The fact that Oscar is a diesel mechanic/engineer was a pretty big factor here, so people with limited mechanical knowledge may want to splash out a bit more. Buying such an old vehicle which had been parked up for 10 years prior was a risk, but frankly, €5000 was all we had spare, so that’s what we got. We ended up fitting a second battery in the engine bay and wiring in a separate plant (deep cycle battery) in the rear of the truck for the fridge and electronics. Pumba needed a pretty serious scrub and quite a bit of repair work which Oscar was fortunately able to do himself (UJs, swivel joint seals, cam belt, engine pulleys, water pump, wheel bearings, brakes, rust removal, diffs – to name a few). We picked up Pumba for a cool €5000, a bloody good deal considering it was already kitted out with a roof tent, fridge, water tank, shelving, snorkel and just about everything else we needed for a long-term overland journey. We settled on our 1996 Land Rover Discovery 1 for two reasons – that it was an absolute bargain, and that Oscar had spent a winters night sleeping under a shrub in rural England in order to obtain it, but that’s another story. Whether you’re planning to tackle the Europe to Cape Town route yourself, or you simply like having a good old fashioned perve at other peoples finances (who doesn’t) I hope you find our Big Budget Blog helpful! The vehicle Doing this trip on a budget was super important for us, and having driven a good chunk of the European continent on a shoestring in 2017, we were pretty confident we could do it. Very few sensible young people spend their life savings on a decidedly unglamorous style of travel when they could be achieving major milestones like advancing their careers, buying a house or making babies. Long-term overland travel is generally the reserve of retired people and influencers/sponsored folk. The answers to those questions are a) no and b) none, but they might have paid us not to go. “Did you win the Lotto?” was soon followed by, “how much money did your parents give you?”. We were asked a lot of questions by different people we met during the trip, some about the perceived dangers in West Africa, some about visas and logistics, but most were about money. It was a long and wild ride that took us through twenty countries over 311 days. 2019 was a weird/incredible/infuriating year – between December 2018 and October 2019, my partner Oscar and I drove from the tiny village of Leenane on Ireland’s west coast, to Cape Town, South Africa.

Chord pickout 3.90