LONDON TO INVERCARGILL
SOME DRIVE, ESPECIALLY WHEN YOU’RE TOWING A CARAVAN
Plenty of us dream about adventures, but not many of us actually complete them. Call it the foolhardiness, or even the enthusiasm, of youth, whatever you like, but, 50 years after the trip, New Zealand Classic Car readers Howard and Ruth Anderson look back with considerable fondness on their grand adventure. A drive, but not just any drive — this one was from London to Invercargill! This epic voyage was not in some madefor-transnational-travel vehicle either; no, they did it in a 1964 Vauxhall PB Cresta, towing a 1968 Sprite Musketeer caravan! They also had three friends on board for good measure. Absolutely not like just popping out to the shops to buy the milk.
Today, Howard says, “We did the overland thing, because I had been seasick travelling to the UK on the Northern Star late in 1966 and felt that [by] flying home we would not see, touch, feel, or taste much of the world, so driving it had to be.”
That’s quite some drive, London to Invercargill, although also in an era when it was possible; it is doubtful that you’d be able to do it in exactly the same way today. The route they followed was via places that are now considered world hotspots. Even Turkey, which until recently was a must-see for tourists and which they crossed entirely, is a bit dodgy in places now.
Last month, in Issue No. 339, we carried a letter in Readers’ Writes from Howard. He was trying to find the car in which they made this epic voyage. That part of the story has a bittersweet ending — see the box on page 42.
The big OE
Howard and Ruth had been living and working in the UK, as so many younger Kiwis did then and still do today, long before Brexit — this was well before the UK was even ‘in’ — and while the UK still had a fairly major car industry. When they looked for a car to buy, a Vauxhall was a better choice than many. While anyone contemplating such a trip today would be unlikely to choose a comparable car made in Britain, Howard says that, at that time, a Vauxhall was a sensible choice: “Vauxhall has a real heritage in British motoring.”
The chosen car was a Cresta with a 2.6-litre motor attached to a three-stage Hydramatic transmission, which was a good choice at that time. The caravan was attached to that combination, and the idea was to drag that all the way to New Zealand.
This was no spur-of-the-moment idea; rather, a carefully planned and executed action on their part. For more than a year, various plans were made and actioned or stored for later use, and the five friends — Howard and Ruth from Dunedin; Margaret Nicolson, Ruth’s sister, a school teacher from Central Otago; David Roberts from Wales; and Shirley Gainsford, a friend/flatmate of Dave’s in London, from Rotorua — started to meet together in early 1969 to plan their adventure.
The car itself needed preparation. It had been used as their mode of transport during an extended stay in the UK. Howard had already added bumper over-riders, a radio, and even reversing lights, but now it was time to get a little more serious.
Upgrades
Howard recalls, “A lot of work went into preparing the car to be a safe, reliable, strong car. I wrote a number of letters to Vauxhall Motors telling them what we planned and how best to prepare the car.”
Having consulted the manufacturer, Howard also spoke to the UK Automobile Association (AA) about the proposed trip, and preparations were made in accordance with their advice and Howard’s good common sense. Some of the changes made were sensible, to say the very least. An extra 75 litres’ fuel capacity was added by installing two specially fabricated petrol tanks, one in each side of the boot, giving the car a 140-litre capacity. Two spare wheels were mounted on the boot lid and two more inside the boot — oh, and two for the caravan, on the roof
of the car. To support this extra weight, heavyduty coils and shocks were added to the front of the car and additional quarter leaf springs and adjustable shock absorbers at the rear.
The tyres were Semperit radial ply, which were still a bit of a novelty then. These tyres had the advantage of having a additional strong moulded ridge that ran around the outside wall. This gave the tyre extra strength, something that would be needed on some of the roads they’d be dealing with.
It was going to be a long way to Aotearoa, and so Howard, who was to become a television lighting director, boosted the car’s lighting with seriously uprated lamps. The standard Lucas units were swapped for lights with quartz glass lenses and 55W quartz-halogen (QH) bulbs. The fog lights were changed to driving lights, and new fog lamps were added below the bumpers. The alternator was upgraded to power all of this, and a transistorized ignition system was added at the same time.
Inside the car, the dashboard was supplemented with some additional gauges. A temperature gauge for the transmission, an ammeter, a rev counter, and vacuum and oilpressure gauges were all added.
Finally, the motor was given a bit of TLC, which included a valve grind. This was the first and most complicated work of that nature that Howard had undertaken since he had tightened the chain on his bicycle at school.
After seeing the London to Sydney marathon cars leave London in 1968, he was inspired to paint the roof of the car white — this was to be a summer trip — and the bonnet matte black.
Finally, says Howard, “We carried a large quantity of spare parts, most of which we didn’t use. They sat in a cardboard box on top of the two caravan spare wheels in the boot.”
An epic journey
With those few changes made, the intrepid explorers — modern-day Marco Polos — set out from London on the trip back to New Zealand. Three in the front: one driver, one navigator, one spotter (someone to read the road signs). The spotter’s role was especially important in any built-up area, because it’s not easy to turn a car and caravan around — and, remember, there was no GPS in ’69, just good music.
The two in the back could sleep.
So, out of London and on down the M20 to the first stop: Dover. One night there and then the adventure really began.
“It was a great four months — 4 August 1969 to 20 December 1969 — Summer of ’69, remembered in the Bryan Adams song!” Ruth says.
The epic journey took the five friends to France, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Austria, Hungary, modern-day Serbia, Macedonia, Greece, Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and then to India, and even Sri Lanka, before the car was shipped to Perth via Singapore, crossing Australia, then over sea from Sydney to Auckland, before the final stage to Invercargill.
The car performed well, apart from one or two minor problems. A wheel bearing was replaced
early on, and, when that gave up, the original was put back in — that bearing was still in the car the day that it was sold. A driveshaft bearing was replaced mid voyage, and the actual frame of the car required some welding as well.
Careful driving avoided too many issues. Any overheating problems — keep in mind that this was a summer trip — for both motor and gearbox were treated patiently; that is, they simply stopped to let the mechanicals cool off now and again.
In Turkey, two mountain passes with plenty of tight steep corners, lots of loose gravel, and vertical climbs of 1800m and 2400m were treated, says Howard, “with a number of stops to allow the Hydramatic gearbox to cool down; it was cold enough outside to stop the radiator overheating. We drove for two and a half days at less than 20mph [32kph] because of the corrugations on the road on the northern edge of the Great Salt Desert in Iran.
“In India, a lot of the asphalted roads were only one-lane wide, which meant when passing oncoming traffic somebody had to get off the roadway — usually us!”
One of those passes took eight hours to climb, so it was a work of patience.
Fuel quality was generally OK, except in Afghanistan where, Howard says, “it was Russian low-octane, about 75, and the engine rattled terribly, sounded like it was going to fall apart”.
At times, security could be an issue, and, over the course of the whole trip, they only freedom camped twice. That was on the Great Salt Desert in Iran, where they were visited by, “men carrying rifles”. They camped at other times inside BP service stations — although that was well before they all had Wild Bean Cafes and reasonable toilets. They would often awake to find locals peering through the cracks in the caravan curtains.
They met locals along the way who took a keen interest, both unhelpful and helpful, in their activities. In Iran, some boys threw stones through a caravan window. But, in India, when the caravan needed some repair work, they were invited into the grounds of a house near Agra, where the owner then took Howard to an engineering workshop where repairs to one of the caravan’s trailing arms were made.
On down through India, across to Sri Lanka, down to Colombo, on to Perth, then across the mighty Nullarbor Plain. One section of that was 160km of straight road navigated through clouds of ‘bull dust’, and on to Sydney, before arriving by ship in Auckland on 7 December 1969.
The final leg of the adventure was from there to Central Otago and then Invercargill. It had been quite the voyage — not exactly “home from the sea”, as the poem goes, but home from an epic odyssey. Four and a half months; 20,000 miles (32,000km); some minor running repairs; a few punctures; maybe 4500 litres of fuel; and magnificent experiences of sight, sound, taste, and feel — they were home from the accomplishment of a dream.