Independent overland travel through Africa in a Unimog called Moglet

The Requirements
So, what did we need our mode of transport to do for us? The following is a list of some of the considerations - its a long way from exhaustive, but it gives you a clue as to how wide ranging our discussions have been!

• Roof tent or sleeping inside?
• How much water can we carry?
• How much fuel should we have?
• What kind of climates will be be in?
• Are we likely to need space for a third person?
• If we sleep inside, do we want a permanent bed?
• How seriously should we take self recovery?
• How likely is it to break?
• Howe easy would it be for us to fix it?
• Are parts easily available?

Land Rovers seem to be the popular choice... Their longstanding history with overland travel made them seem like the obvious choice for us too, but a little more thought into exactly what we wanted our machine to be able to too pretty quickly ruled them out - which is a real shame in some ways as they have so much character.

Pinzgauers are great fun and very quirky looking... In some ways, they ticked more boxes for us than the Landy, they're offroad capabilities are incredible. Trouble is, they're not exactly everywhere, and so when something goes wrong (as its bound to do), parts arent going to be easy to come by. There's only one major supplier in the UK, and they're a private outfit, so if they decide to quit the business and we need some spares shipped out...

So that led us rather neatly to the Unimog!

We decided that, although a roof tent on a Landy is the popular way to go, it wasnt for us. We'd whittled down the destinations list a bit and decided Africa would do for starters! With that in mind, we'd need to bolt on larger fuel and water tanks to the Landy, to be sure we could be self sufficient. Even with minimal gear and roof tent, all that weight would put the chassis at close to 100% of whats it's capable of. Not so bad, you might say, until you read around a bit and realise that some pretty wise minds agree that a vehicle you know is going to be put under a degree of stress shouldnt be loaded to more than 70% of its capacity, just to give all the moving parts room to do their thing. Have a look at the Books section if you want to know what to read to get more all on the technical calculations.