Andrew Evans - The Black Penguin

On the sunny morning of January 1, 2010, I stepped onto a city bus in Washington, DC, and set off for the end of the world.

Up until then, all my grown-up attempts to reach Antarctica had failedthe formal grants and scientific missions, every expedition I hoped to join, and the exotic support jobs I applied for over and over in vain. I thought it totally unfair that such a glaring and prominent section of the globe would prove so elusive to someone like me.

Discovering that one is merely average is troubling, but I responded in kind, with my own average measures. If fate had refused me the chance to reach Antarctica, then I would invent my own opportunity, getting as close as possible to my dream with the everyday means available to me.

I had no car, nor did I have any money, but I had the bus. I had been riding buses since kindergartenit is the simplest and most accessible form of public transportation that exists. If I could just keep connecting from one bus to the next, then eventually I would reach the bottom of the world.

My rules were simple: take the nearest bus to the farthest point south, then hop on the next one, and another after that. I traveled this way for over ten thousand mileswithout any planned route and without any advance tickets. When I felt too tired to go on, I took a break. Sometimes I checked into hotelsto sleep, to wash, and to write. Sometimes I rode the bus all night long and all the next day. Occasionally I cheated: a taxi to the border post, a lift with the milkman, a boat through the Panama Canal, and a twenty-minute plane ride over the impassable jungle.

For me, the gift of overland travel was the joy of gradual transition: from swamp to desert, from mountain to prairie. Taking the bus allowed me to feel the latitudes of Earth in a way that is lost by those who merely jet set from A to B.

Social media let me share my observations from the road in real time. At the time, Twitter was enough of a novelty that my editor assigned me a feature for National Geographic Traveler magazine. The formal assignment helped secure my final passage to Antarctica on the Lindblad Expedition ship, the National Geographic Explorer.

My original Bus2Antarctica story was told from the road in the form of sixty-four blog posts, a dozen videos, and over five thousand tweetsbut even the culminating magazine feature felt inadequate and limited. How do you squeeze a life-changing adventure into a few colored pages? What about the ups and downs of travel, the many hours spent staring out the window, and this odd compulsion to ride buses to the bottom of the world? Some stories cannot fit into a tweet, and others get only half-told, but for those who cared and asked, this book details my epic bus ride across the world, and the even longer story as to why.