So far, eight people have set off from Germany, east across Europe, across Asia, through twenty one countries, before ending up at their final destination,Cambodia, where they plan to give money they raised to a children's charity, some of them had visited five years previously.
The convoy consists of three, Trabants, ( 2 x 601 saloons, 1 x 601 combi) in very poor condition and a Mercedes estate.( to carry supplies and back-up equipment)
The journey will consist of 15,000 miles, covering all types of terrain and many
bleak and barren landscapes.
You would think for such a journey of epic proportions, they would have spent wisely and bought pretty good cars, Wouldn't you?
Wrong!
The Trabbis they bought cost between, $150 and $350.
They paid $1500 for the Mercedes, then realised thousands of miles later, after a blow out, that they didn't have a wheel brace to change the spare wheel!
Much comment, thus far to date, has been on the many minor problems and breakdowns that the Trabbis had. Is it any wonder, when they bought cars in crap condition?
They did, however, think it wise to spend $250( on each car, except the Mercedes), having a metal plate fitted underneath each Trabbi engine, to protect the engines from stones and debris.
The Mercedes was the only car with a sump and a steel plate under it WOULD HAVE made sense, due to the rough terrain and desert they would have to cross.
Oh yes, almost forgot, they set off on this expedition with no maps. They left them behind!
Three times, the trekkers managed to crack the sump on the Mercedes.
This may have been, at least partly to do with the fact that the rear hydraulic suspension failed, within a short time into the trip.
This suspension, similar to that used by many Citroen's, is great when working well and enables huge loads to be carried with an evenness of distribution, unknown with conventional suspensions.
But hydraulic suspension has always been problematic, especially on older vehicles.
Very, very few Mercedes models were fitted with this suspension. The fact that these people bought a car with such, was really bad judgement on their part, as hydraulics are difficult to fix and their pipes which carry the fluid are prone to rusting and springing leaks.
One of the group, Tony, was in charge of mechanical repairs as he 'allegedly' had done two years of a motor mechanic apprenticeship.
Eventually the Merc deteriorated further to the point, that they abandoned it after ten thousand kilometres.
This meant that they had to dump much of the cargo of spare parts that had been carried in the Merc, as the 3 Trabbis were being further burdened by two extra people, let alone carry the cargo as well.
There were plenty of mechanical problems with the Trabbis, but as the cars were heaps of junk when they were bought, this was hardly surprising.
A couple of clutches failed, a left control arm broke and attempts to weld it would only last a few hundred km before it would break again. ( they had no spare ones)
They seemed to have a lot of problems with battery failure in all the cars. I wonder if the cars had 6volt electrics, which would account for this.
A gearbox broke on one of the cars, a clutch plate sheared in half, a leaf spring snapped which was also unsuccessfully welded many times( a spare one of these would also have been handy).
The engine on one of the car's seized and had to be replaced. The Author doesn't say why this happened and I doubt he knew why, but a two stroke engine seizing is often due to insufficient oil being present in the fuel, which if this is the case, is down to the ineptness of the group and nothing else.
There were other engine changes also towards the end of the trip.
This may seem like a huge obstacle but Trabbi engines only weigh about forty kilos and can be changed in thirty minutes by a mechanic who knows what he's doing.
Trabants were made to be simply and easily fixed, not only for mechanics but with their owners in mind, for easy maintenance.
Many times throughout the book, he would say one of the cars broke down, without saying what the problem was, nor say how it was fixed.
It is obvious that he had little mechanical knowledge, if any.
The group made it 350km into China when the cars more or less gave up and packed in.
So, the cars were freighted 3500 km across China to Laos, where they managed to repair them enough to continue. Shortly afterwards they had to abandon one of the cars in Northern Laos and continue with two cars to Thailand and then finally Cambodia.
They visited two main orphanages there and donated the ten thousand dollars sponsorship their journey had raised. This, of course, was the best and most worthwhile part of the whole exercise.
The group are to be commended also, for doing the trip on their own funds, not dipping into the sponsorship pool to fund their expenses getting to Cambodia.
How this group managed to drive about eleven thousand miles (by my reckoning), across mountains, and two major deserts is beyond me. They seemed to be appalling drivers, almost without exception and many of the breakdowns were acknowledged to be of their own doing, by the Author.
Bad drivers, bad cars and constantly bickering amongst each other throughout.
Much effort is made by the Author to rubbish the cars at every opportunity, which I feel is unjust.
The three Trabants combined cost approximately eight hundred dollars and were poor cars to begin with.
That said, the Mercedes they bought cost $1500 and didn't perform as well as the Trabants, due partly to the fact that the Trabants are much easier to fix, work on, and replace vital components quickly and with relative ease.
The author at times, seemed to jeer the fact that the Trabants were archaic, slow and dated.
If the Trabants were not so simple, mechanically, this group would never have made the journey as far as they did. More complex cars would simply have broken down and none of the group would have had the skills necessary to repair them. I feel that the Author has attempted to make their journey seem much more of an accomplishment due to the fact it was done in Trabants, instead of admitting the simplicity of the Trabant is the real reason they were able to have any degree of success.
Even the book title ' Trabant Trek' Crossing the world in a plastic car' is derogatory and attempts to sound sensationalist. Trabants were made from a man-made material called 'Duroplast' which was plastic resin mixed with a by product of Cotton waste. These materials combined together produced a body that proved more durable in independent crash tests, than many Western cars made from steel, of the same era.
The reason Duroplast was invented was due to the fact that there was a chronic steel shortage in Eastern Europe in the late fifties, early sixties.
These are well documented facts.
The book is at times interesting and also boring at times.
The Author tries hard, too hard in my view, to be funny.
Each chapter begins with a stupid 'Trabant' joke, which is unnecessary.
More about the individual countries should have been written, mainly costs and about the people they met.
There's a sort of yuppie smugness that comes across from the Author and some of the group, that is irritating at times. They appear at times to be a bunch of spoilt brats, lost in the desert, which was probably close to the bone on a number of occasions.
It's not a great book by any means, but is at times interesting.
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