Tail firmly between legs – The new Landcruiser

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Timothy Hausler

Post the disastrous result of our wonderful 40 series LandCruiser having a gearbox failure and the discovery that country mechanics have little interest in helping those with older vehicles we came to the conclusion that we should probably look for a replacement vehicle. While this might not be a permanent choice i.e. after the return from the trip we sell the car and carry on with the old toy, it could be…

Unfortunately, no matter how much you correct with the old gear you can’t really plan for the gearbox falling apart internally….

We’ve long worked on the 37 year old 40 series LandCruiser repairing/ preparing the vehicle for trips and we’ve learned to accept its oddities. We’ve also not even driven what you might call a ‘modern’ car, the MX-5 while being legendary, is still a 2006 car with a CD player and electric windows as features. Thus the talk these days about lane change control, assisted highway braking sounds fantastic but … what are they.

So to begin our adventure we had a few suggestions from the family who largely, it would seem, just buy Pajeros. This was, the Toyota Fortuner, Pajero Sport and the Isuzu MUX. To be honest, we wanted to replace the Land Cruiser, with, well, a Land Cruiser. But, technology moves on so, worth a look?

All three of these cars were far more advanced than anything we had driven, and all were capable 4WD replacement vehicles which also had the lovely benefit of being very good cars around the city.

  • Toyota Fortuner GXL ~$54/55k depending on how much rubbish we added (bull bar etc), ~60k for the crusade
    • The first car we drove
    • Looked the best out of the three
    • In the brief drive, it drove well
    • The crusade was lovely inside, maybe the GX/ GXL aren’t as nice?
Bred for Adventure
  • Isuzu MU-X LS-T ~$57k for heaps of plastic
    • Looks great on the outside
    • Everyone says they tow great, we have no idea
    • Apparently the running gear is out of something good, according to the internet
    • Made us nervous to drive as it seems to wobble around
    • Stepping out of the luxurious Fortuner crusade and into the rather horrible plasticky interior of the MUX was a shock. I’m sure it’s practical and easy to clean but I’d feel ripped off if I spent 60k on it
    • 3.0 Turbo Diesel was lovely, and yes as the dealer told us rev’d very low at highway speeds.
Adventure, Awaits
  • Pajero Sport Exceed – $54k
    • Makes the other cars seem like they only have electric windows. The sales guy took about 30 minutes to explain all the things that were in the car. I’m sure they were great, but I was excited when he said it had electric windows, the rest just seemed like a whole lot of stuff which I didn’t seem to need before, but now we did?
    • Drove nicely, but not as nice as the Fortuner, but that might’ve been because the Fortuner was first
    • Looks nice at the front, not fans the rear
Elevate your adventure

We did not make up the captions, they are literally from their websites, amazingly enough they must all know about each other?

Given we all lost more that that on the stock market this week I figure that the prices hardly matter….

Anyway, after a lot of thought on the subject the question really boiled down too; Do you need one car for everything, or is two ok and both can be good at their own things? If you need a car which is fit for all uses then the cars above would be perfect. Which ones better, in my nonsense opinion, basically I’m sure they’re all plenty capable of doing weekend 4WDing more capably than any sensible person would require. Thus, if you like gadgets then get the Pajero Sport, it might also be the most capable of going over wild stuff because of the full time 4WD. Get the Isuzu MU-X if you want something reliable (and probably the best at pulling things) and spill stuff in the cabin often. Get the Fortuner if you like a car that looks nice, has almost as many gadgets as the Pajero Sport, plenty comfortable inside. The only issue with the Fortuner is that it is related to the Hilux which is a 100% bogan (cool?) car and Lena is not a Hilux fan.

If it were us, we’d buy the Fortuner, it was the nicest and the best looking.

So on that note and after the research, we bought a Land Cruiser 70 series GXL Wagon. What? Well, first, we are doing a trip around Australia and I’m sure all the other contenders are great, but we didn’t feel like driving off into a place where there is no internet, which we would need to work out how to get the car into 4WD. It’s made for The Australian outback, given we’re going into The Australian Outback, seems like a reasonable choice. It is by far the best looking car in the 4WD landscape, even with its stupid rear track being 95mm narrower than the front. It also looks and sounds awesome… I mean, really do you require any more justification?

Still powerful, still indestructable

Last point, don’t trust delivery times when the corona virus is on a rampage, you just might not get what you want…

Hello new LandCruiser.

Oh, yeah, what a feeling?

Stanthorpe and Disaster

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Timothy Hausler

Stanthorpe has lots of well-known parks for south-east Queenslanders so it was a little disappointing to find out that Girraween National Park was closed for camping. Sundown national park was open but there were no options for camping with a camper trailer in the national park (or so it would seem according to Queensland National Parks). However, given this nuisance, we gave Wikicamps a go and picked the Top of Town caravan park in Stanthorpe. Wikicamps seems to be the goto application for general camping information but we did notice that some national parks are not included, but maybe this is because the content is somewhat user-contributed?

Stanthorpe is a lovely old town near the top (The Summit is the top) of the great dividing range. While it’s not the highest point in Queensland (Ravenshoe is) it is cooler and home to the parks as well as Queensland’s Granite Belt wine and apple region. While we’re not wine buffs our impression of Queensland wines has been that they’re pretty rubbish, but, as discussed with the Ballendean owner this is a typical impression of Australians who haven’t tried Queensland wine.

Setup at the Top of Town caravan park in Stanthorpe

As it so turns out we were indeed wrong, the wine from both Ballendean and Golden Grove estates was tasty and interesting, our picks were the Barbera at Golden Grove and the Saperavi Durif at Ballendean.

Aside from the wines we spent a half a day riding through Stanthorpe and the lovely Quart Pot creek area, this looks like it’ll have some new bike paths soon so it should be great. While we weren’t expecting a challenging mountain bike track the old (what appeared to be disused) walking path heading south-east was… extremely challenging.

See if you can find the Southern Cross Windmill
Most people have train carriages in their backyards

We also dropped in at the Granite Belt Brewery which has an excellent session ale and the cider is also good, however, we’d pass on the merlot sour. We were surprised about how much of a lovely bar and restaurant they had. Were we to spend a bit more time in Stanthorpe we’d make an effort to go.

The parks themselves are great, and at the moment (February 2020) they’ve received a huge amount of rain and as a result, the rock pools are all full of water and there is an abundance of moss and beautiful new plant growth. The best part, is simply that at ~900 m it’s a darn site cooler than Brisbane.

Lovely day for a walk – although its quite a steep one.
Bacon and egg wraps at Vixen’s cafe, they’ve even painted a little courtyard mural.

The conclusion we came to is that given Stanthorpe is not too far from Brisbane we could come back again (most likely next year) to check out promised snow and wildflowers.

Our departure day from Stanthorpe was a lovely sunny day. It rained the night before so it was great to catch some sun and let the canvas of the camper to dry up before we packed it. Very excited about our next stopover (Kwiambal National Park) we left Stanthorpe. Blissfully unaware of what was ahead of us we were driving through the range enjoying green meadows with wildflowers when all of a sudden we ran out of luck and our LandCruiser refused to shift out of third gear…

Moments before what seemed to be smooth sailing ended

Hoping it was just a temporary stubbornness of the car – it loves the attention that car – we continued on hoping it would change its mind and change back to normal. Alas, it was not the case…

Since turning around in third gear on a narrow road with a camper in tow and no possible way to go in reverse, the only way forward for our journey.. was forward. Texas was the closest town, and thanks to the road workers who reassured us that there was a mechanic in Texas.

We had always anticipated some form of car failure, remembering that vintage cars – no matter their reputation – are more than capable of causing issues. However, we had figured that once out of the cities and in the country we’d be able to work with mechanics to complete the repairs. This delusional interpretation now faced reality. The reality of which was that mechanics in Texas had absolutely no interest in helping. We guess they’re there to make money, and assisting a traveller with an old car is just trouble, trouble that they don’t want. Presumably, dealer repair jobs, or insurance jobs and stranded travellers are more the order of the day. This left us stymied, with the real world crushing our delusionary world and the generous offer of waiting two weeks till someone could take a look, a look mind you, not even a fix. Alternatively, we were generously offered to be towed to Brisbane at the cheap rate of ~$11 dollars per km (a nice $3,000 tow).

About 5 seconds after the tow offer, we placed her in low range to take off, and high to drive and left Texas. At roughly 60 km/h we would’ve been a nuisance on the highways so we picked a quiet set of roads to return on although this did increase the distance a little. I think the gearbox was just bad luck as there were no other issues, even revving the car pretty high at 3200 rpm (high for a 13B-T) for 5 hours didn’t seem to worry the old 40. The minor dirt roads and the many flooded crossings through Millmerren provided little challenge even with only a single gear.

On the road, we considered the options of repairing/switching out the gearbox (we have two working spares) but came to the conclusion that while this would fix our immediate problem, it would not fix the problem with Australia, and to assume that we would require no further assistance would be foolish.

It was a sad moment to leave the 40 series LandCruiser on the mountain. We had put a lot of effort into the car but hadn’t anticipated the gearbox failure (mind you, we had been interested in having the gearbox reconditioned but were advised that since it was recently rebuilt and sounded good it should have been fine for the trip). We could only take the positives of this away, however, had we been 1000 km into the trip the 5-hour drive on backroads would’ve been 20 hours (or maybe a generous $11,000 tow, thanks guys).

With the LandCruiser parked and resting we hooked the Ultimate up to the Pajero rescue car and returned to Brisbane. Now it was time for a re-think and potential purchase of a replacement vehicle.

Home again, home again… and now the wait begins

Kent Mountain Rains and Onward to Stanthorpe

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Timothy Hausler

Rinse and repeat as they say, whoever they are. Friday found us back at Kent Mountain again but this time for real… real you say.

So the summary is this if you’re preparing to travel for six months, organising everything on the home front in one and a bit days is a little tight. Sure, we’d covered all of the major stuff but it was the tidy up and finalisation of items like tax and power/water/house that actually needed more time. Also try to avoid adding shipping a car also on the same day as you’re departing…

The upside of this was that when we finally got away the road was kind, the car was shipped and the family all turned up at the mountain. Only mistakes were checking the foundation strength of a support pillar of a house with the side of the Ultimate. Don’t take tight turns immediately after installing extension mirrors. The Ultimate is strong… but the external power adapter and the awning beam stay holder are not as strong as house supports. A few rivets later, and it was history with some egos bruised.

For several years the Darling Downs have been dry, this meant that Kent mountain was pretty brown and hard to enjoy. Now, however, the rains have come and the mountain is lush and green.

Automated plant watering systems take time to set up and run – see www.opensprinkler.org very nifty

2017 – Still pretty, but not terribly green
Now substantially nicer

The mountain was good fun as usual, shashlyk was had and the main thing!

There was some drizzle which made any bare soil extremely sticky. They say that if you stick to the downs in the dry, it’ll stick to you in the wet!

The Ultimate seemed to redeem its itself with respect to the hot water system and we let it run for roughly a day to ‘burn-in’ you may say. This seemed to improve things but it still seemed a little finickity.

Collecting a few more parts from the spare LandCruiser (which was at the mountain) left us mostly ready to move on.

The drive from Nobby through to Stanthorpe was pretty easy, although for the LandCruiser this meant another slog of uphill climbing, which it coped with well.

Driving through Warwick was quite convenient as we stopped at Bunnings for some extra tools and supplies.

After we left for Stanthorpe we realised that all spares bought we’d doubled up on as were some additional fan belts and spares left at the mountain from the previous trip to Cape York (for a 40 series LandCruiser a complete list of spares and bits we took is here). This meant a quick return trip in the evening (less van) and a dinner at Soban House in Warwick which was very tasty.

Test Run for The Australia Trip

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Timothy Hausler

A brief introduction; After many years of working hard together, we found ourselves in receivership of long service leave. Originally we had planned to travel internationally. However, our work provides us with plenty of that opportunity and the AUD is weak. Instead, we figured we’d head around Australia. I guess Australia isn’t cheap to travel either, but some of that cost depends on how to travel.

So – driving around seemed like a sensible idea given we’re residents. Camping for 6 months seemed like a stretch, we’ve done that for a month but 6 would be tough (for us), hotelling/motelling is an option but that’s great for keeping close to towns and cities but leaves little room to explore beyond that. Thus really for us pulling something better than a tent was the plan.

Our younger selves after a month of camping, we were still smiling but I think after 6 months we might not be smiling

We decided against a big caravan almost immediately without much thought, I guess we just figured that we don’t have lots of people to sleep, and we want to access rugged areas. There are exceptions to that rule but we also don’t have the hundreds of thousands of dollars required to buy something that fits both purposes. We also would need to buy something which could pull it… Yes, that brings us to our car. We have an old land cruiser BJ42, now I (Tim) had thought we could think about changing this over for something more comfortable, but Lena was of the mind that as I’d spent so much of my spare time toying around with the stupid thing that we would get some use out of it for a change… and fair enough!

Turns out I was lying, we don’t have just one but two – well it’s a long story as the one on the right was my brothers…

But it’s a Landcruiser? Right, yes they’re those huge cars pulling semi-trailer length caravans along the road, wrong. The small 40 series diesel land cruisers are/ were basically the worlds most powerless cars. The original 3B motor generates a huge 25bhp at the rear wheels (this is less than a reasonable 250cc motorbike makes). However, we did have a leg up on the 3B which has trouble pulling you in the driver’s seat, we found after much searching a 13BT turbo. A little tuning later the car was yielded a whopping 78bhp at the rear wheels. This means we were in the market for a lightweight camper van or trailer that we might be able to tow up gentle hills.

When I was younger my parents toured Australia in a Jayco Lark, I have many fond memories of that caravan. We looked into it and while excellent there was an overwhelming concern that while great on the road, off-road was hard on it resulting in breakage. Do I know for sure? Would it have been a better buy than what we have, who knows? This left us in the world of camper trailers. Our first discovery is that while you get plenty less in a camper trailer it would seem that you don’t pay any less… We thought something in the 10-20k mark would be easy to find. But that’s just not the case, most camper trailers exceed that. Another surprise was that off-road camper trailers are heavy. As that had completely stuffed up our budget, we figured that, bugger it lets just get something that’s good. In the end, we settled on an Ultimate Xplor, and yes, you’re right, it’s more than 20k, more like three times that.

We would put this choice largely down to a few things:

  • Something that had everything we wanted and was comfortable and we were confident that we wouldn’t need to test run it multiple times before we departed
  • Internal Kitchen
  • Very light, 850kg
  • Looks good and has a double bed and hot water if you want it

We were going to skip on a test run, but given the weather was nice we thought we’d head up to our family property on the darling downs to see whether the Landcruiser could really pull the van up a steep hill (the Toowoomba range) and that there were no unexpected surprises.

mmmmm mud…

It turns out that some of the things which we ordered like ‘hot water’ in the
Ultimate while seeming gimmicky make for a totally different experience. That being that you don’t have to go to bed in your own personal dirt covering, or psyche yourself up for a cold shower under a bucket to return to human.

So, did we gain anything from the test run and did we miss anything?

  • Some spares for the land cruiser.. well that is a never-ending requirement; fan belts, heater hoses, radiator hoses, tin snips to name a few – maybe later I’ll add a full list of tools and spares for anyone foolish enough to take something like this on a trip… and no doubt it’ll never be what’s required
  • Surprisingly simple cooking utensils like spatulas and cooking spoons. Normally this would be part of the bbq stuff when camping but we missed it
  • Ground matt for the entrance, either that or have dirty feet
  • Small broom and some spare rags

Otherwise, all that was left before the trip could commence was some minor car modifications (resonator to cut down on the drone at 100kph, UHF radio and interior console, radiator overflow capture bottle) and packing.