truck build 1

You have to have a capable truck here if you’re going to spend any time in the Delta. Most people catch rides with safari vehicles and stick to Moremi Park, but if you’re going to explore there’s quite a bit of preparation involved.

You start here:

BE FORWARD

Click on that Japanese website and you’ll see all kinds of cars going for a song. In fact nearly all the taxis in Maun are from this website, Honda Fits, from about $500. Japan offloads these non-conforming used vehicles to countries that are right hand drive and have no environmental restrictions on older imports. Not a big world market, hence the rock bottom prices.

So you bring one in, pay 30% duty and away you go. The drawbacks:

and

If you’re going to serious modify a truck, there’s only one vehicle to get: a Toyota. At the top there are the Land Cruisers, then the Fortuna, then the Surf.

So I buy a Land Cruiser Prado, mint, with only 58,000K on the clock, ready to go into the shop

Then you take it to Kavango Engineering.

They get these in

Gut them

And turn them into these, for the camps

So we ordered EFS suspension from Australia, a winch and steel front-end from Wild Dog in South Africa, big wheels and tyres, boxes of various smaller offroad essentials, and ended up with this

Nice.

It’s a big 3 row, 7 seater beast, and is being gutted inside now. Part 2 of the build involves building a 185 liter fuel tank, 100 liter water tank, all kinds of electronic stuff, roof rack, shower installation (arrived from the US 2 weeks ago). The dual battery and 60 liter fridge are installed already