Fear and Loathing in North Africa

A scroll-driven replay of our Copenhagen-to-Copenhagen run at The Adventurists' Poles of Inconvenience 2024: 11,531 km of official route, 28 ludicrous checkpoints, a 13th-place finish. Scroll to drive.

Scroll inside the frame to drive the route. The timeline on the left fills as we go — click it to jump to any checkpoint. (The full interactive map is at the end of this post.)

In July 2024 my mate and I pointed a questionable car at Europe for The Adventurists’ Poles of Inconvenience: no fixed route, a list of deliberately absurd checkpoints, and a scoring system that rewards bad decisions over sensible ones.

We were car #27, Fear and Loathing in North Africa. The numbers, straight off the tracker:

• 11,531 km of official route (Copenhagen out and back came to ~12,300 km), 12 July to 8 August 2024
• 28 checkpoints, Denmark down through the Alps to Sardinia, the Vatican, the Balkans, Bulgaria and Romania
• 7d 19h moving, 18d 17h stopped (an honest ratio)
• 13th place, 68 points

The full loop: Copenhagen → Skagen → Izmir → Junktown → Copenhagen. The poles dropped just before the official start, so we made an early run north to Skagen to steal a headstart, the leg before the clock began. It ends home in Copenhagen too: we drove back the same day we finished, to be fit for work the next morning. Both home legs are shown dashed, since the GPS tracker only ran from Jutland to Germany.

More words (and the video) to come. For now: the map.

Explore it yourself

The interactive version: drag the timeline or click the elevation profile (← / → to step), and toggle terrain or satellite.