When Alvarez Silberstein was 18 years old, he was in a car accident that left him paralyzed from the chest down. Before his accident, Alvaro had a dream to go Torres del Paine National Park in Patagonia. Once he started using a wheelchair, he assumed it would be impossible for him to fulfill this dream. But in 2017, Alvaro and his incredible friends organized a trip to make his wild idea a reality.
When Alvarez Silberstein was 18 years old, he was in a car accident that left him paralyzed from the chest down. Before his accident, Alvaro had a dream to go Torres del Paine National Park in Patagonia. Once he started using a wheelchair, he assumed it would be impossible for him to fulfill this dream. But in 2017, Alvaro and his incredible friends organized a trip to make his wild idea a reality.
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Shelby Stanger:
Recently Johnny and I went on a trip to Europe and I was reminded of the magic of travel. We hiked in the Alps of Switzerland, taking in the most majestic views all the way to a glacier. Then we went to Majorca, Spain, where we hiked along the coast of the Mediterranean Sea and explored remote coves. Many of the trails on my adventures were labeled and accessible, but in my experience, that's not always the case. For people who are disabled, there aren't always many options to hike to the top of a mountain or explore a secluded beach. But Chilean adventure, Alvarez Silberstein, who uses a manual wheelchair, has found a way to do things like climb Machu Picchu, scuba dive in Mexico, and so much more. Now he's on a mission to bring experiences like these to thousands of other travelers with disabilities. I'm Shelby Stanger, and this is Wild Ideas Worth Living, an REI Co-op Studio's production.
When Alvarez Silberstein was 18 years old, he was in a car accident that left him paralyzed from the chest down. Before his accident, Alvaro had a dream to go Torres del Paine National Park in Patagonia. Once he started using a wheelchair, he assumed it would be impossible for him to fulfill this dream. But in 2017, Alvaro and his incredible friends organized a trip to make his wild idea a reality. Alvaro became the first person in a wheelchair to complete the famous W Trek and Torres del Paine. The trip inspired Alvaro to co-found Wheel the World, a startup that empowers people with disabilities to travel without limits. Alvaro Silberstein, welcome to Wild Ideas Worth Living.
Alvaro Silberstein:
Thank you, Shelby. Thank you for the invite. Very excited to talk with you.
Shelby Stanger:
Well, I'm excited to talk with you. You had a really, really wild, beautiful important idea to found Wheel the World. Let's go back in time. Before age 18, before you had this accident, were you always an outdoorsy kind of kid?
Alvaro Silberstein:
Absolutely, so I grew up in Santiago, Chile. That could be a very similar landscape as Denver, Colorado, or Sacramento in California that you have the mountains nearby, the ocean nearby, and I am the youngest of four brothers and they always pushed me with my parents to go camping, to go hiking. I did a lot of surfing, snowboarding, windsurfing since I was very young. So when I got my accident, it was really tough, especially thinking that it will be impossible for me to have an active life. But through the process of getting used to my disability, I realized that I was wrong and it was possible. But for that to happen, equipment is needed. The help of your friends is needed, information is needed. So that's why we founded Wheel the World to make people travel and go places.
Shelby Stanger:
You said it was really hard to get back to a place where you wanted to go adventure again after you were 18, so it's been 20 years since you had this accident. I'm always curious about the mental game. How did you get yourself in a place where you're like, okay, I want to go adventure again. What was that journey like for you?
Alvaro Silberstein:
It was a process, definitely. And at the beginning you think it will not be the same. Okay, I will go camping with my friends, but it will not be the same. And through the process, you realize that you can still enjoy experiences with your friends, with people that you love, places that you love, and adapting to doing things differently and being also okay and receiving help. So for example, yes, you were mentioning about adaptive surfing. Now, if I go surfing, I need help of two or three other people. I cannot do it by myself, but it's still amazing. I still enjoy it. And you end up realizing that you can enjoy life even if it's different from before. Many times it's hard. In my case, it took me, I don't know, two, three years to accept my physical disability, to accept that I would be dependent on different aspects of my life. But once that I accept and I pushed myself to do the things that I really wanted to do, I realized that I was enjoying life same as I did before.
Shelby Stanger:
Okay, so acceptance is really hard, and I think two to three years is actually pretty fast, especially when you're 18, you have a lot of juice in you at 18. So what was that process like? Did you talk to people? Did you have friends who are going through similar experiences? Was your family helpful? Was it therapy? Was it like seeing a movie? Was it everything?
Alvaro Silberstein:
It was many things, but the most important thing was the support of my family and friends. I mean, they were there in the tough moments. They were okay helping me for going places or the things that I needed. So for example, it took me a while to be independent as I am today. But one year after my accident, I went back to college and to go to the bathroom, I needed help, and my brothers, they arranged themselves to go and help me in the middle of the day because we were all living in the same city. So the support that I received from my close network was really important. For example, one year and a half after my accident, my best four friends were planning a road trip around Argentina from Santiago, that I am originally from Chile, right? And the plan was to cross the Andes by car and do a road trip of three weeks around Argentina.
And I was living with my parents at that point, not doing much, and they went to my home and they said, Alvaro, you're going with us. There's no excuses, we want you to be part of this adventure. We will not accept no as an answer. And we went together for three weeks. And that trip, for example, made me realize that traveling and having that kind of experiences helped me on my rehabilitation process, to adapt to the circumstances, to understand how can I solve problems.
Shelby Stanger:
Alvaro has a strong support system that has always helped him adapt and push his limits. About 10 years after his accident, Alvaro started to revisit his old dream of trekking Torres Del Paine. Many people thought it would be impossible, but Alvaro's friend Camilo was certain they could make it happen. Okay, so you were 18 years old when you had this accident, and then you had this really wild idea not long after to go to Patagonia and to complete this really infamous hiking trek called the W Trek, and it's called the W Trek because when you look it on a map, it kind of like the Strava of lines look like giant W. So I'm really curious, when did this wild idea come to be?
Alvaro Silberstein:
Yes, so before my accident I was talking with a friend and we said, okay, let's work during the year to save money to do a trip every summer. And the first trip that we wanted to organize was Torres Del Paine in Patagonia because as Chileans, that was the very first place that we wanted to visit. I got injured, so this plan was not a plan anymore. And after 10 years, I started to plan my move to Berkeley, and now I live in Berkeley, California.
And I went to visit a friend's house, one of my best friends whose name is Camilo, and he was planning a solo trip to Torres del Paine. And I said, dude, you will be there. I would love to go there at some point. Why don't you see how feasible if is someone in a wheelchair do this trip? And Camilo is this kind of person that he gets excited pretty easily and he gets obsessed with ideas. And he thought that it was such a good idea. And he went on his solo trip and he was talking to people all the time and figure out all the time, how might we do a trip with me included in my wheelchair. All the answers that he received was, no, it's impossible. We have never seen a wheelchair here before. And it's most probably that it will be impossible to do.
Shelby Stanger:
And that's because it's like rocky, tiny little trails.
Alvaro Silberstein:
It's a six-day hike with a lot of slopes, very narrow trails that are not very well maintained, and it's just like in the mountains, to give some context. Yosemite National Park, you can have a pretty accessible experience in Yosemite National Park, but there's also hikes that are not accessible as any other mountain or national park. This one is all not accessible. And when he came back from his trip, he was super excited to start figuring out on how we would do that trip. The first thing that we did was just bought the flight tickets to Torres Del Paine.
Shelby Stanger:
Yes, I love this. So I just wrote a book about wild ideas and I was like, the first thing you got to do if you have a crazy idea, a wild idea is just book your ticket and then you have skin in the game and you can't back out. Even if you don't have anything else figured out.
Alvaro Silberstein:
So that's what we did, and we bought the tickets, and I still have that email where Camilla bought the tickets. He forwarded the tickets to me and the other four friends that got into this adventure and he put in the subject, life is too short. And that was the moment that we started figuring out of how someone in a wheelchair would do this trip.
And we realized that nobody else in a wheelchair did it before. And I was working for a startup that they designed very high tech wheelchairs here in the Bay Area, and I went to a conference to an expo of different mobility devices, and I found that one of the companies that were there was a French company that manufacture hiking wheelchairs, to go on hikes through trails that are not designed for a conventional wheelchair. It is a very special wheelchair that has only one wheel. It has someone pushing you from the back. It is an assistive device. People cannot use it by their own. So it's someone on the back that push you and another person at the front that has harnesses and also push you. So it has suspension and it has breaks.
Yes, and at some point I had some conflicts because I really liked to do things by my own. So I was kind of having conflicts of being sipping there, not doing much effort, but on the other side, was the only way that I would explore and get to those places that I really wanted to visit.
Shelby Stanger:
Alvaro had to redefine what hiking was for him and his friends did too. With his specialized wheelchair, hiking was much more of a team effort. One friend would wear a harness connected to the chair and hike in front of him, pulling Alvaro along. Another friend was harnessed to the back of the chair, hiking behind to help push and control Alvaro's speed. Here's the kicker though, this special chair cost $5,000. Alvaro and his friends didn't have the extra cash to spring for this equipment, so they launched a crowdfunding campaign. As part of the campaign, the group decided that after the trek, they would leave the wheelchair in Patagonia for other people to use. With this pay forward mindset, they were able to raise the funds in just a few days. When we come back, we talk about how this small project became a full-blown business and Alvarez experience pioneering wheelchair explorations all over the world.
Alvaro Silberstein had always wanted to go to Torres Del Paine National Park and Patagonia, Chile when he ended up in a wheelchair at age 18, he didn't think it would ever be possible. But 12 years after the car accident, Alvaro became the first person in a wheelchair to complete the famous W Trek and Torres Del Paine. The W Trek is a six-day hike through extremely rocky terrain. And one day on the trail, you can experience every kind of weather, snow, rain, sun, even extreme heat and cold.. Along the way, there are beautiful lakes and a massive glacier sits at the end of the hike as a reward for weary trekkers. Not only was it an incredible experience, but it allowed Alvaro the space to have some major epiphanies.
Alvaro Silberstein:
We did the trip, it was amazing. I mean, the first day we started hiking, I was looking around like the mountains, the nature, the lakes, because these places, it has seriously a very special energy. And it was a moment also that I think I can do anything. My disability shouldn't be an impediment for anything that I really want to do.
Shelby Stanger:
Alvaro realized that even if something seemed impossible, he could find a way to overcome whatever life threw at him. It helped that he had an incredible support system too. On the W trek, his friends took turns hiking with the wheelchair, setting up camp and making food. One of his friends even filmed their trek and made a short documentary. The film ended up going viral both in the US and in Chile.
Alvaro Silberstein:
And that's when the most important thing that happened in my life happened. It was not the trip, it was that then hundreds of people started reaching out saying how cool that trip that Alvaro did. I also have a disability and I also want to do it.
Shelby Stanger:
So I'm just really curious, how you get all this publicity and all these people reaching out to you. What was that like? All these people saying, oh my gosh... Yeah, I'm just curious what went through your head when all this is happening?
Alvaro Silberstein:
Yes, I understood that there was something here. There was something here that was special and more than the publicity and the yes, our story went viral. For example, Mark Zuckerberg posted a video with our story.
Shelby Stanger:
Just Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook? Met a guy?
Alvaro Silberstein:
Yeah, that was crazy, but the most important thing was actually people willing to do this trip. And that was our initial story. I didn't want to become the only one. I wanted to become the first one to then allow other people to repeat it.
Shelby Stanger:
Just as they had promised, Alvaro left the wheelchair at an eco lodge in Torres Del Paine for others to use and started spreading the word.
Alvaro Silberstein:
And actually only three weeks after our trip, it was the second person that repeated that trip and it was a family with a kid with a very severe disability that they lived in Punta Arenas. Punta Arenas is the closest city to Torres Del Paine. It's like a three hour drive. And they knew about our story and they reached out to us because they said, okay, we never thought that it would be possible for us as a family to go to Torres del Paine. So we really want to do it. And we organized everything for them. When that second trip started, it was the same day that I was going back to Berkeley and I was freaking out, to be honest, because it is a complex trip.
It is quite an adventure. So I had to disconnect from my phone and I had an eight-hour flight to, I think it was like Dallas, that I stopped over. And when I landed to Dallas, I connected to my phone again and the first thing that I see is a picture of this kid with a huge smile. And I started crying. And when I started crying, the person that was next to me in the plane said, "Are you okay? Do you need any help?" And I said, no, I'm fine. I'm just happy.
Shelby Stanger:
Over the next six months, Alvaro supported a handful of people with disabilities as they took on the W trek. From there, he and Camilo started wondering what other places might be possible to visit in a wheelchair? How could they find adaptive equipment around the world for people to use? They made a list of all the places that Alvaro wanted to visit. Machu Picchu was next. How did you do Machu Picchu? I've been to Machu Picchu and it's not accessible at all.
Alvaro Silberstein:
It's not accessible at all. And we have put together an experience that we figured out, what are the accessible accommodations. We have an accessible transportation that gets you to the different places. And to get to Machu Picchu, we have also a special hiking wheelchair, and we have trained guides that would help you to go on the more challenged parts because yes, it's not accessible. And actually that story of Machu Picchu was also cool because I went before. I went when I was 16 years old, and I get to Machu Picchu by train, and when I was there in Machu Picchu, I met two guys that they did the Inca Trail. That is actually the hike that you arrive, Machu Picchu, just like hiking. And I said, "Oh, next time I need to come back to this place and I will do the Inca Trail."
Of course, after my accident I thought this would be impossible, but after Torres Del Paine, I thought there might be a chance to do it in the same wheelchair. So actually the second time that I went to Machu Picchu was to do the Inca Trail and I get to Machu Picchu by the Inca Trail, and we have a beautiful documentary about that trip in YouTube that is called Vol Ver. Vol Ver in Spanish means going back. And that's an experience that we don't offer to our customers because it was crazy. It was very risky to be honest.
But we do arrange tours and experiences to people to get to Machu Picchu by train. So that was the second destination. And then we replicated the same thing of working with local operators to design an inclusive experience with equipment, with assistance with accommodation and transportation. And we did that in Machu Picchu, in Oaxaca, in Mexico, in Maui, in Hawaii, in Brazil. And we started to have customers that started to book trips to these destinations, and that's when we decided to expand because people started to reach out saying, I love your adventure in Torres Del Paine, but there's no way that I will take the risk going there, but I really need to find an accessible hotel to go to Rome
Shelby Stanger:
When Alvaro and his team started getting some more basic accessibility requests, they realized how desperately needed they were. People with disabilities don't just want to climb mountains, they also want to visit international cities and know that their equipment is going to fit in their hotel room or that they'll be able to get into the shower. Wheel the World started offering not just adventure trips, but also a database of accessible hotels and tours. Since that initial expedition to Patagonia in 2017, the company has helped more than 5,000 people book trips to over 200 destinations. What are the biggest impediments to adventure when you have a disability? What are some of the things that people are most concerned with and how are you guys addressing them?
Alvaro Silberstein:
I think that the challenge is getting to know the place in advance. Like, how I will get to the bathroom? That's one of the challenges. Where I will sleep, how I will get to some place, right? It depends so much on the person, right? Because one of the things that we have learned so far is that every disability has a spectrum. Every person with disabilities have different needs. So it's all about the information, having the detailed information of what you will experience when getting there so you can prepare in advance.
So that's pretty much what we are doing. Raising information, and many times the answer can be no. For example, our experience in Machu Picchu, we cannot handle power wheelchairs, not because we don't want, it's just because the train that gets you to Machu Picchu, they cannot store power wheelchairs that are very heavy and that are way larger than manual wheelchairs. So that's what we say to our customers. If you are in a power wheelchair, unfortunately we cannot make this trip happen, but we can take you to Costa Rica because we have an amazing transportation there to even get you to Tortuguero, that is like a place in the middle of the jungle, right?
Shelby Stanger:
That's so cool. Yeah.
Alvaro Silberstein:
So we like to build that credibility through information and through matching the needs of our customers with what's actually the experience. We have done a lot of trips that have different complexities. You don't need to do the whole W to get an amazing experience there, and we can recommend you to go to the more easy parts. We, at first, we're very focused in adventure travel, and now we have expanded to also allow people to find accessible transportation in Barcelona or the accessible things to do in New York or the accessible accommodation to stay in Berlin. We have expanded ourselves to be able to also impact more people and not the only ones that really like adventures and the Elders
Shelby Stanger:
Wheel the World quickly expanded to fill a gap in the travel industry, from urban international travel to outdoor adventures. They have hiking wheelchairs and more than 30 destinations around the world, plus other equipment for activities like adaptive kayaking and cycling. Alvaro, thank you so much for coming on Wild Ideas Worth Living. I love your energy, your creativity, and I love Wheel the World. If you want to learn more about Wheel the World, check out wheeltheworld.com to get in touch with Alvaro directly. You can find him on Instagram at Alvasil, that's Alvasil. 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 Peers Nitzberg of Puddle Creative. And our senior producer is Jenny Barber. 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. And remember, some of the best adventures happen when you follow your wildest ideas.