What if swiping on a dating app led you to your partner and an epic bike ride the length of Latin America? This was the case for Erin Azouz and her now-husband Mehedi. The bike trip profoundly shifted Erin's relationship with her work, her husband, and most importantly with herself.
What if swiping on a dating app led you to your partner and an epic bike ride the length of Latin America? This was the case for Erin Azouz and her now-husband Mehedi. The bike trip profoundly shifted Erin's relationship with her work, her husband, and most importantly with herself.
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Erin Azouz:
I realized that it was a test. How committed am I out here? I'm getting on the bike every day and I'm doing the work. Yes, I have these amazing days where I feel strong and triumphant over each hill that I'm cresting, but then there's all these other days that I feel weak and I kind of just want to crawl in bed and have my mommy make me soup. I kind of had to look at myself and say, you're stronger than this. You can keep going, get better, and let's hit the road again.
Shelby Stanger:
10 years ago, artists and photographer Erin Azouz never thought that she would be biking 10,000 miles from Mexico to Patagonia. She was working for a design firm in New Mexico and getting on a bike didn't sound that interesting to her, but when she met her now husband, Mehedi on Tinder in 2015, things changed and fast. Mehedi convinced Erin to go on what turned out to be a life altering journey through Mexico Central and South America. The bike trip profoundly shifted Erin's relationship with her work, her husband, and most importantly with herself. I'm Shelby Stanger, and this is Wild Ideas Worth Living an REI Co-Op Studios production brought to you by Capital One. Biking from Mexico to Patagonia is an epic continental journey. When Erin first set out, she had no idea how long the trip would take. If she'd known the ride would last almost two years, she might not have gone, two years is a massive commitment, especially considering that Erin and Mehedi hadn't been together for very long. Erin Azouz, welcome to Wild Ideas Worth Living. We're excited to chat with you.
Erin Azouz:
Thank you. I'm excited to chat with you too.
Shelby Stanger:
So I love interviewing badass females with the most extreme wild ideas, which yours was to bike all of Latin America.
Erin Azouz:
Yes.
Shelby Stanger:
So many questions.
Erin Azouz:
Yes.
Shelby Stanger:
Why, when and why did you get this wild idea?
Erin Azouz:
So I have to give credit where it's due. My now husband Mehedi, this was kind of his lifelong dream to get on a bike and ride all the way to Patagonia. One of the things that I had always wanted to do was to travel in Latin America with my camera and a guitar and just kind of live the vagabond life for a while. Sounds amazing. So I guess when we met, we really started to talk about different travel ideas, how we wanted to live our lives, and he went on his first long bike trip. It was about three weeks down the West coast, Oregon and California, probably about four months or so after we had started seeing each other.
When he got home, he just had this just stoke about it and it was like he was alive and that was really attractive for sure, but it was also just really powerful to see the passion in him about traveling and being on his bike and feeling totally self-sufficient. He came home and was like, we got to do this together. It's so incredible. It's so freeing. There's just this sense of freedom about your day. You don't know where you're going to go, what you're going to do, what you're going to see, but it's amazing and let's do it.
Shelby Stanger:
What day did you leave? When did you get this idea and when did you leave?
Erin Azouz:
Okay, so I guess the birth of the idea was in September of 2015. Again, our one-way plane ticket to Puerto Vallarta was on February 8th, 2016. So it was really very little time before we took off and there was very little preparation and in a way kind of going in so blindly had its advantages because I think if we had done more preparation or decided, okay, a year from now we're going to do this thing, then you kind of come up with all of these reasons not to do it. Like, oh, this bike part isn't the right thing, or I don't know, I'm really uncomfortable in my bike shorts and maybe I need to find something different to make it work. You kind of just, if you don't have a lot of preparation, it is harder on the ground, but you adapt because you don't have any other choice.
Shelby Stanger:
You don't have the analysis paralysis, being as your friend when it comes to wild ideas. I totally agree. I love this. Okay. What did you have to give up? Where were you living? You obviously probably had a job, family, there had to been some doubters.
Erin Azouz:
Yeah, so right before we went on this backpacking trip, I was working at this creative agency in Santa Fe. Loved my job, had a blast there, and I had this feeling that I needed to spread my wings and focus on my photography. I kind of said, I'll give myself a year and see how it goes, and if I need to find another job after that year, that's fine. But I ended up hitting the road and I've been just doing freelance work since. So it really worked out in that way. It was a huge leap of faith. So we had left behind our little casita, we packed up all of our stuff in boxes and kind of just stored it away.
Mehedi's parents own our house, so they were cool to kind of just let us store our stuff for however long we were gone for. We weren't sure how long, but our families were so supportive of us doing this. I think everybody kind of thought, well, let's see how far they really get. I don't think anyone thought that we would continue doing it for as long as we did, but in a way, that kind of disbelief really lit a fire under us. Like, okay, well we got to prove them wrong and in a way prove ourselves wrong. We had our own doubts.
Shelby Stanger:
Before this trip, Erin had very little experience with long distance biking. She'd done some other outdoor adventures like backpacking, but those trips were usually only a week or 10 days long, despite her lack of experience, Erin took the leap and said yes to the journey. Mehedi let her one of his extra bikes, they flew to Puerto Vallarta and the two hit the road. They put in between 10 and 60 miles a day. At night they camped and used the warm showers app to find places to stay along the route. For food, Erin and Mehedi tried to cook as much as they could using a little biolite stove to make meals. It wasn't always easy, but the two were determined to make it work. Okay. So you started in February, 2016 from Puerto Vallarta and the goal was to get all the way down to Patagonia. Was there a time that you needed to be in Patagonia? Were you afraid you were going to run out of money?
Erin Azouz:
Yes, absolutely. So money was a big factor in feeling like we had a pressure to get to where we needed to go at a certain time. When we first started or right before we left, money was probably the biggest question mark for us. It was like, how are we going to do this? How are we going to get to where we really want to go? But you just get creative. So what we did was while we were on the road, the first, we call it the first trip or the first half of the trip, Mexico to Peru, I had been posting a lot on Instagram.
I had been keeping a blog and we were crowdfunding and be on the road for two weeks and really needed to stop somewhere and shower and dry out. We would approach a hostel or a hotel or something and be like, can we take photos? Can we post in exchange for a free night or two? Then my husband is a woodworker. He's actually incredibly talented, trained woodworker, and so he would carve these spoons from local hardwood and sell them on our website and also just he would be able to offer handyman work for some of the places that we were staying.
Shelby Stanger:
I love that. Okay, so I want to talk a little bit about the fear. Before you left, you were scared of the language, you were scared of money. What else were you really scared of before going on the trip?
Erin Azouz:
I think I was afraid of failing or feeling like I was going to fail. It's so scary to take on such a big idea, but it's vulnerable to put yourself out there and tell people, I'm going to do this thing, and then what if you don't do it? So I think for me, I felt afraid of failing and there were so many times that I really wanted to leave and just get on the next flight home from the nearest city. So I had mentioned that it took us about four months to cycle through Mexico, and really it was only half of Mexico because central, we started in Central Mexico.
Shelby Stanger:
[Inaudible 00:10:11]. Yeah.
Erin Azouz:
So we spent the four months there. In those four months I had gotten sick three times. I had some bacterial thing, typhoid thing, like stomach stuff. The day we crossed the border into Guatemala, we were so happy. I mean, it was our first border crossing after four months of cycling through Mexico. So it was this profound sense of just accomplishment and pride. We rolled into this tiny little village and decided this is where we'll camp tonight. I started to feel kind of sick again and I spent the entire night in the bushes basically and just really sick. I really had this kind of turning point. I realized that it was a test. How committed am I out here? I'm getting on the bike every day and I'm doing the work. Yes, I have these amazing days where I feel strong and triumphant over each hill that I'm cresting.
But then there's all these other days that I feel like I just want to crawl in bed and have my mommy make me soup. I had to look at myself and say, you're stronger than this. You can keep going and get better and let's hit the road again. So we took some time off in Guatemala, about two weeks, and I worked on my gut, a lot of probiotic stuff, and I felt so much better after a couple weeks that we hit the road and we absolutely just nailed it through all of Central America. I look back at that time and I think that was the strongest that I felt in all of the time that we were cycling. It was because I had this adversity to challenge me and to ask myself if my heart was really in this. In the end it was.
Shelby Stanger:
Erin learned to be confident and to trust her intuition on the bike. There were plenty of times like throwing up in the bushes all night where other people would've thrown in the towel, but Erin kept going and it was worth it.
Erin Azouz:
There's so much beauty in Latin America, and I feel like most Americans will unfortunately never get to see the side of Latin America because there's so much kind of fear instilled in us through the media that a lot of these places are unsafe, especially in a lot of Central America. I can count on one hand how many times, how many days in two years on the road where we didn't feel safe. I feel like you could say that about anywhere in the world. Definitely, there's so much profound beauty in Latin America especially. We really loved South America for its just vastness and the Andes are incredible mountains. They're just so picturesque, they're colorful. We were really, really lucky to spend, gosh, I don't know, a few weeks on this one route called the Peru Divide. It took us just through some of these most remote and picturesque landscapes that we had ever seen.
It had to be 14,000 feet or something, maybe higher, and we stopped. There were all these sheep on the side of the road and alpacas, and there was a shepherd who was watching us come up the mountain. So when we met him on the road, we stopped and just chatted with him for a little bit and got a photo and he told us about how these peaks that we were looking at, which were bare, he said, these used to be covered in ice year round. We had never seen them before. Just in the last 30 or 40 years, they had melted. Now you can see these gorgeous colors in the mountain that we never knew were under there. Without really saying anything about it, we could understand how he was talking about the world changing, our climate changing, and we had this really sweet and profound moment with this local just talking about his land and how it's changed since he's been alive.
Shelby Stanger:
Wow, that sounds so special. It has to take a lot to even get up 14,000 feet on a bike. What were some of the biggest things you considered as you traveled through these different landscapes?
Erin Azouz:
So we spent about four months in Mexico, four months in Central America, and then we spent, gosh, a total of, I guess it was 10 months in South America. But what ended up happening was that we hit the rainy season in Central America, and for the most part it was okay, but by the time we got to Costa Rica and Panama, it was pouring on us every day. So we had to wake up really early at 5:00 AM and hit the road at 05:30 just to make some miles before the storms would come in.
Shelby Stanger:
I cannot imagine. So you were there in late summer, September or October.
Erin Azouz:
Exactly.
Shelby Stanger:
That's heinous. I've been there and it flooded so much I couldn't walk a couple feet.
Erin Azouz:
Yeah, it's pretty intense. We were also camping, so it was like, there was a certain point where I think by the time we got to South America, it was still raining and it was rainy season in Columbia and Ecuador. In fact, it rained on us almost every single day we were in Ecuador. It was like everything was soggy. Our shoes never dried out, and you can imagine the smell. I mean, it was just intense, but all of our stuff, my cameras, my lenses were foggy and it was just like we were getting it handed to us. We'll put it that way. So we ended up actually stopping the trip in northern Peru.
My grandmother had passed away and my mom really wanted me to come home and we had like $60 in our bank account by then. So we were like, okay, maybe this is a good breaking point here and we'll come back and we'll finish it. But at that point, we had been on the road for we 14 months and we were like, okay, let's go home. Let's recalibrate. We'll buy some new shoes. I had to buy some new camera equipment and saved up some more money. Then we were able to go back to Peru about a year later.
Shelby Stanger:
Taking a break allowed Erin and Mehedi to reset and come back to their trip with a new perspective. When we come back, Erin talks about what it was like to get back on the road after pausing the ride and spending a year at home. She also talks about what it was like when she finally reached the finish line and the lessons she learned from this life-changing experience.
When photographer Erin Azouz came home from 14 months of biking across Central and South America, she and her now husband Mehedi felt like fish out of water. They were no longer riding for miles every day. The couple had to adjust to being together in regular life again off the road. Around the same time, Erin's career really started to take off when she and Mehedi started talking about returning to Peru to complete the trip, they knew it would be different. They had more financial security and better cycling equipment. Most importantly, Erin and Mehedi had grown a lot in their relationship and as individuals. You came back from this year long break and went back to Peru. So what were some of the main differences between the first and second legs of the trip?
Erin Azouz:
Yeah, it was very, very different. The second trip felt so much easier despite the fact that the riding itself was much harder. So we were just more prepared. We had more money. So we would rent an Airbnb for a week and I would just knock out a whole week's worth of work, and then we would leave and go back on the road and be completely off the grid for a couple of weeks, and then we'd do the same thing in the next big city.
So it felt a little bit more like normal life in a way because we had a little bit more financial stability, and it was a lot harder when we were really trying to not spend any money, camp as much as possible, find the cheapest hostel for just a shower. I also felt like I had gone through such a transformation on the first trip that I wasn't questioning as much. I wasn't asking myself, am I going to make it? What am I doing out here? It was like, this is my journey and I've accepted that and I'm here and I'm going to do it and I'm going to finish it.
Shelby Stanger:
So you bike 10,000 miles. What was it like when you finally made it to Patagonia?
Erin Azouz:
Well, so the whole time that we were on the road, I used to think about this transformation that was happening within me, that I could feel taking place every day. One of the things I used to think about was who is going to be that person that rides into Patagonia? Who is that Erin? The answer is probably a surprising one. So in the last few months that we were in South America, I started to develop a kink in my back and I kept pushing through. By then we were so close to the end, I didn't want to stop even though I could feel something serious happening in my back. By the time we finished in Patagonia, I could no longer walk. Once I was separated from my bike, it became really clear that something pretty bad was going on.
So we finished in Patagonia probably about maybe 500, 600 miles shy of Ushuaia, which is actually the very, very bottom. It's where the road literally ends. So it was pretty anticlimactic actually after such a long journey. I was in such severe pain. I had sciatica running through my right leg. So we turned around and went home, and I ended up being just laid up for about nine months before that pain went away and they wanted to do surgery. I knew that wasn't going to be my journey, but it was really a trying time and sad because I felt like I couldn't really enjoy the glory of finishing this trip because I was in so much pain. So that was the person who finished in Patagonia, was Erin who could no longer walk.
Shelby Stanger:
Well, I appreciate you sharing me that because I think a lot of finish lines are glorified in adventure books and movies, and they're not always glorious, and I don't think your story is unusual. I'm sorry you had to go through that. That sounds really painful. Sciatica is no joke, but I bet in those nine months and after and today, I mean, that trip changed your life. You'll talk about it all the time.
Erin Azouz:
Oh, it was just, yeah. I mean, it was absolutely the turning point in my life for everything that was no longer sustainable, just couldn't be. It was like everything I had learned from being on the road for two years was working itself out in my physical body, and I had to embody the new me. I talk a lot about how this journey felt like it was a journey of self-love in a way, and learning how to just take care of myself was such a huge part of it because I pushed myself so hard. The fact of the matter is the body will do whatever the mind tells it to do. It will fall in line.
Shelby Stanger:
Would you be open to talking about the things that you decided to no longer carry in dear life after Patagonia?
Erin Azouz:
Yeah. I mean, one of the biggest things that I realized was no longer sustainable was, this sense that I didn't deserve the things that I wanted in life, that I wasn't good enough, that I couldn't do it. Thankfully, I'm also very stubborn, and I think that stubbornness really pushed me at the beginning when I really truly believed that I couldn't do it. I was just too stubborn to stop. I remember there were many days where I would look at my husband and I would say, I can't do this. I cannot do this. He would look at me and he would say, Erin, you are doing it. You're doing it. Look at where we started and look at where we are now. You are actually doing it. He was so right. It was like, I was my own worst enemy out there, and I had to just let all of that go, because you can't finish a journey like this and believe that anymore.
Shelby Stanger:
Yeah. It sounds like self-love had been the best tool in your toolbox that you discovered along this journey, which is beautiful. Any advice for someone who wants to go out and pursue a wild idea or bike down to Patagonia?
Erin Azouz:
Oh, wow. Yeah. I would just say you need less than what you think you need. We always over pack, whether it's a bike trip or a trip to Europe or a weekend away. So don't let what you don't have come in the way of doing the thing. We can just forget what the point is of doing these wild things, and we can make it be about, well, I don't really have the right bike, or I don't really have the right tools. Well, you know what? You're going to find them, and sometimes they'll come from unexpected places, and you'd really be surprised by how receptive the world is when you're committed to your idea and making it happen pretty much at any cost.
Shelby Stanger:
Just because I'm a sucker for love, I have to update you on Erin and Mehedi's life after this trip. Erin says that everything they went through on this bike ride set them up for a beautiful relationship. The two got married in 2020, they have a child together, and that the time of this interview, Erin was pregnant with baby number two. It's no surprise that someday when the kids are a little older, the two hope to take their whole family on more adventures like this one. If you want to learn more about Erin, check out her Instagram at Erin Azouz. That's E-R-I-N A-Z-O-U-Z. Her photography is stunning.
There you'll also find a link to her online shop. If you liked this episode, you might also like our interview with David Sacker, who biked from Alaska to Argentina, or our episode with Jerry Hall who biked from Alaska to Mexico. You can find links to both of these episodes in our 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 Mintzberg of Puddle Creative. Our senior producers are Jenny Barber and Hannah Boyd. Our executive producers are Paolo Motala 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. Remember, some of the best adventures happen when you follow your wildest ideas.