Guest Bio
Gregg Bleakney is the founder of WhereNext Travel, a premium destination management company (DMC) serving international travel advisors, luxury tour operators, and experiential travel brands across Colombia, Peru, and Latin America. Before launching WhereNext Travel, Gregg spent more than two decades leading a creative agency that produced campaigns for global lifestyle brands, tourism ministries and international development organizations, including USAID’s $40 million Destination Nature tourism initiative in Colombia and a collaboration with 60 Minutes on the country’s tourism revival. Unlike traditional DMCs, WhereNext Travel grew out of destination storytelling before building its operational infrastructure across Latin America. Today, the company combines cinematic storytelling with operational excellence to design bespoke, multi-country journeys supported by trusted, on-the-ground teams.
Show Summary
In this episode of the Big World Made Small Adventure Travel Podcast, host Jason Elkins speaks with Gregg Bleakney about his path from competitive athlete and tropical fish enthusiast to founder of WhereNext Travel, a premium destination management company based in Colombia and Peru and expanding into other Latin American countries. Gregg shares stories from his 18,000-mile bicycle journey from Alaska to Argentina, the challenges he encountered along the way, and how the experience reshaped his life and career.
Gregg explains how, unlike traditional DMCs, WhereNext Travel grew out of destination storytelling before building its operational infrastructure across Latin America. The conversation explores how modern destination management extends far beyond logistics, requiring deep local relationships, operational excellence, cinematic storytelling and reliable on-the-ground support to deliver exceptional travel experiences.
Gregg also reflects on his work promoting sustainable tourism in Colombia, including a landmark campaign for ProColombia that helped position the country as the world’s leading birding destination, and his commitment to community-based tourism through the restoration of his boutique coffee agroturismo in the Colombian Andes.
Key Takeaways
- Gregg’s 18,000-mile bicycle expedition from Alaska to Argentina sparked a lifelong connection to Latin America and inspired the philosophy behind WhereNext Travel.
- WhereNext Travel is a premium destination management company specializing in bespoke luxury travel across Colombia, Peru, and Latin America.
- Unlike traditional DMCs, WhereNext Travel grew out of destination storytelling before building its operational infrastructure across Latin America.
- Modern destination management extends far beyond logistics, requiring trusted local relationships, operational systems, and experienced on-the-ground teams.
- WhereNext Travel partners with international travel advisors and luxury tour operators to provide seamless, multi-country support throughout Latin America.
- Gregg discusses how storytelling has become one of the most valuable tools for building destinations, attracting travelers, and creating meaningful travel experiences.
- The conversation explores Colombia’s emergence as one of the world’s most compelling luxury travel destinations and Peru’s continued evolution as a leader in experiential and cultural travel.
- Gregg shares lessons from leading USAID’s Destination Nature initiative, which used tourism to support conservation and economic development in formerly conflict-affected regions.
- The restoration of Gregg’s boutique coffee agroturismo demonstrates how hospitality, conservation, and community can create more meaningful travel experiences.
- Curiosity, genuine human connection, and operational excellence remain the foundation of unforgettable travel experiences.
What You’ll Find on WhereNext Travel’s Website
- A behind-the-scenes look at how a premium destination management company operates across Colombia, Peru and Latin America.
- What luxury travel advisors should look for when choosing a trusted DMC partner.
- Why operational excellence and reliable on-the-ground teams are just as important as beautiful destinations.
- How cinematic storytelling creates more memorable travel experiences.
- Bespoke, multi-country journeys across Colombia, Peru and Latin America.
- Why local expertise and long-term supplier relationships matter.
- How sustainable tourism can support conservation and local communities.
- The role of gastronomy, culture and adventure in designing transformative journeys.
Learn more about WhereNext Travel and connect with Gregg at:
https://travel.wherenext.com
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Podcast Transcript
This transcript is auto-generated on recording, and has not been edited by a human. It may contain lots of mistakes, crazy words, and stuff that makes no sense. The host and the guest are not responsible for the accuracy of the transcript.
Jason (00:01.1)
Welcome back, everybody, to another episode of the Big World Made Small podcast for the adventure traveler. So happy to have each and every one of you back today and also very excited to have my guest. We’ve got Greg Blakeney. Greg is the owner of Where Next Travel. Greg, welcome to the show.
Gregg Bleakney (00:18.471)
Hey Jason, how are you doing? Thanks for having me.
Jason (00:20.362)
I I I’m doing great. This is going to be a lot of fun. I want to share with our listeners that I spent the day with you yesterday exploring Colombia. We both happen to be in Bogota at the same time. You live here, and I’m just kind of passing through. And you were gracious enough to take me out into the into the hillsides and the the mountains in the Andes and show me a special project that you’ve been working on for a while that we’re going to discuss. But we call it a finca. So let’s start with what is a finca, because I’m sure some of our listeners might not be familiar with that that particular word.
Gregg Bleakney (00:51.057)
Sure, in Colombia, if you actually translate finca directly to English, it means farm. But in modern Colombia, finca for most of the use case means cabin.
So if a Colombian invites you to their cabin for the weekend, it’s something really special because the finca or cabin in Colombian culture, especially in modern Colombian culture, is really where Colombians go to escape the big city and spend time together, intimate time together as a family. And it’s almost it’s a very accurational thing in Colombia to have a finca. And it’s something that’s just a very special escape, especially when the majority of the population lives in these huge.
metropolitan area areas like Medellin and Bogota.
Jason (01:41.753)
Yeah, we were discussing that a little bit on the drive yesterday and it was kind of the it’s yeah, like you said, the cabin or some people it might be a lake house or it might be a a country house or something like that. So it it fits because now if if they have livestock, do they call it a finca still or does that change the change the word?
Gregg Bleakney (02:03.019)
Yeah, so it’s interesting. So the the origin story of the finca would be an actual real working farm that, you know, fifty hundred years ago, Colombian families might have had a a base camp in the main in the city where they do a lot of their business track transactions, but their actual center of operations would be somewhere in rural Colombia where they’d have cattle or they’d have some sort of crops, etc. And so the finca was, you know, somewhere where they’d be going back and forth between the big city and and their rural
basically on from a business perspective. And now when you are talking about fincas with friends here in Colombia, people actually ask me, is it a finca finca? Meaning, is it a real farm? Do you have animals? Do you have crops? Do you have stuff? Or is it a finca that’s basically we call them conjuntos, which are like private golf communities with a golf course or a gated community where people basically are living in condominiums or country homes and there is no farm, there’s no cultivation, there’s no animals, but people still call them fincas.
Jason (02:38.56)
Gregg Bleakney (02:57.767)
So we might call them the states again, go into your cabin or your your you know, your recreational property. So s I have had that experience where people ask me to clarify what kind of think am I going to? Am I gonna g are there gonna be bugs? Are they gonna be cows? Are they gonna be you know, t fruits, or am I gonna be like in a chase lounge by the swimming pool the whole time? Right.
Jason (03:10.606)
Ha ha ha.
Jason (03:15.918)
Very cool. Well, in in a sense, I would say after having experienced your finca, not your finca finca, but your finca, is that you do have a lot of fruit trees and you you’ve got coffee plants on your finca. So I guess maybe it’s somewhere kind of in between because you’re not necessarily producing commercially, but you’ve got a lot you do have a lot of fruit there. So but
Gregg Bleakney (03:39.046)
Yes. So the history of of my finca was it used to be a cattle pasture. most of it, most of I’d say about sixty percent of the property, and it’s about twenty acres.
And then it was converted into an organic coffee farm. And then over the years the coffee farm was let go and it was used more for a recreational property for a family who live here in Bogota. And so since my wife and I have purchased, I think a couple years ago, we’ve been restoring the coffee plantation as you saw. And we’ve been really planting more fruit trees and it used to have horses, etc. So yeah, it is kind of a hybrid where it is a recreational property, but we are planting a real working coffee farm there again, which is which is really fun and and interesting.
Jason (04:19.586)
Very cool. Well, it it’s a really, really cool place. I suspect that during this conversation, we’re gonna get back to that and how that kind of ties into your business. But before we discuss how you got from where you were to where you are now, let’s give our listeners kind of just what is where next travel? I think that’s an important place to start. we won’t spend too much time on what it is, and then we’re gonna go back into how it came about, and then we’ll get back to more about what it is. So what’s the what’s the short version of what is where next travel?
Gregg Bleakney (04:49.157)
So We’re Nuts Travel, we’re a DMC based in Latin America. We have operations in Colombia, we have operations in Peru, and we’re opening in other countries quickly here in Latin America. And a DMC for the audience who’s not familiar with the industry, Lingo, basically is a business-to-business travel company. So we white label travel experiences for other travel brands who are
based outside of Colombia. Most of our partners or our clients are ba are based in Europe, so they’re European operators who sell travel directly to consumers and or they’re based in the United States and they trail and they sell travel directly to consumers in the United States. We also work with travel advisors, which are very prolific right now in the United States. Those are individuals who represent mostly families who like to experience a premium level of travel very experiential and
We developed the trips for them and we managed those trips white labeled in countries throughout Latin America.
Jason (05:50.275)
Heard it sometime, and thank you for sharing that because some of our listeners might not know what DMC means, but you’ve you’ve explained it very well. I’ve also heard it the term kind of like boots on the ground. You’re the ones here in Colombia that have all the local connections, access to all these special places that maybe a travel advisor in Milwaukee or a outbound tour operator in France might not have direct access. So you’re able to put all those parts together and then create an experience that they can put.
kind of put in front of their clients and then when the clients show up, you’re the ones taking care of them when they get here. Is that is that a good re rewording? What do you think?
Gregg Bleakney (06:26.533)
Yeah, that’s right. Yeah, it’s good rewarding and I think something to clarify about how we’re structured. Obviously, you know, I know I was born in the United States. I’ve been living outside of the United States for over twenty years now. So I’m a twenty year resident in Colombia. It’s a place where I’ve build a
A life for myself. I’ve married here. My wife is from Argentina, but we both live here. she works for an Argentinian company based here in Colombia, and we have a daughter or a newborn daughter, and we built businesses. We have three or four businesses here in in Colombia and we have businesses throughout Latin America. And so I’m not a Colombian native but a Colombian resident. And the way that we’re structuring is we have a company in the United States based in
based in Seattle, that co owns each corporation in the country we operate, where we have a local general manager or we call them country managers in travel lingo, who owns a percentage of the company.
So for us it’s a unique model where we’re co-owned locally and also in the United States. And that’s allowing us through that corporate structure to create a network of companies based across the entire region that operates under a singular standard.
and a singular set of systems and technology behind the scenes. again, boots on the ground. When I hear that, I think operations. So, what some people are paying us for is smooth operation in these countries that sometimes are challenging to operate, right? And so sometimes I call you know, being a DMC is the art of operational excellence where your guests don’t really know what’s going on behind the scenes. So the whole swan in the lake looks elegant and beautiful from the surface.
Gregg Bleakney (08:20.317)
But below the boil of the water, the legs are kicking like crazy, right? And so we would be the legs be under the water where our clients would be the business of consumer brand where they’re the elegant, you know, front, branded front of the experience.
Jason (08:35.64)
It’s a it’s a really good way to put it. And the other thing that kind of came up for me with with that particular business model is in a sense, you’ve got a travel advisor or a tour operator at another country that’s maybe marketing the trips, and they’re dealing with a US company, which I guess has some advantages. I don’t know. We could go into that. I don’t really know. But they’re dealing with a US company, they’re sending their money to a US bank account.
And then it’s it’s being distributed and and the operations are happening with your country managers, whether that’s in Peru or Colombia, that type of thing. Did I get that right?
Gregg Bleakney (09:12.858)
Actually
We depending on each client, we transact differently. Some clients want to directly transact with our bank and and our our corporation in the country where we’re operating. And others who might be doing yeah, some who might be doing multi-country trips would transact directly with our US company. So we have a flexible, yeah, with a flexible payment model. Some US clients prefer to transact with a US corporation where the transaction will be protected under US law and US corporate law with from a Delaware C Corp, and that gives them a little bit more peace.
Jason (09:18.647)
Okay.
Jason (09:25.033)
okay.
Jason (09:30.649)
okay. All right.
Jason (09:37.518)
Mm-hmm.
Gregg Bleakney (09:44.593)
peace of mind than transacting with a a foreign entity.
Jason (09:49.239)
Okay. Very cool. And do you have a you know, as a DMC, I guess we should focus a little bit more on climb but I’m more familiar with it and maybe make maybe there’s some variations and differences, but what what types of trips do you set up for your clients that are then turning around and selling their trips to their clients? Is do you have a a specialty, a niche or something that you’re most excited about?
Gregg Bleakney (10:14.319)
Yeah, it’s well first off, as a DMC, you’re basically putting on the hat and jersey of every client you’re representing, right? So one thing that we’re really focused is on is operational excellence. And so understanding the standard and the methodology and how our clients
Jason (10:24.034)
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Gregg Bleakney (10:37.379)
want to present and manage a trip for their guests. And so learning that system and then replicating that system seamlessly in these different destinations where we’re working, right? So that’s number one. and then number two, I have a strong feeling about this that
Our clients are paying us for our creativity. I come from a creative marketing background. We can get into that later, but they’re paying us for our creativity, our our know-how, our experience in the destinations, and the fact that our team is local, our team is constantly traveling, constantly experiencing their kind of you know on trend or understanding what’s new and what’s interesting. I’ll give you a very very specific example of what we’re getting paid to do. So we had a family, and I wouldn’t say that
Jason (11:00.589)
We will.
Gregg Bleakney (11:24.731)
luxury but this family wanted a premium comfortable travel experience and one of their stops was Medellin and someone in the family I think one of the the the kids had seen a a hotel on Instagram that’s very beautiful. And
They wanted to stay in that hotel. And so one of the things they came to the table with through our client was, you know, if they want to be in this hotel. And we know the hotel well. The hotel’s a nice property, but, and this again, I’ll be very direct here, and we had to be very direct with them. The hotel is known for foreign men spending time with prostitutes. So
Or paid escorts, we would say. And so when you frequently when you’re going in and out of the lobby of the hotel and around the hotel, there’s prostitutes. And this family was traveling with young with kids at an age where we didn’t think it was appropriate to be experiencing that every day. So we felt very compelled to say, Look, this looks great on Instagram. Obviously, you’re not gonna see this on Instagram photos, but we recommend another hotel a few blocks away, away from this stuff that’s more family oriented, right? And they were like, my gosh, I never would have known. And when they got there, they’re Thank you so much, because
Jason (12:05.836)
Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.
Gregg Bleakney (12:34.025)
Obviously they went and checked out the hotel. You know, when they’re in menu, just to just to double check. And they’re like, you know, thank you. So that kind of stuff.
Jason (12:36.398)
Yeah. Cheers.
Gregg Bleakney (12:42.521)
is what we’re getting paid to do, right? And I think that’s really important that we’re, you know, aligning ourselves with the brand of our clients and then really understanding who their guests are and checking up on that kind of stuff, right? That’s what we do. and then when you go into what makes us different and special behind besides the operational excellence that we’re providing for those clients and really focusing on that is okay. So yeah, we understand this this this place really well. We know kind of what’s going on.
Let’s be really creative. How can we integrate unique people that you wouldn’t normally connect with? How can we design experiences that I would want to go on? How can we design experiences that our travel advisors would have go on? And how can we adapt those experiences to your guests? So, for example, we have an advisor’s name is Nicholas Gill, and he is the
Latin American food writer for the New York Times. He’s co-written books with some of the most famous chefs in Latin America and the top chefs in the world. He knows gastronomy culture in these regions as well as anyone, and he’s an expert. And he has some very strong opinions on how people can better experience gastronomy.
In these regions, besides in a especially in a luxury sense, the tendency to go to the top 50 list and say, you know, book me this, this, and this, so I can say I’ve been at the top three restaurants in this region. What he really loves is traveling and discovering the next top restaurants that will be on that list five years from now. Because the really cool thing is to get in there where the chef is there, visit your table, you have a really strong connection with him or her. And then three years later, like we went to that place before.
It was that place. Yeah. So yeah, we were like part of the journey of the ascent of that place. And that’s something we think is really special. So we bring those types of experiences to the table. The gastronomy example is just one example, but also adventure, outdoors, really
Jason (14:22.488)
Before it was yeah, on on the list.
Gregg Bleakney (14:41.915)
believe me personally in experiences like birding and cycling. And birding sounds strange, but birding is one of the fastest growing hobbies for young travelers. I call it a hobby, but it can be more of an obsession for young travelers. And people are doing a lot of backyard birding in the United States. But Colombia is the leading birding destination in the world right now. Peru is up there as well, maybe top three, top four, right? So just getting people outside of their comfort zone
Jason (14:54.958)
Mm-hmm.
Gregg Bleakney (15:12.179)
to look at birds whether it’s a a toucan or brightly colored tanager and bring into places to see these birds and really connect with that world in a different way with these incredible guides. It’s like learning another foreign language of the planet. and that’s something that we we like to integrate. Those types of experiences that may not be on a classic guest checklist and seeing sometimes if it clicks or not. We’ve had
families come back to us and say, you know what? We did a quick little birdie thing and our 15-year-old daughter for the first time in a long time showed this incredible interest for this hobby. And she’s been asking about burning.
She’s come back home and she’s like wants to take classes on birding, and now she’s looking at birds in the backyard and she’s wondering how migrations work and how birds migrate from the north to south, from North America to South America. And it’s something that started as just taking a risk on this new activity for their family. And down the road, had fun. That fun converted into a small transformative experience for them. And that’s things that we’re really proud of.
Jason (16:21.144)
Right, that’s that’s very cool. Do most so let’s talk you mentioned specifically European kind of outbound operators or people that, you know, are are selling the trips there, you guys are the ones that step in with the operational ability to make it make it one of those transformational experiences. I guess the question is, do most of the tour operators you work with have kind of a niche? So like
Would it be a a tour up you mentioned the gentleman that was into the culinary s gastronomy? So is that his market? Is that like if he sends you somebody, it’s somebody that’s interested in gastronomy or is that what does that look like a across your client base? If you know
Gregg Bleakney (16:52.177)
Yeah.
Gregg Bleakney (17:02.725)
Yeah, so right now I I would say that most of our clients are not niche. We’ve d we’re done we’ve done a few tours, for example, for coffee aficionados in Colombia and Peru. And so that would be more niche. But I would say most of our clients are doing general travel experiences in Latin America where
Just to act of traveling to Colombia in its own by itself is like a niche because, like, whoa, you guys decide to go to Colombia over, you know, an island in the Caribbean, right? Or over Mallorca, right? And so that is a niche for us in itself. So one thing that we’ve had to come to realize as travel planners is living here and being here for 20 years, some things that are fairly normal for us are actually very exotic and new and interesting for
Jason (17:30.094)
Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Gregg Bleakney (17:50.168)
some of these groups and and you and it’s easy to forget that. So that’s another thing that’s I think is is being really in tune with those types of nuances. these people might be coming to South America for the first time. Many people are, especially our North American guests. And something new for them. And you know, and again, I don’t wanna put down my culture ’cause we have a lot of people that are very, you know, worldly and understand the context of various continents and different cultures around the world.
Jason (17:50.467)
Yeah.
Mm-hmm.
Gregg Bleakney (18:20.005)
But in general, the idea of premium travel experiences and luxury travel experiences is not associated with Latin America, especially South America, right? It’s associated with Europe, it’s associated with the Caribbean and different regions of the world that are not Latin America. Latin America is kind of up and coming. And so one of the things that we found that we can really help are
clients with is how can they present these experiences and itineraries in Latin America in a visual way, how can they communicate them to their potential guests.
That showcases them in a little bit more of a luxurious format so that they’re more comfortable on taking this leap of faith, right? Instead of like going to a very secure place psychologically like Europe, where you know you’re gonna have a high level of service and you have these incredible hotels that are already well established. And it’s kind of like a guaranteed, you know, first base hit, right? You’re gonna go there and you’re gonna at least get on first base, you know, psychological, like we’re gonna have this nice solid experience. And you know, taking the risk, you know, because it is.
Jason (19:22.2)
Yeah.
Gregg Bleakney (19:28.777)
Kind of a risk or taking the leap of faith and coming to Colombia or Peru or Argentina or see some of these other countries that aren’t necessarily culturally known as premium travel destinations, right? And so that’s something else that we’ve really work with our clients on. How can we help you present these experiences? Because in my appearan, in my opinion, we hit we do have some incredible luxury properties, hotels, properties, and
place to stay in these regions. But for me, luxury truly starts when you take your first step outside of those properties. And you start experiencing, you know, we did this yesterday. You met some of the staff of this agro tourism company that we’re running. And stepping out the front door with your family and experiencing and growing together is like the biggest luxury of of all right now in the world of travel, in my opinion, right?
Jason (20:08.448)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Jason (20:19.212)
Yeah, yeah. I I hear what you’re saying because as as a travel advisor, you think, okay, well, I can probably sell Italy all day long and people are not gonna come back and say, Well, the hotel wasn’t nice. There’s a lot of nice hotels. there’s great food, it’s just kind of a you know it’s there.
And there’s also some over overcrowding and some some tourism issues that, you know, a lot of people think Italy would be a nice place to go. So a lot of people go there, which means there’s a lot of people there. And one of the things that I’ve experienced spending a fair amount of time traveling around and and definitely quite a bit of time in Latin America is you can really get away from it and still have an amazing experience. And I remember when I first came to Colombia, I I think I was sitting on a a s
you know, on a sidewalk drinking coffee and eating a croissant thinking, man, I feel like I’m the only American here. I know I’m I know I’m not. And I say American meaning someone from the US, because people in Colombia are Americans too, I guess. You know, I’ve heard I’ve learned. But anyway, it’s it’s just that, wow, who would have thunk it?
Gregg Bleakney (21:20.507)
Yeah.
Jason (21:25.538)
You know, I’m here having this amazing experience and and a lot of people just don’t know about it. And so I so I get I get why the travel advisors, it’s just send you to France. You’re probably not gonna complain about the hotel, you’re probably not gonna complain about the food. And if there’s a bunch of crowding, you’re not gonna complain either because you wanted to go there, I guess. I don’t know. yeah, I don’t know where I’m going with that. But anyway, yeah. Yeah, please add. Yeah, please do.
Gregg Bleakney (21:50.78)
Well I’ll I’ll say I’ll if I could jump in to this intro interesting fact for your viewers that if you’re from if of your viewers from North America, Canada or the US, we learned geography as kids as the Americas being two continents, North and South America. And I thought that’s just how it was. How many continents, Jason, how many continents do we have on the globe or in the world? From your education, seven continents, right?
Jason (22:00.462)
Mm-hmm.
Jason (22:06.39)
Yes.
Jason (22:13.9)
I know. Until a couple
Yeah, yeah, exactly. And well six.
Gregg Bleakney (22:24.774)
So
Jason (22:25.676)
Yeah, I I know where you’re going with this. Go ahead. It’s fascinating.
Gregg Bleakney (22:27.801)
Yeah, so so and my wife is from Argentina and we had discussion is that most of the world outside the United States, almost everyone learns that there’s North and South America are one continent called the Americas. And so that was a big a big kind of like boom, wow, you know, we’re educated differently around the world.
Jason (22:40.418)
Yeah. Mm-hmm.
Gregg Bleakney (22:46.055)
educated differently in the United States than most of the rest of the world and a lot of these geographical features of our planet and that influences very much how we think including the fact that you brought up that if you’re traveling in Latin America or you’re living in Latin America as as I am, if you say I’m an American, most people don’t like that because we’re all Americans. They you need to say I’m from the United States or I’m from North America from the United States. The challenges in Spanish there’s no easy way to say that.
Jason (23:05.506)
Yeah, it’s
Yeah.
Gregg Bleakney (23:13.553)
There’s no word that says I’m United States person. It’s it’s a long
Jason (23:13.646)
Mm-hmm.
Jason (23:17.07)
Well, there is the Spanish there’s the Spanish word and it’s hard to pronounce. And I think it’s like Yudis, Yudasidencia, or maybe you can say it.
Gregg Bleakney (23:23.843)
So it’s like really fun.
Jason (23:27.926)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And and and in the English language we don’t have that you know, we’ve got Mexican, Colombian, French, German, we’ve got all those words for pretty much every other country I can think of, but there is no word that other than American, right? We say American. We can say I’m from the United States, but if you say I’m American
It works for us. Most people kind of know what you’re saying, or they look at your face and they can kind of pick they can put it together. And oftentimes I’ve had people in in the Latin world, they’ll just come out and say, you you’re American, right? And I’ll just look at them, I say, We’re all Americans. And they and they and they smile, they grin, they’re like, Ooh, you get it. You get it. So so that’s a good tip for anybody traveling in the Americas.
Gregg Bleakney (23:55.621)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Gregg Bleakney (24:07.846)
Yeah.
Then they hit it. They know that you know. They know that you know.
Jason (24:17.162)
South America, Central America, whatever is if you can say something like that to somebody, they’re gonna say, Ooh, you’re not the typical quote unquote American. So anyway, yeah, that’s a good tip.
Gregg Bleakney (24:25.861)
Yeah. Also but when you’re in Europe you can sound an American and everyone understands. But in Latin America
Jason (24:31.138)
Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So I I I had a friend in Ecuador that we had a lot of conversations around this before and she was very opinionated about it. And I don’t I don’t blame her. I get that. okay, so
Gregg Bleakney (24:43.463)
Yep. And that’s one of the that’s one of the great thing. Let me put up that’s one of the great things about travel. So someone can be in Cartagena, for example, step out of the hotel, meet a Colombian, have a coffee with them, and get into that discussion. And let’s say they’re with their sixteen-year-old son or daughter. And then all of a sudden, wow, now you have something to talk to your kids about when you come back. It’s like, wow, we met this guy. Mom, I didn’t know that the Americas was one thing. Is it really? And like
Jason (24:49.303)
Yeah.
Jason (25:06.456)
Yeah.
Gregg Bleakney (25:11.461)
That’s a pretty cool moment to have that’s inspired through getting out your front door at the hotel, right? Those are the types of things that we love to hear. We love to hear about when we’re putting these trips together.
Jason (25:19.278)
I don’t yeah. I don’t think either you or I, if we had never been to Latin America, I don’t think we you know, we’d never have a clue that a lot of people, especially a lot of people in the Americas, see it all as one continent. And yeah, it’s it’s it is just the cool things. And it’s not just about the words. It’s like people identify with these things. These are powerful things. We can say, well, it’s yeah, it’s one continent, two continents, doesn’t matter, but to them it it you know
Gregg Bleakney (25:40.623)
Hundred percent.
Jason (25:47.769)
To different people, we have different things we care about. And you’re never gonna figure those things out unless you get out and and explore a little bit. So all right, let’s we’re gonna get probably get more back in more back. That’s great English. get back into more stuff about kind of what you’re doing right now. But you’ve got a fascinating story. And so when if I ask somebody, how did you get from you know North America to South America? A lot of people say they got on a plane.
Gregg Bleakney (25:50.385)
Yeah.
Jason (26:15.768)
You’ve got a a slightly different story. So I want to have that conversation with you. I don’t know if that’s I don’t want to start right there. I know I know a little bit of story. But let’s go back a little further. I understand you grew up in in the Seattle area. So what was it like growing up in Seattle? So let’s kind of shoot for that, you know, 10 to 18 age range. What was going on in your world?
Gregg Bleakney (26:22.983)
Mm-hmm.
Gregg Bleakney (26:35.163)
Yeah, so I I grew up on two islands in the Seattle area. One is called Mercer Island and the other one is called Bainbridge Island. my both my parents were educators. And you know, I had a very I’d say an incredible childhood. I have a really great family. Again, a family that dinner time discussions,
Almost always framed around education with both my parents discussing different strategies. And my mom was also a business owner and she owned an educational academy that she was one of the first to diagnose ADHD in young children in the Seattle area. And she had a school that private school for special needs kids in the Seattle area.
And she also worked with gifted kids. So she and my dad eventually became the superintendent of schools for those islands where I grew up and also helped with the entire school district of Seattle as like an interim superintendent assist assistant in a transitionary time in the Seattle School District. So I had the the good fortune to grow up with a parental structure that really valued education and
Also sports. So both my parents were athletes. My dad was an athlete. And I was an athlete at the University of Oregon. I did the triple jump and and then I became a professional triple jumper afterwards and actually the the lead into my whole reason why I came to Latin America was because at the US Olympic trials I blew out my knee triple jumping and I had to recover my knee through writing.
stationary bikes. And that would kind of be my my as growing up in a nutshell, I would say one thing that I always was attracted to
Jason (28:21.646)
Okay. Yeah.
Gregg Bleakney (28:30.779)
Growing up, as we moved from Rush Island to Bainbridge Island, Bain Majamas sat in the middle of the Puget Sound and from the island the side of the island that we lived on had an incredible view of the Olympic mountain range. Every morning from my f from my window in my bedroom, wake up to see Olympic mountain range in Olympic National Park. And so although my parents were were incredible educators, they weren’t outdoorsy. And towards the end of high school, you know, when I was around seventeen, I started and I bought my own car and I started loading up the car on the weekends.
and going out and hiking the trails in Olympic Peninsula. And that’s when my first connection with the outdoors. It was very much self-guided, using books, you know, and studying myself and going down to the local outdoor gear store and talking all the sales guys until they probably, you know, dreaded me coming through the door and asking about the trails and Olympic Peninsula and how I could do this, how to pitch a tent, and all this stuff. So I kind of found my way into the outdoors on my own. and then when I went to college.
Jason (29:22.39)
Uh-huh.
Gregg Bleakney (29:30.633)
I got a scholarship for track and field from the University of Oregon and the University of Oregon in Eugene is kind of an epicenter for outdoor activity as well. So yeah.
Jason (29:39.129)
Our activities. Before we before we get too far into what was going on in school with the triple jump and the biking and all that stuff, you had mentioned you said that you had the benefit of parents that were in into education or you benefited from that. I’d like to dig a little bit more deeply into that because that could mean a couple different things. The things that pop into my head was one is just people telling me you need to get an education, because I’ve had people in my life, hey, education’s really important, you need to get an education. And then I had other people in my life that
just by nature, because they were educators, were just super curious and really, really enjoyed sharing with people that they cared about things. So when you say you you had the benefit of having educators in your family, tell me a little bit more about that.
Gregg Bleakney (30:25.435)
Yeah, so my f my parents always supported me following my curiosity and they felt that was like a key component of education. So I had that support. And as we go through this, I’m I haven’t had the the kind of standard life. I’ve made decisions in life that most families I think would would struggle to understand. And my parents always embraced those decisions and understood and supported and supported my decisions that were I would say are kind of non traditional. So I would say that on that side,
That’s what I meant by that.
Jason (30:57.016)
Did they, if knowing what you know about them and kind of their life journey, did either one of them I mean, sometimes educators have a very traditional path. You know, they grow up, they go to school, they become teachers. It sounds like what your parents were doing, were doing things in the educational world that were not necessarily super traditional. But I guess where I’m going with this is did your parents travel? Were they into travel? Was was there anything that you could point at in their upbringing that
It would help explain why they were so supportive of you following your dreams and and your curiosity?
Gregg Bleakney (31:32.146)
So yeah, my parents weren’t travelers and again they weren’t outdoors people. I think, you know, we grew up very you know, by the time I came along my brother was before me, w you know, my dad
Marriage due to housing, he’s paying for his own PhD. And so we grew up where I think the big, the big, big splurge for the family was, you know, getting a pizza once a month type thing. And then as as yeah, and so it’s a different a different time, a different generation. I would say that they were that my parents were were successful and then we never worried financially. But I think things have changed now where it’s like, I don’t know.
Jason (31:53.726)
my god, yeah, yeah. I could relate, yep.
Gregg Bleakney (32:05.327)
contemporaries on Mercer Island, it was normal for them to jet off to Europe or Hawaii for a weekend. That was very common. But like us growing up, those those types of things didn’t happen. So we would drive down to to Eugene for the Track City Classic and that was like our summer vacation for my brother and I to go run on a track, right? And so that was and then we go out to bend Oregon sometimes, you know, but I would say like big
Travel travelers, you know, I think they’d did they’d done a study abroad program in Europe they did, just after they graduated college. So they’d gone over there and they’d spent a few weeks but supervising high school students, so that was like their kind of big international travel. But I think it’s not because of lack of curiosity, but I think just in that generation my par parents just wasn’t it wasn’t normal for someone it wasn’t as easy or normal for someone to go, you know, travel the world as, you know, I’ve had the opportunity to do, you know, post college.
Jason (32:31.789)
Okay.
Jason (32:52.302)
Okay. Did you have any do you have any memories from kind of before college? You you mentioned sports, you mentioned going out and pestering the guys at the sporting goods store to get trail maps and stuff like that. But I’m curious at an early age, were there travel things around? sometimes that might look like national geographics. That seems to be a popular, popular theme coming up. But I was wondering if there were stuff like that around you that maybe influenced you?
Gregg Bleakney (33:15.192)
Yeah.
Gregg Bleakney (33:21.765)
Yeah, a hundred percent. So one of the kind of oddball things I was interested in as a kid was tropical fish. So I was a tropical fish hobbyist. Yeah, and so if I wasn’t, you know, to when I was in high school I’d go I’d go down to the outdoor stores. But starting from four years old, I think my mom took me to a country fair and I won a goldfish. And then from there we went to the we went to the fish store. It was called the fish door in over in Isquah, Washington, and I saw these aquariums, you know, and I think by the time I was ten I had thirty aquariums in the basement of my
Jason (33:27.994)
Okay.
Gregg Bleakney (33:51.712)
Parents’ house, and I was supporting them through breeding and selling tropical fish, mostly cichlids from the Amazon River Basin. And I had a massive library of books, and one of them was written by Jack Watley, who was an early explorer from Florida who would go down to the Columb to Columbia and to you know as as we can talk about, but into the Amazon.
Jason (33:59.981)
Wow.
Gregg Bleakney (34:16.965)
region of of Colombia and he would look for these different types of discus strains which he would bring back to United States and breed them to bring out these new colors of turquoise, etc. So I grew up reading these books about tropical fish enthusiasts and their expeditions into Latin America. And that’s since I was my first book report was like why I want to go to Latin America and why I want to go to Brazil and the Amazon River. And so that’s where my travel inspiration came from from the you know Jack Jack Watley’s handbook of Discus
book from probably when I was eight years old. And I’d, you know, custom designed my filtration systems and, you know, pe if people if you ask my friends from like childhood, you know, what their memories of me, they’d be like, he’s the he was the fish guy, you know. So
Jason (35:00.418)
was that was gonna be my next question, Greg. I was gonna ask you, how long were were you involved in the f the fish? Like when did did you get to a point where you’re like, okay, I’ve shifted focus to backpacking and hiking and stuff like that or like at what age did you give up the I shouldn’t say give up the fish. That sounds bad, but you know what I mean.
Gregg Bleakney (35:17.224)
Yeah, so I hadn’t I’d I’d I yeah one aquarium that I brought to college with me. Yeah. And then after college the fish the fish went away and I was you know starting to work and starting to travel and and and it didn’t do it. Yeah, yeah, probably. Yeah, I don’t think I don’t know if fish you know it’s funny because I didn’t what I didn’t know I never thought about this because I was a total fish nerd, but like
Jason (35:23.648)
Okay. All right.
Jason (35:31.134)
Starting to get interested in girls. Just kidding.
Gregg Bleakney (35:41.34)
Having a an aquarium in your dorm room in college is like the most cheesiest pickup thing, like, hey, come back to my fish tank. At least, you know, I don’t know what it’s like now, but back then, yeah, so it was kind of like a sketchy, like a like a that guy’s a little bit sketchy type thing. I got an aquarium in my in my dorm room. But I just, you know, I don’t think these you know, if a woman came to my dorm room, she’d pretty learned pretty fast that it probably wasn’t a tactic, like a romantic tactic, was something that came from like, you know, she’d probably scare it off because as a nerd, you know, I’d be talking about discus from the Amazon region, right?
Jason (35:47.259)
See my tropical fish.
Jason (36:08.608)
It would probably not be a great line. It it might sound a little weird like yeah. It’s but it’s funny you say that ’cause when I was about in that same age range, I was really into snakes. And I had I had several aquariums with snakes in it and then I had the for every aquarium I had with a snake in it, I had
Gregg Bleakney (36:11.299)
Yeah.
Gregg Bleakney (36:21.146)
cool.
Jason (36:29.88)
three aquariums full of mice or or things that I, you know, I won’t discuss why I had mice in the room, but I had snakes in the room. So you maybe you can make the connection. And yeah, and looking back at it like that would be even worse. Come back to my dorm room and see my snake.
Gregg Bleakney (36:36.934)
Yeah.
Gregg Bleakney (36:45.551)
It’s your snake, yeah. That doesn’t that doesn’t that’s not that that’s much worse actually. Yeah. That’s not advised. That would yeah.
Jason (36:49.356)
Yeah, yeah, it is. It sounds it sounds creepy and there’s not too many people that are super excited about seeing a snake. So anyway, so that’s funny. I’m happy I asked that question. That’s that’s a pretty that’s I did not hear that story yesterday. So very, very cool. all right, so you took the you took the aquarium. Actually I had a thought. The y I don’t know if they do it anymore, but you go to the fairs or the festivals and you can win the goldfish. You mentioned that.
Gregg Bleakney (36:58.343)
Yeah.
Jason (37:15.554)
wonder man if those guys have like a commission arrangement worked out with the local pet store. And if they don’t, they sure should. I just that was a business idea that popped in my head. They had a when they give you the goldfish they should hand you a ten percent discount card at a pet store.
Gregg Bleakney (37:22.897)
Yep. Hundred percent.
Gregg Bleakney (37:29.881)
Yep. Yeah. First thing I had to do was go buy the go buy the goldfish flakes at the whatever pet store was closest to my house. And then those guys had those guys those guys had me and again there the guy who ran those general manager of that store was named Carl. And I remember this and this is was this was, you know
Jason (37:36.566)
Yeah, yeah, exactly. So anyway, let’s
Gregg Bleakney (37:46.116)
four forty five years ago, right? Forty years ago. His name was Carl and he worked there as a sales rep. And then he ended up buying out the store. So for probably twenty years, he was like my almost like my babysitter. So I would ride my bike over I-90 Bridge, right? My bicycle that didn’t have a bike lane at that time, and go and I’d be at that store all day long with Carl and I would volunteer and I’d help clean the fish tanks. And we go to the Seattle Aquarium together. He would drive me there and we go to the tropical fish auctions at the Seattle Aquarium and we’d look at all the new fish species and then we go to these guys that were designing field tracing
Jason (37:47.96)
Wow. Good memory, yeah.
Jason (38:12.77)
Wow.
Gregg Bleakney (38:16.059)
So he became almost like this mentor of mine in the fish world. And and you know, I don’t know why I d I and I I still to this day I’m not sure why I didn’t study biology in college, but when I was a kid, yeah, that’s that that’s what I did, yeah.
Jason (38:29.176)
That’s really cool. That’s that’s that’s a really cool connection to just white and then
Forty some years later, you end up in Columbia surround in the in the mountains with and actually yesterday when we were walking around your finca, we were looking at the river. You’ve got a couple of rivers right there on the finca, and you’d mentioned about some some cichlids or something that lived in the river. And I had no idea. Like, he knows. You know, you know what you’re talking about. So, all right, that’s cool. Okay, so anyway, you go you go to school, you’ve got your fish tank and you’re on the track team and you’re doing triple chump, you hurt your knee.
Gregg Bleakney (38:40.017)
Yep.
Gregg Bleakney (38:47.398)
Yeah.
Gregg Bleakney (38:51.729)
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Jason (39:03.884)
What did what were you s I should ask this, what were you studying in school?
Gregg Bleakney (39:07.823)
Yeah, so I did a redshirt year my first year. So the in college that means instead of finishing on four years and when you get a scholarship, they pay for you to study for five years. So you don’t compete your first year. so basically my my big my big brother was a Pac Ten champion in triple jump as well. And so he was four years ahead of me. So when when I got there, they didn’t want both of us to overlap and be competing the same year. So they didn’t want me to burn a year of eligibility, my freshman year. So they do a thing called redshirt. So you don’t compete, you just train with a team. Basically you’re like
Jason (39:19.031)
Okay.
Gregg Bleakney (39:37.73)
on the practice squad, right? And then my sophomore year I started competing so for four years. So I actually went to the University of Oregon for five years. And so I finished my major, which was sports psychology in four years. So I really got into sports psychology. you know, University of Oregon my what what a lot of people you know I tell the story in Latin America, but my coach was Bill Dillinger and we would go to
Jason (39:37.774)
Okay. Mm-hmm.
Gregg Bleakney (40:02.361)
up to Bill Barman’s house. And if you don’t know the story, University of Oregon track and field team, my coach founded Nike. So Bill Barman founded Nike. It was founded from
you know, with with him and also with a an athlete it who was on the University of Oregon track and field team. So we had a lot of that running deep. The the the the face of Nike is Phil Knight, the co founder was our coach. So Phil Knight would actually come in for track meets, we’d write him notes, we would meet him, we go to Bill Barman’s river house and meet him and talk to him. And these guys were some of the most iconic coaches
In history anywhere in the world, and they also built one of the most iconic brands in the world. And my fifth year, my senior year, I’d completed my sports psychology degree. And that was incredible to study sports psychology and be in that kind of environment where these kind of coaches who are kind of zen masters of the sports psychology invented, you know, the sport of jogging, right? and my fifth year,
Jason (40:34.702)
Yeah.
Jason (40:48.067)
Yeah.
Gregg Bleakney (40:56.443)
I had finished my major and I wanted to do some other stuff. And so I had some friends that were involved in the journalism school. And the journalism school in Oregon was also combined with the ad school. So advertising basically. And I really became fascinated with with advertising and marketing, right? And there was a guy who would come down every year and do a
an internship program and you’d you’d apply and they’d pick like ten students from the ad school every year to do the internship program for them. And I didn’t know at this time I was pretty naive, but hit but he was named was Dan Wyden and he was the founder of White and Kennedy Advertising Agency, also known as the agency and the guy who invented Just Do It and the Nike brand. Right? So I was able to work with him
Jason (41:40.256)
Okay. Right. Very cool. Yeah.
Gregg Bleakney (41:45.254)
be with him and do a really intense, incredible, like life changing internship directly with him. He’d drive down to Oregon from Portland where his company was based. And some of the guys that were I was in that pr internship program, I’ve gone on to just do like
incredible things in in in the world of business. And that was a really special program. So I I kind of came out of Oregon in that time I was also transition transitioning to become a professional athlete. and so I think my first my my drive for from from a kid to go down to experience the tropics, there’s a guy who ran for the University of Oregon who who was from Brazil. And he actually transitioned from Brazil to
Jason (42:02.296)
Mm-hmm.
Gregg Bleakney (42:29.327)
or University of Oregon to train under the coaches at the University of Oregon, which were who were the best coaches in the world. His name was Joaquin Cruz and he went on to win multiple gold medals in Olympic Games and long distance running, right? A really iconic guy. And some point I think he was I was talking to him
And he was up busy in Oregon, and I told him about my dream to go down to the Amazon. And he said, Do you know that we have the best triple jump coach in the world in Brazil? So, you guys, like 10 years ago, you your university brought me up. So now I’m gonna talk to my university and we’re gonna bring you down to Brazil. So that way you can you can you can come down here, you can train with the best triple jump coach in the world and prep for the Olympic Games, right? With this coach, and you can also live out your
Jason (43:05.953)
wow.
Jason (43:13.741)
Mm-hmm.
Gregg Bleakney (43:16.157)
dream of being the tropics and maybe go check out the Amazon, right? So I went down my f like my fifth year I actually did an exchange program and I went down with with Joaquin Cruz and trained with some of the leading these guys all coached in Cuba et cetera and trained with their Olympic team for the triple jump and kind of was able to c combine those pursuits of you know my athletic career and my you know fascination with tropical fish and in the Amazon front with kids. So
Jason (43:19.032)
Yeah.
Jason (43:39.277)
Yeah. That’s cool. I got I gotta ask ya I gotta ask you this. Why the triple jump? It it it to me it because I’m not in the sporting world, I don’t really know much about it. So it s seems random to me. I’m sure it’s not, but maybe it is. Like how do like did you know I wanna do well, I guess your brother was doing triple jump, so that might have had an influence. But do you just kind of start track and
Everybody just kind of finds what they’re the best at and that’s what they pursue, or how does that work?
Gregg Bleakney (44:10.003)
Yeah, so it’s it’s a good question. I think and the public school system, at least in the United States where I grew up, there’s thing called recess, right? So you three times a day, you know, they let you out and you run around I don’t know what they do. Yeah, so you ha you go out there’s a playground and you go and play for like fifteen to thirty minutes depending on the recess.
Jason (44:19.726)
I don’t know if they still do that, but I remember that, yeah.
Jason (44:29.678)
Mm-hmm.
Gregg Bleakney (44:29.979)
And you kind of like for little boys at that time is like basically we’d all go out and we’d just go crazy, right? Because we’d all this built-up energy and we’d we’d play in every sport we could, running, chasing, tag, everything. And so I think by the time you’re like in second grade, you all the boys know who the fastest.
Jason (44:35.662)
Mm-hmm.
Gregg Bleakney (44:45.137)
Fastest guys are right. And then that time we had a thing called a presidential fitness test, which they don’t have anymore, I don’t think. But it was like a mandatory test of, you know, pull-ups, running fast, climbing a rope, you know, all this jumping. And so I think by by the second or third grade I knew I was the fastest kid and I knew I could jump really high. And so my dad put me in track and field and like when I was in fifth grade I broke the the record, the US national record for like the fastest kid who did hurdles, shock put and high jump and like
Jason (44:45.292)
Mm-hmm. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Gregg Bleakney (45:15.091)
hundred meters, right? So I so right that boy so they kinda took me and put me in this thing called the Junior Olympics program. And I did that all the way until my freshman year high school and then I I didn’t go through puberty. So my I went from like being this kid who broke the national record, you know,
Jason (45:16.483)
well.
Gregg Bleakney (45:31.76)
in the junior Olympics to like not going through puberty. So high school I just ran the high school track team, but I I didn’t even I didn’t qualify for anything. And then my senior year I had this massive growth spurt in in high school and I won the state championship in the in the triple jump.
‘Cause I I don’t I don’t know I don’t know why I I picked the jump but I just knew I could jump. So I did the triple jump, I won the state championship. And then Oregon came and re and all these colleges started recruiting me to to go you know, and my and I think my parents are pretty happy about that because you know, getting a scholarship from a US university out of state is like, you hundreds and hundreds of thousands dollars. So it’s a good it’s a good deal. You know, it’s a great deal. It’s even more now it can be, you for a big university be three, four hundred thousand, five hundred thousand by the time you get your room aboard paid for and stuff. You know, so it was a it was
Jason (45:48.908)
Wow. Okay.
Jason (46:08.076)
yeah.
Jason (46:17.048)
All right. Okay.
Gregg Bleakney (46:18.913)
That was why I did the triple jump, I think. It was a good ticket to free education as well.
Jason (46:23.126)
It’s it’s pretty cool. And again, it sounds random to me. People that are into track and field and sports and stuff like that probably are like, Yeah, I mean I’m not saying it’s random and like it’s not cool. It’s super cool. It’s like, wow, that’s that’s so you had one thing. Yeah.
Gregg Bleakney (46:35.311)
It is a random event. It’s not it’s not a well known event. It people call it the power ballet. So it is most people aren’t familiar with but it’s tr Colombia when I first moved down here, there’s a woman in Colombia called Katarina Bargan. She won the Olympic gold medal in triple jump, so it’s cool to follow her.
Here in Columbia. So I’ve talked to her, I’ve I’ve, you know, I’ve hooked up with her a few times and and talked to her and try to understand what she’s doing here to work with kids in Colombia and and in track and field. So it is some one of the things that we promise ourselves is that this thing called the you know the the men of Oregon. There’s even a book about the men of Oregon, but it’s people, men who have gone through the University of Oregon track and field program, and it’s one of the things that is kind of like
Jason (46:59.511)
Yeah. All right.
Gregg Bleakney (47:13.603)
unwritten rule is that you need to get back in the future through coaching if can. So a lot of my contemporaries, guys I trained with, have go gone on to to coach kids in high school, won state championships and just does some really incredible stuff. So that’s I think one of the disadvantages of me living abroad internationally is I have been able to tap into that and kind of get back through that athletic program is something I want to try to accomplish here in the next, you know, decade of my life. Yeah.
Jason (47:29.976)
Yeah.
Jason (47:33.714)
yeah. Yeah, very cool. So so you you stayed in Brazil for I guess one year, a semester. How long were you actually in Brazil? Six months, okay. And then kinda walk us w where did you go from there? ‘Cause were you finished with school by then or was did you still have a little bit left to finish?
Gregg Bleakney (47:43.375)
Six six months. Yeah.
Gregg Bleakney (47:53.416)
That was during my during my fifth year. So then I had to come back, I had to finish my academic year at University of Oregon. And then jump into the college track and field season, which is the end of the year. And so then I went to the Institute A Championship, which that year I b I think was in in New York, competing the Institute A Championship, and then that year also qualified for the US national championships, which is the entire, you know, all the professional stuff.
Jason (48:16.824)
Mm-hmm.
Gregg Bleakney (48:17.743)
And then I I got a sponsorship from a Brazilian sponsorship. So the these guys in Brazil actually offered to bring me back to Brazil and training with them. I really got along well with them. It was great. And Mizuno came in, they were sponsoring me as a professional athlete. And then I went to the US National Championships and from there I was gonna do a circuit around Europe and then hopefully go that year wasn’t a Olympic year, it was off Olympic year, which is a have a a different type of Olympics.
and so that was that was that was gonna happen that summer. But so what happened was I blew up my knee. I was still under my insurance policy at the University of Oregon, so I went back to the University of Oregon and I had this incredible doctor rebuild my knee. And at when he done when he finished rebuilding it, he was basically like, You’re gonna triple jump again, but you can like go do trekking and we wanted you to protect your knee, let’s do this rehab. So he put me on a bike and we did lot of rehab. And it was that it was during that summer that I was basically had to stay at the University of Oregon.
That I found and where next.
Jason (49:15.924)
Okay. All right. And let’s let’s tie that to the internship you mentioned with the the marketing and and ad internship. ‘Cause that was before Brazil you did that internship.
Gregg Bleakney (49:27.695)
That was after I came back from Brazil. Yeah, so my last yeah, yeah. The end of my college college academic career, yeah.
Jason (49:29.506)
That was after you came back from Br Okay. All right.
You founded Where Next at that time, but you were ’cause I’ve heard a little bit of your story, but you went and had a a corporate job as well at some point. So h help me tie that together.
Gregg Bleakney (49:47.248)
Yeah. So where next started during that summer when I was rehabilit rehabilitating my knee and I really stuck there. So the internet had just started and so and that was when the whole internet revolution in Seattle started. So I had this idea ’cause I’ve been traveling quite a bit for my
track and field career, I’ve been going to Europe and competing in the summers, etc. And I’ve been using, you know, in my track meets, I go and travel and try to see as much as I could see, right? And so I’ve been using Let’s Go and Lonely Planet quite a bit. And what I discovered with, especially with Lonely Planet, you know, and also I’ve been using Rick Steves. Rick Steves was a guidebook writer out of out of Seattle. I really loved him. But the key with these guidebook guidebooks is so the journalist for the Let’s Go or or
Jason (50:06.926)
Mm-hmm.
Jason (50:22.126)
Mm-hmm.
Gregg Bleakney (50:30.983)
Only planet would go, but let’s say in 2017 they would go. And by the time all their updates were integrated to the guidebook, you might be in 2019, right? And then someone would be using it in 2020, you’d be using something that came out in 2019, and you’d be using three-year-old information, right? So the information was out of date.
Jason (50:38.35)
Yeah, yeah.
Gregg Bleakney (50:49.541)
We raised some capital, venture capital, and I started Where Next, and Where Next was a digital guidebook for travel. And so we had nine countries in Europe represented and we had local reps in every country, right? And so we had a database, which that time was like a big deal, right? A database behind like a public facing website. This was like nineteen ninety eight, right? And the database we we
Jason (51:05.208)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Jason (51:09.998)
Mm-hmm. Yep.
Gregg Bleakney (51:12.625)
We’d update the database every week. So all these writers would update content, stories, if the address changed, if something would recommend, like a hostel or a hotel, or there’s an event, everything was always live. And so that was also the early days of internet dating. I think there’s a thing called match.com at that time. And so we’d use like a similar algorithm to match.com, but we’d match people to travel. So you’d log into the website, you create your own account, and you’d say, I want to go to Europe during this date range.
Right? I want to go to these countries and then you’d do a like a we call it a psychographic profile. And so you’d say, you know, are am I there to party? Am I there for arts? Am I there for food? And you’d kind of do this test and then we’d match you to all the database that we call them attractions, to all the stuff that we had. We went over to Europe several years and we had this really extensive
database of you know every hostel in all the key cities, everything was all reviewed and up to date and all the content was imp important to this database. And then we would render your own custom guidebook that you could print out and take with you. So your guidebook was like no one else’s guidebook, right? And so this was before smartphones, so like we’re little bit ahead of our time, you know? But so people would print it out
Jason (52:12.878)
Okay, great.
Jason (52:16.558)
Yeah. So you had to print it. So print it, take it with you. Yeah.
Gregg Bleakney (52:19.781)
You print it and take it with you, and then on and then integrating the output of the printing, we’d have like coupons and the advertisement stuff that those guys in Europe would pay. That’s like the revenue model.
Jason (52:28.814)
So who was creating so let’s just call it the content creators. Who was who were the ones creating these the content that then needed to be updated ’cause you said it was constantly updated. So I’m just curious we don’t need to go too far into it. I’m just curious.
Gregg Bleakney (52:39.995)
Yeah. So yeah, so I would go over there with a team of other people and we’d go over there every summer and we create and write all the content initially and then we’d have we’d hire local personalities ambassadors who would live in each country and they would be responsible for maintaining that content up to date. And then they do like two or three different articles every month that we post like as a digital magazine.
Jason (52:47.502)
Mm-hmm.
Jason (53:02.626)
Wow. It’s kinda
Gregg Bleakney (53:03.717)
Yeah, it’s very cool. Actually you can go to the Wayback Machine and you can see the website still and you can check it out. Yeah, it’s still on there. And then we had the dot com crash in early two thousands and we had to shut it down.
Jason (53:07.854)
Yeah. It’s very cool.
Jason (53:13.454)
Okay. So you shut you shut that down. when did you start actually get when did you get when did you jump jump from? When did you when did you move from the stationary bike to to actually going places on a bike and and then I’m trying to trying to lead into this big story that I know that that you’re gonna share with us. It’s very fascinating.
Gregg Bleakney (53:24.711)
Yeah.
Gregg Bleakney (53:30.863)
Yeah.
Gregg Bleakney (53:36.838)
Yeah, so then you know, this the one thing the key interesting thing we had at the time was we had this really beautiful dynamic database that we created for this for where next initially. So when I left there I got hired by a database marketing company. first with Oracle and I worked with Oracle as a salesperson and then moved to this company in Seattle. that would had a
system that I was I was familiar with and I knew how to sell right and during that time I had continued my rehab right with my knee and I really gotten into cycling so I started doing all these like things called randeneurs so there’s a a a group of guys in Seattle called the Seattle International Randeneurs and it’s a style French ultra endurance cycling.
Right. And so every four years there’s like a huge event where they ride twelve hundred kilometers without stopping in France called the Paris Bresse Paris. And we were kind of like the top group of guys out of the US that would go and qualify for that. So we’re like the random American club that would go over there and compete. And so I started training for that. And I and you start with a hundred kilometer ride and you
to go it’s kind of like a cannonball run and you have these grocery stores and you have to buy something at the grocery store and the timestamp and have the guy to prove that you did the route, right? And yeah and then you do then you do like 200 kilometers and you do 300 kilometers and you do 400 kilometers 600 kilometers and you have to do it in a certain time to qualify for the next one. So you actually have a season that builds up to it. And if you do the 600 kilometer
Jason (54:48.078)
Okay. interesting.
Gregg Bleakney (54:59.673)
certain time you qualify you can apply and qualify to go to the big one in Paris, right? And so that’s when I started riding bikes and I st you I kind of poured on my Olympic ambition to do this like ultra extreme bike races and bike rides. until my dear friend called me up and he he just lost his mother to
gestational diabetes. And so he had done signed up for a bike ride call with the American Diabetes Association called Tour to Cure on the California course. And he knew I was into cycling and he was a friend of mine from college and he was like, hey, you want to jump on with me and do this fundraising ride. And so we did it and then we kind of we did a couple more and we started learning that like a lot of the funds that we had raised through friends and family, you everyone gets hit up by these things everyone says well, hey I’m doing a marathon or hand doing this, can you contribute? Right? And so we we discovered that one of these particular events that we had done together.
That a lot of the donations were like hung up in administration and bureaucracy and salaries for that kind stuff. So we decided to do one on our own. So we created our own website and we rode down the Pacific Coast from Seattle to San Francisco together. And we had no clue what we were doing. And that was before like bike touring was cool because it’s very cool now, you know? And so like there’s very few of us, but there’s a a couple association called the Adventure Cycling Association, so they had a map.
That could research. And this was like early 2000s, right? When we did this, 25 years ago. Plus. And so we rode down the whole coast and we raised, I can’t remember what we raised. Brooks, my my partner in that, he did like most of the heavy lifting and it was an incredible thing for him to do with his mom. He got very close with American Diabetes Association.
So that was like a really beautiful series of rides we did during the summers. the next summer we did the national parks route. So we went up to like near Banff and we were all the way down through Glacier National Park, Yellowstone National Park, Grand Teton National Park, down to Jackson, and then flew out of Idaho. So we started doing those every summer. And and and that was that’s what kind of sparked I guess the
Gregg Bleakney (57:06.529)
inspiration for the next big adventure and I can say I was getting introduced but w during one of these rides along the Pacific coast we pulled into like a roadside diner because one thing when you’re riding your bike you’re burning a lot of calories.
So you’re like doubling or tripling your calorie necess you know necessity every day if you want to like kind of strike an equilibrium, right? So you just go and you start hitting these truck stops and you’re just you just chowing down big pancake breakfast and all this kind of stuff. And we went and it was a rainstorm and we pulled into this you know diner and we saw another cyclist, right? And this guy, you know, he looked like
Jason (57:21.486)
Mm-hmm. Yeah, yeah.
Gregg Bleakney (57:45.17)
He didn’t look very good, right? He was looked he was he had a tough day. And he was just kind of like head down, eating this plate. And we we of course we were like, hey buddy, how you doing? Tell us about what’s going on. And he’d actually just what we discovered, which he told us, he just smoked like a giant
reefer before going into before going to the restaurant. So he was like out of it. He like looked it up. I remember this so clearly he looked up and he’s like, dude, I’m really stoned right now. So I just can’t focus on talking to you. I just need to eat this plate of food. But yeah, like I’m riding my bike I’m riding my bike all the way down to Mexico and I got like a website. So you can like check it out and he like gave me a card.
Jason (58:04.298)
Okay.
Gregg Bleakney (58:23.207)
So of course, like when I got back from that trip, I followed his bike trip all the way down through Mexico, and I was like, that’s the coolest thing ever on his and he he had to hit a blog, you know. So then that’s when I pitched after we finished our great national parks ride. I pitched to my friend who’s like, you know, I needed something to replace my Olympic dreams for track and field. And I pitched riding the longest road in the world, which was from Prudhoe Bay, Alaska, all the way down to Ishway, Argentina. So self-supported bike trip, and he said yes. And so
So it took us like three or four years to save up the money. That’s when I was kinda working a corporate corporate job and software. And I was living, you know, really simple. I was living with three or four roommates in in Seattle. I was saving up all my dough so that I could self finance this bike trip. And then my friend,
You know, we were gonna do it one summer and then he he he didn’t he wasn’t quite ready, so we pushed it off one year. And literally like two months before the trip, he had bought a Mini Cooper and the whole car blew up. And so he hired a lawyer and through the lemon law got reimbursed this this settlement, which gave him enough money to do the bike trip for with me. And he was like, We’re good to go, dude. I just won my lawsuit. I got my Mini Cooper, like, let’s go, you know. So we flew up that summer of two thousand five to Prudhoe Bay on fully loaded
Jason (59:34.006)
Yeah.
Gregg Bleakney (59:40.038)
Bikes and of course he worked in he works in marketing sponsorships and I had this background. So we got the you know, at that time we got some sponsors, we had outdoor research,
in in Seattle, a really cool outdoor clothing brand. And then we had CoMotion, the cycling company out of Eugene, Oregon, right by the University of Oregon. Who knew who I was? They donated the touring bikes. They made tandem bikes. So they made these custom touring bikes with tandem bike tubing that’s like extra strong so we could put all the penny and all the weight on the bicycles. So they do sit they gave us the bikes at a really discounted rate. And then we got a couple other people to donate some of the gear and stuff and we are on our way and we flew up to
Jason (01:00:05.71)
Okay. All right.
Jason (01:00:15.822)
So when you I’m I’m trying to imagine like how much stuff you start with be I like what’s the r the rundown? Maybe the bike, things to fix the bike with, some clothes and a tent and what else do you take? ‘Cause I’m trying to get an idea for what you started with and then you just replace food all along the way or I don’t know.
Gregg Bleakney (01:00:39.781)
Yeah, so it’s interesting so after I finished this bike trip, the
The Seattle Times did an article about it. And so from there, I got a lot of these different types of rotary clubs and stuff around the country that asked me to come and do these presentations, you know, and then I have companies coming, outdoor companies and stuff. I go and do presentations for the staff. So one of the first things I do in my presentation, I show the picture of the bike. And so the bike has these things called panniers, like or panniers, whatever they look out of a French term. And it’s like these saddlebags that sit in different spots on your bike. So generally, in the old school way of doing it, you have two in the front, two in the back, and then you have one on your handlebar.
Jason (01:00:52.174)
Mm-hmm.
Gregg Bleakney (01:01:13.533)
And then you have one over the top of the two on the back on the rack, right? So you so you have like six bags in total. And so everyone has it does it a little bit differently, but I had my I had everything really, you know, I had a really tight program on how I packed my bike. Both of us did. We were like OCD on it, so the balance weight balance was perfect. So you think a lot of think about like you’re packing a a backpack, right? So you want the heavy things at the bottom, you want everything clearly organized. you’re doing a lot of your your your
you know, prepping your tents and breaking things down and dark, so you need to be able to do stuff like you need to know where everything is. So I’d have my handlebar bag where I’d have my camera and I have my notepad and I’d have like my wallet up there.
And then I’d have my kitchen and everything on on the front left panier. So I’d have you know everything to cook, clean, some food stuff. And on the right side, I have my my rain jackets and my rain gear and stuff. Like if a storm hits, boom, pull it out really fast. And on the back, you have your tent over the back on the saddle, you know, over the top. And then you have your clothes, and then you have your like sleeping bag stuff on those side. So everything’s in car compartments. You know, this was this was over 20 years ago, and I can remember I can close my eyes and I know where everything is on my bike still, right? And so yeah, and then and then on your bike.
Jason (01:02:18.139)
It’s I I can tell that. All right.
Gregg Bleakney (01:02:21.629)
Frame you have mounted different water balls because there’s there’s sections of the trip where there’s no water for a couple weeks, so you had to figure that out. So, yeah, you there’s certain sections where you the first you know thousand miles across Alaska, you know, few stops were few and far between yeah, and the Prudhoe Bay, the the pipeline road where you’re riding riding through the oil pipeline, there’s only like one stop and like 450 miles. So you got to bring everything like just like you’re on a backpacking trip, you know, think about it that way. And then when you’re riding through more like dense urban populations, you know, you’re just hitting truck stops. Truck stops are the best, you know.
Or you get it up trust stock because you know for like twelve bucks at that time you just get a massive plate of food that would be like, you know, breakfast and lunch combo. You know, it’s just about just piling on calories. Yeah. Yeah, a shower. Yeah.
Jason (01:03:00.512)
And and and a sh and a shower. Truck stops were great. I don’t know if you took those or not, but so I I know we could talk for hours about the whole trip because it took you well and a lot of things happened, but I guess first question, how long did it take you to get from Purdue Bay to Ushuaia? And was it generally straight through? I mean, w where there’s stops and starts, what did that look like?
Gregg Bleakney (01:03:28.005)
Yeah, so the overall trip took me two years and I guess the trip in a nutshell was you know life changing experience. when I look back on it, the inspiration was fun and exploration and also kind of like a frustration that I didn’t accomplish my Olympic dreams in track and field and I wanted to do something big, right, for myself. And I wanted like I wanted a win.
Jason (01:03:45.174)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Gregg Bleakney (01:03:48.498)
win, I wanted a big goal and I wanted to accomplish it. So that was my inspiration. But over the two years, when we talk about transformation of travel, I think that like I look in the mirror and I’m like everything for my life is like pre-bike trip and after bike trip. Right. And I think now you know we just had a little girl like in the last few weeks and I can tell that it’s happening again. It’s like pre-kids and after kids. Like it’s just like it was just a major mark
Jason (01:04:02.99)
Like
Gregg Bleakney (01:04:12.207)
marker in my life that everything changed and nothing’s been the same since I’ve done this bicycle trip. And I guess in the nut in a nutshell, the bicycle trip t took two years. my dearest friend Brooks started the bicycle trip with me and we got into Mexico and we took a couple of of roads. We were very confident at that time, you know, two young men really conquering the world on our bike. By that time, you know, a few months, four or five months in the trip, we were like super fit. You called like frog people. Our legs were just like full muscles and ripped in like we were really lean.
You know, we could get off at any tourist attraction and just run to the top of any pyramid. You know, in Mexico, we stopped some of those ruins in Mexico’s that are high altitude, and we would like run up of like gazelles. It was just like we’re we were very confident from our you know psychological fitness, we’re very free, physical fitness, and I think we made a couple moves going into places that were conflict zones and in the border of Mexico and Guatemala and we paid the price for that. So we basically got attacked by a criminal gang and
And we almost were murdered. it was very very difficult situation to talk about, but we were almost murdered. we almost were decapitated with machetes and we we managed to escape the situation.
It was a horrible s it was a really horrible thing. both of us had, you know, some stress issues, post-traumatic stress issues after that. And he he decided to call quits after that. so he he went home and he had something to go back to. He had a you know, it’s incredible fiancee at the time, which he went home. They married, they have beautiful families with two great kids, and he went to go pursue that. And I continued, I decided to continue on my own.
Jason (01:05:31.246)
Yeah, I’m sure. Yeah.
Gregg Bleakney (01:05:52.402)
And so that’s and when I was on my own, I kinda really had to stop to think about why am I doing this? Because this isn’t just like me conquering the world and having fun anymore. This is like some of the places and people that I’m meeting are different, you know, and like ninety-nine point nine percent of the people in the world are good, incredible people, they’re there to help you. But there’s a reality that like we almost were murdered and it was pretty close and you have to really think through like, is this worth it now? And so I had to have
Jason (01:06:18.51)
Well, and you’re I I don’t know, but I imagine, you know, if and I’ve traveled enough in Latin America and I’ve let’s put it this way, from Pruto Bay to the Mexican border, not much I mean, there’s things happening, of course, but when you get to southern Mexico and you have that issue right there as you’re getting ready to go into Guatemala, I can imagine that you’re looking at, well, geez, there’s a lot of
potentially challenging stuff ahead of me. It’s not like I’m almost there. The easy, you know, the hard parts behind me. It’s like, no, ’cause then emotionally, psychologically, okay, yeah, I’m going into Guatemala and then maybe you know, Honduras, El Salvador, all these all these places, Colombia, stuff like that. And yeah, yeah. So I I I can
Gregg Bleakney (01:06:50.449)
Yeah.
Gregg Bleakney (01:07:07.483)
Yeah. Like we were just getting into it. We were just I mean you look at it. The next succession of country is Guatemala, which is an incredible place, but and especially during that time it was very insecure. And then you have after that you have we went into Honduras, right? And then El Salvador, right?
And and those like those pre in in that time, two thousand five was a pretty hardcore place and you El Salvador’s like the security situation improved there. But like I was just in Honduras like a couple months ago and it’s still you know, it’s better but it’s still like a little bit mm, you know, and and then going from there you you you’re going down to Colombia and in two thousand five Colombia was not a safe place. I mean it was just getting safe, but it was still pretty sketchy. And then even along the coast of Peru, so it’s like
This isn’t you know, in the United States, the the biggest risk we had for safety were RVs and they you know so many RVs they would forget to put their ladder up or they put their ladder up so the ladder would be like shooting out from the RV. So I had this mirror, so like these RVs would come blown by you and they just take you out with your ladder and like gone. So that was like the biggest I think safety risk were like RV guys who forgot to put the stepladder correctly. Yeah.
Jason (01:08:12.3)
And you’re and you’re you’re so exposed on a bicycle. It’s one thing on a motorcycle, you’re still exposed on a motorcycle, but it’s hard to outrun people on a mo on a bicycle too. I mean, I’m sure you’re very fast on a bicycle. And if they’re on foot, maybe you can outrun them. But other than that, that that’s yeah, you’re kind of exposed. So all right.
Gregg Bleakney (01:08:22.363)
No, they can’t. No. Yeah.
Gregg Bleakney (01:08:30.213)
Yeah. No, these were very experienced criminal organizations and they they were hiding in on uphills which are in around blind corners and they w they were very coordinated. So like these guys and it’s funny because yeah learning about living in Latin America and being in some of these in some certain situations
The perception of some of these places isn’t necessarily aligned with the actual reality of the situation at that time. It’s usually it’s usually pushed back, it usually takes a couple years. So if a place kind of goes south for security, the general public doesn’t know about it for a couple years. Like that takes a while for that perception to kick in. And then when it cleans up and the security is stronger, it usually takes it takes a while for it to catch up. So, like in that part of the board or southern board between Guatemala, Mexico at that time in 2005 was already facing some serious security issues, and basically you had this massive wave.
Jason (01:08:51.192)
Yeah. Yep.
Jason (01:09:03.416)
Takes a while for people to get comfortable with it. Yep.
Gregg Bleakney (01:09:15.609)
of migrants you know moving up to the United States and they all had money to pay the Cayotes which was like six to seven thousand up to ten thousand dollars to get smuggled across the US border so there’s a very strong band of criminal organizations working that border in Mexico who would you know kidnap these types of migrants and steal their money right and so that was the area that we knew we were going through we didn’t we think you know we’re untouchable they’re not gonna touch us but they definitely saw like us as an opportunity as well and you know we didn’t really stand a chance these guys were professional you know professional
Jason (01:09:20.536)
Mm-hmm.
Gregg Bleakney (01:09:45.449)
you know organizations and so like a couple green you know a gringo guy growing up on Rush Island Bam John Washington didn’t stand a chance against these guys.
Jason (01:09:53.081)
You’re and and I’ll tell you, you’re a tall guy. You’re a big looking dude. I I yeah, so they’re not afraid of that. okay, so let’s let’s move forward because I wanna get into a little bit about what’s important to you about creating, you know, tourism. You’ve been involved in some
Gregg Bleakney (01:09:57.371)
Yeah.
Jason (01:10:11.936)
some kind of I guess I don’t know if it’s NGO organizations or projects to help increase exposure and tourism and I know probably want to touch on that a little bit, but but your bike journey is such a big thing. I feel like I could just keep asking a hundred questions. What’s I will ask you this if would number one, knowing what you know now, are you happy you did it or do you wish that you hadn’t? I think I know the answer to that question, but I don’t know. I’m gonna ask anyway.
Gregg Bleakney (01:10:40.485)
Yeah, so I think the bicycle game, like I said, is the single most transformable transformative experience of my life. Before I started to bike trip, you know, I was I was a software sales and that was
Jason (01:10:46.466)
Well yeah Yeah, but but can’t but hold on. But cancer a s a cancer scare can be a big transformational thing as well, but you might say, I don’t wanna do that again.
Gregg Bleakney (01:10:55.887)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean again I I I would I wouldn’t I wouldn’t trade that my bicycle trip for anything. And a hundred percent. And I think, you know, I started as a software salesman living in Seattle, who I you know, I’d done some travels and stuff and I’d like, you know, again, really privileged upbringing and and very lucky for that. But by the time I came out the back end, you know, look at look at me now, I
I’ve lived abroad for 20 years. I speak I I speak in a different language every day. I’m married to a woman not from my culture. I have a kid who’s who has four nationalities and I have a completely different career path. Like I I don’t know really much what what el what else could have changed in my life more than like what’s changed? My career, my you know, my my family situation, kids.
where I live, even to like, you know, when I speak when I speak different languages, I feel like I’m a different person, right? So it’s a it’s been a major transformation.
Jason (01:11:52.921)
Do you think your you know, I really should have asked this, your parents when you two two parts when you started the journey, were they supportive? Because it sounded like they were pretty supportive overall. So when you said I’m gonna go do this bicycle ride, were they supportive? And did that change at all? And how did that change when you got to the Guatemalan border and had that incident?
Gregg Bleakney (01:12:16.721)
So yeah, well before I left, I’d say like one of the least supportive I felt for my parents was on the spicy trip, but I’d I’d also anticipated it. So I’d like prepped for the spicy trip for years and saved money. And I didn’t tell anyone about it except for my writing partner, Brooks. Like very few people ever knew about this bicycle trip. So I kept it a secret for my parents. And then a coup a few weeks before I left for that bicycle trip, I actually found them.
I’ve set up a time to go talk to them. And I was dating a girl at that time, and she knew that I was gonna leave the bike trip, so was kind of like a temporary type thing, you know? And but they thought it was more serious than it was, so I was like, I gotta meet you guys, you know, we gotta go and I gotta tell you something. So I sit them down, we’re sitting at the table at their house, I remember, and I’m like, okay, I gotta tell you something. My mom jumps up with her hands up, she’s like, my gosh, you’re getting married, you know? And I was like, no, sorry, mom. It’s something totally different. So like I quit, yeah. Yeah.
Jason (01:12:47.256)
Uh-huh.
Gregg Bleakney (01:13:09.295)
So like at that point I like kind of like from the outside, I like this nice American lifestyle picket fence type thing. I just bought a beautiful home in Ballard, you know, at a young age and I had this great career and I had this nice girlfriend, all this kind of stuff. So like, you know, I think from the outside everything looked like it was it was going well. So I was like, you know, I selling my home, selling everything I own, you know, splitting up with this girlfriend and taking off to ride a bicycle from Alaska Argentina. I think it was just like kind of a pretty big shock for them. And then when I had this happen in you know on in Mexico on the border of Mexico and
in Guatemala. They actually my whole family kind of flew down to Guatemala and had an intervention with me. And so they all they came down, had an intervention and they tried to convince me to to to kind of rethink everything and we blew back home, right? And so that was a really tough moment for me and I decided to stick with it, keep going against kind of the the the push of my family.
Jason (01:14:04.12)
Yeah, I I get that. So for those of our listeners, we get to enjoy the Colombian music. They’re they’re at your place. If anybody there hears that, it’s great. It’s part of what makes Columbia Columbia. And I love that. If you have not experienced that in your life, come on down. It’s it’s there’s always good good good stuff going on. so I can I can completely imagine why they did that. And I wonder so here’s the thing, you were thinking about doing this not thinking, you were planning this trip for quite a while.
Gregg Bleakney (01:14:12.527)
Yeah.
Gregg Bleakney (01:14:21.965)
Gregg Bleakney (01:14:33.99)
Yeah.
Jason (01:14:33.994)
And they’re looking at you, you’ve got the house, the girlfriend, and and do you think in hindsight or did have they shared with you ’cause honestly, if my kid came to me and said that, I would think she broke up with him and he’s lost his mind and he’s gonna go get on a bike. Like he I’m I’m I’m assuming he just came up with this like within twenty four hours of the breakup.
Gregg Bleakney (01:14:52.519)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Jason (01:14:58.971)
And did they fully understand that that was something you’d been thinking about for a while? d did they even want to hear that or did they just think you just lost your mind? Boom, like that.
Gregg Bleakney (01:15:08.585)
I don’t think they I I don’t know. I think at a certain point they’re used to me being a little bit of a different kid, you know, you know, asking for tropical fish for my Christmas present, you know. that kind of stuff. So they used to be doing different kind of stuff, but not that kind of big of a departure. And I think also my brother was getting married at that summer as well. So one of the things when I came back to the US I rode down and like flew to my brother’s to to his wedding, right? So I think my mom was very focused on that ’cause that, you know, on on on one side they had the kid, the black sheep who’s going off and doing this and the other s the other side they had my brother who was made this, you know, my sister in law’s
Jason (01:15:13.55)
Yes.
Gregg Bleakney (01:15:38.299)
Awesome, you know, who’ve met this incredible woman who’s getting married and it’s kinda like so they have that nice little balance, you know. So I think they could float back and forth. So I think I gotta thank my brother, give him a high five for getting married just at that time and you know, kind of easing easing the the the burden of my parents examining my lifestyle decisions.
Jason (01:15:39.406)
Mm-hmm.
Jason (01:15:54.509)
Okay, so now let’s fast forward to you get to Ushuaia and I assume you call them or something and was it a my God, thank God, please don’t ever do that to us again? Or is it like, you know what, I’m proud of you for pushing on and great, great thing. And they might be listening to this. I get that, but I’m just curious how that changed after the fact.
Gregg Bleakney (01:15:58.257)
Yeah.
Gregg Bleakney (01:16:15.527)
So you have to understand that like by the time I got to Ushuai it’d been two years. They’d been pretty I think everyone got pretty used to me being on the road and and having this type of adventure. So I think by the time I got done with Ushuaia I like looking for the next thing. And I knew I couldn’t come back to the States. So for me, like most of the people around me were like, where are you going next? Right? You know, what’s the next bicycle trip? You know?
Jason (01:16:35.0)
Well, you wait, hold on, hold on, Greg. You said I knew I couldn’t go back to the United States. Help us understand that.
Gregg Bleakney (01:16:43.911)
I think by that time, you know, living in a tent on the side of the road and and going through that type of travel experience, I say it was very transformative. I developed also literally having a beat out of me when we had that terrible experience in Mexico. I can back up. One of the positive thing that came out of the experience in Mexico is that through this kind of PTSD I had, the way I got through was like one of the best pieces of advice I ever got was from a very close friend from Seattle.
Who been through some trauma in his life, and he said, the way to get through this is to be like a dog. And what do dogs do when they meet new people? They sniff butts. It’s like, go sniff butts. And it sounds weird, but from then on, you know, going through El Salvador and Honduras and all these places, people had guns all over the place. There’s guys with machetes on the side of the road all the time.
You still can’t forget that 99.9% of them are the most friendly, incredible people you ever know, and they’ll invite you to their house, you know, to have dinner and pitch your tent in their backyard. So what I did, instead of shying away, I went into it, right? So when I see a guy inside the road with machete, instead of freaking out and riding my bike to the other side, I rode up to him and I practiced my Spanish and he just big smile, you know, missing teeth, you know, the hat, the whole deal, and was like, you know, come you know, come be you know, we’re having a quincy quincianera for my daughter, you should come, you know. It’s like all of a sudden
I started sniffing butts. And so that opened up this like extraordinary sense I think it developed during this bicycle trip of people and feeling something. Right. And that’s the motto of my business. Feeling something. So it like my sense
Jason (01:18:19.054)
Wow. Yeah.
Gregg Bleakney (01:18:24.505)
My kind of sixth sense of people through that fear and through that post-traumatic stress issue was so elevated, like I would just freak out over everything for like the first month after writing. And then when I started applying the sniff butts, I learned how to flip that into like a curiosity and like instead of going back, go forward, but like feel that, you know, that sense you have for these people and instead of going backwards, go forward, run into it, right? And so that
was my own kind of education throughout the rest of the trip. And by the time I got done with that trip, it was like, my God, something happened to me here and I can feel stuff and I can sense stuff and I can put myself in a position for serendipity and luck and beautiful experiences that I was not able to do before. Right. And even I had comments with some of my friends, it’s like, hey man, like
when I travel with you now or when my film crews and stuff, when I work with I’m not normal, right? Like I still I try to open that stuff up and feel that and like, you know, I’m chasing down people down alleyways and doing stuff. So we always end up in these incredible moments that are not scripted ’cause the best stuff for travel and
Production work is not scripted. It’s the best stuff. And you can only get to that stuff if someone is shepherding you into it who knows how to do it, or if somehow you’ve opened yourself up to exploring it, right? Because the majority of people are scared and they don’t they they kind of have that stay away, right? And so once they figure that out and they can flip the switch and they can feel confident diving in and moving forward and and in creating those situations, then it’s like something really beautiful. So that’s like you know what I learned.
Jason (01:19:49.068)
Yeah, yeah.
Gregg Bleakney (01:19:59.558)
trip that I like to use now when I design experiences for other people. Stiff butts.
Jason (01:20:03.008)
Is sniff butts. That’s what I got. And I thought as as you were s as you’re saying that I like, that’d be a pretty cool brand, actually. S like sniff butts media, sniff butts travel, sniff butts expeditions or something. I don’t know. I don’t know. It sounds pretty cool. But all right, so that’s so you got a lot out of this and you said I couldn’t go back to the US and it’s because it’s transformational. You just didn’t want to go but it wasn’t that you couldn’t go back to the US. It well, depending on how you define the word.
Gregg Bleakney (01:20:15.996)
Yeah.
Jason (01:20:30.168)
But it’s that you chose not to. You decided I don’t want to go back to working a marketing job for somebody else. And so where did where did you go from there?
Gregg Bleakney (01:20:39.525)
Yeah, so I actually moved to the US. I rented an apartment and I tried to live there. So number one was the physical yeah, physical thing. After two years of sleeping in a tent, I really struggled to sleep inside for multiple days. Like it struggled like I felt like oxygen was out of the room was and I really struggled. so that was like one thing. And number two is like I was so used to moving from place to place to place to place that I struggled to stay in one place, right? I started just to t you know, so after a couple weeks in this apartment s
Jason (01:20:42.37)
You did, okay.
Gregg Bleakney (01:21:03.001)
I I start freaking out. So I call like the most the world’s most expensive storage unit, you know? So like after like a month I could never be there. So I just hit the road again. And so luckily that time I got a s I through some of the s work that I’d done, I started blogging, and the National Geographic found my blog and they asked me to start blogging for their their magazine and they gave me a scholarship, right? And so I gone out to the National Geographic,
headquarters in DC and I met all these incredible photographers and met their editors and they started giving me some spec work so I started traveling around as a photojournalist. And so I had for like those first six months of of doing that, I had like that apartment as a base camp in Seattle and I c that’s when I came I came down to Columbia and I did my first kind of assignment for as a spec assignment for the adventure magazine they had there. And then I did some some other work in Columbia and then
That led to like a a tenure career as a photojournalist where I ended up turning in that apartment and just basically living you say I I say homeless. I didn’t have a home, but it was by choice, you know. And I was very frugal, I was very like much by the end of the spike trip I was very much out of money.
You know, but was just scrapping by as a travel journalist. I would I was sleeping in cars, I was still sleeping in tents. I did my my dear friend in San Francisco Incredible, he had a closet in his in his house, just like a rent, he looked one those random rooms that he was just using as a storage closet, and he moved all the boxes out, and I slept in his closet for like six months. I used that as my base camp. So I was like pretty much a pretty hardcore vagabundo, very broke for a long time, really pushing his career as a as a photojournalist. And at that time, 2007, the whole industry crashed for magazines.
Like combining the photography and the writing, so I was able to start writing. So I started writing a lot. and I wrote a lot of feature stories for magazines. I probably like 500 feature stories for a lot of different outdoor lifestyle magazines and traveling the world as a photographer. So I think I probably went to like 30 different countries, most of them on assignment for magazines. Pretty incredible time. and then I got a call from Ex Oficio, which is a
Gregg Bleakney (01:23:00.935)
lifestyle c clothing company out of Seattle. They’re known for like their safari gear like their fly fishing stuff. And they saw an article about me, about my trip in the Seattle Times, where somehow I just randomly mentioned to the journalist interviewing me. She asked me like how many flat tires and how much water and I think she asked like
you know, how many pairs of underwear did you have, just like randomly? And this sounds gross, but I only had two pairs of underwear for those two years, right? And a lot of it’s because you’re wearing bike shots and you the underwear is like your comfortable thing, you slip on at the end of the day when you go to sleep ’cause you’re like in bike shorts, right? And then so ex officio saw that and one of the new products they’re pushing was this travel underwear, like antimicrobial that you could like wash in the sink and you could travel with, right? Yeah. Yeah. So they called me and they brought me in, right? And they’re like
Jason (01:23:32.653)
Yeah, yeah.
Jason (01:23:41.539)
I remember yeah, I remember that. Yeah, I remember that. Uhhuh.
Gregg Bleakney (01:23:47.334)
Just curious, did that underwear happen to be ours? And I was like, yes. And because I’d, you know, during my bike trip, I’d gone into their outlet store and I’d bought my underwear.
At the exoficio outlet store. So I’d ridden with their underwear just casually, and they’re like, my God, we gotta use this. So they created a campaign, two years, two pairs of underwear. And my bicycle with the underwear was in the CTAC airport for like eight years on the wall. You know, everyone could walk by it in front of their store. And it was the whole story of like my bike trip, two pairs of underwear, and then the underwear became 60% of their of their product, the sales, their underwear.
Jason (01:24:19.982)
Greg, did were th were these was this ad campaign, did this include you standing there, like just in underwear with a bike over your head or something? What I mean were you an official underwear model? That’s where I’m trying to go. Is is that on your resume?
Gregg Bleakney (01:24:30.029)
No. So it had it No. No so this is this is this is like one of the most random times of my entire career. They
took some of the ph photos from my bike, right? And so they had like they do like, you know, underwear and then a picture of me on the bike, right? So they keep separated. So they started running my photos from my bicycle trip in their campaigns with like underwear on the side, saying Greg, two years, two pairs of underwear. It wasn’t ever me like in my underwear. And then they starts you know, so they start seeing some of my work in magazines and stuff and they said, Hey, you know, we wanna we do a catalog every year. Can you
you know, maybe can shoot some photos for a catalog. So like five for five or six years I was the ex officio catalog photographer and which
you know, became like an underwear photographer, right? So it wasn’t too bad if so I I was able to this is how this is the whole origin story of Renex and my marketing agency. So I was able to go, that’s why I started going to these different travel conferences around the world and negotiating with different tours and destinations. Like hey, I got this catalog for a clothing company in the US and I think it had like a million distribution. And what I pitched ex officio is like let’s make it a destination piece and let’s go to a destination every year and make it almost like a let’s write stories about traveling to the destination and let’s find real people, real travel
Let’s bring them and let’s do these incredible trips and we’ll photograph them in your clothes. And I think it was a little bit ahead of his time, but we ran that for like five years and we did incredible stuff, man. We went to Australia, we did out back out outback Australia. We are on a like a sailboat yacht off the coast of Australia. We did bush flights in Australia. Then we went to the Azores in Portugal, you know, this beautiful group of islands. We travel all through the Azores. We went to South Africa.
Gregg Bleakney (01:26:11.383)
in cooperation with and beyond the like most luxury top safari lodges in the world and we for and we shot on safari like two weeks there. And then on every every shoot I would bring these very attractive people
And we’d do an underwear session, right? So I’m not gonna say like, you know, it was only we bring men and women. So I became a men, a men’s and women’s underwear photographer for them for about five years. And then a couple of the models got really, you know, they’d launch a career like underwear photography from this stuff, you know. So like we’d go back and we shoot them over. And sometimes we just would do underwear shots. So I’d fly up to Seattle and we’d rent studios and we just did underwear photography. So it was a really incredible relationship that actually funded the initial growth of my marketing agency.
Jason (01:26:39.79)
All right.
Jason (01:26:55.884)
Right. So let’s let’s touch on your marketing agency and how that turned into very much the tourism promotion stuff. And we can move through that at whatever speed you wanna move through that, but I I do wanna touch on that if we can real quick.
Gregg Bleakney (01:27:10.437)
Yeah, so that I started moving from through that work with Ex Oficio, one of the destinations I picked was Colombia. So Pro Columbia actually helped and some local people in Colombia helped fund a multi-week shoot through Columbia. And this was like probably back in 2010 or so, before Colombia was on the radar anywhere. And I met some people in Colombia at that point and they’re like, hey, you know
Why don’t you come down here more often? You know, some we’re the company from a photojournalist perspective, but not from a commercial perspective. So when I decided to start this marketing agency, you know, at a certain point I was like, hey, I gotta put down roots. I need to start and I start hiring people. So I’d be with crews of five, six, seven people for these shoots that I was doing. And I needed an office and I needed a place to put hard drives, so I decided to do it in Colombia, right? and then my clients, commercial clients, started figuring out I was in Colombia, right? And so we’re doing shoots all around the world, and I started hiring a team in Colombia, kind of like asking.
Accidentally, right? And then I had clients like Merrill, so we do all this stuff for Merrill Global. We did Columbia Sportswear. And so these guys all said, hey, you know
What if we come down to Colombia? How cool would that be? You know? And so one of the challenges these lifestyle companies have is like when it’s winter in the United States, they gotta shoot their summer catalogs with all their summer stuff. And so like can we come have summer in Colombia when it’s winter? I might be obvious now, but this is like 15 years ago. And then when it’s summer in summer in the US, can we have winter in Colombia? And because Colombia, the verticality of the country of Colombia, you can get any season at any time of year. So these guys all start coming down to Colombia. And then the the Minister of Tourism.
And start seeing all this work from this random American American guy. You know, this is a lot, we’re generating a lot of publicity for Colombia, like millions and millions and millions of pages of catalog work and you know, running photos of Colombia in these massive global ad campaigns, right? and so they took note of that and they called me in and they said, Hey, you know, who are you and why are you here and how you know how can we work together? So they actually invited me. This was never my agenda, they invited me to bid on.
Jason (01:28:52.739)
Mm-hmm.
Gregg Bleakney (01:29:15.129)
A project to position Colombia, the country, to international markets for the t first time in history. Because before, you know, only c travel that really existed in Colombia was outbound, like Colombians leaving, going to Miami, going to Europe.
etc. And no one was really there wasn’t enough people coming into Colombia to to justify really an investment in marketing to bring people in. There was no DMO stuff like that time. So this was like one of their first DMO things. And that’s when I flew to Namibia to represent Colombia for the first time on a global stage at the Venture Travel Trade Association. I did the keynote there. First time Colombia was spoken about on a global stage. You were there doing that event. That’s when we met, right? And
Jason (01:29:49.666)
Yeah, which is an interesting side note.
Gregg Bleakney (01:29:52.486)
Yeah yeah. Yeah, so we met during that time and then and then came back and they asked me to they’re like, hey, you know, one of the challenges we have in Colombia, obviously people know about this, is that we have a perception issue, right? We have perception issue and people think when they think about us, they only think about one thing. So we need to like so our strategy talking to them was like what we need to do is not like change the perceptions really hard. When you have narcos like the top
Netflix series and history was running at that time, right? It’s like really hard. You’re not gonna no one’s gonna forget that, but like let’s embrace that, let’s acknowledge that, but let’s like dilute that with what else does Colombia have. So we look for things and the and and the minister had some ideas about this. Colombia just discovered that they have more birds than any other country in the world. And you can see some, you know, these bucket list things where we can say we are the best or we have the most. they work really well marketing because they’re really singular and they’re really simple to communicate.
Right. So they had this idea, we have more birds than anywhere else in the world. Birding is an incredible, incredible mechanism for s for sustainable tourism.
And in community-based tourism because people go to these small communities and the and the and the cash usually goes straight into those communities, right? And so we created a campaign in 2000, we started working on 2016, it ran until 2022, to position Columbia as the leading burning destination in the world. And we did it. And it’s one of the most incredible, successful campaigns in the history of any ministry of tourism anywhere. And we did a series of documentary films. We partnered with the Audubon Society, we partnered with the Orno the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, eBird, which is
app that has like millions and millions of users that be used to identify birds around world around the world. We brought fan groups, we brought lots of different birding companies to Colombia. And then once that campaign was done for international markets, we were asked to pivot it to the national market and educate Colombians on their birding biodiversity they have. And now Colombia whenever you travel in Colombia everywhere you go there’s Colombians birding. And it’s like it’s like a really really cool thing to do. And a beautiful thing about birding in Colombia for foreign travelers is like
Jason (01:31:45.774)
Birds. Yep, yep.
Gregg Bleakney (01:31:54.6)
Unlike some of these other countries where you go to, and it’s just like foreign travelers, you know, retired people, you come to Colombia and you’re gonna be birding alongside Colombians. You’re gonna meet Colombians who are young and fun and cool, and they’re gonna be talking to you and interacting. It’s not just like a singular thing that only foreigners do here. So you you’re birding and you’re discovering it alongside people from Colombia, and I think that is really special, and that’s why I can say Colombia is one the most interesting places, not just because we did the campaign position of the country, but I think it’s one the most interesting and fun and engaging places to bird anymore.
in the world, not just because of the birds, but because the people you’re birding with.
Jason (01:32:28.91)
And that’s that is definitely a thing with Columbia. You know, I’ve been to a lot of places. People are great. There’s great people in a lot of places, pretty much everywhere. but boy, there’s something about connecting. Like when you travel in Colombia, you connect with people. There’s there’s places in the world you can go
And have a whole week long vacation and not connect with anybody if you don’t want to, I guess. But here there’s just you’re just gonna connect. You know, you might walk into a convenience store, you’re gonna connect with somebody, somebody on the street. There’s a lot of characters here. It’s just a magical place. And when I say characters, I mean in a very, very good way. In from my perspective, you know, you’ve got more time.
Gregg Bleakney (01:32:49.519)
Yeah.
Gregg Bleakney (01:32:53.67)
Yeah.
Gregg Bleakney (01:33:03.759)
Yeah. So the the interesting thing about Colombia is if you look at the history of Colombia and the security situation situation, most Colombians until like not too long ago were neighbor never able for multiple generations to travel and explore their own country. They’re very much isolated.
Jason (01:33:17.964)
Mm-hmm.
Gregg Bleakney (01:33:19.739)
to stay you know within Bogota and even just leaving from Bogota down to my finca you had to go in a caravan with military security etc right so traveling within Colombia was not an option for Colombians for for generations right and so most Colombians would go internationally if they travel somewhere. Now Colombians are discovering their country you know really for the first time you know this is the first generation out and about exploring the country without like you know too many hangups about historical things when you know insecurity and things from the past right so Colombians are out and about they’re exploring and so
So when you’re an international visitor and you’re exploring as well, you’re exploring alongside Colombians. So it’s very cool. So like Colombia is very much culturally in this phase of like let’s learn who we are, let’s see who we are, let’s explore all this cool stuff. So when you’re in WhatsApp groups and you’re in chat groups and you’re in Facebook groups, you know, the vibe is very much like, hey, did you hear about this new cool place, this new cool river, this new place where we saw this new burden? Like it’s very much exploring and discovering, which most countries around the world have been fully explored to discover. Colombia hasn’t yet, you know.
Jason (01:33:53.602)
Yeah, yeah.
Jason (01:34:17.792)
Y you’re right, ’cause I imagine just you know, going to an interesting place here in Columbia. Let’s call it a I don’t know, there’s just a a cool place. There’s a lot of cool places. So I’m gonna go to a cool place and I’m not going to a cool place to hang out with a bunch of people from the US.
I I was almost said Americans, but it’s not a bunch of people from the US. It’s like there might be a few because people do come here. It’s a fascinating place. But yeah, you’ll have, you know, there’ll be a a couple there from Cali, and then you’ll meet someone else from Cartagena, and then you’ll meet someone else from Bucaramanga. And it’s it’s so cool. And they’re exploring their country. They’re excited about it. They’re sharing it with you as opposed to, you know, I there’s I know there’s places in Europe like
Gregg Bleakney (01:34:37.745)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Jason (01:35:01.058)
There might be other Europeans, but there aren’t gonna be too many French people there because the French people are like, I’m not going there. There’s too many tourists there. And you don’t really get that here, you know? Yeah, yeah. So all right. Well, yeah, maybe that wasn’t a great yeah, yeah. Carthana. But it but even then, you know, it you don’t have to go too far to get away from the the I don’t know, the US crowd, the the the regular tourist crowd.
Gregg Bleakney (01:35:07.033)
Yeah. Yep. Nope. Maybe in Cartagena now you do a little bit, but
Gregg Bleakney (01:35:16.039)
Mm-hmm.
Gregg Bleakney (01:35:27.75)
Yeah.
Jason (01:35:28.77)
Because there’s it’s just not overrun with tourism, you know. So maybe the the historic
Gregg Bleakney (01:35:31.697)
Yeah. Well I would say I would say I would say car I would say Cartagena Midi right now in Colombia in the last five or six years has
So you can be on a you can be on a peak season weekend it’d be a lot, but if you you like you’re right, if you go a couple of kilometers out of the main gathering s points, you’re you’re gonna be you’re gonna be
Jason (01:35:39.148)
Yeah, but I but
Jason (01:35:47.417)
That’s yeah, that’s the thing. There’s, you know, there’s a couple neighborhoods that you and I both know in Medellin that if you go there, you’re gonna see a lot of a tourists, a lot of tourists from outside the country. But literally you can go get on the metro, go two stops down and you don’t see any of You know, which is pretty cool. So it’s not the whole city for sure, but but anyway, so let’s
Gregg Bleakney (01:36:02.63)
Yeah. Yeah, yeah.
Jason (01:36:11.21)
So you’ve got the marketing agency up and running. You’re doing all these things to promote tourism to Colombia within Colombia. I don’t know if you want to touch on this this big special project. I know you had a big special project promoting tourism kind of not just in Colombia. I don’t know if you want to touch on that because it kind of leads into I think what you’re doing now.
Gregg Bleakney (01:36:26.491)
Yeah.
Gregg Bleakney (01:36:31.845)
Yeah, so the evolution is our marketing companies we we started to grow. We’ve probably had twenty employees or so and we’re doing
And an incredible team of talented Colombians. And we saw a big a bid by the US government that came out. The US government has had an arm of the US government called USAID and has basically our internet international development funding to I would say win favor and support foreign governments, right? And so in the in Colombia
the the the administration that is just ending right now four years ago, one with a a a massive
push to replace the extraction economy, which would be like oil and gas extraction, with a s a sustainability economy. Which like on service sounds really cool and really fun, great and like all about that. And one of the key components of sustainability is tourism, right? And so they said we’re gonna really look at how can we develop sustainable tourism throughout Colombia. And so the US government got behind that and I think maybe with through funds, so they established a forty million, forty two million dollar fund to develop
Sustainable tourism activities in regions in Colombia affected by the by conflict. So regions of Colombia that went through the 2016 peace deal, where you know there’s certain pockets of Colombia, swathes of Colombia that were basically a a cocaine or an illicit economy only, right? And they’re and they were controlled by the the the Far Guerrilla or different factions of the guerrilla, right? And so when the peace deal was made, brokered you know, brokered
Gregg Bleakney (01:38:08.271)
Everyone laid in theory, everyone laid down their arms, right? But then the big problem you have there is okay, okay, now what do people do, right? Because all these jobs went away, you know. So the the idea for this program was to go and develop sustainable tourism product and demand and monitor the effect that that demand had on those ecosystems because a lot of these places were like some of the most biodiverse places in the world that the guerrilla were operating with.
Right. So it’s like not only do like can we go develop product in these regions, but can we create create demand and send high value tours
To those regions to support those economies, right? And then what’s the impact of those tour, like depending on how they behave? So can we like look at certain types of regenerative tourism activities they can do in those regions, and then can we measure them? So there’s like a whole like satellite imagery and camera traps and stuff to see like if these tourism, these areas, actually affected in a negative or positive way these environments, right? Because what was happening is like the fight there was, okay, if it’s not gonna be some sort of licid economy, then also an illegal mining comes in and then illegal you know cutting down trees.
Created cattle farms. So it’s like you’re kind of looking at those two things. And so let’s go ahead and measure that. So that was an incredible program. Our our our our company wanted as the local subcont subcontractors the implementing partners. So we had scaled up about fifty people in our team. We had four offices in Colombia and all the different regions. And it was really express an incredible experience with me working with the with the US government and
you highly regulated, controlled environment and then having all these teams and really the the the idea of that project was a really good feel-good project. And unfortunately that project was was one of the USA projects that was initially killed like right away by the the new administration or I wouldn’t say kill but like they shut it down, right? And so during that time that was that was obviously a very strong impact on my
Jason (01:39:51.682)
Right.
Gregg Bleakney (01:39:55.964)
company, I was the legal representative here in the United States. I was the legal representative in Colombia for that project. So put me personally on the hook for all unpaid debts associated with that project. So when those funds were were frozen, my family, myself and my wife were on the hook for paying you know ver a lot of a lot of dues owed
from that project. And so we are able to, you know, through our retained earnings in our company that we’ve been pretty careful about, we’re able to to pay those. And it was a very d very difficult, very stressful time for me business wise. We’re very much on the brink of collapse. But you know, one thing about having an incredible wife is she sat me down and said, you know, look, I’ve never seen you as like a consultant, right? And you’ve been a consultant. You were the guy behind the scenes. I was the legal guy. I wasn’t out in the field doing stuff. And if you know my story now, like I thrive when I’m out.
doing stuff and making connections and and meeting people and being inspired, being creative. And I converted to like an office guy for that project. And and I sat down and really had to think and it was like, you know, for the past ten or fifteen years, I’ve been building these marketing programs for governments and I’ve been building marketing programs for brands and really in campaigns to inspire people to do
Jason (01:40:54.146)
Yeah, yeah.
Gregg Bleakney (01:41:12.153)
something mostly would be like to travel and explore the world and have fun and like grow as a human being, you know, and and change for in in in a good way. But at the end of the day I never controlled the experience piece, right? So one of the frustrations I had with the Colombian the gu the US government pro project in Colombia is at the end of the day,
Jason (01:41:16.78)
Yeah. Yep.
Gregg Bleakney (01:41:32.529)
We never delivered any high value tourism to those regions. So people are trained, they’re capacity built, there’s conferences, there’s a lot of talk, and there’s a lot of philosophy, and there’s lot of measuring, and there’s a lot of like systems put in place, but there’s never significant
I guess high, high impact travelers delivered to any of these regions. And that was frustrating for me because we were doing making the promise and then on the ground level I never saw that happen, right? And so I had thought I had an opportunity to combine
Jason (01:41:53.752)
Yeah.
Jason (01:41:59.127)
Mm-hmm.
Gregg Bleakney (01:42:05.753)
my marketing experience with an experiential travel and connect everything. So there’s no one to blame but me. So it’s like if I’m making the marketing promise and painting the picture and design this stuff, and then we’re also in charge of like delivering the experience, like I’m the one. Like I can’t we can’t blame anyone. Like I’m the one controlling both sides. And so I was like, what if we stopped just marketing travel and actually designed it and executed on it. And that was
Jason (01:42:20.396)
Yeah, yeah.
Jason (01:42:28.643)
Mm-hmm.
Gregg Bleakney (01:42:28.913)
where I came where I’ve come up with with Ware Next Travel and that’s where we started this DMC. and we actually started in 2020 and I was behind the scenes as an investor in that. And now I’ve come and become an active role and we’ve grown it throughout Latin America. And that also came with buying the the agro turismo that we went to yesterday, think like Guadelá.
Jason (01:42:47.246)
So when you say so when you say agriturismo, I kinda know what that is, but I mean it it basically is it fair to say that’s the finca. So anybody that hears you say we bought the agritorismo, I I don’t know what that means. So okay.
Gregg Bleakney (01:42:56.219)
Yeah, it’s the thing guy.
Yeah. Yeah, agriculture is most like it’s more of an Italian word of you know, it’s a hotel that are that are in rural air rural areas and you go there and you relax and you’re surrounded by nature and you eat great food that’s basically comes from that region. Right.
Jason (01:43:12.076)
Yeah, yeah. I mean I kinda understand the the concept of what that is, but I just wanted for our listener and for me, just to make sure I understood. So you you bought the Finca, you’re you’re using that to create experiences for people that are coming out there and staying through a variety of different different sources and then you’re offering other services as we discussed earlier in Colombia.
Gregg Bleakney (01:43:18.267)
Yeah.
Jason (01:43:36.568)
Peru, other places in Latin America as well, or what is that what do you want our listeners to know as far as w what areas?
Gregg Bleakney (01:43:43.272)
Yeah, so we’re growing to Argentina as well, and through partners, we’re offering experiences in Costa Rica. So we’re starting to look at that as well. But the the vision over the next few years is to have a network of offices, you know, in ten countries throughout Latin America, all branded, all with the same level of quality that you know, one of our clients can through us create multi-country, or they can continue to offer experiences throughout Latin America.
To have a higher high return on investment for their guests through us, through working with a singular entity. Because right now there’s not too many multi-countr country DMCs in La especially in Latin America that have unified systems, any unified like brand ISOs and how you how you manage your clients. And so if a client works with us in Colombia, they can also connect their their guests to to Peru seamlessly between the two destinations to have a multi-country destination without having to work with two different DMCs. And then yeah.
Jason (01:44:32.974)
Two different DMCs using totally different systems and yeah, yeah, yeah.
Gregg Bleakney (01:44:37.391)
Yeah, and then when they’re when their guests have a really strong experience of Latin America, then also okay, okay, yeah, what else can we do in Latin America? Maybe in two years they want to come back to Latin America. They go back to Europe, but in two years they they’ve done Colombia, they did a Colombia Peru trip. now maybe we can offer them Ar Argentina. And then that client knows they can trust us because they worked with us before. They know their they know their guest has been with us before and they and they kind of vetted the experience and they’re you so they can continue to book and send people throughout Latin America with confidence, knowing that they’re working with the same same organization.
Jason (01:45:07.25)
I I think just real quick, I I I don’t know if this is controversial to say this, but I think you’ve got an advantage or benefit that’s that serves and supports your clients because you’ve got you know
the US connection, the the experience there, but you’ve also spent so much time, like on a very intimate level in Latin America, to have that ability to kind of bring those two together. It’s kind of be like a liaison. And you’ve done it also with the with the you know the creative agency and all that stuff. It’s the same type of thing. and that’s not knocking somebody that runs a DMC that is born and raised in a particular country or anything like that. But it just it it potentially adds a h a an
Gregg Bleakney (01:45:36.112)
Yeah.
Jason (01:45:51.392)
A new level that could be beneficial. I get that. Do you do you feel that as well or you wanna add to that? Or is that just me talking out my butt, sniffing butts?
Gregg Bleakney (01:45:58.215)
No, I think you know as it as it as an as an entrepreneur that you I think something that I think is very important in my development as an entrepreneur is to look at the mirror and be very honest with myself. Like where’s where’s the best and ma best use of my time, right? And so obviously at a certain point when you’re starting a company you gotta do everything, right? You’re doing everything. But as you kind of grow and you have different people who are leading different regions, like I I’m able to have country managers in in each country and then they have people who work for them, etc. and
Jason (01:46:12.887)
Mm-hmm.
Jason (01:46:23.598)
Mm-hmm.
Gregg Bleakney (01:46:28.177)
Where am I where’s the best use of my time? I think something that’s really unique for me is you know, I’ve I
I’m America, an American and from the United States, and w we deal in luxury travel. And I happened, you know, my parents were educators, we were like middle class family, but I happened to grow up on Mercia Island, Washington, which is probably one of the wealthiest communities in the world, right? My neighbor was Bill Gates, the other neighbor, you know, was Jeff Bezos, founded Amazon, and the other guy was Howard Schultz, right? So like very few places in the world has such like an incredible, like massive wealth been created than Merchant Island, Bellevue, Seattle, Washington, right? So I grew up understanding
Jason (01:46:53.218)
Mm-hmm.
Gregg Bleakney (01:47:04.147)
that culture and actually seeing my friends and their families you know take luxury trips to Hawaii like I’m familiar with that world right and I I th I feel like I understand that world to an extent. and then I’ve also lived in Latin America twenty years and I’ve worked with government projects. I understand how things move down here. you know I’ve I’ve gone through everything. Like I’ve basically almost been kidnapped and murdered down here and I’ve also won the largest sustainable tourism project in history down here and managed that with the US government. So I think like combined like I said those two worlds is something like that’s really something special that I have.
Jason (01:47:09.506)
Mm-hmm.
Jason (01:47:29.806)
Yeah, yeah.
Gregg Bleakney (01:47:33.849)
And like where can I focus my time, where can I focus my energy? Like let’s look at the you nailed it. I think that’s why I try to, you know, leverage that kind of I guess situation that I found myself in and use that to grow to grow the business.
Jason (01:47:44.003)
Yeah, yeah, it’s it seems like you’ve done a great a great job. And just on a very like very, very surface level is you know, I in my travels, I spent a lot of time working in tourism. I can, you know, I’m very f I’m familiar with a lot of it, but I’ve also spent a ton of time just in the last few years in Airbnbs. And most most of them that I walk into are missing something that’s just culturally it’s a n it’s a cultural nuance. And it’s like, ooh, you know.
Gregg Bleakney (01:48:00.912)
Yeah.
Jason (01:48:11.628)
I wish I could think of a great example, but there’s a lot of things it’s like I don’t think the person that owns this Airbnb has ever maybe traveled to upscale Airbnbs in the US, for example. you know, and I walk and when I was in your place yesterday, I was like, Yeah, you guys have everything like
Gregg Bleakney (01:48:21.691)
Yeah. Mm-hmm.
Jason (01:48:29.248)
I I don’t think that I could have picked a single thing that I was like culturally it’s missing. But at the same time you had the Colombian culture as well. So you had like both. And, you know, even just the the wonderful, beautiful family that you have working with that you out there is just such a fun experience. so yeah, I I just sense that you you’ve you’re in a unique position to do that. Greg.
We’ve discussed a lot. I know we spoke quite a bit longer than we thought, but there was there’s so much to share. Is there I’m curious, is there anything you wish I would have asked you or that you want to touch on before we wrap up?
Gregg Bleakney (01:49:03.213)
Yeah, I think well you know thanks for all your time and all your questions has gone along, but I think I would love to to talk about the the Finca a little bit more because we we were able to go out there yesterday, and one of the reasons I wanted to bring you to the Finca is just to hang with you because I think I want people to know that you and I have a really interesting relationship that we kind of figured out accidentally. 15 years ago when I first started working my
Jason (01:49:11.64)
Yeah, let’s do it.
Jason (01:49:24.471)
Yeah.
Gregg Bleakney (01:49:27.791)
Marketing agency first started working for ProColumbia in Colombia, one of the things that we were looking at promoting alongside birding was fishing. And so in your former career life, you’re the head of travel experiences for a brand called Orvis, a fishing brand in the United States. And so we had emailed
Jason (01:49:42.518)
Mm-hmm. Yep, I was, yeah.
Gregg Bleakney (01:49:47.703)
for probably a month and I’d put together a fishing expedition that was like incredible, flying on a bush plane out of Bogota into the Jlanos Plains, which is like this plains like out of Africa, this is transition zone into the Amazon. And this area region was formerly controlled by the guerrilla. And and guerrilla, fark guerrilla people, these you know, these these military, these these groups
Jason (01:50:10.126)
Mm-hmm.
Gregg Bleakney (01:50:11.995)
didn’t eat fish, they ate cows. And it has these incredible river systems. So we were going to fish river systems basically for the first time in a generation ever, for monster peacock bass and flying in on bush planes because there’s no other way to get there, right? So it’s a pretty awesome thing. And the last minute you canceled, you bailed on the trip. And that’s that’s the
Jason (01:50:30.914)
Well, I no, I I don’t think I got to the point of saying yes, but here, Greg, I I love that I love that you brought this up because it was a seriously profound moment in my life that I’ve sh I have very, very seldom shared the story. But yes, I was working at Orvis. I was running the travel business for Orvis. I think you and I actually first met must have been in in Namibia at the Adventure Travel Trade Association, because we figured out that we were both there and started chatting. You’d reached out, said, Hey, there’s this great opportunity.
And I went to my boss and I said, Hey, what do you think? He was generally like, You could give Jason whatever you think, because, you know, this is your thing. And I went to him and he’s like, Yeah, I don’t I don’t know how well we can sell Columbia, but you know, it’s pretty cool. You know, yeah, if you want to do it, go ahead and do it. We’ll we’ll support you. And then I went home and I was so excited. I went to my my wife at the time, as a wonderful woman, very supportive woman in so many ways. And I said,
Sweetheart, I’m going to Colombia. And she said, no, you’re not. And I’m like, what do you mean? And like I was so excited because I’d been to so many cool places. She’s like, No, no, no, no. I don’t think this is whatever. And we won’t go into too far details, but you know, there’s some preconceived ideas about Colombia. and it turned out where I was like, you know.
If mom ain’t happy, ain’t nobody happy. And I think it went back to you, Greg, and said, geez, I it doesn’t look like this is gonna it doesn’t look like this is gonna work out. So fast forward several years, quite a few years later, you know, yeah, yeah, I’m divorced.
Gregg Bleakney (01:51:53.851)
Yeah.
Gregg Bleakney (01:52:00.476)
Fifteen years later. Okay.
Jason (01:52:04.662)
And I’m divorced and I’m sitting in Phoenix, Arizona in my apartment thinking, I really wish I was traveling. And then I thought, you know what? I’m just gonna go travel. I had a great situation with my son where he could potentially travel with me and do all this stuff. So anyway, I I sold all my stuff and I thought, okay, where am I gonna go?
The only place that anybody ever told me that I couldn’t go was Colombia. So guess what the first plane ticket I bought? I bought a one way ticket to Colombia and I’m going to Colombia because you know, that’s yeah. So and here I am.
You know, four and a half years later, out of the last four and a half half years traveling full time, over two of that has been spent in Columbia. And then you and I bumped into each other. I I think re bumped into each other on LinkedIn and we had a quick little video call and you’re like, you used to work at Orvis, right? And I’m like, Greg Mm.
Gregg Bleakney (01:52:53.863)
Yeah, so So when I figured that out, I was like, you know, whether we do this podcast or not, like this guy we’re gonna hang because we were supposed to hang fifteen years ago and like we’re gonna hang. So you’re gonna come down to my think and we’re gonna hang for a day. Like just to get to know each other, just to make up for the last five. Yeah, we didn’t finish Doctor. Yeah.
Jason (01:53:10.69)
We did walk we did walk the river. We didn’t fish it, but we did walk the river, so that was cool. So yeah.
Gregg Bleakney (01:53:16.027)
And so that was like kind of the the kind of story behind getting you to the finca to spend some quality time as a couple of American guys in Columbia hanging out together. And for me the the impetus of the finca is when I bought this finca with my wife, it was a one year labor of love to read you know
Jason (01:53:22.542)
It was so good.
Gregg Bleakney (01:53:29.883)
renovate the entire finca and we’ve replanted all the coffee, right? We had to rip out all the old coffee because an organic coffee farm, but all the coffee had been let go. So we took it all out, we’ve replanted it. And my wife and I, after the the the crash of the USAID and we lost that project, it’s like again, kind of like the bike trip was like we needed a win, like I wanted a win, right? So we said like we’re gonna turn this finca that was our recreational cabin into
an actual agro turismo like a tourism experience. So what we discovered is like
80%, 60 to 80% of all tourism employees in these regions in Colombia, or in Colombia in general, are informally contracted, right? So we’re gonna do it right. We’re gonna apply all these things that we learned about during the US government project, and we’re gonna make them a reality in our own little micro business, right? So we hired people, my wife works in human resources, so we hired a staff for the first time in their life. They had a formal contract, they had vacation. This woman working seven years in tourism hotels, she’d never had
Paternity leave and any of her three kids she had. She had never had vacation. She had never spent Christmas with her family for five years, right?
Jason (01:54:39.875)
Yeah.
Gregg Bleakney (01:54:40.325)
That’s what means what it means to be informally contracted in Colombia, right? So through a formal contract by law, you have paid maternity leave in Colombia, four months, it’s incredible paid maternity leave. You have holiday, you have vacation that’s paid for, you have health, right? And she and her husband or her partner were contracted for the first time in their life. They’re able to have Christmas with their family for the first time, but they’re also still able to serve, you know, work with our guests. And it was like a really beautiful experience to have that staff and then integrate all
these members in the community around to come and do like honey tasting experiences from the honey farmer who lives on the hill to have the the local biologists come and do bird bird tourism to talk about the history of indigenous culture in the finca in the valley that our finca is a very important piece of indigenous culture and a transit route. The name of our finca is called Gualiba and in the indigenous language of that region it means the way home so people travel up and down the valley of our finca from their hunting and and and gathering missions back to their to their where they’re actually based
based the indigenous culture. So we thought that was really special for us. you know, the way home being a foreigner and actually buying my first residence in Colombia. And so we’ve been able to through through the doing that, all the renovation staff
And also it’s you know, 30 to 40 percent that we walk through is virgin forest. It’s never been cut down. So we’ve been able to kind of through this mechanism of renting this finca protect the virgin forest because you’ve seen some of our neighbors, they’ve all cut the forest down, right? And we’ve been able to preserve this forest. And over the last year, we’ve turned this finca into the number
Jason (01:56:05.634)
Yeah, yeah. Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Gregg Bleakney (01:56:13.991)
Top 1% Finca in the world for Airbnb. And that’s in something really special for us. So it’s yeah, so they gave us an award and we’re just like, you can see it on our website. And so we just feel like a high five moments, our own little project. And so like, what can we learn from this little microenterprise, the finca, the business within the business? What can we learn from that? Like, and so we’ve had all these hands-on educational experiences from this finca, and it’s just been really special. So it’s cool for me to walk.
Jason (01:56:17.73)
Yeah. I’m not surprised. Yeah.
Gregg Bleakney (01:56:41.871)
through the Finca with you yesterday and kind of show those things is in it’s since we’ve bought this, you’re the first guest I’ve had that really, you know, speaks English that I’ve been able to do that with. So I’ve I haven’t been able to show that before. So that was a really cool moment for me and thanks for thanks for coming and checking it out.
Jason (01:56:52.823)
Okay.
Jason (01:56:56.856)
Well, thank you so much for inviting me. I mean and I’ve been fortunate enough to see enough of Columbia to d to first of all, appreciate how beautiful the country is, and also to appreciate how special your place is. So I’m not d I’m not turn I’m not saying anything negative about the rest of Columbia, but your place is really special. It’s this sweet little jam. And you said, Well, you notice some of my neighbors are cutting stuff down. I don’t want anybody to hear that and think that
You’re sitting in a little patch of forest with a bunch of bare mountains around you, because that’s not the case, right? So I don’t want anybody to hear that. Yes, I saw where some some stuff had been cut, but it the it’s so amazing. The trees and the mountains. And honestly, if you hadn’t pointed it out, I wouldn’t have even thought anything about it. I grew up in Wyoming in the mountains and I’ve seen I’ve seen clear cutting up in the mountains there. It’s still beautiful, but I didn’t I wouldn’t have even noticed it had you not pointed it out yesterday. but the other thing is I love that you touched on
Gregg Bleakney (01:57:50.257)
Cool.
Jason (01:57:53.068)
Was the thing about the informal employment? Because last night when we were driving back, you said, they’ve always worked informally. And the first thought that popped into my head was, like under the table. And then I think, a lot of people in the US will say, I got this great job, it’s all under the table. And so I said, So what’s wrong with informal? And then you explained to me, informal means, yeah, there’s there’s no con
Just what you said about, you know, vacation time, maternity time, guarantee of pay, just all that stuff. So I’m happy that you clarified it for me last night and you brought it up again to today as well, ’cause that I g I get that now. So
Gregg Bleakney (01:58:33.051)
Yeah, I think it’s something you I mean you probably know in the car I get very passionate about and I get fired up. So I apologize if I put you through that on the drive home last night. And also I also I also apologize for leaving the sunroof open in my car while it was parked during a rainstorm. So you had to sit on a wet seat the entire way home. So I apologize.
Jason (01:58:38.082)
Yeah.
No, no. It was fascinating.
Jason (01:58:46.081)
Ha ha ha ha ha.
Jason (01:58:50.456)
But you know why you know, I but Greg, I know why you were so excited because we pulled in there. You were so excited to get out and walk around and show me the place that you forgot to close the sunroof. Hey, I get it. It’s it’s no big deal. Anyway, Greg, it it was
Gregg Bleakney (01:58:57.967)
Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah, it’s also it’s also the first time I’ve been there in over a month and ’cause you know, we just had a baby. So it was my first time back there and I’ve been like a yeah.
Jason (01:59:05.762)
Yeah, you had a yeah, you had a baby, right? And yeah, you mentioned that. So I look forward to seeing you again soon and collaborating with you on some projects in the future. It’s fascinating conversation. I know we covered an awful lot and we probably really to do adjustments probably need to come back and do some more. But anyway, Greg, thank you so much. I appreciate you sharing your story, your fascinating story starting with the the the goldfish at the festival. That was I’m so happy we got to that point. We almost missed that, so I’m happy we got there. Greg, thank you.
Gregg Bleakney (01:59:19.237)
Yeah.
Gregg Bleakney (01:59:30.179)
Yeah. All right. Just
Jason (01:59:35.726)
so much. I appreciate you. All right. Bye bye.
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