Looking back on 2025: a year full of adventures.

In 2025, we were on the road for the entire year. There were no quick flights back to Europe and no visits to see family – although that’s not entirely true, we visited Michael’s sister living in Costa Rica and his other sister came to visit us.

We experienced a great deal, mostly good. Nevertheless, there are moments when homesickness creeps in.

Looking back, it’s hard to believe we had the time to live all these things. The year went by so quickly. Here is a brief look back to remind ourselves of all the wonderful things we saw and experienced.

Peru

Things got off to a great start in Colombia with the world’s smallest monkeys, the pygmy marmosets. Then the itinerary included a drive through guerrilla territory for Cora’s birthday, followed by a few weeks helping out on a cocoa farm and searching for anacondas in the Llanos. During the search, we were surprised by an Orinoco crocodile coming our way.

We also went on a hippo safari on the Magdalena River – we couldn’t stop marvelling at it all. Afterwards, Michi did his dive instructor training. For once, we stayed in one place for an entire month and were able to do some repairs on the car, such as fixing our window. Only the Airbnb host was peculiar; we definitely don’t want to go back there.

Venezuela

Venezuela – our favourite! Finally, a real adventure! Right at the start, we were met by the secret service and asked into a white container for a three-hour interview. That wasn’t exactly great. But once we were allowed in the country, everything went like clockwork.

Maracaibo was like a journey back to the 1970s. The food and service were good—a blessing after Colombia. And the people were exceptionally kind – everyone. They invited us into their homes for barbecues and rum. They organised diesel whenever things didn’t go smoothly.

Only the amount of driving was exhausting. Unfortunately, our container ship to Panama departed from Colombia, so we had to do a round trip through the vastness of Venezuela. We sat in the car for hours and had the occasional row. However, prospecting for gold in the Wild South of Venezuela put everything right again.

The food was mediocre. The last day was lovely, though: we visited local weavers, walked through a colonial town, and bought cowboy boots for Michael. Finally, we went to the thermal baths to relax. One week was enough.

The road ends at the impenetrable jungle. It is impossible to get through by vehicle. The Pan-American Highway, the longest road in the world, simply ends in Colombia.

This is a fact that surprisingly many people are unaware of. The road, which connects the American continent over a distance of 30 000 kilometres, is an interrupted project.

106 kilometres separate the north and south, between Panama and Colombia. In between lies an impenetrable jungle that repeatedly makes headlines on migration and drugs.

A chaotic shipment

We have been in contact with Ana, our logistics coordinator, for weeks. Everything is organised and agreed via WhatsApp. It’s just a bit tedious because, as everywhere in Latin America, you have to ask several times about every detail. A document with the most important information? No chance. A contract with a list of costs? Wishful thinking. In the group chat, we only occasionally get a useful answer to our questions.

Ana is considered chaotic, but also reliable. We have no other choice anyway, because organising things directly with the authorities is even more tedious.

So we wait for information that always comes at the last minute, and then it has to be done quickly. One example is the power of attorney they need to complete customs formalities. This has to be certified by a notary and could easily be prepared in advance. But it arrives one day before the weekend, and everything has to be cleared through customs by Monday. Great.

But that works too. We drive the Landcruiser to the port, everything is clean and tidy, the gas bottle emptied in the park the night before. The tank is not quite on reserve.

We simply ignore a few of the rules. Let’s see if they check.

The car stays in the port overnight. They assure us that it is safe and that someone will keep an eye on it. Nevertheless, we prefer to leave our surveillance camera running. Then we have to wait until the police announce the date for the inspection. In our case, it takes two days.

The Darien Gap is not transitable by car. The road was never built due to the difficult terrain, and now economic and political interests as well as nature conservation are preventing its construction. It is possible to walk through the jungle, but there is no real path for pedestrians either. In addition to the dangers of disease and accidents, armed groups are also a huge problem. It is very dangerous for everyone.

You can also get to Panama by boat, but then you either have to cover the last stretch by plane or still hike through the jungle. We opt for the comfortable option: a flight from Cartagena to Panama.

Container shipping is expensive, especially for such a short distance. The price is so high because the entire procedure incurs standard costs, i.e. port and container fees as well as the transport itself. Around 4600 US dollars for two parties. And that’s still the cheapest option.

The route would actually be very suitable for a ferry, as the crossing takes less than 24 hours, since it is only about 540 kilometres. There used to be one, but it was uneconomical and was therefore discontinued.

Everything takes longer with the container ship. Ten days after loading the container we can pick up the car at the port of Colón on Panama’s Caribbean coast. On the journey, we have only two backpacks and the cash to pay the agent.

Here, too, we only receive confirmation the day before. Boris, the agent, will be waiting for us at the port of Colón. We take the bus from Panama City and get off at a petrol station. We meet him in the café, hand him our passports and vehicle documents, and he disappears with them. For us, it means waiting again.

Five hours later, he picks us up and says everything is ready. The containers are on the trailer in a muddy field. A ramp? No such thing. Instead, there is a tow truck.

How does the unloading work? You drive onto the tow truck, which moves forward a little, puts the ramp at a steep angle and lets the car roll down. This isn’t a problem for us, as our car has high ground clearance. For cars with lower ground clearance, however, it’s very, very tight. But in the end, they all land safely in the mud.

The customs officer comes by, checks the chassis numbers and gives the OK. We are handed all the papers, hand over the money, wave briefly, thank you. Quickly fill up with water, do some shopping and refuel, then it’s time to set off on our Central American adventure!

685 days in figures – a review

A ship arrived in the port of Montevideo in Uruguay on 1 October 2023. Another ship set sail from Cartagena, Colombia, on 3 August 2025. Both times, a car is on board – the Land Cruiser, of course. In between, there are many kilometres on land, criss-crossing the South American continent.

We have travelled a long way, and still only saw a fraction of what is possible. But at some point you have to decide whether you want to do another loop or continue travelling north. For us, it’s time to head north.

Six hundred and eighty-five days ago, we started our journey in South America. There was a longer break in Switzerland and Michi’s time out as a tour guide in the Bolivian Amazon. We experienced so much during this time, some things we write about them here and on our social media accounts. And yet there’s a lot more that we don’t post. At least not on the internet.

Among many things, we seldomly share, is all the hours driving – thousands of kilometres, to be precise: 34 164 kilometres. That takes a lot of time and diesel. Now is the right time to take a look at the figures.

How far?

We travelled a total of 34 641 kilometres in 204 drive days. From Montevideo in Uruguay to Cartagena in Colombia. That corresponds to an average of 170 kilometres per driving day. The longest distance in one day was of 560 kilometres in Venezuela. Michael once rode 550 kilometres from Brazil to Peru on his own. Both times we were pressed for time. In Venezuela we had to get back north to the ship and in Peru Michael had to catch the plane to Switzerland.

Note: After the maps and statistics, there is an empty space that I could not remove. Just keep scrolling.

It’s said so quickly, but here the few hundred kilometres per day equal many hours on the road. We must have spent over 14 hours behind the wheel on these individual days.

Bolivia holds our record of kilometers. We know the country quite well by now, but there are still a few places we had to skip. We covered a total of 8 417 kilometres in the country. Brazil is in second place with 6 997 kilometres. The country is simply huge; we didn’t have enough time for the whole of it and stuck to the south and west of the country. In third place is Venezuela, where we spent the most days driving. We had too much to see and too little time – what a pity. It shows clearly on our average kilometres per drive day: a whole 260.

Attentive readers will have noticed that we hardly travelled in Argentina and Chile. That’s true, at least on this trip. As we both already knew Patagonia, we skipped this part. We weren’t travelling together back then and the data would have been much older to allow a meaningful comparison. But that region would add around 20,000 kilometres.

Brazil was generally expensive, the more remote the area, the more so. In Peru, prices change a lot. Near the Amazon, where petrol is extracted, it is quite cheap. In northern Peru, for example, we didn’t have to fill up once as we filled up in Pucallpa for just under 0.88$ per litre. After that, we drove until Ecuador, where we knew diesel was only 0.50 US$/litre at every petrol station.

The price fluctuations in the statistics are due to the exchange rate. We felt this very strongly in Argentina after Milei’s election, when petrol became 100% more expensive within 3 months. The dollar, for its part, lost a lot of value during this time. That was (and still is) a big advantage for us.

And what else?

All these data is our own that we collected over the course of the journey. Every time we filled up, we had to convert the price into francs and often also from gallons to litres. Every evening, we reset the odometer to zero and noted the departure and destination points as well as the distance. The result is the figures here.

If we look at the summary now, it’s incredible to see what we’ve done. Of course, this includes countless stories. We couldn’t always fill up at a petrol station. Sometimes it was a barrel or a bottle, like in Peru. Sometimes we had to haggle hard to get a few litres. Often we had to insist that we wanted diesel and not petrol. Here in South America, all Land Cruisers are petrol-powered.

We usually drove long distances in a day because it’s not worth packing up the car for a few kilometres. It’s far too much effort. We’d rather take a taxi or have a rest. But a short 100-kilometre trip has also turned into an all-day trip because the road was so bad or so steep. In general, we didn’t have to rescue ourselves very often, but a few times we had to let the car cool down at altitude or patch a few tyres. Mostly in the garage, fortunately, and not in the middle of nowhere.

In Argentina, we pulled a policeman’s car out of a river, in Colombia a guerrilla car with a box of ammunition out of the mud and in Bolivia a tourist. In Venezuela, we helped a policeman start his car with the jump starter.

We went to the hospital or doctor in almost every country, not always because of us, but often to accompany and to translate. It was an adventure every time, because hospitals work differently here and doctor-patient communication doesn’t seem to be part of the medicine curriculum.

Another question we get a lot is about police checks and corruption. So far we have got off lightly. In Bolivia we met a corrupt policeman. We also paid him, otherwise it would have taken forever, and we actually took the wrong turn, except that another 10 cars took exactly the same turn. There were four controls in Colombia, two in Peru and 209 in Venezuela. Venezuela is famous for this among travellers, but they were all nice, and we sometimes got a coffee, water or tips about the country.

We visited ten of the 13 countries on the continent. Only the three small ones – Guyana, Suriname and French Guyana – we didn’t. It’s a shame really, but travelling also teaches you to do without things. Who knows where we’ll be travelling to in the future. For now, however, we are taking many wonderful memories with us as we head north.

That’s what the roads in South America are like. There are huge differences and conditions often change with the seasons. But on the whole, the countries are passable with any type of vehicle. You just have to choose your routes accordingly.

Motorways and toll roads

The main roads are paved and there are usually good motorways. You will make good progress, especially around the big cities. You usually pay a toll, depending on the country, a few cents as in Bolivia (although their tariffs were very opaque) or always a dollar as in Ecuador.

Tolls are usually charged on the motorways, but they’re in good condition. Only the speed bumps used to limit speed are a major hazard. Most local drivers, even those with the best off-road vehicles, brake very hard just before them, so you run the risk of hitting them from behind – it pays to keep your distance. And don’t forget that you have to expect everything on a motorway: walkers, cyclists, horse riders, cows, llamas, simply everything.

Mud and potholes

Country roads are different, they may have just been resurfaced or they may be full of potholes. The mountain roads are always a surprise – even if they’re supposed to be national roads, don’t expect to drive faster than 50km/h.

The smaller roads can have potholes and you have to be prepared for anything. But this is true everywhere. That’s where a high-riding car comes in handy. It doesn’t have to be a 4×4, but a two-wheel drive without a lift is definitely limited. And above all, every pothole (and there are many) becomes a major bump in the road.

Then there are the unsealed roads: some are brilliant, others almost impassable. This mainly depends on when they were last maintained and whether it is the rainy season. This means that conditions can change within months or from one day to the next.

The mountains slide, and there are places that are known for this. After a slide there is not much left of the original road and you can forget about getting through. However, the local bus drivers usually know what the situation is like. It helps to ask or just turn around when the road ends.

Is 4×4 compulsory?

Most routes can be done without 4×4; though if it’s very muddy or steep we’re happy to have it, but there are often alternative routes that are easier.

In our experience, your own driving ability is more important than whether you have 2WD or 4WD. Some drivers get further with their 2WD than any other driver of an off-road vehicle. So it’s worth investing in a good off-road driving course before you start your travels, as you’ll also get to know the car better.

We got stuck three times

We only got stuck three times: once because it had rained so much overnight that we couldn’t drive on the muddy country roads. We had to wait a day for it to dry. The other time it was also raining and we were going up a stretch where there wasn’t really a road – but we wanted to get to that bridge. Once we had deflated the tyres and put our recovery boards in place, we got out. Another time the road was completely washed away and we had to wait until another road was built. Luckily we were never in danger.

In Bolivia, we were stuck for a while because of protests and road closures, but we got to meet a lot of the locals in the town. In Argentina we had to turn back 200 km because we couldn’t cross the river – too much water.

So actually RAIN is the deciding factor. When it rains, you often have to wait for it to stop and the road to dry out a bit or find another route.

Road works and schedules

Roadworks are an often forgotten detail. Here, unlike in Europe, they like to close the road completely, without providing a diversion and without being able to keep traffic flowing in one lane. Then the road is closed either for the whole day – as happened in Ecuador from 9am to 6pm. Or by the hour, like in Peru when we went to Machu Picchu. That means they work for 2 hours and then take an hour break to let the cars through.

The many signs with the schedule would be great – if they kept to the time on them. Sometimes they work an extra hour – or two – or they don’t work at all, in which case ‘lucky you’. As a reminder, schedules in South America are only a guide and are never binding.

As I’m writing this, I’m waiting in line again. They need to fix a pipe and everything has stopped. All day long, from 9am to 6pm. Even though only one excavator is working. But they had already announced it at the crossroads. Two women stood there with a handwritten cardboard sign – just like the ones you draw in primary school. They told us that the roadworks had been announced on the Ministry’s website a week ago, but no one had thought to put up a sign.

We just laughed and knew that we’d be waiting for 4 hours (until 6pm) or 6 hours anyway. The detour takes twelve hours and is 300 kilometres longer.

The different types of travellers

The looong-term travellers

Travelling for years, often retired and in vehicles that are better equipped than some city apartments. The Germans prefer their reliable Iveco, the Swiss love their Mercedes Sprinter – but both groups have one thing in common: they have a solution for absolutely every problem.

The traveller families

Mostly French, that teach their children in classrooms on wheels. Their motorhome is school, kitchen, bedroom and playground all in one – and somehow it works.

The express travellers

‘Alaska to Ushuaia in six months? No problem!’ – at least that’s what they think. Mostly young people who have taken time off to discover and then realise that America is a bit bigger than they thought. They travel in vans and are always in a hurry – for whatever reason.

The low budget travellers

Often Argentinians selling handicrafts while travelling. They take forever to get anywhere, but are real survivalists. Their campsites? The main squares of the villages – always where the best sales opportunities are.

The camping haters

Campsite? Puff, unnecessary. After all, they have everything with them! They don’t need anything! But of course, there was a budget for a 200 000-dollar expedition vehicle with satellite dish, hot water heating and oven.

The camping addicts

They travel exclusively from campsite to campsite – because ‘free camping is far too dangerous’. The route is carefully planned, the risk minimised. Adventure? No, thank you! They prefer to stay in the safe bubble of a well-rated campsite.

Those who have a campervan but always sleep in a hotel

Why is that? Nobody knows. Maybe they thought camping was more romantic until they had to spend their first night in the car.

The rental campers

They rent a campervan for a few months, especially in Patagonia. Their main problem? They have no idea how the thing works. Neither does the landlord, by the way. And when the inevitable problem occurs, nobody knows what to do. Chaos awaits.

The locals or weekend travellers

It’s the weekend, time to pack the pick-up: chairs, tables, a cool box, the grandmother and – most importantly – the biggest jukebox they can find. Destination: a beach or a river to enjoy life for two days.

The motorbike travellers

Usually travelling alone or in small groups, but with plenty of speed. They love hostels, are well connected with local motorbike clubs and always have an exciting route ready.

The Adventurers

Paved roads? Yuck! Tourist hotspots? No way! They seek out the bumpiest, most remote route they can find – the fewer people, the better. Tarmac is their biggest enemy.