Volks Wagen
Traveller
Welcome to this web site!
This site is about travel, and more importantly
about the big wide world out there just waiting to be explored.
It is specifically about our VW adventures but includes other locations such as
the USA and New Zealand where we met some wonderful people and enjoyed the
magnificent National Parks and scenery.
You don't have to be an arctic explorer to
enjoy the benefits of travel in a camper van and what better way than
with a Volkswagen campervan first making the market with the Split Screen,
then later
by the introduction of the Type Two, or bay window which is where I discovered
the
world of travel in 1977 driving in a 1970 left hand drive VW Bay window, which
took me overland from London to the Middle East passing through Turkey, Syria,
Lebanon, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, back through Saudi to the Arab Emirates
then across Saudi again to Jordan, Syria through Turkey and then on the home stretch
to Holland to meet up with Hanna, my wife who I had met the year whilst
working as an Entomologist in Kathmandu, Nepal.
More details of this venture can be found on
the journey page of this web site about
my experiences in the Middle East, from which I
wrote a book called "Inshallah, Odyssey to the Middle East"
which took 6 months and covered 27,000 Km overland.
It took several years until 1990 before we
bought a VW type 25 water cooled 1.9 litre pannel van for £950 that I had
intended to convert but with the purchase of a new house was sold a year later
for £3,500 so not a bad investment only requiring a new exhaust.
My wife and I are also into WW2 Jeeps and a succession of 1943 Willys and now a
1944 Ford kept our ventures going from the 50th Normandy anniversary in 1994
till the present day.
We purchased a 1973 LHD 1.6 liter petrol Californian Camper off the internet
from an American couple, now our very good friends Ed and Ceeney Dobson. We took
the bay VW to France and completed a tour of the Pyrenees and during our
ownership overhauled the engine, Painted the body work before deciding to go to
VanFest in Malvern where we could get up close to the VW T25 Syncro vans that
were there.
We were converted so after posting an ad on line we were lucky to obtain a 1986
2.1 litre petrol T25 Syncro Joka which had diff locks back and front and with
the G or crawler gear which has bee. very useful for hill climbing especially
when towing a 1.5 ton load including a trailer and Jeep. This we have converted
to run on LPG (Autogas) which has been relatively trouble free since 2006 and
with the addition of LPG garage data bases in our TomTom SatNav has always
provided us with good service at a much cheaper price than Petrol or Diesel as
well as the benefit of the burn products being just CO2 and Water.
