A question quietly materialized while I was surfing in Nicaragua. Could I hike across the entire continent of South America?

This thought did not randomly occur; some background information on me might clarify why I would consider such a question. After graduating from college, I spent a gap year hiking the Appalachian Trail and adventuring across much of Central America. I then worked as an organic chemist in a medical school for two years. After leaving that job, I returned to explore more of Central America while writing a book and then hiked the Pacific Crest Trail.

Following that second long hike, I continued adventuring in Central America, and after writing a second book, I completed North America’s Triple Crown of Trails by hiking the Continental Divide Trail. Then I took another laboratory position, this time with a large brewery. When my bank account had recovered from all the travel, I spent a year scuba diving in the Caribbean before moving on to surf in Nicaragua.

Walking across South America felt like an organic next step in my career as a long-distance hiker, given the 8,000-plus miles I logged over the previous decade. Beyond that, before this trip, I knew little about South American culture apart from the broad strokes I had picked up throughout traditional education. I wanted to understand South America.

Deeper than my elementary school bullet points of the conquistadors and sugar plantations, a vague appreciation of military coups, dictators, and cocaine. I wanted to walk among the people, feel the same wind on my face, brush the same earth away from my shoes, know what they ate and drank and loved, to live as they lived.

From extensive research into the adventure side of things, I also learned this hike would be a first, rare in the long-distance hiking or adventuring community. A handful of people had walked long distances in South America, but no one connected a continuous route and hiked the entire way. I’d personally spoken to the hikers or read the trip accounts of previous hikes during my research phase. This information inspired me further because the Andes Mountain Range in South America is the longest continuous mountain range on the planet.

Beyond being the first, I knew this was an adventure I needed to attempt while I still had the resolve and the physical capacity within me to accomplish something grand and unique. Whether or not other people thought hiking across a continent was grand and unique was not all that important to me; by my estimation, this was the ultimate test of myself.

So that covers what I was trying to do but perhaps does not entirely explain why I was doing it. If I am being honest with myself I am not entirely sure of the answer to that question. It is certainly an internal drive of my own and ties into my need for freedom. Hiking provides the ultimate freedom, a space apart from the human world, breaking existence down into the simplest building blocks. I also enjoy solitude; being alone fulfills something within my soul. I’m going to explore that answer to why I did this over the next two books.

Now that I’ve provided the what and the why, all that is left is the how. How did I finance this? By the skin of my teeth. I started with around $15,000, worked through that, and ended around $15,000 in debt from cash advances on my credit card. It was a frugal three years but I knew that going in and embraced the challenge.

I chose the title of this book because this was how I introduced myself throughout the majority of my journey. A lone rancher in the high Andes first suggested it during our conversation; after I shared what I was doing and why, he said (quite matter-of-factly) oh, you are a caminante.

The caminante is a significant figure in South American culture, embodying both the physical and the metaphorical journey through life’s challenges. South America’s migration history has established the caminante as a symbol of resilience. The act of walking reflects both the freedom of adventure and the hardship of displacement, concepts with which many South Americans deeply identify.

When I introduced myself as a caminante to the people I met along my journey, it referenced their knowledge base, and oftentimes, no further explanation was necessary.

Once in Nicaragua, I started my pre-hike surfing trip in San Juan Del Sur, a surfing hotspot in Central America surrounded by sandy beach breaks. Here I purchased an old surfboard and began moving from beach to beach, looking for places to swallow the salt water. I am a strong hiker but a terrible surfer. By the end of this trip, I had repaired the board many times after colliding with reefs, black coastal rocks, and other surfers.

But I could have spent an eternity breezing through these lazy paradise moments in the south of Nicaragua. I eventually ended up in a backpacker beach resort. Private or shared rooms were available, but I opted for a little personal enclosure constructed with 4′ concrete block walls closely resembling a human-sized doghouse. The doghouse rental included access to a shared open-air kitchen with a collection of battered pots and utensils and several clean shared bathrooms. An old flatbed truck would deliver fruits, vegetables, and sometimes eggs twice a week.

Coconut palms and tropical plants blossomed throughout the property, which sat next to a spectacular half-moon beach of soft white sand. The waves and wind were a consistent soundtrack. To enter the doghouse, I would crawl through a small screen and wood frame door and onto a double-sized foam mattress covering most of the floor.
I could sit up once inside, but just barely. A rattling fan hanging on the wall to cool off at night and an outlet to charge a laptop completed the humble habitation. The fact that I could lock the screened door and keep the mosquitoes out meant I was there to stay for a while. Back then, it cost around five bucks a night.

Slightly to the north and west of the resort stood the remains of a petrified coral reef, flowing into non-surf-able waves and roiling foamy waters that seemed to contain a vast unknown quantity of something. On the night I internally pledged to cross South America on foot, it was a jutting, tooth-shaped rock framed by the setting sun on a fading point of ancient coastline that first drew me in and inspired me to action.

From the doghouse, it could have been the end of the world for all that it mattered. I considered this thought in the evening as the irrefutable deep blue of the Pacific slowly bled to black in the encroaching dusk, and the waves waned.

I began a journey to the tooth-shaped rock by walking around the half-moon beach in front of the resort. The tide was out, and the wet sand felt like a gentle foam, rolling over my feet as I sunk deep. The route followed along the bottom of steep earthen cliffs past the beach, hopping from ridge to ridge across a plateau of coastal rock. What I had missed seeing from the beach was a deep rock channel leading from the ocean to the cliffs where the waves wore through the plateau and smashed up into the mainland.

As I descended into the channel, I noticed waves had also worn a cave into the hard rock heart of the earthen cliffs. The footbed underneath crunched with each step, broken shells and small stones worked back and forth by the patient tides, the area strewn thick with driftwood and ocean debris.

Once in front of the cave, I pulled out a headlamp to search for bats or anything else that promised to be interesting because there was time before the sun finished setting. From this position, it was apparent one side of the tooth-shaped rock would be an easy ascent, so I did not foresee any significant effort needed to climb to the top. I had the desire to meditate there at sunset.

At first, my search produced only the discovery that the cave was much higher and less extensive than it initially appeared. Turning back to my sunset mission, the debris in the cave’s bed demanded examination. Initially, one object looked like a hairy coconut, decaying for months in saltwater and beaten against rocks until the fibrous strands of the shell became stringy in appearance. Leaning in for a better look, I had a moment of surprise, thinking this was a decaying human head. I stepped away from the head to leave with quickness when it moved.

It turned out not to be a head but a sloth curled tightly in the fetal position. In this position, the curve of its back and the vertebrae extruding in bumps resembled a black shrunken skull. Its hair hung slightly past its hindquarters, reminiscent of an 80s rocker hairstyle, bleach-blond with noticeable dark roots.

As the sloth uncurled, I saw sinews flexing in a lean body close to starvation. Its skin was like shiny dark leather stretched over a wooden frame, and the hair was nowhere near as thick as it appeared from afar. But what shocked me were its eyes. It looked up at me through these soft, faded, milky white eyes, and I don’t know if it could see me or not, but at that moment, I could see it. I could see straight through to whatever ethereal substance comprised the place beyond the physical.

With the waves creeping into the channel on the incoming tide, the calls of the gulls wandering away in the wind, and the setting sun painting the mouth of the cave with shadows, I felt what the sloth felt. It was a fleeting moment that touched me in the deepest recesses of conscious reality.

After some contemplation, I carried the sloth back to the doghouse. To make it comfortable, I offered a piece of driftwood. The curving talons grasped while I supported its weight with a hand cupping the spine. While arranging ourselves, I offered the driftwood several times, but the sloth would release slowly when I raised it. Once I gave support, it seemed to grasp the driftwood as a child might hold on to their favorite toy after awakening from a nightmare.

Climbing out of the channel with hands full of sloth was tricky, but eventually, I was leaving more deep footprints in the sand toward the resort, with bystanders in tow. The crowd grew around us as I encouraged the sloth to drink and cleaned the salt from the fur.
Sloths rarely drink water. They hydrate from the vegetation they consume, as I would later learn. Looking back, I have decided I should have sent a tube down the throat to force some hydration, although it most likely needed an IV. But alas, I did not.

This was not an accessible area of Nicaragua, nor did Nicaragua have the services and organizations one from the United States might assume to exist. There was no one to call to help, and the police would not take this animal. The sloth was visibly stressed, so I placed it in a quiet tree behind the backpacker beach resort. I then put fruit around the branch as an afterthought and asked the onlookers to leave it alone. When I checked later that night, it was still hanging, although it had not moved from its original position.

I lay in the doghouse haphazardly working on my book about the Continental Divide Trail, lost in thought, unable to sleep yet also unable to focus. I was trying to put unclear thoughts and feelings into words, which I find highly frustrating. The moment I stared into the eyes of the sloth as it uncurled from the fetal position in the cave kept flashing through my mind.

I then thought about the journey to this specific cave. The sloth was not endemic to this region of Nicaragua. I assumed rogue currents swept it out to the open ocean while trying to cross a river or stream in its home territory. I might never know how long it floated and what it experienced in this lifetime.

Did small fish nibble at the tips of its fur? Did the saltwater burn the inside of its nose? During the gentle times, was the sun on the water and the mirrored reflections at eye level something beautiful, or was it dominated by fear?

Then, when that random swirling of watery karma finally deposited it into the cave, what was the condition? Was it strong enough to attempt escape, reaching in a methodical, pensive manner for the surrounding rocks, making progress over the low tides only to have hope dashed as the water rose and tore it from the walls of the channel? Or was it defeated long before reaching safe shores? Was this piece of dry land heaven or hell after a potentially long time in the open ocean?

Imagining the struggle, the fear, the fight for life until the world finally beat its body to the point it lay holding itself and waiting for the end; this was what kept me up that night in the doghouse. If I could adequately capture this level of emotion in words, I would consider myself an author. But I could not write the sloth’s story; this was one of my speculation and its raw spirit. I could only write my own story.
At this moment, I fully committed to crossing South America on foot. I was afraid of the unknown, unsure if I had it within myself to accomplish such a goal, and not ready for what would come next. I was unprepared to hold myself in the fetal position and wait, although by the time the journey ended, I would intimately understand this experience.

But before I set foot on the continent of South America, I decided to face another of my fears, a trial by pain and danger to temper my soul to the hardness it would require for my aspirations. I would cross the Darien Gap, a deadly stretch of rainforest between Panama and Colombia, before I began walking south. I decided my next journey would start on the Panama Canal.

The sloth died in the night and fell from the tree. In its last moments, I like to think it felt a loving touch and some sense of familiarity. It felt bark against the tough skin of its smooth palms and a release from the cave’s undeniable waves and saltwater. Male sloths will swim incredibly long distances in search of a mate. The call of the female echoing across the jungle is all they need to take these risks.

Perhaps it was the Andes calling me that sent me down the path I took. Maybe it was me not having a passionate love in my life. Whatever the reason, I was now committed, and all that remained was to prepare as best I could.

At sunset, I lashed the sloth’s body to a heavy stone and carried it back to the edge of the ancient coastline. I meditated as the sun went down behind the tooth-shaped rock and tossed the stone as far as I could, past the breaking waves and into the deep unknown.

I know the ocean has long since picked the remains of the sloth clean. Yet I have always hoped that one day I would somehow find myself on this coast again, to have the fleeting chance to hold my breath and revisit the bones lying quietly in my past.

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