Our Car

We are traveling through Africa in a 1984 Land Rover series III LWB/109 (Stage 1 V8).
It's really a magnificient car which we bought in South Africa at the start of our trip. The previous owner (Mr. Armstrong) took great care of the car and completely renewed the drive-train, so our Landy has a brand new 3.5L V8 engine which runs very quietly and is very strong and a not all that bad fuel-consumption

The Landy was called Mohammed but we renamed it Pumba (the warthog from the Disney movie The Lion King) as we liked that better.

Pumba has no powersteering but is fitted with the famous Land Rover airconditioning (flaps that open to the front), so we will grow nice biceps and survive the heat as long as we drive over 40kph.

After we bought Pumba, we started fitting him with some overland necessities like a long range fuel tank which brings our total capacity to 150 liters. Furthermore we've got a rooftop tent fitted, dual battery system + Engel fridge, and we took the back-seats out to create more space. We also fitted an immobilizer to make stealing a little more difficult.

Preparing the car for the trip took us nearly three weeks of hard work. A long time compared to our normal preparation time for traveling, but very short compared to most overland-travelers. You do have to think about a few things: What spares to take? What tools? Camping gear? How to store everything without the boxes flying through the car?

Before departure our car-mechanics knowledge was limited to the excellent course on car mechanics by Tjeerd de Jager which both of us did in Holland and proved to be amazingly useful. But the real knowledge came by experience and after a couple of months of African roads we think we are passed the stage of trainee-mechanic. It makes the trip different from previous travels and also very interesting.

Pumba will be our home for the coming months so it's not just throwing your packback in the car and off we go. We needed to buy some camping gear: