Land Rover Expeditions Around the Globe

By JOSEPH V. KUCA

It's interesting to look at some of the many famous expeditions which employed Land Rovers to complete their exciting worldwide journeys.  The brand, now 62 years old, has racked-up an impressive list of expedition achievements over those six decades.  Too many in fact to cover and do justice to in this small space.  But, we shall endeavor to touch briefly upon a few of the more prominent journeys.

Countless expeditions to some of the darkest corners of the earth have chosen Land Rover vehicles to get them in and out of those often-precarious and, needless to say, nearly unreachable spots.

Sir Laurens Jan van der Post, a famous Afrikaaner---author, war hero and explorer---led several expeditions into Botswana's famed Kalahari Desert just using a couple of Land Rover Series 1 vehicles.

And there’s Colonel Leblanc, who in 1949 took one of the first Series I Land Rover’s overland into Ethiopia and from Algiers to Nairobi, taking orders for the vehicles from government organizations and NGOs along the way as well as anybody else sold on the vehicle’s off road capability.  In essence, he was Land Rover's first sales guide!

The list of Land Rover achievements in exploration is long and varied, and too extensive to properly cover in this article, but several notables worth a mention include, those expeditions in North Africa and the Middle East in a Series 1, by famous female explorer Barbara Toy, who called her vehicle "Pollyanna".

Oh, and let’s not forget Sir Ranulph Fiennes, a former member of the British Special Air Service (SAS) who the Guinness Book of Records called the “World’s Greatest Living Explorer” for his astonishing Transglobe and unaided Polar expeditions, using Series II Land Rovers.

Too, there is the famous First Overland expedition in the 1950’s when six students from Oxford and Cambridge, drove non-stop from London to Singapore in two Land Rovers. After six months, six days, and 29,000 kilometres both vehicles rolled into Singapore.  Apparently, the only reason the expedition went ahead was because Sir David Attenborough commissioned a three-part TV series on that epic journey while he was working for the BBC.

It’s really all about the vehicle's heritage and its off-road capability.  It attracts an undivided loyalty from its fans who are really attached and understand the brand.  And, not to put too subtle an emphasis on it, but it is a loyalty that really only Land Rover knows and can boast in the now somewhat cluttered SUV marketplace.

Such great public loyalty exists for the brand that the UK television series phenomenon, Top Gear selected nine all time cars from which viewers had to choose “the greatest car of all time”. You know which car received the most votes?  Yep, you guessed it – it was a Land Rover.  The Land Rover Defender, to be exact.

So, whether you're a current or would-be Land Rover owner, the vehicle you're involving yourself with has a rich heritage and a very unique history as well as an impeccable pedigree.  As we like to say, Land Rover built for the extraordinary.

SOURCE: Anthony Crawford, Car Advice