Last summer, we got our first taste of Southbound, a YouTube series that follows three friends riding Suzuki DR650s from Los Angeles to “End-of-the-World” Ushuaia, Argentina. Episode 1 delivered plenty of adventure, culminating in a tense standoff in southern Mexico near the Guatemalan border, where a gang of cartel members accosted the riders at gunpoint. 

At nearly an hour and a half, Southbound Episode 1: Mexico offered a satisfying blend of excitement and charm, all set against gorgeous drone and video work by filmmakers Danny McGee and Jonah Levine, who are joined in the adventure by Levin’s cousin and “supreme mechanic and navigator,” Jesse Evers.

One aspect that sets this series apart from other moto travel vlogs is the trio’s pragmatic approach to chasing the Pan America dream. All in their late twenties, they face the same time and money constraints most of us do, so instead of tackling the immense journey all at once, they commit to riding one month each year and find places to store their bikes in between, until they get to Ushuaia.

And that’s where we find McGee, Levine, and Evers as Episode 2: Central America kicks off: flying back into southern Mexico to retrieve their bikes and begin the Central America stint, hoping to check off Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, and Panama on this leg.

Dialing In the DR650s

The crew had left their trusty steeds in the care of Ivan and Julio, members of a motorcycle club that maintains a clubhouse and shop in Tuxtla Gutiérrez, Chiapas, where, during their long hiatus, the DRs, which were already equipped with larger fuel tanks and aftermarket seats, got a few upgrades, including new suspension.

Evers, a software engineer who also serves as the crew’s wrench, tells ADV Pulse they replaced the stock setup with a full DDC fork upgrade package and Mojave shock from Cogent Dynamics. “It absolutely kicked ass and made the bikes handle so much better with a heavy load,” he says. Evers explains they were all “bottoming out left and right on the first trip,” and while the new setup didn’t add travel, it offered a notable improvement in bump absorption. Now, Jesse jokes, “we only bottom out if we hit something truly horrendous going super fast.”

The clubhouse where the crew is invited to stay as they prepare their bikes is ideal. While there, they wire up electronics, modify racks to fit their new Mosko Backcountry V2.1 bags, and tackle other odds and ends, including a new seat for Levine. For gear, the friends were outfitted with the same modular, multi-layered REV’IT! Sand 4 H2O ensembles they wore in Episode 1. 

The night before they ride off, the club members gather to share some advice and merriment, a warm camaraderie that couldn’t be more different from the year before, when just miles away the guys were held up at a petrol station by ten cartel members with machine guns.

The next morning, that unpleasant memory suddenly fresh again, they needed to ride through the same stretch. With an early start, camera equipment out of sight, gas tanks full, and an escort from Ivan, crossing this still-volatile area felt a little safer this time. Still, McGee reported it was one of the most stressful experiences he’s had on a bike, as they navigated a half-dozen checkpoints while still inside Mexico. “Some were police, some were military, some were just random groups of people.”

Anyone who’s ridden through Central or South America knows border crossings can be ridiculously painful, and the guys’ first experience is no exception. After making the mistake of bringing only copies of some of their motorcycle paperwork, they were stuck before they even got started, with the bikes now signed out of Mexico yet unable to enter Guatemala, leaving the guys trapped in a three-mile-wide neutral zone.

And sure, it sounds like a rookie mistake, but this is one of the great things about the Southbound videos. These are three young guys learning on the fly for sure—in fact, two of them hadn’t even ridden off-road before they left California. It all comes across as very raw and real, and you quickly learn these friends are also wildly capable at finding solutions, a skill set that will continue to come in handy as things grow even more complicated further into the trip.

With some help from a local motorcycle chat group, more legitimate-looking paperwork materialized overnight, allowing all the bikes to cross the border. Now more than 4,000 miles into their journey, they are only entering their second country, clearly ready to leave Mexico behind.

Best Laid Plans

Central America is known for lush, green landscapes dotted with colorful cities, as well as warm, friendly people, something the guys experience right away when they meet up with Jose, whom they’d first connected with in an online chat group. Jose’s family runs a street food cart on the Guatemalan border, where McGee says they had the best food of their entire trip. “The best part of travel is the people you meet,” he says. “People you didn’t even know existed just hours before can quickly feel like family.”

Once on the road, the drone work and videography take center stage. The stunning views, gnarly tracks, and remote side quests the guys tackle, such as the massive sinkhole that provides a dream-like swim and dive sesh, leave viewers wondering how they plan these trips.

In the narration McGee says they first sketch out a rough route and cool things they want to see. Then they search through motorcycle forums for ride reports and comb Google Earth “to find the twisty, dirtiest roads possible.” This is Evers territory, and he’s a master at digital research.

Starting three or four months before departure, Evers says he begins scouring the internet for tracks. Where he can’t find real-world rider accounts on the forums, he relies on Wikiloc, a navigation platform that offers GPS tracking, offline maps, and route planning. It’s built around a community where users can discover, record, and share trails.

Evers says that before heading out, he’ll reach out to anyone he knows who’s been in the area. “I’ll message them and ask if they have tracks, or find moto tour companies in the general vicinity and ask them.” On the fly, he’ll zoom out on the GPS and look for a road that looks small, winding, and like it’s going in the right general direction. “Sometimes that means dead ends, sometimes it means really, really hard riding, and sometimes it means the coolest spot ever that I never could have planned for.”

This is, of course, the definition of adventure, and the guys—despite being newer to motorcycling—understand how two knobby tires are the ultimate enhancement. “One of the coolest parts about seeing a country from the back of a dirt bike is you can pretty much go anywhere,” McGee narrates. “Dirt tracks that a normal traveler wouldn’t have any way of accessing are not only doable on the bikes, but way more fun than pavement.”

Adventure Isn’t Always Pretty

The next stretch of the feature-length video is a celebration of adventure riding, capturing what it’s really like to explore this part of the world. Along the way, the guys make new friends, both human and furry. They come across impromptu campsites with otherworldly views and dive into wild off-the-bike adventures, including an overnight hike to see a volcano that looks more like AI than real life.

And there’s the downside, too. If you watched Episode 1, you know the guys dealt with a ridiculous number of flat tires, and sure enough, a few days in, the pop-fest begins anew. By now, though, they’re pros at fixing these punctures, most of which are caused by nails. Their camp food game — a funny theme in the first video — hasn’t improved much, with one laughter-filled dinner consisting of eight tortillas, two cans of beans, and two cans of tuna, the latter of which had spent the past year in Levine’s saddlebag.

The tropical heat is omnipresent night and day, and you can see the guys physically wilting under the weight of it. There are noticeably fewer spills on this trip, however, a clear sign of how much the journey has improved these young riders’ off-road skills. Back home, they live in different states, and while they meet up for adventures and creative projects, there isn’t much time for actual riding. In fact, Evers is the only one who’s owned a motorcycle long-term.

It’s this plunge into adventure riding that has really pushed their skills forward, backing up the idea that you don’t have to be an expert to take on a trip like this — just gutsy enough to learn on the fly and laugh off a few inevitable mishaps.

Some Borders Bite

Before long, border crossing debacles once again become a theme. While playing in Guatemala, McGee’s DR had shed its license plate, making for a tense crossing into El Salvador. Incredibly, officials let them continue into the country with nothing more than a piece of cardboard with the license plate number scrawled on it.

As you might guess, this laissez-faire admittance by the El Salvador officials foreshadowed a more precarious situation down the line. They make it through the Honduran border with the makeshift plate, but when they try to cross from Honduras into Nicaragua, a notoriously thorny border, the cardboard sign quickly becomes a roadblock for McGee’s bike. Getting a replacement from the States would take at least a month, time they don’t have.

After getting another hard “no” the next day, even with a more official-looking “temporary plate” in hand, they decide Levin and Evers should continue on at a slower pace so McGee could hopefully catch up if and when he found a solution. It’s a tough moment for the friends, having to split up, and a truckload of border guards wielding assault rifles doesn’t make it any easier. They stop Levin and Evers inside Nicaragua, demanding to know where McGee is. “They thought I had somehow snuck in. It wasn’t until Jonah showed them my location on his phone that they left,” says McGee.

Unbeknownst to the guys, this was just the start of a drawn-out struggle — an inevitable dark side of foreign adventure travel — which Levin summed up best: “If you decide to do a trip like this, just know it’s going to be really fun a lot of the time, and really not fun some of the time.”

Not the Journey, or the Destination

We won’t ruin it by telling you how the border drama plays out, only that the next ten days are dramatic and intense for the now-separated friends. Levine and Evers continue on with the ride, reluctantly stumbling upon hidden treasures, tricky ankle-twisting trails, and a wild moment when millions of cicadas quite literally made it rain, showering them with “honeydew” (a.k.a. piss), while McGee wrestles with every possible option to get his bike across the Nicaraguan border.

On top of it all, they’re temporarily without the drones that had made the Southbound videos so ethereal, having had to ship them from El Salvador to Costa Rica because Honduras doesn’t allow drones into the country. The shots are still top-notch and compelling, and the lack of aerial footage actually does a service, underscoring just how low they all felt during this period.

The void makes one thing clear to everyone, including the viewer: nothing hits the same when the friends aren’t all together. “The time I spent alone honestly just made me feel really grateful to have friends like Jonah and Jesse,” says McGee when the trio is eventually reunited.

People often debate whether it’s the journey or the destination that matters most in travel, but these guys make it clear that companionship is every bit as important. “We got stung, burned, beaten and bruised. We got separated. Our plans completely unraveled, but at the end of the day, that’s really what we signed up for,” says McGee. “We didn’t want easy. We wanted to see what we were capable of. At the end of the day we made it. And we made it together.”

Now that we’ve ridden along for all the highs, lows, and everything in between of Southbound’s second episode, we’re eager to see how the guys fare on their next leg, one that Evers tells ADV Pulse they’ve already completed. We’ll be sure to let you know when Episode 3 drops.

Photos by Danny McGee

Author: Jamie Elvidge

Jamie has been a motorcycle journalist for more than 30 years, testing the entire range of bikes for the major print magazines and specializing in adventure-travel related stories. To date she’s written and supplied photography for articles describing what it’s like to ride in all 50 states and 43 foreign countries, receiving two Lowell Thomas Society of American Travel Writer’s Awards along the way. Her most-challenging adventure yet has been riding in the 2018 GS Trophy in Mongolia as Team AusAmerica’s embedded journalist.