Irish Unimog motorhome in South America

mervifwdc · 13-12-2013 1:18pm

Hi,

we have been exploring South Peru with our 2 good friends from the peoples republic of Cork. They flew out and hired a 4x4 pop-up camper, and we had a few great weeks together. We have written a pretty big blog post on our Peru Adventure, with loads and loads of photos from the Jungle to Machu Picchu.

This was our mode of transport for a few days on the rivers of the Jungle.

This is what the Inca trail looks like, the 4 day hike to Machu Picchu if you do not want to take the train. The trail is hard-core, and it gives loads of amazing views along the way.

View from the Inca trail.

Anyone interested in doing such a trip let me know, and I'll answer any questions I can. it's possible to do in 3 weeks.

What are the chances of meeting another Irish camping truck out here? - pretty small I would have thought, but we met a huge 6x6 truck. but not the owners who are home in Ireland at the moment.

I cannot link to the image of the truck, but it's on our facebook page at www.facebook.com/moglander

We will now head North, hoping to get to Ecuador for christmas and to find a warm beach somewhere. It's pretty wet here in Cusco, bit too much like home :-)

Merv.

mervifwdc · 22-01-2014 6:48am

Hi Folks,

We are coming to the end of our adventure here in in South America. It's been brilliant, and thank you for everyone who followed along.

We are going to sell our beloved camper, ideally here. This will be perfect for anyone wanting to explore South America for a while, as the truck will be left ready for action. It's just got a full service including a new set of belts on the engine, so it's good for quite a while.

If anyone is thinking of doing a trip like this, let me know and we'll see if we can work something out. We would ideally like to sell it in May, but can be flexible by a month or so either way.

http://moglander.com/the-truck/unimog-camper-truck-sale/

Merv.

mervifwdc · 23-01-2014 1:03am

We are almost out of Ecuador, and have have found it to be a great country to travel through. They are not uses to campers, so are very interested to chat about ours. Our spanish is not great, so with a bit of sign language, they get to understand what we are all about.

Ecuador Overland blog post is here.

As a snippet, we spent new years eve here, in a town called Vilcabamba. It got a write up years ago in something like readers digest as the place with the most people over 100 years old. We did see some old codgers, but on new years eve it was the younger folks have the craic.

Fires were lit of puppets on most street corners at midnight, and the local lunatics jumped through the flames.

Small roadside food stalls are even smaller than this! This setup was able to cater to about 30 people at a time. 2 things on the menu, end of story! And tasty empenada's were one of them! :-)

Volcano with a lake in the crater. It looked even better in real life.

And proof that we made it from the bottom of South America - way down in Tierra del Fuego to the equator. We're pretty happy with that!

Next stop: Colombia.

mervifwdc · 21-05-2014 2:04am

Hi Folks,

It's been a while since we've updated the various forums on the web that we keep an eye on. Since our last update, we have driven through Colombia and through Venezuela and are not in Brazil. Pity we're not simply a bit early for a few matches and could welcome people over to the world cup.

As to what you can see by motorhome in Colombia: First off is the coffee farms. Colombian coffee is as good as it gets, and they are glad to show you round the farms. We stayed on one for a few days as they gave us free expressos whenever we wanted.

We also found a few pretty wild places to wild camp along with a German couple in their very nice MAN truck. Total traffic on this road: 4 vehicles per day, 5 donkeys and 9 hikers. Perfect.

I had my third birthday while on this trip, guess we're travelling a while now! it's not so bad, I still get cake!

We made a trip to Visit Bogota, the first time in quite a while when we stayed in a hotel and left our truck on a camp site many miles away. That felt weird! It was nice to wander the streets of Colombia's capital and we spotted the locals who had moved their chess tables into a bus stop to beat the downpour of rain.

Very Irish I thought.

We had a bit of a technical hiccup and needed to get the wheel bearings replaced on one of the back wheels. Colombia has it's own "Mr. Unimog" who sorted us out pretty lively.

We in Ireland might moan at the prices that we pay for fuel, but we do not have to queue for it all day long. This is a Venezuelan fuel station:

More about all that on our Venezuelan blog post.

Shortages in supermarkets is normal.

We skipped out of the truck for a boat to get to Angel falls, the highest waterfalls in the world. It's a wild trip to get there, but worth it where you go through rain forest in a dugout canoe with an outboard motor. Loads of the rain forest is disappearing and being replaced by farmland.

And: Our trip is coming to a close. We have almost completed a look around South America, and we are thinking to the future. We might ship our beloved unimog camper home, but if we can sell it here in South America to another motorcaravaner with a sense of adventure that would be our preferred option. Details about the truck are on the moglander blog if you click here.

There will be a few more updates, but the end is in sight. It's been a brilliant trip for us, and many thanks to everyone who had a read of the blog and left is a comment or email, it's meant a lot to us.

Merv.

21-05-2014 2:22am

How many wheel bearings have you replaced I've lost count?
Bet you'll be sad to part ways with the Mog. When's the sequel?

mervifwdc · 21-05-2014 3:04am

2 wheel bearings, and a king pin. The joys of using a 1986 vehicle for long term/distance travel. Still, We cannot complain as it's brought us through adventures deep and mucky :-)

as to the Sequel, as soon as we can refill the piggy bank. It may be quite a while, if ever, that we can afford to do something mad like this, but we sure will be trying!

Merv.

Sir Liamalot wrote: »

How many wheel bearings have you replaced I've lost count?
Bet you'll be sad to part ways with the Mog. When's the sequel?

Malta1 · 21-05-2014 4:28pm

Fantastic Photos as ever

Thank you

mervifwdc · 15-06-2014 6:16pm

I am guessing there are not too many World Cup fans on here, but we've ended up in Brazil as part of our travels and we're now surrounded by people from all over the world who have arrived to Brazil to watch the World Cup. We have no tickets and no plans to go to a match, but the atmosphere is great craic.

We got here by driving through Venezuela, but once go enter Brazil, you pretty quickly hit a major obsticle to overland travel - the Amazon river. It's bigger than just about anything you can imagine. We sailed for over 1000 miles on it, and it was usually between 1/2 mile wide and up to 2 or 3 miles wide. It can handle pretty large ships.

Paddling across this huge river you can see families in their home made dugout canoes.

and just about everything else in between.

We were on board for 5 days, and set up our dinner table at the very front of the barge. We had one heck of a view and it kept changing while we were eating, probably one of the most surreal places I have eaten a meal.

The truck drivers that normally use these barges have seen it all before, and have a nice way to pass the time during the voyage.

This is the Unimog driving off the barge at the end of the Voyage in Belem.

As usual, the whole story and more photos are on our Blog in the post about the Amazon cruise by Unimog

Oh, And the truck is sold! More on that later....

Irish Unimog motorhome in South America

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