My Daily Driver: @mt_drift's Land Rover Defender 110

Having fun in western Tanzania

1. How did you come to the decision of buying this car?

In November of 2018 my wife Julie and I were living in Botswana. We had been there about a year-plus at that point, and we had been happily exploring the wilder parts of southern Africa in our 2001 Mitsubishi Pajero. Botswana, Namibia, and South Africa are dream destinations for overlanders, and being enthusiastic campers and 4-wheel-drivers back home in Montana, we tried to spend as many nights out in the wilderness as we possibly could. 

After about a year living in Bots, we were feeling emboldened and looking to push our travel envelope a little further. When the overmatched Mitsu struggled through a long trip to the remote Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park, and then nearly stranded us in the middle of nowhere near the Central Kalahari Game Reserve for a pretty scary 48 hours (a story for another time), we found the signs pointing to a change. 

On that particular sunny afternoon in November, I was browsing through one of the many Africa overland Facebook groups, and stumbled on a scruffy-looking, but pretty well-equipped Defender for sale. I gave it a “thumbs up”, and kept scrolling - then my phone buzzed. It was Julie texting me from work.

“Did you see that Land Rover on the Overlanding Africa FB page?”

“Uh, yeah”

“Let’s buy it.”

“But… it’s in Ethiopia.”

“So what? Let’s fly up there, pick it up, and drive back to Botswana.”

Hmmmm. 

Should we buy a 26-year-old notoriously finicky truck we knew nothing about, that we’d never seen in person, from complete strangers on the Internet, in a foreign country we’d never been to, with the idea of driving it home in the middle of a tropical summer 7000kms through 11 developing countries?

After a few DMs with the sellers, we reached a deal in a day or two, and the flight was booked.

It came equipped with a roof tent, solar power with dual batteries, a 12v Snomaster portable fridge, and 55 liters of filtered and electrically pumped drinking water - everything you need for a whimsical jaunt across all of east Africa. And - cue the jokes - a full tool kit with plenty of spares.

The rest, as they say, is history. The owners turned out to be fellow American ex-pats (from, weirdly enough, Wyoming, where I grew up) who had traveled with the Landy from Cape Town to Addis Ababa. They had in turn purchased “Henrietta” from a UK couple who had driven it from the Isle of Man all the way to South Africa the year prior. So this truck had earned its stripes.

Julie and I met the sellers at a ramshackle pension in the heart of Addis on a cold December afternoon. We un-ironically rechristened the Defender “Toto”, and took the right-hand-drive wheel to struggle through the throngs of left-hand-drive traffic in one of Africa’s largest cities. Finally spinning free of the tangled metropolis, we were off into the unknown.  

2. What has your ownership experience been like?

I can preface the following by saying we fell so hard for this Land Rover, that we shipped it home to Montana when we left Africa last year. 

In all honesty, I never planned for this car to be my daily. It played that role during the last few months we lived overseas, along with its duties as an adventure-mobile. But in bringing it back with us I really intended to turn it into our dedicated overland rig. We already owned the standard Missoula Staff Car, a Subaru Outback, as our regular transportation.

In her former life Toto was clearly a work truck - maybe a farm vehicle, or a tradesman’s van. It never had a radio. The roof is covered only one third with a sagging headliner. There are no carpets. The cargo area is bare-ass aluminum, and all these thin panels resonate and hum at unspeakable volumes at anything over 25 mph. The heater barely works, and I’ve pushed Briggs and Stratton motors in the yard with more refinement than the 2.5 liter turbodiesel 4 cylinder. It’s unsafe. It’s uncomfortable.

But after we freed it from a container at the port of Vancouver, BC last August following a two month sea voyage, I just couldn’t stop driving it. Every time I get behind the wheel, it puts a huge smile on my face, and I unexpectedly enjoy the attention this odd bird gathers in our mountain town. The long-throw gear box is fun and satisfying to shift with my left hand, and the open-diff AWD system is a hoot in the snow, even if I have to scrape the inside of the windshield most winter mornings. RHD can be a pain in the ass, but less than I had originally imagined. With the giant roof rack and tent catching the breeze up top, I can’t fit in most drive-thrus anyway. Visibility is top-notch, and she gets about 27 mpg around town.

A note on reliability - Land Rover has a notorious and well-deserved reputation for deeply flawed products, but I think these early Defenders (Land Rover started using the name in 1990) are one exception to that rule. 

The chassis and bulkhead are prone to rust (ours have plenty), and refinement is not on the agenda, but this truck has proven to be rock solid. The only major breakdowns we have encountered have been a direct result of allowing terrible mechanics to fondle our beautiful beast. We snapped a front coil spring in Malawi (probably original equipment), lost a rear shock bolt in Zambia, and had several suspension components that were installed by imbeciles fail on us during a second trip to Botswana’s Central Kalahari Game Reserve. I do nearly all of my own wrenching at home, but our apartment in Botswana had no garage, and I wasn’t willing to shell out huge money for the proper toolkit that we likely would have had to leave behind when we left Africa. No more mistakes like that.

All those problems I did manage to repair myself with simple hand tools, and with commonly available parts sourced from shops found even in far-flung locales. The alternator died last fall - also original equipment - and there are some niggling little problems here and there, but no more than any other project car I’ve ever owned.

Changing brake pads, Botswana

3. What is your fondest memory with this car?

This is definitely the most difficult question for me to answer - since nearly every mile that has rolled under Toto’s tires with us has been the best mile, sadly most of which my memory strains to hold on to. 

Compelled to choose one, I believe it’s this. On Christmas day on our long trip home to Botswana, we fired up the Defender and left a small campsite in the western Kenyan city of Kitale on our way to Uganda. Passports stamped, and money exchanged at the tiny border post of Suam, we began the long ascent to the Ugandan highlands in Mt. Elgon National Park. 

We estimated the climb at nearly 3500 feet over about 20 miles - a never-ending sequence of mud-slicked and potholed switchbacks. The gravel track, sometimes only a trail in places, was lined by tiny villages and banana plantations. School children would run along with Land Rover, laughing out loud, as we whined up the grades in low gear, dodging goats and chickens. 

We traversed several different ecosystems, from misty, sticky jungles to open-floored forests of towering pines. The vistas from the plateau stretched endlessly over the Great Rift Valley, across to Kenya’s ancient volcanoes whose conical shapes faded into the haze like they were in some kind of Instagram filter. Wood smoke from cooking fires drifted in our open windows. The locals waved and cheered us on as we bumped and bounced languidly forward, neither of us wanting the drive to end. 

Four hours later we found ourselves taking in the equatorial sunset at a crowded but cheerful little bar in Sipi Falls, cold Nile Specials sweating in our hands. As Christmases go, I can’t imagine a better one. 

Roadside humor in Namibia

4. Why do you love cars?

Like many of the other folks in the Daily Driver series, I was lucky to grow up in a household with interesting cars, an active garage, a mechanically talented parent, subscriptions to the big three auto rags, and the Indy 500 on the television. As a toddler my father would put me in the baby jumper and let me bounce around the garage while he adjusted valves and changed the oil on the two Beetles my parents owned. 

The smells of gear oil, horsehair-backed upholstery, and the Olys my father would drink during wrenching sessions all still trigger some of my clearest most well-loved childhood memories to this day. One of those Beetles, the green ’71 Standard, would become my first car, and I still drive it to this day. Its rolling restoration proceeds slowly, but I hope we can do something special for its 50th birthday. Maybe drive around the world? Who knows.

Steve Edwards is one half of @venturesomeoverland. Now back living in Montana after spending two years in southern Africa, he works in academia but spends most of his time thinking about cars. His writing has appeared in Overland Journal and Adventure Journal.

Photos: Julie Edwards

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If you would like to participate, just answer the above four questions and submit one to three photos of your daily driver to milhousevanh at geemail. Thanks and have fun!