How they do things in Europe

Thanks for the feedback, Tony, I can relate to the "pushbike" comment- I rode my "pushbike" from Cairns to Darwin when I lived in Australia for a year! I think the van's carburetor would whinge at 5,000 Meters!
Sounds like you are having quite the adventure :)

People do the Panamerican Highway on pushbikes and you don't need to have 4wd to do it provided you pick your weather conditions. There is also Ruta 40 which is the iconic Argentinian highway running along the eastern side of the Andes. That goes to 5000 metres - 16400 feet so the air gets a bit thin and cold and VERY windy



We didn't linger as we had to get down far enough to sleep for the night so we didn't end up with altitude sickness. As it was, it wasn't a very pleasant night waking up every few minutes gasping for breath - called Cheyne-Stokes Respiration.

As far as South America, I am hoping to drive my Dodge B200 van down the Pan American Hwy (except for the Darien Gap, of course) in a few years. It is not a 4X4 and I have followed some blogs of other people that have successfully done this in standard vehicles, but I would love your take on this if you've done it or from anyone on the site who has done this...
Thanks!

Small world. Unless "Slow Food +snail" is a commercial logo, that truck was parked in the next row to us at the camp last week.

Saw this one in Brookings, OR a couple of years ago;

Yes, every vehicle has limitations of on and off-road performance and the bigger the vehicle the more limitations it probably has. Conversely the bigger it is the more long term comfort is possible.

Obviously, I wasn't able to get the optimum vehicle in every situation because that takes time and you need to be on the spot and since I bought three of the five current vehicles off the internet sight unseen, it was an even bigger gamble than usual.

Still, we managed pretty well. The Airstream Class A has got me places and roads where many wouldn't go from bottom of Mexico to Alaska, The F350 does pretty well on average in South America, and the Hobby is pretty standard size in Europe.

If I had to have just one vehicle to handle all those situations, it would be the OKA. No question.

One thing about those expedition trucks that is hard to change though is the fact that they are trucks with suspensions to match and even with expensive air seats, a few hours on the road can be very hard work. Thankfully ride comfort is one thing the OKA designer got exactly right.

The Mecedes team made one huge mistake. They thought they knew better than the locals. Standard procedure is to lower tyre pressure so the tyre becomes a very useful part of the suspension and SLOW DOWN. Feel the tyres and the shocks at each stop and adjust speed to suit. Pretty simple really and foolproof as well.
We had a couple of high-end large 4WD towing high end Kimberly Campers come up very fast behind us on the Canning and they radioed to ask if they could get past. I replied sure, we'll dawdle along behind and pick up the pieces. Got a big ha,ha,ha in reply. We've got racing shocks on everything. If you went a bit faster, you could ride on the tops of the corrugations. Blah, blah, blah And they blasted past in a shower of sand and dust.

We caught up with them at well 33 the next day - bashing and hacksawing away bits of steel making up extra brackets to keep their fancy campers from falling apart. One of those satisfying schadenfreude moments that got more intense every time he broke one of his rapidly-dwindling supply of hacksaw blades. I did think of ambling over and offering him the use of my electric tools, but figured he needed to do it the slow way for once..

Caught up with another fast mover halfway down a dune transferring all the contents of his brand new roofrack toinside the vehicle and trying to wire the rack onto the roof to take it back home for repair. These scalloped dunes (with the bumps on each side out of phase causing violent sideways rocking at speed) plus speed were the reason. Go slow and the track ends up better than when you started. Go fast and it and the vehicle get worse.



It isn't all sand though and there is a lot of rocky stuff to test out the tyres

Tony,

Looking at your Picasa Album photos, it appears like you have spent a lot of time in standard non-expedition Class A and Class C motorhomes in conditions and campsites very similar to some we have been in with our Class C here in the West.

Reading about the Mercedes Benz experience, it seems like shock absorbers was one of their weak points. It's easy to beat shocks to death on rough roads when vehicle speeds are a bit high for conditions, which probably was the case with the MB team .... as they had a time schedule to meet for the entire trek. I suspect that with respect to shock wear, it's probably the speed of long-throw actuations that is more brutal on them than the number of long-throw actuations.

Great Album, by the way!

Sounds like a lot of Australian dirt "roads"

Yes, I guess 2000 kilometres of soft sand dunes alternating with constant washboarded roads between the dunes and tough shrubs growing over the road might fit the bill. That is the Canning Stock Route. The one that brought down the crack Mercedes Benz factory 4WD team while Betty and I trundled the full length in an unmodified (but very overweight) 20 year old Australian built 4WD truck without incident.

http://ninemsn.carpoint.com.au/news/2011/large-4x4/mercedesbenz/big-shock-for-mercedesbenz-expedition-26071 and the links below the story tell part of the story, albeit in typical journalistic puffery-speak. Straight out of the factory unmodified vehicles??? Yeh, right!

This story is possibly slightly more honestly-written But only slightly as this reader pointed out

With all due respect, your article should have mentioned that this journey was ONLY able to be completed after parts for 6 of the 7 vehicles were flown in from Melbourne (including the need to specially charter an aircraft to get those parts to the remote location).
Without that key information, it is totally disingenuous to suggest that these vehicles satisfactorily completed the journey.
Particularly the references to other makes that were passed abandoned seems rather poor, when perhaps the owners of those vehicles did not have the benefit (nor bank balance) to be able to call on flown in help?

To sum it up, Mercedes crashed and burned on the Canning Stock Route but even then they tried to make the best of it by selective reporting that fooled nobody

THIS PAGE - which had the Australian four-wheel drive community rolling in the aisles.

Or last time across the Simpson Desert (also hundreds of soft sand dunes) when rare rains turned the last 50km into a grey-clay bog and every second vehicle coming into Birdsville had to get brake components replaced because the gritty mud wore them out.

No Good Sam either although the Birdsville recovery truck might be able to get you out if you have enough money.

All good fun.

Back in the US in a few months. White rim trail looks interesting. Might see if the Airstream is up to the trip.

pnichols wrote:

Naio wrote:
Us hillbillies drove 2wd sedans on them every day.

Yeah .... X2 on that.

A lot of the photos of "extreme RVs" on some of the so-called rugged outback area roads in other countries appear to be roads where I could carefully and slowly take our good old Itasca on, too. I think "slowly" is a defining concept here .... many folks would not tolerate creeping along in their RV for around 50 miles at only 7-10 MPH, like we have done. I guess when one is retired they can take the time to do that. ;)

The only I stuff I shy away from with our rig is pin-stripe-overgrowth roads (but I do carry pruning equipment along), non-compacted sand/beach wheel tracks, wet clay roads, and of course well away from the stuff that the lunatic rock-climbing Jeep'ers mess with.

Tony and I would agree, your Itasca would disintegrate on places like the Gibb Road, even doing it at a snails pace. The Expedition Trucks are based on Miltary Vehicles that go a lot faster. Your Achilles heels would be the corrugations, narrow tracks(Itasca would be too wide and tall) and DEEP water crossings. Did not mention parts for the Fords do not exist when you eventually break down.US Tourists have died in Australia on similar roads, because they think " they can make it" big campaign to get people properly prepared and experienced before they even think about attempting some remote Outback tracks
Seven deaths on Gibb River Road since 1993

The only I stuff I shy away from with our rig is pin-stripe-overgrowth roads (but I do carry pruning equipment along), non-compacted sand/beach wheel tracks, wet clay roads, and of course well away from the stuff that the lunatic rock-climbing Jeep'ers mess with.

Sounds like a lot of Australian dirt "roads"

Naio wrote:
Us hillbillies drove 2wd sedans on them every day.

Yeah .... X2 on that.

A lot of the photos of "extreme RVs" on some of the so-called rugged outback area roads in other countries appear to be roads where I could carefully and slowly take our good old Itasca on, too. I think "slowly" is a defining concept here .... many folks would not tolerate creeping along in their RV for around 50 miles at only 7-10 MPH, like we have done. I guess when one is retired they can take the time to do that. ;)

The only I stuff I shy away from with our rig is pin-stripe-overgrowth roads (but I do carry pruning equipment along), non-compacted sand/beach wheel tracks, wet clay roads, and of course well away from the stuff that the lunatic rock-climbing Jeep'ers mess with.