You may spot that this is not a Jeep and has no tangible links with a Jeep, but it is a true desert truck, so there’s the link. This is my pal Mohammed. Mohammed, with his pal Sulliman, cooks for us in Germa, Libya, where I shall be for January. Germa is a dusty little breeze block shithole in the middle of bumfucknowhere about 700 miles south of Tripoli. Mohammed has had his Datsun pick up for at least ten years to my knowledge and it’s always looked exactly like this. He did point out, with great pride, that he had bought a NEW brake master cylinder recently and for the first time in a few years revelled in having brakes. They have a sort of M.O.T. type test in Libya, but they only test the lights and do it every two years. To get round this most Libyans in the desert towns share a set of lights to be fitted for the test, then removed and passed on for someone else. One headlight and one rear light is, obviously, quite enough for any car.
6 comments:
Now that's what I call a truck. We're missing something aren't we? We should all keep our cars until they drop.
i quite agree - older, simpler, BAGS more style and individuality. Some of the blandness of modern eurocar has come from design-by-windtunnel and apparently we all need to keep up. I'm hoping that the series 2 will perform well under such tests, i got rid of a cart sprung Land Cruiser a few years ago with 265,000 on the clock and going like new, we still have Subaru pick up that i bought new in '84, it now runs around the yard on light duties with a whole rod/piston/head missing - sort of 3 wheels on my waggon style - jiattempts rd
A three cylinder Soob would blend in seamlessly out there and give an eternity of service ON the road. On one trip I saw a group of 8 bewildered Libyans standing at the side of the road looking balefully at a Peugeot 504, 7 seater station wagon. The Pug was sitting on it's floor pan, having deposited the rear axle and torque tube some 50 yards up the road. It had quite simply fallen apart with rust. No doubt, a week later, it was back on the road.
Toby, could you ask Mohamed where he got that fantastic blanket/seat cover, I've tried Peter Jones but they seemed very worried. If you come across some I could do with enough to make a suit please. Secondly could you also ask Mohamed if he ever has carb' icing problems running his truck with no air cleaner or means of carb' heat. Obviously there are the attendant emission issues arising from,I suspect, allowing the crank case to breath un-restricted to the atmosphere - I think I may have spotted the cause of global warming !
He wouldn't last ten minutes in Corby.
Talking of Corby, which I obviously don't do very often, did you know that they bought the old concrete flower troughs off Leicester City Council, the ones that used to parade down Charles Street? They of course still have the fleur-de-lys emblem on them. Until some council dimwit gets them sandblasted off. Keep 'em as they are Corby, they are a reminder of a very old-fashioned concept called civic pride, something of which you could learn much.
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