Road Fever

by Tim Cahill

Release Date: 03 March, 1992

Edition: Paperback

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Read It Fast

You probably can't race through it in 23 1/2 minutes, a minute for each day of Cahill and partner Gary Sowerby's Guinness World Record trip from south of Ushuaia, Argentina, (a lovely little city, by personal and Road Fever testimony) to Prudhoe Bay, Alaska, but you should speed through the pages as they sped along the roads. The trip was in 1987 and would be impossible today because some of the route through Colombia is under violent guerrilla control. I would have liked much more of the trip and much less of the preparations. The logistics of preparing for long-distance race driving are staggering, but -- alas -- they are also not very interesting and well over a third of the less than 300 pages cover the getting ready. Once on the road some of Cahill's descriptions of the people and terrains through which they drive are terrific, especially the accounts of the Atacama desert in northern Chile and especially scary driving through Central America. I'd have liked more of that, but too much of the writing is of the "by five o'clock we reached x where we stopped for gas and got directions out of town" variety. Kind of like reading your MapQuest driving directions; they fill space, (usually) get you there, but are more functional than interesting. In the end, while I enjoyed Road Fever I thought it would be more fun than it was. Final note: absence of a map or maps is inexplicable.

A different reason for loving Road Fever

I gotta tell you that I didn't find the book as laugh-out-loud funny as many of the people here did. But that fact didn't cause me to love "Road Fever" any less then they did. What I loved about it is the care Tim Cahill spent in recounting in great detail the amount of preparation - especially in the area of paperwork - required to make a journey from Tierra del Fuego to the northern tip of Alaska in record time.

Because, frankly, it's not a question of how fast you can drive; rather, the BIG ISSUE is how much time it takes you to cross the border from Country X to Country Y. And then again from Country Y to Country Z. This ain't the European Community where you can whiz past the Germany - Netherlands border without realizing it. These are real border crossings - guards, official stamps, commissars, corruption, danger, you name it.

Garry Sowerby and Tim Cahill spent up to a year preparing for that aspect of the trip. Yes, GM sponsorship helped in places. Yes, the Canadian government helped in places. But what carries them through at the end of the day is the intense focus and planning these two guys put into the journey before the trip even gets started.

There's a lesson in there for everyone.