The van

As explained before, the best transportation for my trip is the van. Small, compact, handy, all ingredients are there. I started my quest in the begining of the summer and I’ve found the holy graal in mid-September, this means how I had patience. I must admit I had to face a lot of possibilities.

Firstly, the brand. I wanted a car with a reputation of something reliable. So I headed to the German and Japanese one. But I also wanted something fairly common, in order to be easily repaired, in case of engine breakage in the middle of Turkey, for example. So, I could reduce the spectrum of possibilities.

Then the model. For the same reasons, I want a car with the least electronics possible. So, I dismissed the newest models such as Vitos or T4 or T5 Volkswagen. We must also admit that these models are not into my budget. “All-equipped” vehicles from Japan are not common. And, we must say that VW T3 have a certain charm:

So I chose my car: it’ll be a Volkswagen T3. But I was not the end of my quest. The more I was going further the more I discovered new criteria:

Gas or Diesel
Air cooled or Water cooled
Pop-Top or hardtop
Equipped/ Not equipped
standard equipment or home-made equipment
Interior equipment :
Westfalia/
Dehler/
Reimo/
Weinsberg ….
Milage
Professionnal / private person
Engine rebuilt / not rebuilt

In short, I browsed lot of ads websites, consulted specialized forums. I have seen all sorts of vehicles: very nice in appearance but that hide lot of weakness, fully rubbish (lots of rust, pop-top canvas missing …), really expensive ones .. I went to the four corners of Switzerland: Geneva, Lausanne, Yverdon, Winterthur. And finally, I found the one in Unterwelberg, in the Luzern canton. Needless to say that we were in the country of Heidi: beautiful and clean houses, cows everywhere and beautiful scenery.

Meeting the owner was quite weird. First, finding the farmhouse was not easy. The seller only speaks German, we had to go through with her daughter because my knowledge of German language are very limited. She did not speak French, so we did some linguistic back and forth between English and German. It was such a sport!