Land Rover: The Story of the Car that Conquered the World. Ben Fogle

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СКАЧАТЬ stood at the little counter under the weak spring sunshine while Rosie worked the Italian machine. They had converted the Land Rover themselves and you could see the passion and love that had gone into this project. As I sipped on my cappuccino, Rosie proudly showed me the scrapbook full of photographs from the beginning of the restoration project.

      ‘Jon will be gutted not to be here,’ she admitted. He still had to work shifts in the pub, but according to Rosie it was he who was the Land Rover fanatic.

      At markets and shows, the car, named Arthur, is always swamped with people wanting to take a photo of it. ‘It makes people smile,’ she laughs.

      I asked Rosie what it’s like to drive her.

      ‘Well, she leaks, she’s slow and she’s really really cold,’ she admits. ‘But I love her.’

      Rosie knew nothing about Land Rovers before they bought Arthur (although Jon was a self-confessed enthusiast), and by her own admission her family think she and Jon are crazy, but with this vehicle they have managed to combine their two passions: coffee and Land Rovers. And you can’t argue with that.

      With my Land Rover-made coffee injecting a much-needed caffeine boost around my body, I said goodbye to Rosie and Arthur the Land Rover and continued on my way to find Blashers.

      If you were to imagine what a Victorian explorer’s house looked like, the Colonel’s house was probably it, brimming with treasures, guns, art, textiles, bows and arrows and other stuff from his various global expeditions. In the hall was a huge Vickers machine gun that he had bought from a ‘local choir boy who is also an arms dealer’. The man himself chuckled, ‘everyone marvels at the gun but no one ever asks if it’s legal.’

      The room was filled with photographs and paintings from around the world. There were muskets and guns mounted on the walls and all sorts of indigenous and tribal objects hanging from every nook and cranny.

      ‘It’s a museum of exploration,’ he explained.

      We moved on to his expedition stores. The entrance contained a carefully indexed library of thousands of travel, adventure and exploration books, all catalogued by country. Next was the film room, bursting at the seams with VHS tapes, DVDs and hundreds of cylinders of old cinematic film which Blashers was in the process of transferring into digital format. One wall was dedicated to a series of little doors labelled: HOT ARID DRY, HOT TROPICAL WET, COLD DRY, COLD DAMP, and so on. I pulled one door open to find a cupboard brimming with khaki shirts and jackets. There were dozens of hats and pith helmets. It was like a props cupboard, except this had all been worn in anger.

      Another wall was piled high with boxes full of rations, tents, canteens, plates, cutlery, lamps, stoves and torches. This was the room of a travelling hoarder. My eyes were overwhelmed. Bows and arrows and spears were propped up in every corner. Each one of them had a story. ‘This one nearly killed me,’ Blasher told me, holding up a knife. It was a living museum of Blashers’ extraordinary life.

      We headed outside to an outbuilding – ‘expedition base,’ he explained. When I visited him he had only recently returned from a recce to Colombia and was soon to lead an expedition across Mongolia. Pretty impressive for an almost 80-year-old.

      ‘So how important have Land Rovers been in your life?’ I asked him.

      ‘Vital,’ Blashers answered. ‘I have driven them in Ethiopia and used them to clear mines in Libya, I have been shot at in Omagh in Northern Ireland and in Cyprus and used them to support expeditions to explore the Blue Nile.’

      Land Rovers really have loomed large in Blashers’ life and they have saved his life on more than one occasion, too. As a sapper in the army, the Land Rover was a vital piece of kit. The cars provided access to the inaccessible. They were packhorses that never tired. ‘I remember the Land Rovers we used to drive had a big sign on the inside of the windscreen which read, “This vehicle cost £1400, please look after it.”’

      He told me the story of one Land Rover that overheated as they drove through the desert. The open-topped Rover had become red hot, igniting a polyester sleeping bag stowed in a cage at the back. ‘We had to jettison all the spare fuel to save the vehicle from igniting,’ he smiled at the memory.

      Blashers is also credited with setting up Operation Raleigh in 1984, which today still enables volunteers to travel to remote places around the world and help local communities. When Prince Charles was given a 110 by Land Rover, he kindly handed it on to Blashers as a donation to Operation Raleigh, for which he was patron.

      The walls of Blashers’ home are papered with mosaics of expedition images, and among the hundreds of heroic shots are the unmistakable shapes of Land Rover Series vehicles. ‘The Queen particularly liked the photograph from the Darien Gap,’ he smiled proudly. ‘We were invited to Buckingham Palace after we made it through the Gap; the Queen told me she particularly admired the photograph of the Series II Land Rover flying the Union flag.’ He showed me a photograph of the vehicle afloat on a river. It’s a great image that sums up the derring-do of the go-anywhere do-anything Land Rover.

      Which leads us on to perhaps Bashers’ most famous expedition: the Darien Gap.

      The Pan American highway had transformed trade and travel between North, Central and South America. The highway ran seamlessly until it reached Panama, where it came to an abrupt halt at a notorious jungle crossing known as the Darien Gap. This hostile, steamy jungle had defeated engineers, who were unable to find a way through the impenetrable swamp between Panama and Colombia.

      In the late 1950s, several expeditions were mounted by international teams in an attempt to cross the gap, and in 1971 Blashers seized the opportunity. He asked his engineering chief if he thought it was a good idea for him to go. For the army, these were the twilight years between conflicts, and the military were looking for opportunities for adventurous training. The Darien Gap project would be a perfect combination of technical problem-solving, engineering, mechanics and jungle training.

      Blashers sent an Irishman on a recce of the jungle, during which he nearly died, but he reported back to the Colonel that, with enough time, men and resources, the crossing would be possible. So the Royal Engineers were enlisted, along with a small army of scientists, zoologists, botanists, geologists and anthropologists. Now all they needed was a vehicle.

      By now Land Rover had built their luxury car, the Range Rover, which they were preparing to launch onto the market. They saw the Darien Gap project as the perfect platform for doing just that, and to prove its off-roading credentials at the same time. It was a brave marketing move – and certainly a gamble.

      Two brand-new Range Rovers were supplied by Land Rover, and were carefully driven from Alaska to Panama, where the jungle expedition would begin. The team had 100 days to cover 250 miles of virgin jungle.

      ‘The problem was the Range Rovers had very powerful engines,’ explained Blashers, ‘but the ground was unseasonably wet, turning it into a muddy quagmire, so the torque of the engines ground the wheels into the mud where they stuck.’ After that, the differentials on the Range Rovers exploded – 12 of them – before Land Rover began to panic and sent out their own engineers.

      Meanwhile, it became apparent to Blashers that what they needed was a Land Rover; not a poncy Range Rover, but a lightweight Series Land Rover to help clear the way ahead of the two heavier vehicles. A runner was dispatched back to Panama City where they purchased on old Series II for $100, which was duly delivered by helicopter to the middle of the Darien Gap to join the expedition. It was named the Pathfinder – and without СКАЧАТЬ