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:
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
I’m going for a clean all-white build, unlike the traditional Africa vehicles, which look more like this, which cost 250K US to complete
If you’re curious what sort of (professional photographer) person does this, here’s the URL on the side of the truck: JENS
Comments
Tires look great!!! You’re rocking it
So are you in India right now.