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.
How many litres?
Many kilometres equal high diesel consumption. Thanks to the large tank, however, we only had to refuel 65 times in all this time, an average of 80 litres each. That’s 5 214 litres of diesel for the entire route, which corresponds to a consumption of 14.3 litres per 100 kilometres.
This cost a total of 4 516 US-Dollar, an average of 95 cents per litre. Refuelling was cheapest in Venezuela at just under 49 cents. The most expensive was Brazil at 1.44 US$.
We also recommend the large tank to everyone – perhaps not 270 litres straight away. However, it allowed us to drive calmly through many areas with fuel shortages. We were also able to switch to cheaper petrol stations.
In Bolivia, we had set ourselves the goal of never paying the foreign price (approx. 1.36$), but always the local price (approx. 0.56$). It worked out quite well. The difference is so big because fuel is subsidised in the country. What’s more, it’s often not available. No matter how much you want to pay the foreign price, if there’s nothing, you won’t get anything. We always filled up with petrol whenever possible and asked for it in advance. That way we never had to queue and could negotiate the price.
There is also a shortage of fuel in Venezuela, especially diesel. Although the country has huge oil reserves, it has almost no refineries or chemicals. In addition, only lorries run on diesel, which is why it is only available at selected petrol stations. Most of the time we got diesel without any problems, but once we had to search for it. However, when we said that we would pay cash in dollars, it was suddenly no longer a problem to fill up with 160 litres.
Brazil was generally expensive, the more remote the area, the more so. In Peru, prices change a lot. Near the Amazon, where petrol is extracted, it is quite cheap. In northern Peru, for example, we didn’t have to fill up once as we filled up in Pucallpa for just under 0.88$ 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.