Cuthbert’s FAQs

So what is this ‘overlanding’ malarkey all about?  Here are the most frequently asked questions that we receive. Click on the question to skip to the answer:

1. How long have you been travelling and what made you decide to do this?
2. Is it tough living in a truck long-term?
3. Which was your favourite place?
4. Did you build Cuthbert yourself?
5. Why did you choose the Iveco Daily 4×4 base vehicle?
6. Does a modern diesel vehicle have problems with South American high-sulphur fuel?
7. Where do you park-up, sleep and eat ?
8. What about bathroom facilities and showers etc?
9. How much water do you carry and where do you get it?
10. What about security… is overlanding safe?
11. How do you ship Cuthbert… by container-shipping?
12. How does Cuthbert perform on rough tracks and off-road?
13. What is Cuthbert’s weight and is it difficult to stay within the axle limits?
14. How do you decide routes, where to go, things to see etc?

Got any other questions? Please feel free to contact us. We may or may not have an answer, but we’ll still be chuffed to hear from you 🙂

1. How long have you been travelling and what made you decide to do this?

We set off in January 2014. Check out our ‘Timeline’ here. Why? Because life’s too short not to. Nobody ever looked back and wished they’d spent more time at work

2. Is it tough living in a truck long-term?

We guess this kind of depends on your definition of ‘tough’ 🙂  Many travellers spend months, sometimes even years on the road living in roof-tents or in the back of 4×4 cars. For us that would be tough. We’re ‘overlanding softies’ and put a lot of thought into what we would need to be comfortable long-term on the road. Anyone can rough-it out there! Click here to see how we chose our (comfortable) overlanding camper truck.  

3. Which was your favourite place?

Too hard to say… so many great places and things. Every country we’ve visited has amazing and unforgettable aspects. There are many ways to judge a country or place but generally, we like places where we receive a warm welcome from the people. In Africa the clear winner in this respect was Zimbabwe. In South America we thought for most of the time it was Brazil, but it was pipped at the post by our final country there: Colombia.

4. Did you build Cuthbert yourself?

No. We wanted to, but living in Qatar at the time meant that logistically, it wasn’t going to be feasible. We found an excellent company Bocklet Fahrzeugbau in Koblenz, Germany who did a great job building Cuthbert for us (click here for the story). Since we have been driving Cuthbert, Marcus has done all the maintenance, repairs and modifications (click here)

5. Why did you choose the Iveco Daily 4×4 base vehicle?

A Landrover was too small. A Unimog was too big. The Daily 4×4 sits comfortably between those two options and is a very capable off-road vehicle (Click here for how we reached this conclusion).

6. Does a modern diesel vehicle have problems with South American high-sulphur fuel or very high altitudes in the Andes?

Nothing that a bit of planning can’t handle (click here for how this has been for us).

7. Where do you park-up, sleep and eat?

It depends. We prefer to wild-camp in places of natural beauty, away from crowds, with great views: on hillsides, beaches, riverbanks etc. It just needs to be safe and level enough for us to sleep comfortably. But…. and it’s a big BUT… it’s often not possible to find such remote, idyllic, free places. Sometimes we pay to go to designated camp-spots. Or we use restaurant or hotel car-parks. Sometimes we end-up in less-than-scenic highway truck-stops (say, if we’re on a long-haul leg between destinations and just need somewhere for a quick night-stop).

In inner-cities we sometimes need to use central car-parks to get within striking distance of main attractions. These are mostly ugly locations and often a bit noisy, but as we are out all day sight-seeing and only use the car-park to sleep, they serve their purpose for a limited time. Most overland travellers now use the iOverlander App to find the best places to park-up.

For eating, if we are in towns we often eat in local food places – cafes/restaurants. We also have full catering/cooking facilities in Cuthbert, including a fridge/freezer, gas cooker (hob-top and oven with grill). We shop in markets and supermarkets and cook all our favourite foods from home, as well as trying local produce (click here for more info on kitchen/food).

8. What about bathroom facilities and showers etc?

In Cuthbert we have a bathroom (a separate room from the living area). This has a water-flushing toilet with a SOG-vent (no chemicals used), plus a sink and shower with a full hot-water system. Click here for internal pics of Cuthbert incl the bathroom.

9. How much water do you carry and where do you get it?

We can carry up to 230 litres of fresh water. We fill the tank generally from taps at petrol stations, but we also carry a submersible pump to take water from rivers/waterfalls if necessary. All the water is filtered to 0.5 micron safe-drinking standard (click here for full details of the water and the other ‘domestic’ systems)

10. What about security… is overlanding safe?

Common sense is the key thing here, but obviously this varies from country to country and even area to area within each country. A bit of back-ground research, chatting to locals and taking common sense precautions a adequate in the vast majority of places.

As I write this in Costa Rica on 22 April 2018, some serious civil unrest has just yesterday kicked-off in our next country, Nicaragua. We’ll be keeping an eye on this and decide what to do when we get closer to our Costa Rican visas expiring. If we can’t safely pass through Nicaragua, we’ll have to back-track to Panama and consider our options to ship around the problem area. (Update: we made it across Nicaragua at the height of the unrest – click here for story)

Over our years of overlanding we have never felt personally threatened. Our only incident was the theft of our sat-nav from inside the car at a petrol station in Namibia when we foolishly left the door unlocked and the Garmin GPS out of its bracket on-view (click here for story: ‘Wallace is kidnapped‘).

11. How do you ship Cuthbert… by container-shipping?

No, Cuthbert doesn’t fit into a container, we ship by roll-on roll-off (RORO) vehicle shipping. We have done this four times now with no bad experiences (click here for the detail)

12. How does Cuthbert perform on rough tracks and off-road?

Marvellously. We chose the Iveco Daily 4×4 because we thought it would be very capable, but it has truly exceeded our expectations. Here are a few videos and stories of Cuthbert doing his rough-road thing:

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13. What is Cuthbert’s weight and is it difficult to stay within the axle limits?

Cuthbert originally was registered at 5.5T but was later re-plated and re-registered at 5.9T (click here for how we did this).  Staying within the axle limits (particularly the heavier rear axle) is a constant juggling/balancing act between water and fuel. If we carry the maximum fuel of 400 litres (between three separate tanks) we can’t carry full water of 230 litres at the same time. The balancing act is calculated with the trim sheet that Marcus drew-up (click here).

14. How do you decided routes, where to go, things to see etc?

Our chosen continent/country is mostly dictated by our long-standing travel aspirations, but also travel rules/restrictions have a significant impact (particularly covid rules more recently). We then form a very general loose ‘plan’ for an approximate route around the country. This is as vague as north-to-south, east-to-west etc, normally dictated by climate, season etc (e.g. due to extreme climates we wanted to see southern Argentina and Patagonia in the summer and northern Argentina in the winter). Then we hit the road.

Unless there is only one route to a destination (e.g. the BR-319 across the Amazon in Brazil, or the Dalton Highway to the Alaskan Arctic Ocean), or a widely recommended specific iconic route across a particular area (e.g. the Carretera Austral in Chile) then we never plan a detailed route. We simply wake-up in the morning and decide which road as we are driving.

Our ways to find interesting spots to stop and see vary hugely from country to country.

  • Published travel guides (e.g. Bradt Guides in Africa, Lonely Planet in South America, Moon Guide in parts of USA) can be a good starting point for main attractions, but often miss local curiosities.
  • Word of mouth from other travellers and more importantly, chatting to locals is a great source for local events and curious minor attractions.
  • These days, Googling can be useful (that Mr G knows a lot of stuff, ask him what’s around the area).
  • In North America we have found Roadside America quite useful (there’s a lot of duff-stuff, but it’s worth hunting through the entries for the good stuff).
  • Around the world, Atlas Obscura has some great info (again, some entries are a bit rubbish but often worth a scan as you’re overlanding through an area).
  • In some countries the good old Visitor Centres can be helpful. Quality varies hugely so don’t raise your expectations of these in every country, but they’re sometimes staffed by helpful local people who know what’s going down in the ‘hood.

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