Pan-American Highway Adventures in a School Bus - With The Global Convoy Team

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In this highlights reel from the Adventure Diaries Podcast, we revisit the incredible journey of the Global Convoy team. From their humble beginnings rallying £75 scrap cars across the globe to converting a massive US school bus for a Pan-American expedition, Max, Joel, and Becca share stories of mechanical mayhem, unexpected local hospitality, and the sheer joy of the open road.

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Chapters

• 00:00 – Origin Story: Exploring the world with a convoy of hitchhikers
• 01:07 – The £75 Cars: Why cheaper vehicles make for better adventures
• 01:46 – Mechanical Mayhem: Breakdowns, repairs, and the beauty of "bangers"
• 03:49 – The Bus Idea: How a campfire conversation turned into a double-decker dream
• 05:27 – Driving a School Bus: Navigating a massive rig on a standard license
• 05:52 – Nicaragua Incident: A chaotic wrong turn involving a fire engine
• 06:46 – Stacey's Mom Legacy: The perfect retirement for their faithful bus
• 07:52 – Kazakhstan Lamb: A terrifying police stop turns into a warm welcome
• 09:04 – Samurai Sword: Accidentally forging katanas while hitchhiking in Japan
• 09:58 – Call to Adventure: Advice for starting your own journey

Transcript

Global Convoy Team Origin Story

as we prepare for the launch of the Adventure Diaries Podcast, season five. We are revisiting the highlights and cult adventures from each episode in season four to keep you entertained and inspired to get you outdoors. And now here are some of those short highlights from my episode with a global convoy team and their Pan-American Highway expedition in a converted US school bus.

Fantastic. Enjoy.

Max: One by one, I started getting more people that were interested, like Becker and Joel. And the goal was to drive into Europe and see what happens. And it was only after meeting Joel, meeting Becker, assembling this crew of about 25, I think at one point in five different vehicles, uh, mainly hitchhikers that we all collectively realized we had a thing.

So right up until that point, it had just been a bit of a pipe dream, honestly. Like we knew we needed a visa for Russia and we needed a visa for Uzbekistan, and we knew at some point we'd need [00:01:00] to ship the cars. But we didn't know when. We didn't know with who we didn't know how.

The £75 Cars

Max: We picked them literally because the cheaper it is, the more adventurous you're gonna be with it. Obviously, you know, gave them mots and check they weren't going to actually break, but. Any, um, cost we could cut.

We did that wasn't, you know, gonna kill us. And 75 pounds was the cheapest car available on Gumtree at the time, and it needed a lot of help to start, but once it was going, it was fine. Yeah, that kind of gave us a lot of confidence when we got to the weirder parts of the world that, you know, it's not our, our baby is just a cool vehicle that we like, hence the endearing nicknames rather than like precious nicknames.

Mechanical Mayhem

joel: It was just because, there's no, nobody else was gonna jump in. Uh, yeah, we had to figure it out a lot. But yeah, no, it was, uh, it was I think of the first 24 hours of the trip actually. We lost a, we lost a car, a car lost a tire, and then I, we [00:02:00] got held back. Yeah, there was loads of different breakdowns and, and setups.

I mean, everybody had to participate and do their part. You know, 

chris w: or did, did you take spear automotive parts with you? 

joel: Not really. I'm trying to think of anything. Uh, maybe a tire that we forgot about. 

chris w: Yeah, 

Max: yeah. Think it was mainly tires, you know, a jack and like a simple box of tools, but nothing, um, very in depth, I'd say.

joel: I think the beautiful accident of, of having such cheap, bangers of cars was basically, they were, they were tinker toys and they were able to be, you know, the parts and pieces and it were able to be swapped out. The first time we ever had to have something actually worked on was the Skoda. We basically, that was probably the, the only forward-looking job we did was when we were in Moscow, we had the timing belt changed, um, because it was so old and it had never been changed before.

Um,

Max: 'cause we paired up, because we could only do it in pairs. You can't like get eight people in a single vehicle. So we split up into teams [00:03:00] and kind of raced. But as we've already mentioned, Japan for me, and I don't really know why, but Uzbekistan, I think, 'cause it was one of the ones that I'd been to once before on the Mongol rally and to be honest, had just the worst time, got very ill, had trouble with the police, constantly eagle there, or at least it was.

So that was a nightmare. Everything was bad. So I came in with a really negative view and we just had like day after day of meeting incredible locals going to these strange places, getting invited to like, you know, don't go there, that's where the tour go, come with me. And then going to some guy's farm or like, this guy grows melons and he has the best melons in town and like, you must take my melons.

And like just this constant like comical series of really heartfelt events. And I just, I left Uzbekistan being like, is not what I expected. And I always think about that. 

The Bus Idea

becca: And in 2022 on Mayhem, uh, we were in Morocco and we had a friend of a friend join us, uh, from the US. And we were just [00:04:00] sitting around campfire that, the conversation came up, what's next? And we were like, oh, well, you know, we've always wanted to do a double decker bus. And then Nick was like, oh, well if you wanna do a bus in the US I could probably help you organize that.

And then, yeah, basically we just kind of, I dunno if any of us really took it seriously. Maybe a little bit, but I think we were just kinda like, oh, maybe, you know, we'll talk about it after. Um, and then he kept following through with messages and was like, my parents have a workshop that we can use to convert it.

Luckily his family are quite sort of mechanical. The bus is like next level for us, right. We've never, it's 

joel: basically a lorry really, rather than a, it's huge, you know, normal deal. 

chris w: Totally huge. 

becca: So over the, the course of 2022, going into 23, I, whilst Nick was back in the US, he was going to look at different buses.

We put out feelers on our, uh, social media to see if anyone would actually be interested. [00:05:00] And then we were like, okay, what, where are we gonna go? What are we gonna do if we do get a bus? And, uh, we thought about doing the Pan-American Highway because we'd covered quite a lot of it on the round the world trip, but not, you know, we hadn't been up to Alaska and we hadn't been down to re at the bottom in Argentina.

So yeah, we were just kind of like, I guess, yeah, just started it. 

Driving a School Bus

joel: with that conversion in the US any normal driver's license will allow you to drive and insure the vehicle as long as you don't have more than a 15 people within the vehicle, including the driver. So essentially that is what we did to make sure it was insured and up to par for doing the whole trip, which to a European sounds absolutely insane and it kind of is, but that's 

chris w: insane.

joel: That was how we, that was how we managed to get away with it. 

Nicaragua Incident

Max: Well, uh, the worst by far. I can see Joel grinning was, uh, in Nicaragua. So luckily this was neither Joel or I [00:06:00] driving at the time. It was our friend Nick, but, and this is not his fault, this wasn't bad driving.

This is just, it goes wrong sometimes. We were going to a very old colonial, uh, Nicaraguan city and the roads just get narrower and narrower and more and more people are parking their cars. And at one point we attempted a left turn. And about everything that could go wrong went wrong. The back left tire hit an old like bent piece of metal, a drain pipe, and so bust the tire burst.

And then in the backup from that, clipped a local car whose owner was there as a fire engine turned on its sirens to say, I have to go down here, you have to move immediately. And it was just absolute chaos and that was one of the most stressful nights ever. 

Stacey's Mom Legacy

Max: So we were trying to figure that out once we got to South America. 'cause another part of it was we didn't know if we'd even make it that far. And luckily, and this was very stressful at the end 'cause we didn't know who, and there were lots of things that fell through, but [00:07:00] we ended up finding a guy that wanted to buy it and he wanted, he helps convert people's vehicles and repair vehicles for driving the Pan-American.

So he really resonated with the story of the bus, first school bus to ever do the full Pan-American. And he wanted to convert it, not scrap it, he wanted to convert it into a bunkhouse that people can live in whilst they're working on their own vehicles. And we just figured this was like the absolute perfect sendoff to Stacey's mom.

She'll forever be housing people. And I remember when we first, uh, showed him the bus, he looked inside and we have graffiti all over the inside from people we've met signing their signature. And he was just like, I can't remember what he said, but it was like, this is, this is only gonna grow. Like, I'm not taking any of this out.

And it was just like he got it and we were like over the moon to give him the bus and, uh, convert. It 

Kazakhstan Lamb

joel: We'd gotten into Kazakhstan and we had basically been told like, okay, you know, you gotta be careful 'cause they have these unmarked vehicles that are like [00:08:00] secret police kind of thing. Yeah, we kind of heard these like rumors and like urban myths or whatever, and so you get pulled over by like a white, a Toyota, four runner, and uh, and, and the guy just basically flags us down.

And so we were, we were really nervous sitting in the Skoda and, uh, and wasn't really sure like what, you know, what was gonna happen, what was going on. And, and, uh, I see they start talking to, I'm in the car behind and I see 'em talking to Max and whoever was in the car. And uh, and I see him kind of shaking his hand and he's speaking really like, you know, almost emotionally like, like it, you can see.

He's got a lot of, he's got a lot of umph to him. And then I see him suddenly he runs back to his, his, uh, vehicle and then comes back out and he's got a giant bag and then suddenly he gets back in front of the car and he holds up the bag and then he pulls out a giant lamb leg. And essentially in a nutshell, he was like, where you guys come from England?

That's amazing. Here have this leg of lamb. Welcome to our country. This is incredible. And that was a, that went from like, wow. Like, oh my God, are we, are we gonna be okay? Is this all right to, it's yeah. [00:09:00] Wow. Like what? What a welcome, 

Samurai Sword

Max: More, yeah. Similar vibes of just local hospitality. When we were doing the, um, hitchhiking through Japan thing on that same trip, one of the guys that picked Joel and I up and we were hitchhiking together was, uh, his name's Jean Chiro, and he basically was like, well, I have like this office, you can sleep in my office tonight.

And we were like, cool, that sounds great. Next day, wake up. And he's like, I'm going to like an art festival. Do you guys wanna come? And we are like, of course this sounds amazing. But it was a traditional iron smelting thing, and they were basically making a traditional Japanese catana from scratch. And they were like, we need someone to work the bellows, get the white guys to do it.

So me and Joel were there, like working the furnace, and it was just this moment that kind of dawned, it's like, are we making a samurai sword? Like I thought we were hitchhiking. And it was just like, that takes me back to Japan and just, it was two weeks of that, just the weirdest, wonderful things.

Call to Adventure

chris w: So secondly, [00:10:00] a call to adventure. So a recommendation to get people often doing some exciting, adventurous, but what would you recommend 

Max: Join the global Combine.

chris w: I think that says it all, quite frankly. So, yep. Excellent. 

joel: I would say from my own, my own personal experience, um, one of the things that got me into traveling the most and like sustainably was, um, was finding a, a summer job. You know, if you're, if you're a younger person or even if you're older, you know, if you find a, a summer gig somewhere out that gets you out to nature, that allows you to work in a really beautiful, amazing place and you could spend time or at least a season, you know, somewhere that's quite different or unique from where you are, I definitely take advantage of doing something like that, whether it's, you know, backpacking or guiding or just working at like a ice cream stand.

It doesn't really matter that that's a huge, that was a massive gateway for me when I was. In my early twenties to getting out and kind of exploring the world in a financially sound kind of way. 

chris w: Agreed. Excellent.

[00:11:00]

So I hope you enjoyed these short highlights from my episode with the Global Convoy team. And if you haven't listened to the full conversation yet, then I highly recommend you go back and do that. And I'll link to the full episode within the show notes below.

Now, if you're enjoying the Adventure Diaries, could I ask that you take the time to leave a quick rating or review? 'cause it really helps the show more than you think, and it's the simplest way to support the show for free. Now one important update as we close out Season five launches at the end of February, 2026. And along with that I will be launching a Patreon site as well with one simple single tier, $5 or three 70.

And if you join that, you'll get the quick fire after shows. So those kind of fun q and a segments. With the guests, plus a new monthly extended newsroom. So look out for the new news episodes that are coming soon and occasional short audio stories as well. And in the mix there will be two [00:12:00] supporter meetups each year as well.

So if that sounds like your kinda thing, you want to support the show, get more content behind the scenes and all those good stories, et cetera, then go to adventure diaries.com/go and just click on the Patreon button. And get ready for the launch now that says, more highlights to come next from Ollie Trivio and his incredible adventure walking the length of the Andes, 14,000 kilometers from Patagonia to Venezuela.

Fantastic piece.