Route map

Below is a map of our completed route around South America (final update in April 2017), driving around 50,000km in total (and yes, we shared the driving – and are disappointed by how many people have asked that!)

Having flown into Buenos Aires, our driving trip started in Montevideo, Uruguay, in early November 2014. After driving to El Fin del Mundo (the end of the world) in the far south and taking a trip from there by boat to Antarctica (January 2015), we journeyed north, following the Andes, with a little detour east across the plains of Bolivia into Brazil, from where we made a return trip to the UK in September 2015 via Rio de Janeiro.

In March 2016, we popped up into Ecuador to make a trip to the Galapagos Islands then returned to northern Peru, from where we flew into Iquitos in the Peruvian Amazon (where there are no roads) and travelled down river into Brazil, to Manaus at the heart of the Amazon rainforest. After that, with the rainy season in the High Andes over, we drove south again to enjoy the mountains of Peru before turning back north through Ecuador and into Colombia. We did another return trip to the UK from Bogota in September 2015, before spending our final few months exploring northern Colombia. The van was shipped back to the UK from Cartagena in early January 2017 and we did a final trip to Cuba in February 2017.

The purple line is our driving route, the red lines are journeys or side-trips not in the yellow van (foot, boat, plane etc.) and the yellow stars are where we have stayed for the night. It’s an interactive google map, so you can zoom in closer to see it more clearly and move the map around inside the frame.