Modern motorcycle diaries

There are road trips, and then there are the sort of journeys that make your annual two-week holiday look like a mildly inconvenient commute. Alex Chacon belongs firmly in the latter category.

He is probably best known for an extraordinary motorcycle journey across the Americas, riding from Alaska to Argentina over the course of 500 days. The resulting video, 500 Days Alaska to Argentina – The Modern Motorcycle Diaries, compresses an absurd amount of road, weather, border crossings, bad decisions and magnificent scenery into something considerably easier to consume from the safety of your sofa.

It should be seen. Preferably before you start looking at motorcycle prices and explaining to your employer that you may be unavailable for the next year and a half.

Chacon has since acquired plenty of viral mileage from other adventures, including Around the World in 360 Degrees, a three-year epic selfie project spanning more countries than most people manage in a lifetime. His YouTube channel contains plenty more material for anyone suffering from an insufficiently severe case of wanderlust.

The name Modern Motorcycle Diaries is of course a nod to The Motorcycle Diaries, the memoir of Ernesto “Che” Guevara. Long before the beret, the revolution and the inevitable appearance on millions of student-bedroom posters, Guevara was a young medical student who set off with his friend Alberto Granado on a motorcycle journey across South America in 1952.

They left Buenos Aires and spent nine months traveling across the continent, encountering poverty, disease and social inequality along the way. The journey profoundly affected Guevara and helped shape the man who would later become one of the most famous and controversial revolutionary figures of the twentieth century. The trip was eventually dramatized in the 2004 film The Motorcycle Diaries.

Different riders. Different centuries. But same basic idea: get on a motorcycle, point it toward the horizon and discover that the world is considerably larger, stranger and more complicated than it looked from home. There are worse ways to spend your time.