Adventures I’ve had: bribing border guards with my last cash at night crossings in Malaysia, climbing active volcanoes in Sumatra and choking in clouds of poisonous gas, listening to the roar of the winds camped at 20,000 feet on a hanging glacier in Nepal, being too close for comfort at a taco stand with hit men from a Mexican drug cartel. But in our Sprinter? Not so much, at least so far.
All that’s pretty tame stuff for Lucy and Rory Macdiarmid from the UK – having sold their circa-1460 millhouse (complete with water wheel), in the fall of 2010 they set off across the Channel in their Iglhaut 4×4 Sprinter, bound for Africa. In the meantime, they’ve emerged unscathed from two revolutions (the Libyan and the Egyptian), driven the road to Hell (a.k.a the Marsabit Road) through Kenya, given the Sprinter camper van tour to curious Masai tribespeople (and giraffes and zebra) deep in the bush, struck off-road through the desert navigating by GPS, changed flat tires while on the look out for lions, that sort of thing. At this point, they’ve reached the southern tip of Africa, and the Van Plan may need more thought as to the next direction…
They follow in the figurative footsteps of Klaas & Jose, an adventurous Dutch couple who toured the deserts and mountains of Iran and Oman in 2002 and 2003 in their Iglhaut 4×4 Sprinter camper, and then headed onwards through Greece. Seems like a deep love of the Peloponnese peninsula, its mountains, people, flora and fauna has delayed further travels for now…
Another intrepid pair is Tree & Stevie Trujillo, from the US. Tree, a champion kayaker and founder of Outdoorplay, a paddlesports Web site, started road-tripping in his Sprinter camper van around the US, climbing and paddling. Fortunately, he met lovely Stevie in Las Vegas, and his new shared universe and ideas expanded to longer journeys through South America. Tree says: “One night we live in a San Diego zip code, the next night our front yard view is Baja Mexico. We don’t own couches, stereo systems or TVs. No coffee tables or lawn mowers. That’s the trade off. We’re light. Everything we own is in the van and we can move the van anywhere. That’s the dream of Sprinter Life.” The two adventurers wax philosophic about their epic travels and the larger journey of life on SprinterLife, and were last seen in Ecuador, heading south…
Then there’s Peter – after practicing medicine in Germany for over 30 years, Peter Mersmann was possessed by “reiselust”. Yes, another Iglhaut Allrad 4×4 Sprinter came into the picture, this one a Professional 730 cube-body RV conversion by Koblenz’s Bocklet, and Peter’s Sprinter was soon deep in the hold of a cargo ship bound for foreign lands. Arriving in Alaska, he started south through big skies and tall mountains. How did the Sprinter hold up? You’ll have to see Peter on the Road…
Good to know that as long as there are people with a taste for real adventures, with real risks and uncertain paths, there will always be stories like theirs – and sometimes in a Sprinter camper! Sets me reflecting on the quote from St. Augustine from the Sprinter Life blog: “The World is a book, and those who do not travel read only a page.”
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