All the while we would look around for a Land Rover Defender . First Lukas ’ s dream car , Lilli got infected rather quickly . The dream of our own Defender was quite far stretched though ( or so we thought ), so wedreamed about it more than we actually thought of buying one . That was until we came up with the rather silly idea of driving through Africa . And of course , if we were to do that journey , what car would be better suited for an overland journey of that scale than a Land Rover ? Legend has it that 70 % of all Land Rovers that have been built since the first version in 1948 are still on the road , and we had to get one . Surely there would be one for us ?
We won ’ t bore you with the whole story how we actually got ours , let ’ s just say we were really lucky finding a Landy that we could afford which wasn ’ t only a collection of rust . One thing though , we bought it very spontaniously and had to change our initial plans of driving all the way from Hamburg to Cape Town a bit . We ended up shipping the car to Cape Town and starting off on an 8 month round trip that lead us through Namibia ’ s desolate and stunning vastness , Botswana ’ s mind blowing contrast between desert and lush delta , Zimbabwe ’ s expensive currency crash and Zambia ’ s beautiful valleys teaming with game so far . On the way we tackled everything from hairy 4x4 tracks to deep sand and dunes to wild animals blocking our way and scary looking guys with rifles or machete ’ s visiting our camp ( who turned out to be very friendly every time , just checking who ’ s camped in their neighborhood ). One morning we were even woken up by monkeys alerting us to a pack of lions running in the riverbed we were camped at .