KlausKommoss
USA 1987
1987, after many wild years of traveling all over the globe we came with this truck to America.
This “thing” was actually an old emergency ambulance of a German government catastrophe relief organization. It was over 20 years old but had less than 10 000 miles on it when I bought it for peanuts on an auction. I converted this 7.5 tons of indestructible ruggedness to a cozy motor home. It had a wood burning stove for heat and solar power already then, 20 years ago. 2000 miles range on one tank filling. In the back, protected inside, was a motorcycle. (Can you see the gun turret over the passenger seat?)
We loved and hated it in about equal measures. We loved it for its fantastic Mercedes reliability and because it really would go almost anywhere. But we hated it because, in spite of its kind of friendly-cow slowness (absolute top speed downhill: 50 mph) it radiated this apparently unmistakable flair of machismo. Wherever we showed up a certain type of people would immediately appear and noisily approach us, beer in hand, and put us in a corner where we just didn’t enjoy to be. (Once, deep in the jungle of Guatemala, the military ambushed us because they thought we were guerrilleros.)
Our traveling had already become slower and slower, we spent more time staying and living in this tank than moving around. The fabled “moving power” had become less and less useful to us. Eventually we sold it and did what we somehow had strangely considered ‘out of style‘ and actually settled down – kind of. America became a new home (at least in summer). However, in a way – and I don’t think it’s just a romantic after glow of our wild free traveling life but rather a beautiful result of serious learning – we never really gave up the attitude of being visitors, temporary visitors on this globe.
USA 1987
1987, after many wild years of traveling all over the globe we came with this truck to America.
This “thing” was actually an old emergency ambulance of a German government catastrophe relief organization. It was over 20 years old but had less than 10 000 miles on it when I bought it for peanuts on an auction. I converted this 7.5 tons of indestructible ruggedness to a cozy motor home. It had a wood burning stove for heat and solar power already then, 20 years ago. 2000 miles range on one tank filling. In the back, protected inside, was a motorcycle. (Can you see the gun turret over the passenger seat?)
We loved and hated it in about equal measures. We loved it for its fantastic Mercedes reliability and because it really would go almost anywhere. But we hated it because, in spite of its kind of friendly-cow slowness (absolute top speed downhill: 50 mph) it radiated this apparently unmistakable flair of machismo. Wherever we showed up a certain type of people would immediately appear and noisily approach us, beer in hand, and put us in a corner where we just didn’t enjoy to be. (Once, deep in the jungle of Guatemala, the military ambushed us because they thought we were guerrilleros.)
Our traveling had already become slower and slower, we spent more time staying and living in this tank than moving around. The fabled “moving power” had become less and less useful to us. Eventually we sold it and did what we somehow had strangely considered ‘out of style‘ and actually settled down – kind of. America became a new home (at least in summer). However, in a way – and I don’t think it’s just a romantic after glow of our wild free traveling life but rather a beautiful result of serious learning – we never really gave up the attitude of being visitors, temporary visitors on this globe.