Overlanding to Australia: Part 15
Quarantine rules mean Haydon Bend's Defender needs to spotless before it can be shipped from Malaysia to Australia
Quarantine rules mean our team’s Defender needs to be spotless before it can be shipped to Australia
With the risk having paid off at the Thai border we are now legal again and in Malaysia. Sadly, our sole aim in Malaysia is to ship the car to Australia and we want to get through as soon as possible. We just don’t have the time to explore, as we are unsure of how long the shipping and cleaning process will take. This shipping thing is totally new to us. We have driven 31,000 miles from the UK and the only boats the Defender has been on were ferries used in Mongolia and Cambodia to cross rivers. Hopefully, we won’t come to regret the rushed time frame.
Malaysia is an ex-colonial country, which gives it a British tinge and it is somewhat different from the other south-east Asian nations. We pick up our toll card at the border and head south, visiting the heavily-populated but beautiful island of Penang, where the British East India Company gained a foothold in 1786. Penang provided a natural harbour and anchorage for British trading vessels and its navy.
Such was the strategic importance of the Malacca Straits – the body of water between Indonesia and Malaysia – the British Navy relieved the Dutch of their occupation of what is now Malaysia in 1795. The opening of the Suez Canal helped link east and west and has made the Malacca Straits the second-busiest
“Our shipping agent is lacking the can-do attitude that an overlander requires”
shipping lane in the world, linking the Pacific and Indian oceans.
At the unremarkable port town of Klang, we check in to a budget hotel and start to arrange the complicated and strict cleaning and shipping process.
Cleaning a car to import into Australia is not a challenge to be taken lightly if you are planning on doing it yourself. The guidelines, set out by the Aussies, are that absolutely no soil, flora or fauna whatsoever can be on, or in, the car.
Our shipping agent, a very responsive and helpful Argentinian living in Australia, puts us in contact with a very unhelpful agent in Malaysia. We meet with Mindy, our Malaysian agent, at her office in Klang and let's just say she is lacking the can-do attitude that an overlander requires. She is clearly unhappy that we want to clean the car ourselves – no doubt because she would have been handsomely rewarded with a commission from the £350 she quoted for the job.
We need to find a ramp and a jet wash to get the car clean and Mindy is not helpful. So we turn to Facebook and the Land Rover community. We join the Land Rover Owners Club Malaysia group and post on the page and are soon inundated with responses including phone numbers to contact.
One thing that we need to do is get the chassis Waxoyld again. It has taken a pounding and has not been done for good few years. Another benefit will be to make the chassis look brand-new and very clean. We contact Mr Lee at Blackhawk Garage who has the cando attitude we require.
As we arrive at the garage the feeling of being in the right place for the job hits us in the face like a sledgehammer. I’m not sure I have ever seen so many Land Rovers in so many different forms. Some look like Frankenstein’s monster and others look more like poster boys. From brand-new Pumas to Series Is and everything in between. The workshop is more of a classic Range Rover place than the new Velar-type establishment.
Mr Lee takes us for dinner at a local Chinese restaurant where we have the very delicious Bak Kuh Teh, a pork stew. We then head back to the garage to discuss what we need and what they can do for us.
Mr Lee can provide everything. The ramp, jet wash, cleaning solutions, spare parts and a specialist to come to the workshop to Waxoyl and underseal the car. We also discover that the garage is the home of the very active Malaysian Land Rover Club. We knew that Malaysia had a lot of Land Rovers from an old LRM article about the Cameron Highland tea plantations, where they use hundreds of them for the transport of tea. The club president and a few members are on an expedition driving back from India where they had
“We will return in five years to join the club's anniversary expedition"
driven the previous year, so we don’t get to meet them, but posters and banners of previous expeditions litter the walls of the workshop. Their love for everything and anything Land Rover was immense. It should be the perfect environment for the next two weeks or so.
The need to clean the car ourselves becomes more apparent as the ten-day cleaning saga continues. Mindy’s quote stated that the cleaning of the car would take one day. Most people would think: “Okay, that seems fair enough. A full day to clean a car inside and out would be adequate.” Indeed, under normal circumstances this may be the case. But not for Australian quarantine standards, nor New Zealand for that matter.
We get the car on the ramp and hash out a plan; we start on the chassis, then move on to the body and engine, then get the chassis Waxoyled... and that leaves the interior and a final polish and dress.
We remove a lot of stuff to be get access to clean properly and it is just a case of not trying to hide anything; if we think it needs to come out it does. To that end we remove all underbody protection, the auxiliary fuel tank, wheels, tent, engine covers, grill, lights, winch cable, all door cards, door seals, soundproof matting, seats, built-in storage... and the list goes on and on. I thought my days of cleaning tent pegs had come to an end when I finished Para training. How wrong I was.
In total it takes us ten full days to give the Defender its vital spruce-up. This was never going to be achieved for £350 and Mindy’s one-day cleaning schedule.
The hospitality we receive in Malaysia is amazing and we build up a good relationship with the garage team. We go for many meals and receive a very fine homemade curry from Mokhlis, one of the Bangladeshi workers who greets us every morning and cares for the security guard (a very aggressive goose).
On our days off we visit the local sights and museums. We hear about all the interesting places to visit in Malaysia, so we promise to return in five years for the club’s 25th anniversary and join that year’s expedition.
As we cleaned the car a change of plan came to fruition, we are now shipping to Auckland, New Zealand, and then on to Australia. We had planned to visit New Zealand without the car while the Defender was on its four-week voyage from Australia to Chile, but we decided to incur the extra cost and go and explore the country in our Land Rover instead.
With the Galileo map downloaded and the car squeezed into the container, it was time for Mary to get her sea legs. NZ here we come...