Ben Coombs, Automotive Adventurer
Ben Coombs is best known for his epic 27,000-mile Pub2Pub drive by TVR from the northernmost bar in the world to the southernmost. Along the way he came across his Favourite Detour.
“I think a great drive needs a great destination.”
“If I had to narrow it down to one day on the road – well it's actually two days – it would be a drive from the Nazca Lines in Peru up on to the Altiplano and across to Cusco.
It was part of the Pub2Pub trip where I'd started at the northernmost pub in the world, which is on Svalbard about 700 miles from the North Pole. From the top of Norway we drove back across Europe, shipped the TVR across to New York then drove to San Francisco, headed down through the US, Mexico, Central America, got to Peru, and we were heading for heading for Patagonia.
With that many miles behind you, it's very easy to get almost blasé. You'll wake up in the morning, you'll think “Oh it’s another great day on the road in Bolivia, or Colombia or wherever you happen to be at the time” and it's quite rare that a day will really jump out and grab you.
Peru is an enormous country, you can drive down the main road on the coast from Ecuador for day after day and we’d done five days getting to Lima and then on to Nazca, just cruising along fairly uneventful tarmac through sandy desert scenery. I didn't really have any expectations leaving Nazca, but when we started climbing up into the hills on to the Altiplano, the desert seemed to drop away behind us and the road went from being a straight cruiser and suddenly turned into an escalator of switchbacks, hairpin stacks on hairpin stacks. The view behind us was built and built and became absolutely incredible looking out towards the Pacific Ocean. For the first time in five days I was able to drive the TVR like a sports car, wring it out towards the red line and load up the chassis and hear the tyres squeal coming out of corners. We went through this for hour after hour just getting higher and higher as the road peaked out over 4000 meters above sea level.
After a good hour or two of this fantastic driving road, again, the world just changed and we found ourselves on the Altiplano. Green reappeared in the new surroundings taking over from the desert landscape we were used to below and we found ourselves driving across the plateau, an average of about 4000 meters up, sweeping across mile after mile of flowing, undulating terrain, past high-altitude lakes, llamas grazing by the roadside. For hundreds of miles we crossed the Altiplano. That night we checked into a hotel in a small town and the following day the hairpins reemerged as we carried on for the last few hours down to the town of Cusco.
I think a great drive needs a great destination. And for that particular journey there was a fantastic destination. Cusco is one of the famous travel destinations: it's up there with Kathmandu and Timbuktu, it's one of those places you just have to go to. For that journey to end at one of the most iconic places of travel, where Machu Picchu is nearby, made for a fantastic end to what was one of the most fantastic drives I've ever undertaken.”
