Breadcrumbs

What is overlanding?

 

Well, firstly it is a made-up word referring to travel overland, made into a verb by adding 'ing'.

Leaving that aside, overlanding, in my humble opinion, (is that now known as imho?) is a form of tourism.

The truck driver who drives her load from London to Istanbul is not overlanding, but is however traveling overland.

Overlanding is tourism with added adventure, excitement, thrills, and adrenaline. It is not without risk, and occasionally has unfortunate consequences.

Introduction to overlanding

 

Free counters!

 

In the 70s and 80s there were a number of operators offering trips to far flung places previously inaccessible as a holiday destination. These trips were however not holidays, nor were they intended to be. They were intentionally called expeditions as this more closely reflected what you were getting yourself into. Encounter Overland and Exodus Expeditions were considered the best of the bunch at the time. Encounter Overland has been taken over by Dragoman and absorbed. When researching what had happened to Encounter Overland I found a number of interesting web sites, videos and photos some of which are included here. I also found this case study about responsible tourism. (Link lost, but found this trying to re-establish link) There is a Spirit of Encounter web site which keeps a virtual Encounter Overland alive. Encounter Overland’s tag was ‘Where there’s a wheel there’s a way.’

The Spirit of Encounter web site mentions an address of 267 Old Brompton Road. I remember an address of 281 Old Brompton Road. I will have to do some more digging.

Encounter Overland had two livery colours, bright orange and pale blue. Although the early vehicles were ex-military they wanted to ensure that the trucks were not misidentified as army trucks as some of the countries traveled through were not as stable as might be desired. You can see both colours in the following YouTube videos. In my time the trucks for Asia and Africa were mainly Bedford MJ 4x4, with one Bedford KM 6x4 if my memory serves me correctly.

Counter

 

 

Free counters!

 

 

 

 The flag counter below is for my original travelogue, which is slowly being replaced by this one, but can still be found here.

free counters

 

 

News Flash

Change of host Sept 2023

 

Change of host Sept 2023

 

In the begining of August 2023 I transfered my ivanhurst.me.uk sites, including this one from 123-reg to IONOS. It was meant to be a simple task. However, that was to to be the case. The reason for the move was primarily the hugh increase in price that 123-reg was applying regarding email boxes. Previously, the upto 500 of the boxes were included in the various hosting packages I had. Now they were going to charge for each mailbox based on size, and as far as I could make out, this was going to cost me nearly £2,000. This was not acceptable, and I did not get satisfactory answers from support. So I turned of all the auto renews and stated to move sites and domains accross to IONOS.

Travel data problems

 

Travel data problems

This is where it starts to get a little technical.

The site is built on a content management system, CMS, using Joomla. Joomla is moving forward and version 3.10.?? is being discontinued. Future developments are for version 4.??

Similarly, PHP 7 is being replaced with PHP 8.

Part of the migration is relatively simple, I have already changed to a new template which works on the new platforms.

However, some of the helper applications, which work within Joomla are not yet ready.

Fabrik is one of those applications, if fact a significant 'Joomla Custom Website Application Builder'.

Refresh 2021

 

Site refresh Easter 2021

I decided to give the site a bit of a refresh over Easter 2021 and install a new template and some additional functions. One of the things I didn't like about the old site was the delay in text appearing which probably meant some people left before the content appeared. This has been corrected now.