Adam Pawlikiewicz Mesa is an endurance mountain athlete and bikepacker who has explored remote regions across Latin America and the U.S. After graduating college, he turned down a financial consulting career to pursue a transformative journey on two wheels. Now a full-time athlete and visual storyteller, Adam documents his adventures through Peru, Bolivia, and Brazil, capturing the landscapes, cultures, and people he encounters. His work blends endurance travel with powerful storytelling that inspires connection and exploration.
Adam Pawlikiewicz Mesa is an endurance mountain athlete and bikepacker who has explored remote regions across Latin America and the U.S. After graduating college, he turned down a financial consulting career to pursue a transformative journey on two wheels. Now a full-time athlete and visual storyteller, Adam documents his adventures through Peru, Bolivia, and Brazil, capturing the landscapes, cultures, and people he encounters. His work blends endurance travel with powerful storytelling that inspires connection and exploration.
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Photo credit: Leonardo Brasil
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Adam Pawlikiewicz Mesa:
For me, it's always been super important to figure out what it is that I'm capable of, and the first time I ever did a bike trip across the US, all of these things were completely, I should not have been able to have done them. You know what I mean? And yet, somehow I figured out a way to do it, and I love these types of, I guess challenges because they often really force you to re-evaluate what you really think is possible and what it is that you're capable of doing.
Shelby Stanger:
Adam Polikiewicz-Mesa is an endurance mountain athlete who has spent the last several years bikepacking through Latin America and the United States. After graduating from college, Adam had a job lined up as a financial consultant in Washington D.C. But before he started work, he took a bike trip that shifted his perspective and opened up a new path for him. Today, Adam is a full-time athlete and visual storyteller. He's documented his journeys across remote regions in Peru, Bolivia, and Brazil capturing the stories of local people and their cultures along the way. I'm Shelby Stanger, and this is Wild Ideas Worth Living. An REI Co-op Studios production presented by Capital One and the REI Co-op MasterCard. Adam Polikiewicz-Mesa, welcome to Wild Ideas Worth Living. I think you're all the way in Colombia right now.
Adam Pawlikiewicz Mesa:
Yes. Yeah, here in Montevideo, in Antioquia. Just kind of like central Colombia, Andes. So I primarily work as a visual storyteller, both photographer and filmmaker and I recently moved back here to Colombia in the last month.
Shelby Stanger:
Where were you living in the United States? Where did you grow up?
Adam Pawlikiewicz Mesa:
So I mostly grew up in Colorado Springs. Actually, that's where my dad still lives, and that's where I would say my love for the outdoors really began. I mean anybody that's been in Colorado can attest to that and the mountains, they're absolutely stunning and beautiful. I realized later on in life that not everybody had rock climbing for their gym class or whatever, so we grew up with just a natural appreciation for the outdoors and then into my adulthood, it just grew in more and more and more.
Shelby Stanger:
So when did you start biking for long distances?
Adam Pawlikiewicz Mesa:
When I graduated from college, I had an actual dream. I slept and had a dream that I was biking across the US and this was in 2013, and I was like, "Oh my God, I'm the first person to have thought of this idea. This is such a great idea, I should do it." And I told all my friends about it, and then I start researching on the internet and I see that there's a huge history of people biking across the US. It's been done since God knows when and that people have been traveling by bike since the beginning of time, since bikes have been invented, but anyway, I really loved this idea that just randomly came to me and I was like, "Well, I have a few months before I was going to start my big boy job." Which was the consulting firm in D.C. That was my job straight out of College.
Shelby Stanger:
Was it like Bain or one of those?
Adam Pawlikiewicz Mesa:
It was Deloitte.
Shelby Stanger:
Deloitte, okay.
Adam Pawlikiewicz Mesa:
Yeah, so I was like, "Okay, I have a few months." I was like, I'm going to go back home to Colorado. So I spent that whole summer painting houses and I was like, "I'm going to save every dollar. I'm going to buy myself the cheapest bike I can buy." I can buy myself all the camping gear and whatever else I would need and budget myself just enough cash so that I can pay for oats, spaghetti, and I think it was sandwiches. I budgeted, I thought it would take me about 30 or so days to go from Colorado to Virginia, which is where I graduated from school from, and that was my idea and then I did it, and I hadn't been biking since I was a kid for fun, right? And the third day that I did this trip, I ended up doing a hundred miles and it was in Kansas, so it wasn't that much, but I was just floored at how relatively accessible this was for somebody who didn't really have a lot of cash.
And it was such an awesome way to travel and see the country that I grew up in, but I have no family ties to, and that was what I really wanted to do. I was like, "I really want to get to know the United States and see what people live like." And I don't think that there's any better way to do that than to travel by bike because you travel just fast enough that you get to see a lot, but just slow enough that you really get to experience a place. But I would say that one experience that really sticks out from that particular trip was there was so many people that went out of their way to help me out, and this is a pretty common experience for anybody who travels by bike is that the world really seems to open up to you because of how vulnerable you are. These communities, just totally opened up. They were so floored that people bike across the US. They would always give me a place to stay. I would pass through so many churches where the pastor would let me just sleep inside the church, which was better than sleeping outside or I'd sleep in the back of bike shops. I don't think that many people get to experience this type of humanity unless they're really that vulnerable and put themselves out there that much.
And as soon as I get to Deloitte, I'm super dark from being outside every single day in the summer. Everybody's talking about what did they do that summer. Some people had other jobs, and I was just a bum on my bike getting to know the country, and it was just the conversation that kept coming up, and every conversation I had with people, it was the thing that lit me up the most and eventually after working there for probably a year, a year and a half, I realized this is not where I belong. It's going to be the quickest way to depression. It's just not for me, and so eventually I was like, "No, I got to figure something else out." And so I was living with a friend at the time in Washington, DC who actually worked in National Geographic.
He was one of their photo editors, my good friend Tyler and he had done a bunch of beautiful photo projects in Nepal. He did all these amazing things, and I was just like, "Dude, I didn't even know people could have that job." And I always messed around with cameras and it was a hobby at the time, but it wasn't something I considered to be a profession. So I ended up quitting that job at Deloitte, and after talking with my friend Tyler for many months about the bike trip that I had done across the US, it ended up falling that summer was the 40th anniversary of the Trans America Trail, which is the one that goes coast to coast, and he wanted to do it and I was like, "Cool, I already did Colorado to Virginia. How about you do that section and I'll join you in Colorado and we'll finish the route."
Because he wanted to do some of it on his own as well and so that's what we did. So he quit his job a month before I did, started biking across the country, and then the day before I was going to fly out to Colorado, he ended up getting hit by a car actually, and luckily he survived, but he had pretty bad injuries, and I remember us calling his sister like a bunch of our friends in DC calling him to check up on him, and the only thing, he was heavy on drugs and he was like, "Adam, we're still doing this. Don't worry. We're going to get it done."
Shelby Stanger:
30 days after the crash, Adam met up with Tyler and they rode their bikes together from Colorado to Oregon. During that trip, Adam learned a lot about documenting stories through photos and video. For the next five years, he worked in the outdoor industry on various marketing and social media teams. In his free time, he competed in bike races, iron mans, and even ultra marathons. Then in 2021, Adam was laid off from his job at a cycling brand. He took the news in stride and decided to go all in on becoming a full-time athlete and storyteller.
Adam Pawlikiewicz Mesa:
As soon as that layoff happened, I called up my friend Leo, he's Brazilian and he had just recently moved back to Brazil, and I told him, I was like, "Hey, dude, I just got laid off. I really want to do another project. Let's figure something out." And he was like, "Well, there's this really historic route in Brazil called the Estrada Real." It was a historic trail system that was built by the Portuguese when they came to Brazil to basically extract gold and diamonds from the mountains and take it all the way to Rio to then ship back to Portugal, and even though it's a very sad history, it's now been adopted by the country as a huge tourism route that people will bike, they will ride their motorcycles through or just travel by car through, and you pass these beautiful colonial villages.
And because the country has really taken it upon itself to make this a form of tourism, now many of these smaller towns are really thriving in many ways because of the tourism that goes through, and so we ended up doing that trip kind of on a self-funded capacity. I was an ambassador. I still am for a bikepacking brand, and so I basically used my budget from that to cover the cost of my trip for the Estrada Real, but we basically treated it like our own project. Like, "Hey, let's take a bunch of photos, let's pitch to magazines. Let's see if we could put some video out with it." But that was just another way for me to see if I could make the whole bikepacking and film, photo, whatever thing, a career and so that's kind of been the trend ever since that particular trip, the Estrada Real.
Shelby Stanger:
For Adam and his friend Leo, bikepacking the Estrada Real felt like the perfect mix of adventure and challenge. This historic route was built by the Portuguese in 1697, spanning 1000 miles. It winds through the mountains and subtropical forests of southeastern Brazil. It's absolutely stunning, but significant portions of the road are not clearly developed, which makes bikepacking through this area particularly difficult. How many miles a day were you doing? How long did it take you?
Adam Pawlikiewicz Mesa:
Sure, it greatly varies because for me, the priority oftentimes is story, and we do really like to push ourselves, yet at the same time, if there's a beautiful town we pass through and the light's not great, maybe we wait a while so that we can get the images or the story that we want to see, or if a person on the side of the street offers us a place to stay, we're going to take it because this is how you get to connect with the culture. So it varied a lot, but it was anywhere from I don't know, 50, 60 miles a day to 100 plus miles a day. Certain parts of the country were way easier to go through than others, but this entire route is off-road. It's all gravel roads, farm rural roads where you're passing through ranches, where there's horses, cows, all of that. It goes through Minas Gerais, and then part of Sao Paulo and part of then into the department of Rio, the Shenandoah.
Shelby Stanger:
What'd you learn about Brazilian history and culture on this ride?
Adam Pawlikiewicz Mesa:
Yeah, so unfortunately I don't speak Portuguese that well. Leo did most of my talking for me. I try to speak in Spanish, and some people understood, but the thing that I really learned the most about that experience was just, yeah, I don't know. It's shared humanity almost in any place, but the people there were just very open and kind, super humble. The food quality is just outstanding. The landscapes are really interesting. There would be certain areas where it was just a deep red desert dust, and then you'd get to these, what would probably seem similar to Yosemite rock style faces in the middle of kind of a jungle environment.
It was really bizarre because somewhat humid, but also super dry the next day, and then you're going in and out of these smaller towns and then into these massive cities because Latin America has massive, massive cities. I remember even one night we were riding into the night, we were just trying to get to the next place where we could stay and get a proper meal, and it was just a total grind on this paved highway, and we were in the middle of the night just hugging each other's tires, one behind the other, trying to rush as fast as we could because there's semis flying by you. That kind of stuff also happens, and you kind of have to remain very flexible when you ride or travel in this type of way.
Shelby Stanger:
Adam and Leo made a film out of their journey and released it on YouTube. The video is called The Estrada Real, and it shows just how gritty and beautiful the trip really was. You can see them crawling under barbed wire fences, carrying their bikes across rivers, bushwhacking through thick forest, and navigating everything from quiet muddy roads to chaotic highways. The ride wasn't easy, but it was worth it, and somewhere on that road, the pair came up with a motto that stuck with them. At the end of this film, there's a motto, can you tell us this motto?
Adam Pawlikiewicz Mesa:
Yeah, it's probably chase regrets. That's really the way that we, I think about these bikepacking experiences, and Leo's not from the US. English was probably his second or third language as well, and I think that a lot of people maybe would not understand that phrase the same way that we do, but oftentimes the way we said it to ourselves was like, "Let's pick the route that's going to create probably a lot of turmoil, or it's like a suffer fast kind of, but it's going to end up resulting in the experience we'll remember the most." And that's oftentimes how we make our decisions, which is not always the smartest way, I will admit to that because it's put us in some predicaments in the past, but as always, we figure a way out through it.
Shelby Stanger:
A few years ago, bike packer Adam Polikiewicz-Mesa decided to pursue his passions as a full-time career. He became a dedicated endurance athlete and a skilled photographer and cinematographer. After traversing the Estrada Real in Brazil with his friend Leo, the pair decided to take on another huge bike packing adventure. In 2024, they set out to ride over 400 miles through the Andes Mountains from La Paz, Bolivia to Cusco, Peru. Unlike a lot of routes here in the US, this journey was not well-marked. Adam and Leo often found themselves passing through very difficult and steep mountain terrain, unsure if they were even on the right path.
Adam Pawlikiewicz Mesa:
So we basically were planning on going from La Paz Bolivia to Cusco, Peru following what was known as the Quiapac Ñan or sections of it because it's not necessarily fully documented, and there was some wild sections of it where, I mean this road system was built on foot. It's not really made for rolling wheels. So you have these epic staircases that drop 3000 feet into a valley, and so it's not made for a bike, let me put it that way. So you're either hiking down or trying to compromise and ride your way down, or there are sections where we get up into the mountains and we're just freestyling descending off of the side of a mountain, and it's just like a sand, rocky, gravelly mixture that you're almost surfing down. I mean it was like a moonscape environment. I don't even know how to describe it. Some of these places, I can't even believe that we got to see a lot of these places with our own very eyes and that we actually tried to ride ourselves through them because it was super remote. I mean very remote riding.
Shelby Stanger:
What were the logistics of this trip like? Were you just camping on the side of the road?
Adam Pawlikiewicz Mesa:
Sure, yeah. On a logistical level, I'll talk you guys through it. So yeah, the way we plan this route is oftentimes looking at a bunch of different maps, like GPS softwares, ride with GPS commute, Google Earth even, and then also looking online to see other accounts of people who have done something similar. Bikepacking.com has a bunch of routes that talk through these different regions, some of which that we rode, but then the most important thing that we often look at is what do the locals say and recommend? And oftentimes, we were riding through various mining roads that took us from one mining community to the other because a lot of these regions in the high altitude mountains in both Bolivia and Peru are all mining regions. So we were passing through very interesting towns. I don't know how else to say it, where the only people that are there are those who are mining and their families.
But yes, so most times, especially on that trip, it was predominantly we were camping. Some of the route took us into the mountains where there is no trail system, so you just go until the sun starts to essentially set, you make your little meal based off of whatever dried meals you have. Hopefully you have enough water to make the meal that day and the following morning, and then you keep hiking or riding until you get to the other side of the pass, ride down and we essentially always carried about three to five days worth of food and water. Food I would say. Water we could get away with maybe two days worth of water is what we were carrying. So our stuff was very heavy, but it's hard to logistically figure this out. Some people would argue you should go faster and lighter. Others people say you should carry more, but there's always a cost benefit to each of those approaches.
Shelby Stanger:
Where would you even fill up on water?
Adam Pawlikiewicz Mesa:
Yeah, so when we'd pass through community, we'd fill up, or if we found a home in the middle of nowhere, they usually maybe had a water source that they could at least offer it up, but more often than not, we were actually filtering from any water trickle we could find, I mean streams. There was a lot of spots on the map that we would see. There should be a lake here or there should be a river here and oftentimes we'd come up either to a dry water source like you're describing, or a river that's completely polluted, either by the mining situation or just because there's no trash infrastructure in much of these regions, and it's just covered in trash.
And so we'd either risk it till the next spot or we'd filter it and hope for the best, but both Leo and I got sick multiple times on this trip. We each lost 15 pounds each on this trip, and it's physically very demanding. So we were ravenous because all you can find in many of those regions is alpaca and potato, that's it and that's not something you can really carry on your bike. You kind of can but up to a certain point. So it was rough.
Shelby Stanger:
Do you have any stories from that trip that have stuck with you?
Adam Pawlikiewicz Mesa:
Yeah, so I was really hoping for a cultural moment, and we definitely got that where we ended up coming to this community, and I had thought from a distance that they were shearing the fur of the alpaca to sell into the city or whatever. This was closer to La Paz, and we ended up getting closer and closer, and Leo grew up in Latin America, mostly in Brazil and he has a much more reserved personality type than I do, where I often trust pretty quickly. He's a bit more reserved in that sense, and I was having this negotiation with him. I was like, "I know we're in the middle of nowhere. I know we're on the last bit of our food and we were getting nervous about where we could get our next resupply." And we were in the middle of nowhere and there's a group of men with all this alpaca, and he was like, "I don't think we should go there."
We don't have any weapons with us, we're not going to protect ourselves. We're too hungry to really do anything, and I was like, "No, it's going to be fine." And we happen to get closer and closer, and I start to realize that they're not shearing the fur. They're slaughtering the animal, and so after some time talking with them, we ended up pulling out the cameras. They were super cool with us documenting the entire experience and this man tells me how they've lived for centuries and the culture and tradition of how they go about slaughtering the animal, because you really witness something interesting where it's not just them killing the animal, but they're also capturing the blood in this massive stone bowl, and then they use that blood to pour it at the entrance of the mines to bring safe passage to all those who enter, because mining is a huge part of these communities' lives now.
But this alpaca essentially brings safe passage and good tidings to the people who essentially bury these under the foundations of their homes, and this is how they've been doing it for centuries, forever, really, and so they're describing this whole process as they're slaughtering the animal before our very eyes. That type of an experience, I don't know how else you'd get to experience something like that unless you really put yourself into a position where you're really out there.
Shelby Stanger:
As Adam and Leo made their way through the Andes, they had high highs, but also some low lows. The lack of clean water in combination with the challenging terrain and altitude really wore them down. To make it worse, they were just a day away from their final destination in Cusco, Peru when something unfortunate happened.
Adam Pawlikiewicz Mesa:
I think now that I'm in my thirties, I am realizing that chase regrets is kind of sometimes a bad idea because I ended up crashing really bad at the end of that trip, and I busted my wrist at like 15,500 feet.
Shelby Stanger:
And so how did you ride to get to a hospital?
Adam Pawlikiewicz Mesa:
So we ended up hiking and slightly riding with one hand. My wrist was broken upon impact, super painful, but because of how high we were and how late it was in the day, we ended up camping that night. I slept 10-minute increments maybe, and just waited for the sun to rise so that my friend could get up and then get out, and Leo did a lot. He had to help take off my shirt, clean myself a little bit, check the wrists and everything, and then kind of make a makeshift splint, and then we basically started hiking at first light and then started making our way down to where fortunately, that place where I had crashed, I had actually done a very short bike pack around that area a few years prior in Peru.
Since I knew the area a little bit, I knew that there was a town, so it took us a handful of hours to get to the campsite, and then the following day, eight or nine hours to get to the closest road, which then we could get a guide to taxi us into a small town that had a bus going to Cusco, which was still a three-hour bus ride. So it was a nightmare. It was the worst 48 hours of my life.
Shelby Stanger:
Since that trip, Adam has been recovering from his wrist injury and turning his attention to his next project, riding between coffee farms in Colombia and capturing stories along the way. The crash was a setback, but it hasn't stopped him from pursuing the work he loves. What advice can you give people who want to take a bikepacking trip through another culture?
Adam Pawlikiewicz Mesa:
Well, I think that if you are a person who can get access to a bike and have access to a backpack, in my point of view, you are a bikepacker, and so I think that the most important thing that people need, especially those who are younger, and maybe they're watching people who are doing these wild adventures, I really want them to know that all of us started with very little, and we did pretty crazy things with just that, and here in Colombia, you're going to see everybody riding their bike up and over mountain passes to get to work, to go to school, to do whatever.
I mean they're essentially bikepacking. I think that we, especially in the northern part of the world, we get pretty obsessed with gear. We think we need the best bike or the best bags or whatever and yes, it makes a huge difference to have a really nice bike. Yes, it makes a huge difference to have lighter equipment. You can go faster and farther, but I don't want people to stop themselves from trying just because they have a Walmart bike and a backpack because you could probably bike the country with just that.
Shelby Stanger:
If you want to learn more about Adam and keep in touch with his adventures, you can follow him on Instagram at Adam On The Go. It's spelled exactly how it sounds, A-D-A-M-O-N-T-H-E-G-O. You'll also love Adam and Leo's YouTube channel at Chase Regrets. We'll link to it in the show notes. Wild Ideas Worth Living is part of the REI Podcast Network. It's hosted by me, Shelby Stanger, produced by Annie Fassler, Sylvia Thomas, and Sam Pierce-Nitzberg of Puddle Creative. Our senior producers are Jenny Barber and Hannah Boyd. Our executive producers are Paolo Mottila and Joe Crosby. As always, we love it when you follow the show, take time to rate it and write a review wherever you listen, and remember, some of the best adventures happen when you follow your wildest ideas.