Gavin Green: epic Defender drives recalled

One of the good things about SUVs, or at least the proper 4x4 ones, is that they’re ideal for social distancing. Land Rovers have been delivering self-isolation since 1948. Recently of course, this has been a much-prized quality. There have been many times over the past 40-plus years that I’ve enjoyed SUV-assisted solitude.

My first SUV segregation trip was to the Australian Outback, aged 15. I was with my dad, who had been asked by Shell to survey the extreme west of New South Wales for a road map. They didn’t know what sort of track, if any, ran along the northern half of the NSW/South Australian border, alongside a section of the ‘Dingo Fence’. This 3500-mile barrier supposedly keeps dingoes from the more fertile south-east of the country.

There was indeed a sandy undulating track, richly populated by kangaroos. The fence must have worked, for we didn’t see a single dingo. Nor, in three days of driving, did we see another car or person on the track.

Two years later my dad’s trusty FJ40 Land Cruiser took us on a 3000mile journey from Sydney, west to South Australia, then up the Birdsville Track. Barren, dry and isolated, the 320-mile track is probably the bestknown Outback ‘road’ in the country. On the way home we visited Betoota, 110 miles east of Birdsville, then officially Australia’s smallest town. The sign as we entered read: ‘Welcome to Betoota. Population 1.’

The town consisted of a camping ground (deserted), a fuel pump and an airstrip. It also had those Outback essentials, a small pub and a horse racing track. The sole occupant was an elderly man called Simon Remienko. He’d bought the pub in 1957 and had been the town’s sole resident ever since. (He died in 2004 and Betoota is now a ghost town, population zero.)

After moving to the UK, my first attempt at SUV seclusion was ambitious: to drive across the Sahara in the then-new 1989 Land Rover Discovery. I was accompanied by photographer Andy Christodolo and a Land Rover engineer. (See CAR, December 1989.)

Things did not go to plan. We motored briskly across Morocco before our problems started. Owing to the outcry over Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, Algeria was not letting in British nationals, despite our having all the necessary visas. Instead of heading to our intended destination of Tamanrasset in southern Algeria, we diverted south-east in Morocco along the fringe of the Sahara towards Mauritania. We ventured deep into the war-torn Western Sahara region. We kept going until landmines stopped us.

Venturing into the Empty Quarter, the vast sand desert in the Arabian Peninsula, was a special story for me, for it followed partly in the footsteps of two of my heroes, explorers Sir Wilfred Thesiger and Sir Ranulph Fiennes. Thesiger crossed the Empty Quarter, on camels and on foot, in the late ’40s. His exploits are beautifully chronicled in Arabian Sands, one of my favourite travel books. Fiennes had used Land Rovers for many of his adventures, including rediscovering an ancient Arabian fortress city at the hub of the 5000-year-old frankincense trade route, on the fringe of the Empty Quarter, in southern Oman. Atlantis of the Sands – the Search for the Lost City of Ubar, Fiennes’ 1992 book, chronicled his successful quest.

In 2010, using a Range Rover, we left Salalah in southern Oman, where Thesiger started and finished the first of his two crossings, and ventured into the Empty Quarter, or the Rub’ al Khali as it’s known locally. On our way, we visited Ubar, stopping at key points on Fiennes’ expedition. An Omani guide navigated me and photographer John Wycherley. I don’t think I’ve ever experienced isolation quite like we enjoyed as we threaded our way over the reddish-orange sand ringed by dunes up to 800ft high. But even a properly kitted Range Rover could only venture so far into the shifting sands of the Empty Quarter. Sir Wilfred Thesiger was right. If you want to truly self-isolate, go by camel.

Google ‘CAR’s greatest adventure drives’ for our website’s pick of epic road and o -road trips from former editor Gavin Green and other CAR writers