A Love Affair With Landies

Choosing a vehicle for extensive expeditions is an extremely difficult task as there are a number of capable vehicles out there. While the choice of a 4×4 adventure vehicle is a personal one, Kingsley and crew are unashamedly ‘Landy people’. He explains why.

- Kingsley Holgate

What makes Land Rover special to us is two intangible traits: its heritage and the wonderful bonds of friendship among Land Rover owners that go beyond borders, culture, and language. On top of its incredible off-road capabilities, these traits are what make this iconic brand unique.

We’ve just been sent some spy pics of the new Defender and there’s growing excitement among Land Rover followers, many of whom were quite distraught when the last old Defender rolled off the assembly line in 2016. Thinking back, I remember how we celebrated that occasion by taking a clutch of old Series 1s through the high altitude passes of the mountain kingdom of Lesotho. That was a great adventure filled with humor, spills, and thrills but every one of those old girls made it back home in one piece.

Recently on our Land Rover Discovery journey from Cape Town to Kathmandu and on to Calcutta, while zigzagging along the last of the expedition’s high mountain passes through mist, thick forests, tea plantations and hundreds of twists and turns to reach Darjeeling, we came across some of the legendary, old Land Rover Series 1s, originally brought to India by the British tea planters. In those days, they were the only vehicles tough enough to withstand the high Himalayan mountain passes of this region.

SANDS OF TIME