Our new home

Thomas:

A car is similar to a house. You buy one and then you find out it needs renovation or optimization since you feel it can or has to be customized according to your likings. So the inside of the Toyota Land Cruiser was a little too conventional with 8 seats and only little storage space but it has a 180 litres fuel tank. What we needed was a small living room, a bedroom, a kitchen, a workshop and a rooftop terrace with a view and all this on approximately 2 m². What a challenge! However, the internet gave some good ideas how it could look like.

Measures of the car are quickly taken and a plan drawn. Removing 6 of the 8 seats of the car is a task of one hour or maybe it was two plus. How to implement the plan is easy said, harder to do and took much longer than expected. The idea was to put boxes in the back of the car to store the belongings and also allow sleeping on them (bedroom) in case the weather is bad or for other reasons if it is more appropriate to sleep inside. To figure out the details how to do it was basically a lot of looking around in Dubai and I had to visit Hardware stores, used car markets, 4x4 shops, IKEA, and so on and so on. The decision was to build it from plywood and have it done by professionals. So the wooden boxes I found at IKEA and I was so proud of didn’t get the approval of the carpenter. So let’s do it all in plywood (there is enough in Dubai). Adds a few kilos but will be for eternity and for sure last longer than the car.


Fixing an appointment in Dubai is a challenge. So after the 3rd trip to Satwa the right carpenter is found and is available. As we implement the plan, we adjust it a little here and there and improvise where required. German engineering/planning skills meets local practical implementation skills. That has to be good at the end. After 6 hours the boxes are in the car and customer and carpenter are happy. Next came the real test, a short camping trip to Mussandam (Oman), which reveales that the current setup can be further improved. Two more short visits to Satwa and me spending a couple of hours in and under the car does the rest.

The next step is finding a solid roof carrier, which is not available for the Toyota Prado, but why not take one for another Toyota Model and fix it for the Prado. Here goes again a day of work with the professionals. Rest is then tinting the glass in the back (for privacy reasons) since we want to sleep in the car and Claudia likes it dark. Moreover a 2nd spare tire is needed, which everyone recommends. Getting it can be easy, just going to Toyota and paying AED 2000 after discount for the alloy-rim without tire or going to the used car market and get it new with an original tire for AED 800.

The rest is then packing, unpacking, sorting, packing, optimizing, packing and hoping that in the end we will find what we are looking for if we need it. Claudia mentioned the highly sophisticated excel-based packing list we have for this …. Where did I store this bloody part again – ‘six weeks ago’?????

Finally packing is over now. Tomorrow we will leave Dubai for Oman…

Moving out...

Claudia:

The relocation company did a great job today! All our belongings are already on their way to Munich (at least we hope)… We are happy to get rid of many many things, but we cannot imagine how these hundreds of boxes should fit in our small apartment in Munich? After the relocation guys finally left after a hard day of packing, we decided to see some friends to say good bye, and at this occasion I found out that they took ALL my shoes!! I was standing there, literally in the rain (it really was raining today) with my "complimentary Hilton flipflops", trying to imagine how to climb with them all the mountains in our agenda… but in the end we were lucky to reach them and they were very friendly to unpack again… thanks God…

Now we are sitting in our almost empty flat, happy that another step is finished and a little sad in the same time, because we know that never in our lives we will stay again in a flat which is so beautiful, located directly at the beach, with a view that took our breath away every day during the last 1½ years.

But as Thomas said: now we change a big flat with no garden to a very small “flat” with the biggest and most beautiful garden one can imagine…

… and it’s the right time to leave anyhow. We just learned today that the rent for this flat will increase incredibly – 5.500 Euro per month! Comparing to this, it’s a real bargain what we paid. Despite the financial crisis, prices are exploding in Dubai, and we would have to leave anyhow, since this is not even close to our budget :-)

So now we are looking forward to spending our last nights in a REAL flat, in a REAL bed, with a REAL shower, however, eating already from plastic plates and wearing our old and worn out clothes we will wear for the next months…

But as always – after the packing is before the packing… so the next days we will spend with packing the car…

Endless preparations...

Claudia:

What a great idea! And what a crazy one! When Thomas was talking for the first time about crossing Africa, I thought it’s just another one of his crazy midlife-crisis-ideas... Now we are about to leave, and I still cannot believe it’s true. But again – just for the records – it’s still HIS idea. That’s important, since whenever something will go wrong (and of course that will happen very often), I can blame him for everything :-) :-)

The preparations of our big project started mid of November 2008 with converting our Toyota Landcruiser. Thomas invested a lot of time in changing it to a real world-traveler-car. Only 2 seats are left, the rest is boxes, boxes, boxes, boxes.... and a roof-mounted luggage rack. Thomas even thinks we can sleep in it, but that would mean to put all our things out in the rain to get some space for us inside... and to arrange ourselves like Swiss knives...

The next big step were all these vaccinations. Never in my life could I imagine the amount of vaccinations one could need. There were times when I felt like Arnold Schwarzenegger, after getting two shots in each arm... but now we are prepared for anything, even for being bitten by wild monkeys (doesn’t that sound inviting?)

One of the biggest hurdles to take was getting all the necessary documents – visa, insurances, trip-tickets, carnets de passage, letters from the company and the embassy confirming that we are good people :-) ... we are still not through everything, but now we know all the visa procedures for every country. We still have to return our Dubai visa, which sounds easy but turned out to be another problem...

It’s raining today in Dubai and looking out to the grey, wet and uncomfortable weather, I still cannot imagine that this will be our “home” for the next months...

... but a good day to pack our things for the trip. I’m about to become an Excel specialist because of all the lists Thomas made (Markus – you won’t believe it!). Millions of items that can be filtered and sorted... now we can find out exactly where in the car the blue toothbrush or the green screwdriver is located, in which box, in which area of the car.... Our first big fight will start when I take something and put it back to a different place than marked in Thomas’ high sophisticated Excel sheet...