South America! Home of hyperinflation, death squads and the military strongman, land of the guerilla and generalissimo, haunt of the junta.
Think Andes — the world’s largest mountain range. Think Amazon — the world’s largest river by volume of water, and the world’s largest rainforest. Think Atacama — the driest place on earth outside Antarctica. Think Patagonia — frozen wastes, and the uttermost extremity of human habitation. Think salt flats, desert, tundra, rich pasture, rainforest, stony wasteland. Think towering, thundering waterfalls. Think glaciers. Think volcanoes, and earthquakes — a physical landscape nearly as unstable as the political.
It’s home to some of the world’s most amazing animals — llamas, alpacas, vicuñas, guanacos; condors and anacondas; snakes and tarantulas; pumas and jaguars; iguanas and caiman; capybaras, tapirs and opossums you’re allowed to like; burrowing parakeets and millions upon millions of butterflies.
Some of the earliest of the great human civilisations were South American — the Aymara, the Huari, the Chimu, the Inca, the Nazca. And today, thanks to the extraordinary series of collisions between peoples that created it, Latin America is home to some of the world’s most distinctive culture: think carnival, think samba, think tango, think macarena. OK, try not to think macarena.
Think Argentine steaks and Chilean reds, roast guinea pig and a dozen varieties of cerveza.
Some of the world’s great cities are in South America: Buenos Aires, La Paz, Santiago, São Paulo. Think contrasts between the rich and poor, the haves and have nots, the powerful, privileged elite and the oppressed, poverty-stricken masses. Think social unrest, drugs, police murders of streetkids, misery.
And linking all this together, think of the roads: Bolivia’s so-called ‘World’s Most Dangerous Road’, Argentina’s Ruta 40, Chile’s Carretera Austral, the rugged ripio of Patagonia, the cultured autopista. Think switchbacks on mountain passes and racetracks on desert straights. Think unpopulated backroads, with no other traffic. Think salt flats again.
OK. Stop drooling.
It’s hard to remember exactly when the idea came to us — we’re not getting any younger, after all… Where were we? Oh yeah, the big idea. We think it came to us in Kyrgyzstan. With our family growing up and reaching the point where they were leaving home, we were able to turn to the other love of our life (or in Gareth’s case, the other other love of his life, outside economics): expedition motorcycling. So there we were, slightly more than halfway through our epic 2005 traverse of the Silk Road, following in the footsteps of the great Venetian traveller Marco Polo. We were full of the joys of adventure motorcycling and — if it was indeed Kyrgyzstan — probably a mug of fermented mare’s milk too. The only cloud on our spiritual horizon was the depressing knowledge that this trip of trips would soon end, and that it was likely to be not only the pinnacle of our motorcycling careers but also a highlight of our lives. What could we possibly do next that would compare?
Before the Silk Road, we’d ridden extensively in New Zealand and done rides in the Indian Himalaya, Nepal and the northern Andes. Our preparations for the Silk Road entailed a shakedown trip to the Australian outback. By the end of the Silk Road, we had left the tracks of our knobbly tyres across a decent portion of the world. So why not keep going, we wondered. Why not carry on and do the World By Bike?
And that’s how the World By Bike concept was born.
So the way it’s turned out, that epic traverse of the Silk Road wasn’t the end or even the pinnacle at all. Since then, our tyres have rolled across several other parts of the globe. In 2007, it was across North America using back roads, the true motorcyclist’s aversion to dual carriageways at the fore — kicking off like Christopher Columbus in the Caribbean we headed on down to Mexico but via the Appalachians, then up the Rocky Mountains to Canada, north to Alaska and up the ‘Haul Road’ to Prudhoe Bay, back down again to Death Valley through the Pacific Northwest. We’ve had short riding sojourns in South Korea, dipped our tyres in the ice floes of Antarctica, and steered our bikes through Africa from Capetown to London. Most recently, in 2008, we’ve circumnavigated Iceland, crossed the Arctic regions of northern Europe, the Baltic States and Russia, riding back into the West through the Crimea and Eastern Europe.
Although we’d been to South America before, we couldn’t really claim to have ‘done’ the place. The 2002 ride was just a teaser; we’d joined a commercial tour designed to give us a taste of motorcycling the Andean highlands. When you look at the route of that 2002 trip on a map, it looks like we went to one of the world’s great museums and never got out of the revolving door. But we got the taste, all right. We always knew we’d be back, especially after the World By Bike project was born. This time, we would do it properly.
South America is too big, and the challenges of travel there are too great, for us to have contemplated riding the whole thing in one go. So in the best traditions of the Treaty of Torsedillas, wherein Spain and Portugal divided the olde worlde 50/50, we thought we would divide this land in two. Looking at a map of the place, and pooling our collective knowledge of the countries that comprise the continent, it seemed easy enough to divvy it up into a soft ride and a hard ride.
We thought we could identify a nice, genteel, civilised route that would take us from São Paulo in Brazil down to land’s end at Tierra del Fuego, and then back up the backbone of the continent — following, crossing and re-crossing the great Andes range of mountains — all the way up to Bogotá in Colombia. ‘Nice’, ‘genteel’ and ‘civilised’ are relative terms: we’d seen the roads across the Altiplano of Bolivia and Peru and knew how tough they were. Some of the others on our proposed route were reputed to be rougher still, especially the section that crossed the windswept wastes of Patagonia, but we knew they could be managed, with the appropriate equipment and level of preparation. Following this route would stitch together Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay and a bit of Brazil. It sounded great.
The other half, the rugged leg, would traverse the Amazonian basin taking in the tropical rainforests of Brazil, the Guyanas and Venezuela and on to Colombia and then up to Central America. That one would keep.
But as we looked into the logistics, it seemed too hard. Brazil is a bureaucratic nightmare, and since it would be the centrepiece of the second trip, we could afford to avoid it this time round, anyway. We tried to organise shipping of our bikes into São Paulo: Brazilian bureaucracy soon put an end to that idea; for them everything seems too much trouble. And there were just too many countries involved anyway: better to cut down the number, reduce the hassles of visas and permissions for the bikes, and put off until tomorrow what we could avoid doing today. As for shipping bikes out of Colombia — everyone became jumpy that every cavity on the bikes would be stuffed with marching powder. We dropped Colombia, and Ecuador, too, for much the same reasons. For a while, we thought it would be great to get out to the Galapagos Islands, but that ended up being too hard.
A couple of iterations later, it seemed to make sense to reverse the trip, starting in Peru and heading for São Paulo via Tierra del Fuego. Then we decided that even shipping bikes out of Brazil would be sheer bureaucratic hassle too, so we said stuff Brazil, let’s just ride them back to Santiago and ship out from there. Once more Up the Andes would be fun, anyway.
In the end, we criss-crossed the Andes so many times — some planned, some impulsive and others forced by dramatic things like earthquakes — that Up the Andes became the name of the ride.
Previously, we’ve done our motorcycle expeditions with a team. Six riders is about the ideal size in rough country: choose your team members carefully, and you can take a wide range of skills with you on the road, and you can share the burden of the organisation and the on-road decision-making. On our previous trips, we’ve been blessed with the teams we’ve selected, due in no small part to the fact that on just about every substantial trip we’ve done, we’ve has the pleasure of Dave Wallace’s company. He was to the World By Bike organisers what Dan Carter is to the All Black selectors: top of the list. He’s competent, resourceful and completely selfless, and just happens to be a top bloke, too. But Dave bought a business in 2008 and has followed a reverse of the arc of every other biker his age: as his golden years loom, he’s becoming more rather than less tied to the desk, and increasingly unavailable to mind Joanne when she heads off-piste in foreign climes. We missed him on our Northern Lights tour of the frozen north, and no amount of persuasion seemed likely to get him to South America, either.
Others were non-committal, too, for a time. After all, we thought we would be away for three months, maybe four, and that’s a long time to spend away from work and families. Nor would it be cheap. So while there was plenty of interest from people we don’t know but who...
