Why Slow Roamers Youtube Channel Struggles to Actually Travel With South America

There is a hypnotic, cinematic rhythm to Slow Roamers. Alex and Meg have been driving their converted Chevy Express down the Pan-American Highway for years now, and the footage they capture belongs in a documentary festival, not YouTube. Drone shots carve through Andean valleys. Golden hour light spills over dusty roads that wind through landscapes so vast the van looks like a toy. The color grading renders even the roughest terrain warm and inviting. I’ve been watching for over a year, and I keep coming back for that visual poetry—the way they can make a gas station in Peru feel like the edge of the known world.

But I’ve started dreading the voiceover.

Their recent Bolivia video finally made me admit what’s been nagging at me for months. They arrive in La Paz, this extraordinary city carved into a canyon, red cable cars threading between neighborhoods stacked on impossible terrain, the highest capital in the world. Alex’s takeaway? He felt like a target. He was the only tall white man around. Someone attempted to pickpocket him. He wanted to leave immediately.

That’s it. That’s what La Paz becomes in his telling.

I kept waiting for the turn—the moment where he’d sit with the discomfort, push past the initial fear, discover something real about the place. It never came. The narrative arc was simple: they arrived, he got scared, they fled. Meanwhile Meg appears in cutaways walking through markets, chatting with vendors, existing comfortably in the spaces that apparently terrified her partner. She treats South America like a place full of people. He treats it like a place full of threats.

The thing is, pickpockets exist everywhere tourists gather. Paris, Rome, Barcelona, New York. It’s annoying. It’s not existential. But Alex frames this attempted pickpocketing as evidence that La Paz itself is dangerous, that the “vibe shifted,” that his height and whiteness painted a target on his back. He retreats to Betty—their van, their fortress—and the camera lingers on him inside, stressed, speaking into the lens about his anxiety while Meg is outside doing the thing he’s afraid of.

I don’t think Alex is a bad person. I think he’s a white Canadian man traveling through Latin America without ever quite managing to travel with it. There’s a difference between moving through a place and actually being present in it, and he seems stuck on the wrong side of that line. His narration reaches for poetry—words like “odyssey” and “ancient” and “soul”—but the actual perspective is telephoto-tight, focused entirely on his own comfort and fear.

Meg is the fascinating one to watch, honestly. She doesn’t fuel his spiraling. When he monologues about danger, she redirects or laughs it off or simply does the thing he’s avoiding. In their Huacachina breakdown video, the van dies in a Peruvian desert oasis and Alex treats it like the potential end of everything—logistics, doom, the whole journey unraveling. Meg cooks dinner. She walks the dunes. She plays with a dog at the mechanic’s shop. She treats the breakdown as a pause in the trip. He treats it as a crisis that confirms his fears about the world outside the van.

The visual language tells you everything even when the narration doesn’t. Betty’s interior looks like a Vancouver condo—clean white walls, wood countertops, organized spice racks, soft lighting. The exterior shots show dust, noise, chaos, people living their lives in places the voiceover frames as “sketchy.” And constantly, repeatedly, the camera shows Alex and Meg drinking coffee inside, looking out the window at a world they’re passing through but rarely joining. The van isn’t just transportation. It’s a bubble. When South America gets too real, Alex retreats into it.

This is bigger than one channel, however. Van life YouTube is full of creators traveling through countries without traveling with the people who live there. The drone shots capture everything—sweeping, gorgeous, wide-angle—but the cultural lens stays narrow, focused on the couple’s internal drama while locals become extras or threats or charming set dressing for the “authentic” adventure. Alex isn’t uniquely guilty of this. He’s just the most visible example because his production quality is so high that the gap between what the camera sees and what he sees becomes impossible to ignore.

I’ll keep watching Slow Roamers. The footage is too good not to. But I’ve learned to consume the commentary with skepticism, to notice when Meg’s body language contradicts Alex’s narration, to pay attention to who’s actually engaging with the world and who’s hiding from it. Slow travel is supposed to mean more than driving slowly. It means judging slowly too—sitting with discomfort instead of fleeing from it, recognizing that one bad interaction doesn’t define a city or a country or a people.

Alex hasn’t figured that out yet. Maybe he will. The journey isn’t over, and people can grow. But until then, I find myself wishing Meg would pick up the microphone more often. I suspect she’d tell a different story about the same places. And I suspect that story would be closer to the truth.