The lockdown road trip route that will take you from London-New Zealand

Hoo, the hotel room offer platform, has put together a worldwide ‘road trip’ route that will take you from London to New Zealand by car, based on a timeline covering the length of lockdown restrictions in England.

See it here with each stage broken down - https://justhooit.com/blog/lockdown-road-trip/

With the lockdown restrictions ensuring we have spent an unprecedented amount of time indoors, Hoo based their road trip timeline on the length of the lockdown across England from the first lockdown at the end of March last year, through the second, and the time we’ve spent in the third, up until the end of February.

The rather depressing figures show that by the end of February, we had spent 184 days in lockdown across the three separate stints, although at 199 days, it’s been worse for those in Wales.

So, dreaming of the better days ahead, Hoo set to work looking at how far you could travel around the world by car during these 184 days, or 4,416 hours, once travel restrictions are eased.

The Trip

Hoo’s trip includes stops at 44 stops around the world, covering Europe, Russia, Africa, South Africa, Turkey, Georgia, Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Australia and New Zealand, with time left to take a flight back to London at the end of it all.

The trip takes you from capital city to capital city by car, with the exception of Aus and New Zealand which take in a number of cities.

There are also three boat trips required to take you across the Strait of Gibraltar and from Singapore to Perth, as well as from Sydney to Auckland.

The road trip isn’t just about driving though, and at each and every destination, Hoo has also factored in a 72-hour stopover for rest and relaxation.

In addition, there are some very challenging drives and so any stint of the journey requiring more than 14 hours behind the wheel has also been attributed eight hours of pitstop time. Hoo increased this to 12 hours for the two most challenging parts of the journey, Addis Ababa to Cairo (76 hours) and Tbilisi to Islamabad (78 hours).

In theory, the route from London to Christchurch and home again should take 4,409.5 hours to complete, shorter than the time currently spent in lockdown. Although as anyone who has travelled will tell you, things rarely go to plan.

Hoo Co-founder, Adrian Murdock, commented:

“It seems as though we’ve been in lockdown forever and so we started out just curious to see how far you could have travelled as a straight journey in the time restrictions have been in place.

However, we soon realised that the lockdown in England has been so extensive, you could piece together the road trip of a lifetime based on some pretty realistic criteria.

Not only could you drive from London to New Zealand, but you could do so with a good three-day break at each destination and take in pretty much the whole world while doing so.

That said, this road trip isn’t for the faint-hearted and even factoring in some substantial breaks, some of the drives are pretty gruelling, to say the least. It also takes you through some pretty tricky terrain and borders and so it would be very interesting to see just how, or if, it could be done.

Of course, half of the fun when travelling is planning your route and then overcoming unforeseen obstacles while out in the big wide world, so while we’ve put together a starter for ten, the lockdown road trip challenge could take you on a wealth of travelling adventures.”

Journey times based on time to drive between each location via Google Maps rounded up to the highest hour. E.g. a journey of 4 hours and 10 minutes rounded up to 4.5 hours.