2024-2026 Arctic to Antarctica

Our Americas journey began at Long Beach, California. From there Hannah and I drove north up the Pacific coast through Oregon, Washington and British Columbia, looped through Alaska, and then took the Dempster and the Inuvik to Tuktoyaktuk Highway to the Arctic Ocean, the northernmost point we reached by road. Turning back south and east, we crossed the breadth of Canada through the prairies and along the north shore of Lake Superior to Quebec and the Atlantic provinces, then followed the US east coast down to Florida and the Gulf coast into Texas.

Mexico and Central America followed, and we spent a long time among the ruins and towns of Mesoamerica before shipping Iggy around the Darién Gap to Colombia. We drove south through Colombia and Ecuador, where we also made a trip out to the Galápagos, then down the length of Peru and over the altiplano, where vicuñas graze beneath Volcán Licancábur. From the Andes we headed east across northern Argentina into Brazil and down through Uruguay before turning toward Patagonia.

We covered Patagonia on both sides of the Andes. We watched king penguins at Bahía Inútil as guests of Jorge Robertson at Estancia Tres Hermanos, walked into the Cueva del Milodón, tracked pumas through Torres del Paine, and followed Ruta 3 to Ushuaia, the southern end of the Pan-American Highway and the southernmost point of our drive. From there we sailed to Antarctica. Back on the mainland we drove north up the Carretera Austral through the parks Douglas and Kristine Tompkins gave to Chile, and near El Chaltén we met Albert Maarse, a Dutch rider taking his Ducati from Alaska to Ushuaia, whose electrics we got going again with our battery booster.

Our last stretch took us through the Lake District around Bariloche and San Martín de los Andes and on to Buenos Aires and Montevideo, where we shipped Iggy to Europe for the next leg. The individual posts in latest news cover each region in more detail.