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Anyone ever considered, or perhaps carried out, a road trip to as far as Cape Horn and back? I intend to do it someday in my truck with a bed camper. Its totally crazy but I think I could take a 2 or 3 months and do it... all the while being able to explore each country along the way.
Anyone drive to South America from the states? How far?
Can't get through Panama, and there will probably never be a connecting road. North American livestock interests don't want a land route over which cattle diseases can be transmitted. Besides the fact that the Darien Gap has proven to be an impossible terrain to put a road through. There are hundreds of abandoned motorcycles in there, that people thought they could drive through somehow. You'll have to ship your car Panama to Colombia. Aside from that, the road is excellent, and doesn't really provide any challenges, good paved road all the way through South America.
Look for a book called "Road Fever", by Tim Cahill and Gary Sowerby. They did it about 20 years ago, and it's a great read. They said a guy from Quebec did it alone in a Cadillac convertible, some years earlier.
I drove as far as Panama, it's easy. Each border is about the same as Mexico, as far as red tape is concerned. There are boys hanging around who know the ropes and have paid the necessary bribes on a retainer, you give one of them $30 or $40, and your passport and car papers, and he pays all the fees and keeps a commission for himself while you sip a cool drink in the shade, and in an hour or so, you're ready to go.
In the no-man's land between border posts, there are a few dozen abandoned cars. When you take in a car, they stamp it in your passport, and you don't leave without your car, unless you pay the customs fee. The only way around it is to drag your car out of the country, leave it in between, and enter the next country without a car. If you want to sell you car in, say, Costa Rica, you and the buyer both go out to the Nicaragua border, export the car from Costa Rica, complete the transaction in no-mans land, and your buyer imports his new car back into Costa Rica.
But outside North America and Europe, driving a across borders is not so simple. You don't just arrive at the border and say "We're passing through" . There are customs and import duties on cars, and often, you need to pay that in advance, which is then refunded when you re-export the car.
In Africa, the procedure is to go to your home country auto club and get a "carnet du passage', which is a book full of coupons. You determine the highest customs duty for any country you plan to drive through, and pay that in advance as a deposit to your auto club. Then, at each country, they tear out a coupon and hold that as a guarantee. When you leave, they stamp the counterfoil matching that coupon. If you don't leave, and sell or abandon the car in that country, they present the coupon to your auto club and demand payment from them from your deposit. You get your deposit back from your auto club when you return home and present your carnet to show that you've returned the car and there is a re-export stamp for every missing coupon. In some countries, the customs deposit is equal to the value of the car.
South America is not so bad, most countries have reciprocal agreements with each other. Brazil is particularly easy, because they have free passage agreements with all adjacent countries, which means all but Chile and Ecuador. It's very rare in South America, even in border towns, to see a car with a license plate from another country, because it is not at all easy to get a car across the borders.
Location: Where nothing ever grows. No rain or rivers flow, Texas
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what if someone takes your passport for a ransom?
Sounds like this cross country driving thing is for the 'white adventurer'. I can think of so many ways this could go wrong
Thanks JT, wasn't aware of the Darien Gap and all that rigmarole in Central America. Also seems like it would be quite a hassle to get to South America. Oh well... would have been a cool ride though.
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