, a young man named Jared whom he found skipping class. Jared appears in Take a Seat.
The empty saddle created certain aspects of a social experiment. Although he found a healthy supply of friends in California, Gill apologetically admits to registering a sort of phoniness, what he called “too much money and not enough brain, and a lot of attitude,” which intensified the further south he got.
He was also getting nervous as he pedaled through Southern California. Five thousand miles of warnings about banditos, pickpockets and murderers waiting for him in Mexico left Gill cycling towards the border with his fight or flight instinct fully engaged. He crossed over into Tijuana with vivid scenarios of being robbed flashing in his brain. What he found was a far cry from the worst he had expected: some new friends and a place to sleep.
“Marco Kelly sold tacos from his stand and his ‘loncheria’ round the corner. He spoke English, French and Spanish perfectly and provided me with more than a soft landing in Mexico,” says Gill.
What started with tacos and friendly conversation turned to shelter and company for Gill’s first night south of the border. As the blog says, “He instructed his incredibly able cook Esmaralda to feed me with delicious tacos, and there, in fading light, on a busy street, sitting on a stool next to a filthy but functional mechanics shop, a love affair started. Not with Esmaralda, but with tacos. I love them more than life itself. Simplicity. Satisfaction. Perfection in a moist tortilla.”
Southern Hospitality
As Gill speaks of these first days discovering Latin America—the new smells, the colors, the people—he has a glazed look in his eyes. Latin America surprised him on many levels. Although he was received “incredibly well” in the States, the social landscape of South America positively overflowed with warmth, hospitality and cariño, or caring affection, he says. The contrast between North and South America made an impression.
“There was a direct correlation between how wealthy people were and how hospitable they were—a negative correlation,” he says. “[Wealthier people] have a harder time trusting people, and more to lose by inviting a stranger into their house.”
In Latin America he was invited to family celebrations, offered homes and yards and even a school house to sleep in. One of the most destitute areas he passed through was Pisco, Peru, months after it was shaken by a devastating earthquake. “There were areas that smelt of death, bodies still under the rubble and people living in tents,” says Gill. But it was there he remembers a local soft drink truck stopping on the road to hand him a Coke.
“I fell in love with so many places. It wasn’t so much because of how a place looked. I could go through a country that was completely average. I spent three days in Honduras, and on the second day a family took me in and treated me like one of their own.”
Such generous hospitality also meant eating what the locals ate. With a family in Ecuador, Gill helped to slaughter guinea pigs, a delicacy reserved for celebrations. “After which the lady of the house painstakingly cleaned the intestines with a knitting needle,” he remembers. Whether it was crickets or cow stomach in Mexico, sheepshead soup in Peru or days of nothing but stale bread and sardines in the Bolivian dessert, Gill survived on whatever opportunity offered him. When he could though, he would stock up on mayonnaise and pasta, the concoction he says tasted “like coming home to my favorite meal.”
The most challenging element of his trip began to take on a new form. Saying goodbye to that kind of friendship and hospitality produced an emotional exhaustion that brought him close to quitting the expedition on more than one occasion. It was a feeling he didn’t want to get used to.
A Story to Tell
In August 2008, Dominic rolled into the icy city of Ushuaia in Patagonia’s Tierra del fuego, (Land of Fire), named for the cooking fires seen burning on the beaches by Magellan and his crew five centuries ago. It was the end of an incredible journey, but the joy he had anticipated was absent. Instead, an emptiness filled him where every day there had been new people and places to meet.
“Here (South America), I am different. I’m almost blonde and I’ve got a story to tell. But when I go home, I’m just going to be me. Walking down the street… without a bicycle,” Gill had told the camera in a moment of reflection.
A year and a half later, more than 200 hours of film footage, an extensive journal and scores of new friends have enabled him to bring part of that story with him. Two years after the adventure ended, Dominic Gill is pinching pennies, but he hasn’t yet succumbed to the nine-to-five grind. He has, however, returned to the world of business.
“I’ve turned what I loved into my work… which was the goal, for good or for bad,” he says. His book, a compilation of the image-rich prose of his journal and blogs, will be published in May of this year.
And Achilles? Presently, sitting in his aunt’s house, reconditioned and ready for a book tour around England.
TAKE A SEAT screens Saturday, Feb. 27 at 7pm as part of the Banff Mountain Film Festival. Festival runs Fri-Sat, Feb. 26-27 at the Rio Theatre, 1205 Soquel Ave., Santa Cruz. Tickets are $15 general/night, $12 student/night at www.ucscrecreation.com or at Bugaboo, Pacific Edge or Sprockets.
