Adventure doesn’t always look like a summit photo or a perfect route traced on a map. Sometimes it starts with a practical fear, like rolling a flimsy rental car on a Patagonian road, and turns into a seven-month drive that stops short of South America yet delivers more than promised. That’s the heart of Matt Savino’s story: a comedian-turned-programmer who set off down the Pan American Highway with a camera, a Toyota FJ Cruiser, and a plan that refused to stay put. Along the way he found Baja dawns with dolphins, student barricades in Nicaragua, and the heavy steel silence of the Panama Canal’s locks. The thread isn’t perfection. It’s connection, curiosity, and the surprising ways humor keeps you steady when the world tilts.
Photos Courtesy of Matt Savino
Mexico becomes three journeys in one. First, Baja’s raw coastline and desert sweep redefine what “empty” can hold: surf camps, elephant trees, and boojum forests that feel drawn by a playful hand. Then central Mexico opens into Puebla and Oaxaca, where food is the map—mole layers and tlayudas crisp from a comal, each bite a note in a deeper song. Finally, the Yucatán and Mesoamerican sites tug the trip into history. What begins as photography turns into research and respect: ruins reveal thousands of years of engineering, ritual, and city life too often reduced to a line about “Cortés conquered the Aztecs.” The lesson lands slowly, then hard. When you walk the plazas and read beyond the plaque, you sense how thin your first take was and how much of the story still hums underfoot.
The journey sharpens in Nicaragua. Protests flare after pension cuts, and roadblocks rise like thorns across key routes. Matt times it wrong and finds himself threading conversations, not shortcuts, through lines of peasant farmers and masked students. No heroics, only listening, patience, and small acts like a cold twelve-pack that lowers shoulders and buys five minutes of grace. The stakes are real—expired car visas can bankrupt you, fear can stampede you into bad choices, and somewhere nearby a reporter is killed while both sides blame the other. Yet the tenor of daily life cuts through: kindness at borders, low crime outside the headlines, and a stubborn civility that keeps people talking even when tempers fray. It’s a human map you can’t get from the news crawl.
Further south, the thread of politics splits into paths. Costa Rica shows a third door: no standing army since 1948, a bet on education, parks, and negotiation that paid off in stability and green wealth. Panama is different again, built around a canal that feels like a moving cathedral. Volunteering as a line handler on a small sailboat, Matt stands inside the lock’s concrete throat while the ocean rises on command. Commerce, empire, and ingenuity echo in the machinery; so does the labor that made it possible. These moments broaden the scope of a “road trip.” The Pan American becomes not just miles but systems—how geography shapes policy, how decisions ripple into landscape, and how travelers are always, quietly, part of the economy they pass through. 
The book that followed, Land Without a Continent, moves like the drive: story first, detours when they matter. Think Bill Bryson’s curiosity with a comic’s timing. Deep dives into Maya and Aztec history sit beside border tips and backroad meals. A Mesoamerican expert fact-checks the research, so the wonder doesn’t outrun the truth. The title hooks a core idea: Central America doesn’t fit the labels most North Americans expect. Ask locals about “continents” and you’ll learn as much about identity as geography. That perspective shift is the real cargo of the trip. You leave with more than photos; you leave with empathy, an appetite for nuance, and a new yardstick for cost and value. It turns out life in Los Angeles can cost triple what a month of motion costs on the road. It turns out that adventure is less about danger and more about attention. And it turns out that when plans bust, the story often blooms.
