Overland Tech and Travel
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Rookie tourist shopping
David Giguere responded to the Lowell Thomas post below with this intriguing comment:
“I wonder if the 'behemoth' truck is one of the Nairn Transport Company vehicles that operated in that part of the world and offered a Beirut to Baghdad route. Nairn also used Cadillac and Buick cars. Thanks for posting the story and video, fascinating stuff!”
He also posted a link to an interesting Wikipedia entry about Nairn, here.
And that begs a short related tale.
While in Jerusalem last November I spent several days exploring the old town and its cacophonous warren of shops, which sell everything from snow globes of the Dome of the Rock (not kidding) to half lamb carcasses, spices, pots, clothes, jewelry, and antiques. Short video here:
Late one afternoon I was headed back through a passage I’d been through several times before, when I was stopped in my tracks by this:
Oh. My. God.
How could I have missed it, and could any overlander possibly live without this poster hanging somewhere in his home? Bought in a souk in Old Jerusalem?
Of course not—so, in my delirium, I made the most fundamental mistake any rookie tourist could commit in any souk anywhere in the world. I leaped into the shop, where the owner sat calmly sucking on a hookah, and, my eyes wide with avarice, shaking finger pointing, said, “Do you have those posters for sale?”
The man slowly exhaled a cloud of cool blue smoke, pulled the mouthpiece from between his lips, and smiled.
Shit.
“Why yes, my friend, I do!” He put up the pipe and pulled out a box stuffed with rolled posters in cardboard tubes. “What size would you like, my friend?”
What does one do at that point? Put on an utterly transparent sham of hard bargaining? Of course not. I picked a tube that would fit on the rear rack of my bicycle, asked how much, and he smiled and named a figure I won’t repeat here out of abject, head-hanging shame. I sighed and pulled a half dozen bills off my roll of shekels. At that price there was bugger all hope of buying extras for my friends Graham and Connie, or Nick, or . . . (And could I find that poster anywhere else in that entire city? Nope.)
Oh well. Let them get their own. I’ve got mine.
And boy did I pay for it.
The first "adventure trailer" and "earth cruiser?"
If you know anything about T.E. Lawrence you are aware of Lowell Thomas (and vice versa, I suppose). Thomas, the indefatigable journalist and travelogue producer, was nearly single-handedly responsible for making "Lawrence of Arabia" a worldwide legend through his sensational traveling multimedia show, With Allenby in Palestine and Lawrence in Arabia, seen by over four million people in the years following World War I.
Lawrence and Thomas in Arabia
(Ironically, it almost never happened. Thomas was originally scheduled to cover the Great War in Europe to drum up support for the potential entry of the U.S. into the conflict. When it became obvious that trying to romanticize the gruesome quagmire that was the Western Front would be futile, he looked for a more promising theater, and thus landed in the Middle East.)
After the success of the Lawrence show, Thomas went on to star in and narrate innumerable other travelogues, of which one is this nine-minute 1940 production, Royal Araby. My friend Bruce sent me the link after he spotted one of the spectacular armored Rolls Royces employed with great effectiveness by Lawrence during the war, this one still in service years later. Indeed at about 2:38 you'll spot the turreted vehicle front and center. (See here for an account of one of Lawrence's unarmored Rolls Royce cars, and the impressive bodge repair he managed under enemy fire.)
But something else caught my attention: two of the vehicles used by the Thomas expedition. One, an American sedan, is towing what could easily be taken for any number of the modern "adventure trailers" so popular with overlanders. Behind that is a behemoth of some sort of articulated truck with what would seem to be spacious living quarters in the back section.
I must try to find out more.
Check it out on YouTube, here.
Recovering a semi truck
In my last post (here) I mentioned using a set of MaxTrax to recover a semi at the 2015 Overland Expo.
Found the video.
Also visible are the Crux Offroad aluminum bridging ladders (here), which also survived with only minor bending and were perfectly serviceable afterwards. Since bridging ladders are designed to be rigid, the fact that these—intended for vehicles the size of Land Cruisers—survived at all was equally impressive.
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Overland Tech and Travel is curated by Jonathan Hanson, co-founder and former co-owner of the Overland Expo. Jonathan segued from a misspent youth almost directly into a misspent adulthood, cleverly sidestepping any chance of a normal career track or a secure retirement by becoming a freelance writer, working for Outside, National Geographic Adventure, and nearly two dozen other publications. He co-founded Overland Journal in 2007 and was its executive editor until 2011, when he left and sold his shares in the company. His travels encompass explorations on land and sea on six continents, by foot, bicycle, sea kayak, motorcycle, and four-wheel-drive vehicle. He has published a dozen books, several with his wife, Roseann Hanson, gaining several obscure non-cash awards along the way, and is the co-author of the fourth edition of Tom Sheppard's overlanding bible, the Vehicle-dependent Expedition Guide.