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Combining a Campervan with a 4WD

Story and Photos by Budd Stanley

Yes, when you go to Australia, you can rent a campervan. There are several campervan companies willing to serve you with everything from a full-size luxury motorhome to a rundown little Toyota HiAce with a bed, sink and some cupboards fitted into the rear. However, this is Australia, and not only does it offer some truly fantastic off-road scenery and adventures, it is a country where Mother Nature can turn into a bitch, and do her best to rid the world of yeah. My initial reason for coming to Australia was the first aforementioned scenic adventure, but Mother Nature dealt me with the latter, and it’s a good thing I picked the vehicle that I did.

Britz Campervans does something that is quite popular down under, offer a 4WD vehicle with a camperized rear section. My steed for a week would be this smart bit of kit, a late 2000s Toyota Land Cruiser 70- Series Troop Carrier, aka “Troopy,” dubbed the Challenger in Britz’s line-up of 4WD Campers. The Land Cruiser base comes as capable as any Land Cruiser, with solid front and rear differentials and a two-speed transfer case offering up 4WD-high and 4WD-low. Motivation is stirred up lively by a 4.5 turbodiesel V8, sporting 32-valves and DOHC, with Common Rail fuel injection and variable geometry turbochargers. With clean air being sucked through a Safari snorkel mounted on the right-hand side, the engine delivers a very useful 202 hp and 317 lb-ft of torque. As with almost every 4WD in Australia, the Challenger comes equipped with an ARB Bull bar front bumper for the inevitable Roo strike.

However, what makes the Challenger so special is the camperized rear. The rear seats have been removed, replaced with a longitudinal bench with storage under the seats. Across on the driver’s side is a row of cabinets with a 32L fridge behind the driver, a sink, two-burner stove with 3-kg gas bottle and a 50L fresh water tank with exterior shower head. The roof has a ventilated pop-top with four quick-disconnect latches allowing it to rise up nearly a metre, producing standing room in the rear. When night falls, the bench slides out into a double bed, while three platforms slide out at the roof line, creating another single bed in the pop-top. It’s an impressive use of space to offer an extremely versatile living area. Britz even throws in linens, pillows, blankets, kitchen utensils and all the pots and pans required for an off-road adventure.

Flying into Sydney, my plan was to head north along the coast to Coffs Harbour, where I would set out on some of Australia’s most infamous off-road trails. The hills around Coffs Harbour are covered in a thick lush layer of sub-tropical rain forest, strewn with old pioneering, mining and ranch roads from decades gone by. However, Mother Nature is a fierce bitch in these parts, and when it rains, the entire landscape floods, cutting off nearly every valley. It just so happened that I set off from Sydney as the hardest rains of the year hit.

By the time I reached Forster, the rains turned from steady, to hard, to driving, to “holy crap the roads going to wash away.” Windshield wipers at maximum, I only got split-second glimpses of the road before another wave of water crashed against the windshield. The radio was abuzz with road closures, water on roads and the entire North of the country being cut off. Sure enough, the traffic begins to thin, and flashing lights and traffic cones ahead indicate that the road is likely impassable. A State Emergency Services Crew tells me that the road is covered with two metres of water, there is no way to get through for at least a couple of days. So I backtrack to a beach access, and set up camp to wait out the rains.

After losing a couple of days to the flooding, the Coastal Highway finally opens up; however, I’m warned once again that I might not make it much farther. The rain is still pouring from the sky with the utmost of fury. I race for Coffs Harbour, stopping off at a tourist information kiosk along the way for some maps and word of the north. The kindly lady sitting behind the desk asks where I’m going, then lets out a disconcerting chuckle when I say Coffs Harbour then on to Brisbane to drop off the camper. The reply was “you should make Coffs, but good luck with Brisbane, it’s completely cut off.”

In an instant my mind begins to figure out that the trails in Coffs are likely impassable and my main focus was now trying to get the camper back before it's overdue and charges start coming off the credit card.

Blasting through Coffs Harbour, my stomach aching from 12 hours without food, the highway to the town of Woolgoolga came to yet another stop. “The road's flooded over, we may have it open around 3 am.” Yet again, turned back and again, some side road exploring found nothing more than mountains of water trapping me in every direction. Time to find another beach.

The next day I was up at 3 am to check if the road was opened, and to my surprise it was clear all the way to Grafton, but closed just after that. Not good enough; I need to find a way through. A shot up the next road; this one is covered as well, but not as violent. There is already someone out in the middle wading up to his waist in the murky flood water. So, another adventurous soul with a 4WD, and I try our luck.

With an equally capable Nissan Patrol ahead of me making it through, I follow a short minute later. With the transfer case set in 4WD, I ease into the water and get a good wave going off the front bumper. As the depth increases, I hold a good steady speed behind my bow wave, following it up to the opposite shore. A short bit of uncovered roadway leads to another flooded out section, and in I go again. However, this time, the current is much stronger, the depths much deeper, and the truck is starting to drift off to the right around three quarters of the way through. A little counter steering and a slight increase of throttle had me straighten out and climb out onto another shore.

However, my job wasn’t done yet. A couple of hundred kilometres up the road, I was dreading the low lands that were full of water. However, even the highlands were fighting back and a large pile of red mud had obscured the roadway in front of me. This time, 4-Low was locked in and the increased ride height saw me not only safely over the 100 metres of dirt in front of me, but another nasty washout shortly down the road.

Soon, the agricultural lands turned to a mountain pass with the rain just as violent as ever. Having been through this situation for the last few days, I knew that I was now in a race with the water to get down to the lowest point. Great rivers of water were now flowing across the roadway and undermining the side edges. I soon came to a bridge signed “Tamrookum Creek bridge #7.” Having crossed over several bridges before, I was hoping that these numbers would be going up, but I was not very surprised to find “Tamrookum Creek bridge #6” only a short distance down the road. The race was on for “Tamrookum Creek bridge #1” as that will likely be the lowest in the rapidly flattening out terrain, and the most likely to be covered by flood waters. The suspense built as my fears were coming true; each bridge was getting a little lower to the ground, the water getting a little higher as the countdown continued.

Finally I rounded a sharp corner, spraying water to both sides of the road, to find that “Tamrookum Creek bridge #1” was still over the water, at least just as I rocketed over the top, crossing the finishing line. I had felt like I had just won a long distance marathon with Mother Nature.

I may not have reached the epic trails of Coffs Harbour, but the extreme conditions that me and my trusted Challenger made it through made for an even more adventurous trip than I had hoped - one that I never would have been able to complete without the capability and versatility of Britz’s cool camperized 4WD.

The Range Rover's First Luxury Competition Had A Familiar Look

Story by Budd Stanley

Back in 1970, Land Rover changed the way people thought of the SUV, inventing the Luxury SUV segment with the Range Rover. Today, the Range Rover has become its own brand with three very different models that are still the class of a highly competitive field full of BMWs, Mercedes, Cadillacs, Porsches, Volvos, Audis, Lexuses and Inifinitis, all striving to rid the wealthy SUV customer of huge sums of finances. However, back in the '70s, the Range Rover was in a field by itself, up until 1976, when Swiss automaker Monteverdi tried to cash in on a then-growing market.

The Monteverdi Sahara was the answer to the Range Rover, and if you look closely, you might notice something familiar. The International Harvester Scout was an icon in off-road mobility here in North America, and while some were exported to Europe, a select group of Scouts were destined to Basel, Switzerland, where Monteverdi would undertake one of the industry's laziest tactics of badge engineering. At the time, Monteverdi was struggling financially as few were purchasing its line of American-powered, Italian-designed, Swiss-built Grand Turismos. As a result, Monteverdi saw that the Range Rover was gathering an impressive bit of popularity in the Luxury SUV segment, a segment that offers a tremendous amount of profit for manufacturers.

There were few competitors to the Range Rover, and Peter Monteverdi set his sights directly on the British-built soft-roader. In 1976, a prototype of the Sahara was released to the public and production followed soon after. Very little was done to disguise the fact it was a Scout with only a minor grille revision. Powering the Euro-undercover were the International Harvester 345 V8, as well as the Chrysler 5.2L (318 cubic inch) V-8 LA-series engine delivering 152 horsepower, and 440 V8s rated at 320. This gave it a significant power and performance advantage over the 3.5L-equipped Range Rover of the time, while the Sahara was also considered to be better equipped with slight interior design modifications.

Monteverdi saw the need to give its SUV an identity of its own, and the Safari came in 1977 and would start to take a serious stand in distancing itself from the Scout. The Safari featured a new body design based on the Scout's lower portions with the upper sections designed by Fissore. The new look was most definitely an improvement, with a more European flair than the brutish Scout.

However, the Safari kept the same drivetrain options as the Sahara, and Monteverdi maintained that the components were also engineered to be able to accommodate Chrysler’s 7.2L (440 cubic-inch) V8 pumping out an impressive 320 horsepower. In its 5.2L form, the vehicle achieved a maximum speed of 165 km/h and could knock a 0-60 mph run in 13.1 seconds from a standing start. However, it was these engines and the American cars that housed them that had just died off due to the recent fuel crisis, which didn’t seem to affect Monteverdi as the Safari would become its top seller, despite the overall fuel consumption figure of 25.1 L/100 km.

Monteverdi had a reputation as a supercar manufacturer, yet the 1977 domestic market price of CHF 39,000 was only CHF 5,000 higher than that of the Range Rover at that time. However, not much was done about the ride qualities of the rugged American chassis, designed better to tackle South Western Mining territory than the cobblestone lanes of Europe. It was here that the Safari had a distinct disadvantage over the smooth-riding Brit. The driving experience was enhanced by automatic transmission, switchable all-wheel drive, electric windows and a bespoke instrument cluster to help overcome the ride.

However, despite ambitious plans for a new design, production would cease in 1982, and the factory was converted into a museum, the Monteverdi Car Collection, in 1985. But for six short years, the Scout lived a double life of grubby, rugged blue collar and sophisticated European during the start of the SUV boom.