ON THE ROAD TO BUCARAMANGA, Colombia _ The rich were the first to leave. They wired their savings abroad and hopped on international flights.
The middle class departed next. They went on buses, sometimes riding for days across several countries.
The poor remained.
They stayed as the economy collapsed, food got scarcer, medicine shortages turned deadly and the electricity cut out for days at a time. But finally they too began to exit Venezuela.
They simply walked out.
The departure of the caminantes, or walkers, began slowly in 2017 with young men hoping to find jobs and send money home.
Now women and children, the sick and the elderly also are taking their chances, expanding an exodus that already is one of the biggest mass migrations in modern history.
Each day an estimated 5,000 people flee.
The most popular way out is through the Colombian border city of Cucuta. Then comes one of the most difficult parts of the trip: a 125-mile passage that climbs more than 9,000 feet to a long and frigid plateau _ El Paramo de Berlin _ before descending into the balmy, green city of Bucaramanga.
The Los Angeles Times set out to document the journey, immersing a reporter and photographer in the river of humanity for five days. No single story would capture the magnitude of the crisis. And so the plan was to observe from the shelters set up by good Samaritans, from the tiny towns along the highway, from the backs of trucks.
The trip started on a Monday morning last May just outside Cucuta at a Red Cross station, where a worker stood before a group of migrants and told them about a 21-year-old man who had died of hypothermia while trying to cross the plateau.
"I tell you this not to make you scared," he said. "I tell you so you'll be careful and understand that these kinds of tragedies have happened."
When he asked where people were headed, they shouted destinations in Colombia _ "Bogota!" "Medellin!" "Cali!" _ and beyond _ "Ecuador!" "Peru!"
