These Are the Bucket List Roads Jalopnik Would Love to Drive

Photo: Hermes Images (Getty Images)

There are possibly too many good roads to list. In fact, I’m certain that there are far too many bucket-list roads, but that’s a good thing! I feel like I’m trying to teleport to disparate points of the globe to come up with an answer. How do I choose between Stelvio Pass in Italy or the Golden Road in Mongolia? I’ll just have to pick someplace closer to my part of the world to narrow the view in my mind, so I’m going with Argentina’s “Ruta 40,” or National Route 40.

Ruta 40 is one of the longest roads in the world at a mind-boggling 3,157 miles long. It spans from Patagonia to Bolivia, and even though it’s in western Argentina (as a national rather than international route) la cuarenta travels alongside the Andes Mountains and passes through many different landscapes — from craggy slopes and lush hills to arid desert and wide-open steppes.

The famous road reportedly offers a journey to the end of the world, and in a way, that’s true; the road ends at the southern tip of Argentina, which is itself at the bottom of South America. If it weren’t for a sliver of the country Chile, Ruta 40 would drain all the way down to the end of the continent. And if a 3,200-mile drive is still not long enough, there are countless detours and rhizomes of road growing out of Ruta 40. It’s an endless drive, which is to say it’s perfect.