Wayawaya

New headlights and rock sliders back on

Sunday, August 14, 2011

During the week Brian finished working on the new headlights. The car is now almost ready to go for its first inspection! However, that turned out to not go the way we had planned, but we’ll see what happens, it might work out alright. The matter of what to do with the car during winter had been giving us headaches for months but now we finally made a plan – we wanted to have it registered in a few weeks, drive it for a couple of months to try it out and keep it going, then take it off the road and leave it parked during winter and start it up again around early spring next year. We would then sell our Peugeot and drive around in the Land Cruiser until the trip. But – turns out there are no appointments for inspection until November! October if we’re lucky…

But we’ll see, there might be other ways to do it. I have only checked with the main company so far, and there might be other companies doing inspections like this. So hopefully we will be able to drive it for a bit this year and then take it off the road. (Driving it throughout winter would just be a big hassle. We would have to empty it of all fluids that could freeze and as much as those tyres have a great grip, they don’t on ice apparently.)

Anyhow, so the work on the headlights went great. Yet another modification that makes the car look like new again!

This is what the old headlights looked like.

old headlights

Feels like looking at a blind car, doesn’t it?

To the left, new headlight, to the right, old one.

And switched on…

Both new headlights mounted. Looking good, hey?

And switched on…

Yesterday I dropped Brian off at the garage, went and worked for a few hours at the grocery store where I work extra, and then went back to the garage. We had taken the rock sliders off a while back to paint them and to sort out the exhaust and Brian was busy mounting one of the rock sliders back on as I got there. How he did it by himself is still a mystery to me! They’re really heavy and it’s precision work you have to do on your back under the car.

The right side rock slider, ready to be mounted.

Brian just had to fix some things with the new exhaust system before putting the rock slider back on. (Which I now obviously helped out with. I don’t only stand aside watching, taking photos!)

Brian’s view.

There are massive amounts of sand stuck here and there under the car – this is like 1% of it all – and it comes out as you do work on it. (Preferably straight into Brian’s face of course. Sand has an amazingly annoying attitude in all forms other than as a beach, agree?) It makes you wonder where this sand came from? Sahara? Namibia? Argentina?

Before…

…and after.

Looking good!

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At the garage

Saturday, August 13, 2011

I wanna go nooow!!!

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The Long Way Down

Saturday, August 13, 2011

A while back we sat glued to the couch watching Ewan McGregor and Charlie Boorman travel around the world on motorbikes as one of our tv channel showed a rerun of the documentary. We knew they had also done a trip from Europe to Africa and just recently we managed to get hold of the dvd. Without blinking we watched the six episodes in three nights, sometimes pointing out the differences between their trip and ours, sometimes giggling like kids at the thought of us getting to experience similar things. Starting up the third or fourth episode Brian said “It’s funny, it feels like I know these guys.”

It was a great inspiration watching the Long Way Down documentary and we felt we could really learn something from their mistakes, number one being have more time to travel. They only had three months and constantly had to get back on the road. Other than that, the major difference is obviously also that we travel by car. Oh, and that they have a crap load of money compared to us. It was a bit frustrating seeing how they rented a huge warehouse and made it into a garage, workshop and office, just to prepare the equipment for the trip. But they took pretty much the route we want to take and they saw a lot of the things we would like to see. Whether you’re into travelling or not, the whole thing is quite entertaining.

Click here to watch all the episodes on Youtube.

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Working on the car

Thursday, August 11, 2011

It might seem weird that we spend so much time working on the car if it was already equipped for a long trip. It sure was, but there are different reasons to why we’re doing modifications to it:

- After some research we knew importing it into Sweden was the best option. (There’s really no way we could have legally driven it around here for a year otherwise.) In order to do that we have to make sure it follows Swedish traffic rules and regulations. Since it’s a right hand drive we’ve had to buy new headlights which are made for driving on the right side of the road. We’ve taken off the tinting on the front windows, since this is not allowed in Sweden, but will most likely redo the tinting before the trip, since it probably works wonders on long, steaming hot sunny days in the desert.

- When importing it as a Swedish vehicle we’re planning on registering it as a light truck instead of as a passenger car. This reduces taxes by two thirds or so, from about 10 000 SEK to 3 000 SEK a year. In order to do that though, we have to remove the back seats and put up load bars to separate the space. We’ll have to change back just before the trip.

- Lastly, there are just some modifications we wanted to do because the previous group travelling with the cruiser were four adults and a baby and there’s only the two of us. We’re simply adjusting things to what will work the best for us, for example moving the fridge to the back space and putting a “sun deck”/storage space on the roof rack where the previous group had a second tent.

You will probably also find that Brian does another 100 things to the car just because he can.

He loves it. He loves the car and he loves working on it. As I was standing cleaning the previously tinted windows the other day, he sat down for a smoke break next to the cruiser and just looked at it and said “I can’t believe I own a Landcruiser. It’s been a dream all my life to have my own Landcruiser.” He looked at it, with its half finished paint jobs and other ongoing projects. “Okay, so it’s not a new and modern and fancy Landcruiser. But this… this is a work horse of note.”

So how’s everything going with the importing process?

We have notified the Swedish traffic authorities that we’ve bought the vehicle and taken it into the country. The first thing you have to do is called an origin control. You fill in an application and send it in together with the certificate of registration in the previous country and a copy of the receipt from when you bought the car. We received a document saying we had passed the origin control a couple of weeks back.

Now the next step is to book an appointment for a first inspection, a so called registration. We’re going to do that once the headlights are on and the work on the car is pretty much finalized, which should be shortly if everything goes according to plan. Once passing that, you usually have to go through a normal inspection as well, like the ones you do once a year. Might sound a bit unnecessary but it has to do with the age of the car and stuff. After all of this you will receive your new bright and shiny Swedish number plates and can buy an insurance and start driving.

The total costs of importing a car the way we do it (i.e. from another EU country) is about 3 000 SEK. That’s only counting the fees of applying for origin control and inspections, not counting insurance and other stuff adding up.

There is a lot of research needed behind a project like this – unless you’ve done it before – and a lot of phone calls made to the traffic authorities (Transportstyrelsen), the vehicle inspection office (Bilprovningen) and the Automobile Association (Motormännen). There have been a lot of tricky decisions to make. We still haven’t entirely figured out whether we should sell the old Peugeot we drive around in normally and use the Landcruiser up until the trip, or if we should take it off road and leave it parked during winter. Both options have pro’s and con’s and it’s all for another day. We’ll keep you posted!

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Definitely going into the book bag

Wednesday, August 10, 2011

The title is The Ultimate Africa Atlas, and it sure is a good name. It has country maps, city maps and a great selection of national parks to visit and sights to see all across the continent.

This book was a gift from Chris, when she came and visited us a few weeks ago. Chris, who I like to call my sister although she isn’t by blood. Chris, who was there from the start when Brian and I met. Chris, who’s been with us through good times and bad.

Chris and I in Maputo 2007

Thank you, Chris! (Not just for the book.)

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Some FAQ’s at this point

Tuesday, August 9, 2011

When are you leaving?

We’re hoping to be able to leave Sweden in August 2012. We thought it would be a good date since it will be Brian’s anniversary to how many years he’s spent here, but there are more practical reasons to it as well. That way we leave in the warm season and don’t have to equip the car for winter driving or bring winter clothes. We’ll be crossing the Sahara desert during the winter season, which means less excessive day heat and pretty cool nights. We’ll be coming into southern Africa during the warmest period, but we don’t mind. I guess the only bad thing is that we’ll enter Moçambique during cyclone season…

How long are you going to be on the road for?

We decided to be out travelling for about six months. It’s flexible, depending on how long we’ll feel like being out there and how long our budget allows us to be out there. We heard about guys who did North Cape to Cape Town in a month. But what did they see along the way? I don’t want blurry photos of the pyramids because I didn’t have time to stop! We also watched the documentary The Long Way Down where Ewan McGregor and Charlie Boorman do this trip in about three months. They were really pressured and stressed. A lot of people who have already been out overlanding say six months is perfect. Longer than that, you might get too tired of it.

How do you apply for visas?

We will be applying for visas to the four or five first countries we get to after the EU region well in advance of the trip. We’ll then have to apply by the border of each country as we go. This is how most people do it and it shouldn’t be a problem, except border crossings are usually never easy anyway…

How do you travel with a car through all these countries?

You need kind of like a passport for your car as well, a so called carnet de passage. This is a bunch of documents for each country you’re planning on passing through and they need to be stamped. In advance you pay a deposit fee calculated on the value of your vehicle and which countries are on your agenda. The stricter one country’s import regulations are, the higher the deposit. Visiting Egypt makes the fee go up considerably, since they are apparently very frantic about who gets to import a car there. We’re counting on about 40 000 SEK. This however will be paid back to us when finishing the trip – if we have all the stamps to prove we haven’t left the Landcruiser along the way somewhere. Each country has three documents in the carnet de passage, one to be stamped and kept at entry border, one to be stamped and kept at exit border and one to be stamped at both entry and exit which we will keep as proof. Each country’s authorities are then responsible for bringing their two documents together to determine that we have not left our vehicle within their borders during our visit. The third copy that we will keep, we return to the issuing office in order to get our deposit back.

Are you camping or staying in hotels?

We’re planning on mostly camping. We have the tent on top of the car and will be able to cook our own food. We will also be able to rinse off with water from the water tank. In a lot of places there will be campsites, in some places you can camp wild. When we get tired of camping and desperately long to sleep in a hotel bed, we will.

Are you bringing a gun?

No. With a gun you will most likely provoke people much more than without one, and possibly trigger a dangerous situation. However, in the unlikely event of ending up in a threatening situation, several things in the car can be used in self defense, e.g. fire extinguishers and various tools. When it comes to wildlife, respect the animals and generally they will respect you.

What does overlanding mean?

Overlanding, we think, was simply made up by people (overlanders) who tend to travel long distances over land using any form of land based transport. E.g. bus, horse, foot or in our case a really cool Landcruiser.

How are you going to be able to blog during the trip?

I will be bringing a laptop and I’ll have power plugs so I can sit and work on it in the car, in the tent or under the awning. I’ll be writing blog posts and editing photos continuously and post them whenever I can go online, usually at internet cafés in towns we pass through. My goal is to update the blog once a week, but then I might be able to post reports from several days.

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Rewind: Getting the car

Sunday, August 7, 2011

Okay, so soon after making the decision to do the trip, we started looking for a car. From reading other overlanders blogs and doing research, we realized that the sooner we have the car, the sooner we can really start preparing for the trip. The car is the biggest expense and once you have it, there’s nothing stopping you. Without a car it’s easy to push things forward and be lazy, but with a huge machine waiting in the garage you have no excuse but to really make the trip happen.

After being in touch with a few Landcruiser owners, we eventually found what we were looking for. An HDJ80 from 1993 in good shape. And it was almost more than we could wish for – since this car had been out on an expedition before it already had all the gear needed. We could instantly stop thinking of getting all the extra equipment and trust me, when your head is full of the million thoughts before a trip like this, that was nice.

We told the owners, Ivan and Dajana Brgic, our plans and they were happy to sell the car to us. Now we just had to make a plan to get the car from Croatia to Sweden…

A couple of weeks later, Brian and I stood at the airport waiting to board a plane to Rijeka. Brian looked at me and said “We’re now going to a country we’ve never been to before, to stay with people we don’t know and buy a car we’ve never seen”. I said “yup” and then we just smiled at the craziness of the whole situation.

Ivan and Dajana, and their little daughter Naomi, met up in Rijeka and we went to their home village outside the city of Pula, where the car was parked. We spent a few hours familiarizing ourselves with the Landcruiser, checking out its interior and exterior and learning about all the equipment. Not all bedrooms come with an instructor’s manual!

That evening we got to be tourists while Dajana took us around Pula and we badly wished we had more time to spend in Croatia. We’re probably the only ones who have been there for one day only! But we only had three days to do this, so we had to get moving. We had closed the deal with Ivan and Dajana by going to the bank and spent the night in their apartment. In the morning, after scoffing Dajana’s delicious pancakes, we set direction north. First, however, we had to fill up with fuel and finding
the fuel station and then finding our way back to the highway probably took an hour and a half…

We drove through beautiful Slovenia only stopping at a fuel station to get the vignette sticker that you put on your windscreen. Same thing through just as beautiful Austria, where we also stopped to have lunch. This was just after that outbreak of EHEC. It was a bit weird doing everything to avoid the veggies on your plate!

Then things started happening that we hadn’t calculated on. Things like traffic jams. We had no idea why or for how long we’d be stopping, we just watched with fascination how the Austrians, obviously quite used to these things, soon stepped out of their cars and started chatting to each other.

Because we spent so much time waiting with the Austrians, we didn’t make it further than into southern Germany the first day. By the time we reached Munich it was already dark. Surely, Munich had to be the one city where I hadn’t done research on campsites. We were just too sure we’d make it further. Classical foolishness. But things went alright anyhow.

We tried to avoid getting into the city and that’s exactly where we ended up of course. Stopping at a fuel station I was advised of a motel nearby. The motel turned out to be a fancy wanna be-hotel way above our budget. But the guys at the reception were incredibly helpful and not only told us of a campsite in the city, but called it up to make sure it was still open and gave us a map!

After a couple of wrong turns trying to read an extremely detailed map of a tiny corner of Munich in the dark (tinted windows are made for driving in the Sahara desert at day, not in big cities at night), we found the campsite probably 10 minutes before they were closing up for the day. We asked the old guy at the reception where we could grab something to eat and he said there was a Bavarian restaurant a 5 minute walk away through the forest. If we had a torch.

I tried to silence my grumbling stomach while we parked and put the tent up and prepared for the night. We then grabbed a torch and went out on our search for this Bavarian restaurant. We couldn’t help but feeling a bit like Hans and Greta as we walked along a stream, waving spiderwebs and branches off our faces in the dark and finally reached a lit up area and saw this massive yellow building with brown shutters and flowers by each little window.

It got even more surreal when the only people we met at the restaurant were all dressed up in traditional German clothing. A woman came towards us in this giant skirt, corset, big bosom and a beer keg in each hand. We figured they were a wedding party so we stayed out of their way and asked a waiter if we could eat something. But no, we were too late and had to be happy with a big glass of beer.

I realized how tired Brian was when he, being the most enthusiastic beer drinker I know, only made it through half his glass. He had after all driven the entire day and it had taken its toll on him. We soon walked back to the campsite and fell asleep in the roof tent, for the first time. I only remember concluding how much I liked it, how nice and cosy it was, before fading away into the sleeping world and Brian was probably there already.

After Munich we kept going north and passed city after city on the map. In the afternoon we switched and I drove for 2-3 hours. But it was quite tricky, I wasn’t used to driving the type of car, and a right hand drive without a rearview mirror on top of that, being so top heavy it sometimes felt like we were going to take off. Which is not a nice feeling when you’re going at 120 km/h on a three lane highway. So Brian got back behind the wheel and towards the evening we reached Denmark.

By now passing country borders was almost not a noticeable event, only a sign by the side of the road. It was only entering Slovenia that we had to show our passports. Driving on the autobahn turned out to be a fairly boring activity and being spoiled with the gorgeous mountainous landscapes of the south, the view got a bit boring as well.

It was dark by the time we drove across the bridge between Denmark and Sweden. We called up my folks telling them we were aiming to make it there, another 2.5 hours away. Stocking up on Coke, Red Bull and coffee (!) we both sat eyes wide open the rest of the way and finally made it to Växjö, my hometown, at about 2 o’clock in the morning.

The following morning the car attracted a bit of attention and we happily demonstrated it to mom, dad and some of their neighbors. Then we packed up and headed for Stockholm, the last stretch of about six hours.

The trip back from Croatia went great although it would have been nice not to have such a tight deadline, but to actually be able to make some more stops in Europe along the way. Without a doubt, we enjoyed travelling with the Land Cruiser and the trip really gave us a taste for more!

Go to the photo gallery for a heap more photos from this trip!

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