We had the chance to speak with Aidan Doyle, a traveler who spent 964 days on the road, covered 67,000 kilometers, and crossed 15 countries while driving the legendary Pan-American Highway—a route that stretches from the United States to the "end of the world" in Ushuaia, Argentina. But his journey was more than just numbers. Behind those figures lies a story of challenges, growth, and transformation. In this interview, Aidan shares what those numbers truly mean to him.

‍964 road days, nearly 67,000 kilometers, 15 countries. When you see those numbers, what do they actually represent to you beyond just statistics?

‍I have always liked milestones. Taking pictures as the car rolled over 10k miles, 20k miles, 40k miles. Day 500, for example—a big day for me. Crossing the equator, an invisible line in the middle of nowhere, and I couldn’t stop smiling. They are arbitrary milestones, but for me, they were always a great source of pride.

When I look back at the final number—those days, the crazy ones, the good ones, the bad ones—the ones I never thought would end and the ones I never wanted to. It’s nostalgic, but more than anything, it brings with it a sense of accomplishment. This all began as an idea, a dream. I don’t know if I ever really believed myself when I said I was driving to Argentina. I started. That I knew I was going to do. I drove into Mexico, scared and green. But there was so much that could happen. Arriving in Argentina was a far less certain fact. Countless borders, cultures. A large Darién Gap, impossible to drive through.

Those numbers are arbitrary. Within them passed faces, places, and lives. Different versions of me and the world rolled by like ticker tape, all stored somewhere in those simple numbers. But I can't help but smile a bit looking at them. Having this very concrete and real representation of reaching my destination that only I can truly understand is special.

It’s 964 days that would have happened regardless of what I decided to do with my life. I would be here, breathing air on this rock, somewhere, on this day, regardless of whether I drove to the end of the world. But I look at those numbers and I am so very grateful for the way in which I decided to spend them. Time is, after all, the most fragile of resources.

You talk about the people along the way: the hospitality, the friendships. Is there a particular encounter that still sits with you, a moment that defined the kindness you experienced?

‍I have an old car. It breaks. Frequently in very inconvenient places. It was the day before New Year's Eve, and after a long string of car-related headaches the week prior, it came to a head as my battery and alternator simultaneously stopped working on a long, straight stretch of treeless highway in Central America. It was also Sunday. In Latin America, people take Sundays off. My girlfriend at the time and I were stranded. We had the hood up in pretty horrible heat, facing direct and unimpeded sunlight. After calling every mechanic in the area to no end, we realized we were, at this point, on our own.

After about 20 minutes, a young man, covered to the fingertips and up to the neck in tattoos, pulled over in his Ford Bronco and backed up near to the front of my car. He stepped out and asked if we needed help. I said yes, very much so. He helped us with a jump, and we barely made it together to the next town when the battery died again. We were in a small rural town in the interior of Costa Rica, far from the tourist hotspots on the coast. Within minutes, I had about five pairs of Costa Rican hands elbow-deep in my engine block. The young man who had helped us told me he was going to get something and would be right back.A few minutes later, he returned with a new battery in his hands. My eyes widened, and he just handed it to me. He said, "You’ll be good now with this new one." I didn’t have any money, and he never asked for any. As I tried to ask to compensate him somehow, he just looked at me, put his hand on my shoulder, and said, "Pura vida, bienvenido a Costa Rica." He turned around and waved, saying he needed to get home to his wife. I never saw him again.“Somehow, someway, someone always comes to save me. Not because they have to, or because they are getting anything out of it, but just because they want to help. It’s been a real lesson in humanity.”

These situations are not uncommon in my life. I call them natural disasters. Somehow, someway, someone always comes to save me. Not because they have to or because they are getting anything out of it, but just because they want to help. It’s been a real lesson in humanity these past few years. I saw a whole hell of a lot more good than I did bad, in a lot of places a lot of people don’t think very highly of.

You mention sacrifices, refusing to compromise on your own compromise. What was the hardest thing you had to let go of for this journey? Was it worth it?

‍People. That is probably the biggest sacrifice I’ve had to make. There were things like financial security, or a career, which is a thing that people place a lot of importance on in your late 20s to build. But those things never really felt like sacrifices. I could always go back to those things. You can always make money, and I am a firm believer that all people on this earth, regardless of their situation, find a way to create a life.

Traveling for 4 years is different than a year. Entire phases of peoples lives happen in 4 years. I have friends with baby’s who didn’t even know their significant other when I left. Best friends who are engaged to people I have never met. So I have sacrificed being a part of the people I loves’ lives. Some have, it seems, sort of moved on from me and I can’t say I blame them. I did after all abandon them for years. Friendships that I spent years building and that I adored, are in no way what they were when I left. I feel almost a stranger at times to some of them. I had to sacrifice some of those people and things in order to do this. A tough pill sometimes to swallow.

There were people I met along the way. People who I wanted to continue with me, who I even considered stopping this thing for. But traveling in a car for years to come was not a part of their plan and I had to be okay with sacrificing them to achieve this. I wasn’t willing to stop, and so as a result I lost some people in my life that I loved. Time will tell if it was worth, but I do know one thing, if I didn’t do this I never would have forgiven myself and I believe a debilitating unhappiness would have festered to a unignorable level.

You’ve seen the world at its best and at its worst. Was there a particular event or moment that completely reshaped your understanding of humanity?

To boil it down to a specific event is difficult. I guess its been more of a slow drip that has developed my continually evolving view of humanity. I do feel particularly lucky however that I have seen so many different versions of this thing we call living. I have lived alongside locals in the Amazon on 4 day slow floats on a barge down the river. Spent weeks inside silver mines in high altitude Bolivia alongside groups of miners with short life expectancies. Crossed the Caribbean on a sailboat and seen the simple lives of the locals living on small islands with dugout canoes and no electricity. Driven through the harsh and uninhabitable yet somehow inhabited La Guajira desert and paid for passage in pieces of candy and bags of water. Dined beside friendly armed Mexican militants in paradise. Gotten drunk with Chilean cowboys. Eaten stew by candlelight in a hut on a Nicarguan island in the Caribbean. Stowed away on Lobster boat.

I’ve been lucky enough to see so many various ways of life. A lot of them much harder than the life I was accustomed to and grew up with. A sense of real struggle that when I put it into terms of my own life, seemed to dwarf my own prior comfortability. I guess I learned humanity, and living is hard. Everyone is struggling to get by but everyone is one way or another making it work. I guess the resilience of humanity is what shined through and I gained a real perspective on the way life is really lived. Its hard, but we will get through it. If all these people that I have seen over these past years are getting through what they are getting through then there is nothing that should stop anyone reading this from getting through it.

Floating through the Darien Gap, sleeping in unknown places, meeting armed militants in paradise—fear was clearly a companion at times. What was your scariest moment, and how did you push through it?

Central Coast Mexico. Guerrero. Michoacan. Beautiful, wild, sparsely visited, and uncommonly known Mexican States. They are unique in that large swaths of the states contain no police or government presence and are controlled almost exclusively by cartels or local militias. This doesn’t necessarily mean that they are war zones. In fact, these small little local governing bodies as you can put it, are rather organized and operate for the most part harmoniously. Unless that is, there are shifts in the power structure in the region. When I was there, there was a small skirmish going on between two regional cartel groups. As a result. I was stuck for a period of time in small surf town. It was paradise so I wasn’t complaining but stuck none-the less.

Eventually the conflict was resolved. I packed the car and on my own made my way further down the coast. Road blocks or checkpoints are not uncommon throughout Latin America. In most places these road blocks are manned by uniformed police officers. In this part of the world however, they are manned by plain clothed militia members. The sight of a man with a large gun in Mexico is not surprising. But the sight of a man with a large automatic rifle wearing street clothes can be very jarring. I was relatively used it at this point but it still scared the shit out of me.I was making my way down the highway when I pulled up to one of these road blocks. My car loaded high with surfboards. A young man in jeans and a t-shirt got up from his seat with an AK47 around his shoulder and waved me off to the side. I pulled over as my heart rate slowly increased. He looked at me, asked me where I was going and where I had been. The common script. Then proceeded to look up at my surfboards. He looked down slowly, and with his hand resting on the broad side of his AK47, which lay high on chest, tapped his fingers ominously against the wood of the gun as he asked, ‘so you surf huh?’ I said ‘ya’. He looked at me, continuing to tap his gun slowly, and said ‘me too. I’m looking for a new board. What sizes you got?’ I responded and he said, ‘you got anything for me’ as he tapped away on his automatic rifle and made perfect eye contact without a single facial expression. I hesitated. I didn’t know what to do or answer. Was he about to steal my surfboards or force me to give them to him?I mustered up whatever bravery, or stupidity I had left, and said, ‘no man sorry I need them all, nothing for sale, nothing I can give you’. He paused, leaned back and jovially proclaimed ‘a man no worries! Just broke my 6’4’’ and I needed a new board! We’ve got epic waves here in Michoacan enjoy hermano!’ He backed away and the 18 year old militia member with an AK47 waved me along.

Now was this the scariest thing that happened to me? Probably not. But it was eye opening. I realized there are lot of situations that we fear simply because we do not understand. Being on wheels throughout all parts of Latin America, you are going to find a lot of seemingly scary situations which you don’t understand. This kid was just doing his job. I was passing through. He wished me no harm. Curious more than anything. It changed the way I looked at a lot of situations that people told me I should be scared of. Those people, for the most part, didn’t understand the things they were warning me about. I stopped being so scared of them. I tried, over and over again, when situations both foreign and scary knocked at my door, to try to understand it from the other side. Trust people until you have a reason not to. Up to this point, it hasn’t failed me yet.

Now don’t get me wrong, there are plenty of dangerous things awaiting you along the Pan American highway but from my experience so long as you don’t mess with any Mexican Cartels, don’t do anything overly stupid, and don’t walk around in bad neighborhoods in big cities at night, it’s a pretty safe trip.

Now that you’ve arrived at the ‘end of the world,’ —what’s next? Does the road still call you, or is this a new chapter?

For a long time I think I almost feared arriving at the end of the world. I had been on the road for nearly 3 years. Traveling for 4. Talking about it for 6. And thinking about it for longer than that. It had become almost ingrained in who I was as a person. That guy driving Latin America. A part of my personality if you will. I was afraid to face the question who was I without this thing that I had, at least in my own mind, become. After I reached the end I wasn’t ‘driving the Pan-American highway’, ‘I had driven the Pan-American highway’. A small difference in words but a big change in sentiment.