A New Document

Ian and Sally have got it right. I shudder to think that we might have been dumb enough to go down the road of a sealed-road van - or worse an 'off-road' van that would start getting 'loose' after a few thousand kays down some grotty tracks.

In a quarry off the Top Springs track I met a well known couple who write extensively on touring and bush cooking. He was towing a small model of a popular brand of van marketed as 'off-road' He was happy with the concept as the sleeping areas took up no internal space..... in fact everything expanded out or popped up. This allowed pleanty of spaced for journalism activitiy. He had done a long haul across some fairly rugged interior 'roads' and had more to go to reach Normanton. I knew he usually towed a pretty solid brand of off-road trailer, when questioned about how the little beast was handling it he replied, with a wry grin "You need to be 'expert-level' with a screw gun. No thanks.

Nowdays our only concern is how well the Toyota will stand the pace.

Expensive? What's price peace of mind when you are out beyond woop-woop.

We have friends with a very nice european styled road van. They like to get get out to the coast and put up with some gravel travel, albiet very slowly. When parked they have 60L of water in one tank plus a couple of jerries, no solar and two batterries. They run their genny three times a day and use mainly seawater or wash on the smell of a damp cloth. Having seen how well we lived they are now going to spend a considerable sum putting in more tanks and solar panels.

I continually pat myself on the back for going down the road of total independence and rock solid engineering.

John

Hello everyone!
Just reading through what we had written about the process we went through before deciding to buy a bushtracker and we realised another important point we forgot. When we looked at so called "off road" vans we found out that they were really "on road" vans put on a so called "off road" chassis. There seemed tp be no strengthening of the van section at all. So for those out there looking, be aware of this!
Cheers Ian and Sally