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April 1984: Canadian adventure driver Garry Sowerby is moments from leaving his wife a widow and his newborn daughter, Lucy, fatherless. He’s lying prone behind the front seats of a heavily modified GMC 2500 Suburban as Kenyan bandits pummel the truck with bullets.

Pop! Plunk. Pop! Plunk. Pop!

Sowerby’s own security detail blindly returns fire with their AK-47 assault rifles. Romping the 6.2-liter Detroit Diesel V8, co-driver Ken Langley speeds them away from the skirmish. Everybody in the truck is shouting as the GMC bottoms out at 70 mph over the wrinkled African terrain. "Go, go, go!"

But Sowerby is an ex-military man and knows that someone must take charge; there’s glass everywhere, one shot-out tire, and the truck is about to overheat. Worried about snapping an axle, he orders a pit stop not far from where they’ve nearly just been killed in the Kaisut Desert.

"When the first bullet ripped though the back window, I knew exactly what it was," he remembers. "All hell broke loose. They hit the Suburban nine times. A bullet went through the headlight, rupturing the expansion tank."

Nothing worse than a busted truck with gunmen in hot pursuit. Sowerby was still 9000 miles from his finish line at the Arctic Circle. He couldn’t fail—he was already $100,000 in debt from his record-setting drive around the world four years prior.

“No problem,” he says, calmly.

Wait. Back up. How do you end up stranded in the Kenyan desert, frantically patching up a GMC Suburban before a mob of armed hijackers catches up? For Garry Sowerby, it was a mixture of bloodline and truck lust.

His father was a plate-glass delivery driver, eating up miles while sprinting from New Brunswick through Prince Edward Island in a 1965 Ford F-100 half-ton. “On the weekends, he entertained his children with tales of the road,” Sowerby remembers. “Jumping massive snowdrifts, losing the brakes on a hill with a graveyard at the bottom, or just missing a moose on a night drive through the woods kept us spellbound. I’ve always felt my career on the road has been an extension of Dad’s bread-and-butter road trips.”

Sowerby first dreamed of being a pilot but eventually settled into amphibious-vehicle testing for the Canadian Army. Young and intrepid with a thirst for trucks, he founded an adventure-driving company in 1977, aptly named Odyssey International.

So, how does the business of “adventure driving” work? According to Sowerby, it’s all about sponsorships: a Shell logo here for discounted fuel, a Bulova decal there for timekeeping instruments. Calling in to local newspapers from payphones all over the world, giving them scoops on progress and travel anecdotes accounts for some extra scratch. Then, of course, a major manufacturer has to donate the vehicle.

Odyssey International’s big break came from Volvo in the form of a new 245DL 2.1-liter station wagon in 1979.

With navigator Langley at his side, Sowerby piloted the single-carb Volvo more than 26,000 miles, setting the record for fastest global circumnavigation in an automobile. The 74-day accomplishment shaved a month off the standing record and landed Sowerby on the cover of Guinness World Records, but Odyssey had gone $110,000 over budget in the process, managing to rack up $400,000 in expenses. Sowerby explains he and Langley were left with three options.

"We could've gone bankrupt—not very adventurous and goes against our fundamental nature, along with an admission of failure. We could've gone back to 'normal' jobs and paid it off over the next 20 or so years — depressing. Or we could do another drive using what we'd learned, our reputation, and our Guinness World Records photo as financing tools," he said.

He took the plunge.

Now with one drive under his belt, Sowerby carefully orchestrated a more lucrative trip with Langley to establish the fastest-ever drive from the austral of Africa to the top of Europe.

As a black-leather-jacket-and-jeans, self-described "truck dude," Sowerby was the perfect man to represent GMC, a company trying to tether itself to the “rough and tumble” image.

"I scored a 15-minute meeting with (GMC Trucks General Manager) John Rock that lasted three hours," he remembers. "A degree of trust and mutual admiration materialized; a gut feeling that a huge corporation and a couple of road-trippers with a dream could partner and benefit all of us. It would be a convincing testament to the then-new 6.2-liter V8 diesel engine for both the North American and the Middle East markets. Rock liked me, and I liked him. In those days, that carried more weight than it does now."

In 1984, the Maritimers made from Cape Agulhas in a brand new four-speed, eighth-generation diesel Suburban 4x4. The 12,531-mile trek was an onslaught of everything from desert freeways to furrow, roadless jungle.

Still, Sowerby and Langley reached the finish line in Nordkapp, Norway, just 28 days later, a feat that both paid Odyssey’s debts and again scribed their names in Guinness. The boys returned to Canada with thrilling tales of sprinting through the war-torn Middle East, along with a bullet-riddled Suburban as evidence of the shootout with Shifta bandits that nearly claimed their life.

The truck is now housed at the Maritime Motorsports Hall of Fame in Petitcodiac, New Brunswick, where Sowerby is somewhat of a legend.

But even for a man who oozes confidence, the attack was a reality check.

"All I could think about was my six-month-old daughter, Lucy, who would never know her father. I'd be just a story to her: a Dad who was shot and left to rot in the desert setting a record. It all seemed a little pointless," he admits. "I wanted to be anywhere on the planet but where we were."

Soon after the episode, Langley retired from long-distance racing, but Sowerby couldn’t bring himself to follow suit.

"I was married with one daughter and another on the way. There was tremendous family pressure to forget about the records,” he says.

“I realized getting kidnapped or ambushed or going down in an accident was a real possibility, but thought I’d do my homework, make the right plan, and take it on. I was life-insured to the teeth and figured if my time was up, my time was up. I think if I had quit then that—even now, almost 30 years later—I would still be sorry for that decision."

He decided to embark on a magnum opus of adventure driving called the Pan American Challenge: a run from the Western Hemisphere’s southernmost road (in Tierra del Fuego, Argentina) to its northernmost one (Prudhoe Bay, Alaska), all in less than 25 days. The drive even championed a book deal when Rolling Stone editor Tim Cahill joined to write an epic travelogue, Road Fever.

With this 15,000-mile trip, Sowerby sought sole possession of all three internationally recognized endurance-driving records.

In April of 1987, Sowerby and Cahill made due north in a GMC Sierra 3500 4x4 diesel—the very first one off the assembly line. Living on packaged milkshakes, Sowerby negotiated Andes Mountain passes, armed checkpoints, and the Atacama Desert en route to completing the drive in just 23 days. For a man with a five-million-mile memory, the image of finishing still gets him a bit sentimental.

"Looking down the North Slope to the Beaufort Sea was one of the highlights of my life. It was more than just that record: I was the first person to ever hold three longest-drive records in the world, simultaneously," he explains, "a quest that'd taken eight years to plan, finance, and implement."

Even after 15,000 miles, his drive wasn't over.

"We had to drive 500 miles back to Fairbanks to get a celebratory drink," he laughs.

In the 15 years since Road Fever, Sowerby has continued his career as both an adventure driver and writer. He ferried a ’91 GMC Jimmy 4x4 to Iceland using a commercial fishing boat, then drove a perimeter lap of the island, stopping midway to play golf on the frozen volcanic tundra; he journeyed 2000 miles across the U.K.—from London to Lands End and back—in a diesel GMC Sierra without refueling; and he smuggled 4000 children’s books to schools and libraries in post-Soviet Moscow. In 1997, he again circumnavigated the globe, this time setting off from Greenwich, England, driving a Vauxhall Frontera 4x4 SUV.

No laptops. No cell phones. No sat-nav. Just gumption, cunning, and tenacity. For his first record-setting drive in 1979, Sowerby mapped the entire route using hundreds of local bus schedules, tirelessly calculating minutes and hours while plotting various waypoints on a paper map. It was a chance last-minute detour (caused by the outbreak of Sudan’s second civil war) that led him to those armed Kenyans in 1984.

The stakes were higher, the circumstances unsure, and the consequences more grave, giving Sowerby’s exploits a certain unmatched sincerity and authenticity. Still, world records and all, he’s among the most polite and reserved guys you'll ever meet—a genuine Canadian badass.

So, after three decades in the business, what's next?

"There will always be a mission, dream, or an escape that hasn't been done," Sowerby says.

"After all, every road goes somewhere."


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