When overlanding you cross paths in campgrounds, which can be good as you spend a lot of time on your own on the road. Not that I’m complaining but I am married and women like company. I enjoyed Armin’s company and he showed me some upgrades he’d done to his home and that we want to have done to our van when we get to the shop in Uruguay. So we had some electrical boy talk.
We met Liz and Armin here in Arequipa, from German speaking Switzerland in a Toyota four wheel drive camper. They had a couple of problems, the rear differential had a crack and the box on the back was coming unscrewed from the frame. I know we have no transmission right now but everyone has problems sooner or later. It’s life on the road…
If you look closely above you’ll see Armin chatting with a German traveler and next to his leg is a gray box. I was sitting reading and I looked up and I realized how different we are in some ways. When I empty our toilet tank I try to do it unobtrusively when other campers aren’t around, perhaps early when Rusty wakes me up or when everyone is in town. Europeans just haul their crap right through the campground. I’m going to have to harden up.
They are travelers and they told me a story about driving through Cameroon when they were overlanding Africa a few years ago in a different Toyota pickup, a Hilux with a camper shell. They were driving from Cameroon to the border with the Congo and it was not a good road, it was dirt turned to mud and there wasn’t a lot of traffic except for military vehicles patrolling the border and resupplying frontier posts every month. This story is another reason I don’t want four wheel drive by the way, as I’d get into just as much trouble as they did. I was in Cameroon on a motorcycle (a Yamaha SR500 if you care) in 1979 and I put the bike on a train to avoid the washed out highway. They drove.
They came to a puddle in the road in the jungle and they figured they could cope but as it happened the puddle got very deep suddenly and drowned their pickup with water coming over the windowsill. Very long story short the Toyota was stuck in that puddle for three weeks until a military truck pulled them out. It took two more months to import a new engine and transmission from Germany and dry out their home to get back on the road. “It was a difficult time,” Armin said in a mastery of understatement.
You can see in the photo above their new(er) Toyota has a big black air pipe sticking up from the engine, known as a snorkel. Telling the story Liz laughed and said “everything would have been okay if we’d had a snorkel” thus preventing water getting into the engine. We have adopted the phrase “if only we had a snorkel” when something goes wrong.
I guess the point is there’s always someone worse off than you and perhaps their story explains why breaking a gearbox isn’t necessarily the worst thing in the world. And no, we have no plans to overland Africa. Don’t be caught without a snorkel.
