Best Overland and Extreme Driving Adventures

Pan-American Highway

The Pan-American Highway is more of an idea than an actual road. It runs from Ushuaia in Tierra del Fuego, Argentina all the way to Prudhoe Bay, Alaska. This allows you to drive from the most extreme southerly tip of South America to the most extreme northern point of North America. We're talking nearly 30,000 miles of "road." For the purists out there, there is unfortunately one 54 mile stretch of rainforest in Panama that is impassable; you must take a ferry. Or get very, VERY creative.

With the exception of overlanding the world (more on that later), this is probably the most extreme road trip you can take. Period. To be done properly, I think this should be done on a motorcycle.

Trans-Labrador Highway

This is an adventure in your own backyard. If you're crazy, have a decent off-road vehicle, live in New England, and are really bored, this one is actually pretty doable. It doesn't entail the extreme financial hardship of some of the others. College road trip, anyone?

The traditional way to do this is to drive to Quebec City..... and keep on going. You take Quebec Route 138 to Baie-Comeau, and then Quebec Route 389 all the way into Labrador. This is not a highway, it is a shockingly dangerous accident prone stretch of gravel. Once in Labrador, it is only going to get worse as the road becomes Route 500, the Trans-Labrador Highway. You can drive it all the way to Happy Valley-Goose Bay. Google "middle of nowhere" and that should be somewhere in the top 10.

But the story gets better. I've written another guide about driving to the top of Newfoundland, whereupon you can take a ferry into Labrador. You will start driving on Route 510, the southerly section of the Trans-Labrador Highway. Currently (if conditions are perfect and you are skilled enough), you can drive from Blanc Sablon to Red Bay all the way to Cartwright, Labrador. And there is currently a road under construction from Cartwright to Happy Valley-Goose Bay, said to be completed in DECEMBER 2009.

Meaning you can make a round trip affair of it: drive from Boston to Quebec to Labrador City to the absolute terminus of civilization on the East Coast, back down along the Labrador Coast, into Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and back home.

Just don't try this in February, boys and girls. I disavow all knowledge.

Driving the Ice Road

This is another driving expedition right in your backyard, that just about anyone crazy enough can undertake. It is probably best done from the West Coast. In fact, I read about a group of VW bus enthusiasts who rallied together in Vancouver and headed for Inuvik. They didn't get as far as Tuktoyaktuk, though.

There are a couple of different routes you can take through British Columbia. By the time you hit the Yukon Territories, it is going to be Route 1, than the Klondike Highway until just outside of Dawson. The you can take the Dempster Highway all the way to Inuvik. Check your map.

Now the best part... if you've managed to get this far during the winter months, you can actually, legally, DRIVE THE ICE ROAD, just like in Ice Road Truckers, to Tuktoyaktuk, located on the shores of the Arctic Ocean, at the very top of the world. Best of all, unlike the sissies driving actual "roads" to Prudhoe Bay in Alaska, you'll have traversed a frozen river and a frozen bit of the OCEAN for 150 kilometers.

Mongol Rally

I've already devoted an entire guide to this, so please see :
http://www.ruba.com/guide/santiago_ripley/best_adventure_in_europe_and_asia

Basically, you drive from England to Mongolia in the cheapest, most beat up, underpowered tin heap you can find. They also have some great adventures driving rickshaws around India, driving similarly wrecked vehicles from England to Cameroon (crossing the Sahara!), and driving motorcycle taxis through the Amazon from Peru to Paraguay. Awesome stuff all around, and true extreme driving adventures.

Cape to Cairo

Possibly the most well-known and popular extreme road-trip is the famous "Cape to Cairo." You drive from Cape Town, South Africa to Cairo, Egypt (or vice-versa.) It doesn't matter which way you go, rather that you drive all the way across Africa. There is some scary terrain along the way, and you're sure to run into some dodgy, dangerous situations. This is also what Land Rovers and Toyota Land Cruisers were specially designed for. This one is definitely on my list of things to do oneday, but I think I would prefer to do it via motorcycle. This is THE extreme driving classic.

Driving Around the World

Follow the route taken by Ewan McGregor and Charlie Boorman in Long Way Round - drive around the world! Drive from London to Magadan, through Eastern Europe, the Stans, Mongolia, and the fierce ride across Siberia along the Road of Bones. The road is so named because it was constructed by Soviet prisoners and dissidents; thousands died under the brutal slave labor conditions, and their remains were physically incorporated into sections of the road. Only a place this tough could make the later drive across Alaska and Canada seem like a cakewalk.

the South Pole

You probably won't be able to do this on your own, without lots of experience, money, permission, and the like. But the point is that it has been done, and now people do it every year. Top Gear successfully managed to drive a highly modified Toyota to the geographic North Pole. Inspired by this, a team of four Toyotas took off from Novo, a Russian research facility in Antarctica. They drove over 5000 kilometers in total: 2500km to the South Pole, and then back, finishing in February 2009.

Driving in Antarctica: it doesn't really get more extreme.

The Ultimate Road Trip

The Cape to Cape trip: drive the same vehicle from the Cape of Good Hope to Cape Horn. Yes, this is theoretically possible (if you combine a few recent world records). It has yet to be done in a continuous basis, however. You could be the first, a modern day explorer! This is, without a doubt, the ultimate driving adventure in the world.

There are three main challenges to this, aside from endurance. First is managing to cross the Bering Strait in a car. Do you make your vehicle amphibious, or do you try and drive across the ice during the 3 week interval in the winter? Someway you need to get across the over 50 miles of water that separates Russia from Alaska.

The second challenge is getting across Siberia after Yakutsk or so, when the roads sort of peter out. Or become trails, or ice roads. The main route seems to be somehow getting to Pevek, and taking the ice road to Uelen. And once you get to Alaska, it isn't exactly a picnic to get to Fairbanks, where real, continuous roads start. The third challenge is crossing the Darien Gap in Panama, with its lack of road through the rainforest. But after CROSSING THE BERING SEA IN A CAR, these seem trivial.

So far Steve Burgess and Dan Evans of Wales have come the furthest. They started in the UK, drove to Yakutsk, and took an ice path along the top of Siberia to Uelen in their highly modified Land Rover. Putting on pontoons they had carried on the roof, they successfully made it across the Bering Sea: the Rover became a boat, with the engine turning an outboard propeller. Upon arrival in Wales, Burgess and his team them made it to Nome. However, throughout this trip, there has been lots of back and forth flying, support vehicles, and the trip is currently on hold as he raises money to get from Nome to Cape Horn.

In short, it can be done, but has not been done yet. People occasionally make the trek across the Bering when it is frozen via snowmobile to see family in Russia or the US, whichever the case may be. A man and his son have skiied across.

Now if only you could get some sort of highly modified motorcycle, maybe with a sidecar, small enough to get around the bush, light enough to be able to get across the ice without falling in.... that would be a journey. Ewan McGregor stopped in Magadan and took an airplane to Anchorage. That's cheating. No airplanes, no boats, just one land vehicle, Cape Town to Ushuaia. Enough said.