Innehållsförteckning för Spring 2010 från Overland Journal

Overlanders instinctively recognize a hierarchy of style among modes of travel, graded naturally by the commitment needed to accomplish an equivalent route. Do Cairo to Cape Town in a Unicat with a full bathroom, kitchen, and flat-screen satellite TV and, while you’re certainly traveling in style, the overlanding style quotient is pretty low, if you get the difference. Do the same route in a Land Rover 110 or 70-Series Land Cruiser, and your style quotient jumps a good bit. Do it on a BMW GS and it jumps a bunch, and if you accomplish the same trip on something like a DR350, you’ll collect enough style points to earn raised eyebrows and raised glasses at any gathering of travelers. Obscure or fringe vehicles—Lada Nivas, Peugeot 504s, 60s VW Combis, old…

A teenage boy bangs away at a rusted truck hub hanging from a tree—the makeshift alarm clock for 300 students at Manyara Secondary School in northwestern Tanzania. It’s barely 6:00 a.m. as we peel our bodies off the cement floor and are offered tea and white bread for breakfast. The African sun has just poked its head over the vast horizon, throwing a warm glow onto the dusty school grounds. Children saunter around in clusters before eventually gathering around the middle of the courtyard, waiting for their day to begin. “Good morning students,” says a tall man dressed in a grey suit and green tie too short to reach over his bulging belly. “Good morning Headmaster!” they shout back in unison. “Today is a special day for us. We have…

Riders for Health Anyone who has traveled widely in Africa can corroborate this sad truth: There is an abundance of aid—but often the aid is squandered by lack of training and assistance in simple things such as vehicle maintenance or driver training. We see dozens of derelict Land Cruisers and “piki-pikis” (motorcycles) littering the back lots of rural clinics or community organizations—all for want of a simple part or the knowledge to install it. Motorcycle enthusiasts Barry and Andrea Coleman and Randy Mamola noticed this as well during several trips to raise money for children in developing countries. They subsequently founded Riders for Health, an international non-governmental organization whose mission is to ensure that health workers in Africa have uninterrupted access to reliable transportation. Their approach is not to just…

How many people do you know who’ve survived a bite from a black mamba? How about two bites from black mambas? I know such a person. Let me tell you about him. One afternoon a few years ago I stood outside the Foley’s Africa Land Rover shop in Livingstone, Zambia, within sight of the plume of mist that rises from Victoria Falls. I was supposed to stay at and write about the Taita Falcon Lodge, which the builders had perched dramatically on the edge of the Batoka Gorge, the canyon cut by the Zambezi river downstream from the falls. The managers had told me they’d send someone to pick me up, and I took the opportunity to look at the Foley’s operation and its bespoke overlanding modifications and game-viewing coachwork…

Mike Herbert Mike Herbert was born in England in 1956, but for the past 30 years has lived in Norway. Since 1995 he has been to Iceland numerous times with his modified arctic trucks, where he has gained much experience in driving on glaciers and in the harsh terrain of Iceland. Mikes loves the outdoors, especially if the journey is to anywhere there is snow and ice—thus his natural attraction to an expedition to Antarctica. When not dodging crevasses, he enjoys skiing, walking, dog sledging, and photography. Lois Pryce Weary of the daily grind in jargon-infested London media-land, Lois Pryce jacked in her job at the BBC to ride from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego astride her Yamaha XT225. Upon her return she wrote the book of this trip, Lois…

1 It all started with... The triple-tank-slapper approaching a sharp turn in a dirt road, while riding my little Suzuki DR200 during our soft-luggage test (Fall 2009). Cause: inappropriate tires for the conditions, and a rear drum brake that’s easy to lock up. The smooth tires slid effortlessly across the dirt, and the rider behind me thought for sure I would slide off the road and down the hill. 2 Fast-forward six months (and better tires)... To a junkyard in Cataviña, Baja California Norte, where I was having a broken luggage rack welded back together. Cause : overloading a small bike with too much weight, and bombing down miles of washboard roads trying to keep up with a Honda NS650. It was impressive to see a hand-cranked diesel-generator-powered welder in…

If you’re a subscriber to Overland Journal, chances are you’re a fairly healthy person. You may have a couple of minor ailments, perhaps take some ibuprofen now and again for aches and strains, but overall, generally consider yourself to be in good health. As you age, however, chances are good that you’ll develop a few medical issues such as high cholesterol, hypertension, diabetes, or other conditions that require regular medication, or possibly the use of medical “devices.” Clearly these will impact you and your travels, especially if you travel overseas. The most important consideration before traveling to very remote areas or developing countries is to honestly assess your own general health, get a complete physical examination, and discuss your medical conditions with your primary care physician. Your medical issues, where…

Sometimes it’s difficult to tell if my wife is pulling my leg without doing a Google search. The other day while she was in town, I got a call from her in which she described driving up next to a truck swathed in a marketing wrap advertising a product called TotTurf—apparently some sort of padded synthetic playground covering designed to make sure children playing in the dirt don’t have to play in . . . dirt. I said. “Oh, no. Nope. Not buying it. Nice try, though. How’d you think up the name?” She said, “Google it.” So I did. Sigh . . . Ten minutes and several disbelieving Tourette-like outbursts later, I had the whole scoop. TotTurf is a real product, designed to “provide the safest playground environment possible.”…

“Remember that rainy season back in ‘98 when we had to winch the trucks for 17 hours?” “Yeah—or that time that tree stump ripped the brake caliper off the Range Rover’s axle and we ended up using olive oil as a substitute for brake fluid to make it out?” “Right! And what about . . .” Thanks to a second bottle of Chilean Carménère, and the mystique of the hot tropical night, fantastic stories of our past experiences were resurfacing faster than ever. By the third bottle we had switched to the inexhaustible debate: “What’s the better expedition vehicle, Land Rover or Toyota?” All in all, it was a great evening shared with great company. But this story wouldn’t be worth writing about if Bernie hadn’t decided to share with…

Adolph Hitler had a problem in 1939, as he stood over the map in in his command bunker with his finger on Poland and his eyes straying beyond, to France. His Panzer divisions comprised some 3,000 tanks, with attendant support battalions and artillery batteries. Then there were the 1.5 million troops poised to follow hard on the heels of the armored spearhead. They required their own mechanized supply chain. All those vehicles would consume massive amounts of fuel, and in order to ensure the speed of the planned “lightning war” or blitzkrieg (which, despite what you’ve read countless times, was apparently never the official name of the campaign), that fuel had to be transported in huge numbers of sturdy, leakproof, easily handled containers. Fortunately Hitler had already had his best…