AmAndes 2011

In 2011 we crossed South America from the Surinamese capital to Peru’s Pacific coast: jungle tracks through the Amazon, red clay and “washboard” pistes in Brazil and Bolivia, and the high passes of the Andes en route to Cusco, Machu Picchu and the Nazca Lines before finishing in Lima. It was raw, beautiful and demanding—three thousand-plus kilometers of unpaved roads within a 9,000-kilometer odyssey.

TopGear joined the adventure—driving a near-standard Kia Sportage on tougher rubber and a steel skid plate—then wrote two long features about “how simply excellent” it coped alongside Defenders, G-Wagens, Land Cruisers and even classics like a Volvo 240. Their verdict after the finish: “never… anything denigrating about a Kia Sportage again,” delivered after the Kia (and most teams) made Lima despite broken springs, bent arms and the kind of terrain that shakes cars to bits.

The route mixed long gravel stages with fast mountain tarmac, river towns with high-altitude plateaus, and the kind of daily variety that defines a CarChallenge: you drive your own pace by day, regroup in handpicked (sometimes basic, often superb) stays by night—while our team keeps the logistics, borders and repairs moving. In TopGear’s words, accommodation ranged “from basic to top-level in the Andes,” and the scale of nature felt “almost megalomaniac.”

Crowning moment? TopGear named AmAndes 2011 its “Event of the Year”—a nod to the spirit of the trip and the crews who willed their machines to the ocean.