JDV On Air is a vodcast on leadership, risk and the people who take it on. Host Johan de Villiers talks to entrepreneurs and adventurers about what they’ve learnt the hard way. He then breaks it down into lessons for business leaders.
Overlander and author Dan Grec joined me on JDV On Air, and I have not looked at a price tag the same way since.
Dan was a software engineer in Calgary, at a desk with a view of the Rockies. Every working day he could see the snow and could not get to it. He looked at colleagues spending 40 years under the same artificial light, did the sum on his own next 40 and, in his words, scared himself into action.
In June 2009 he pointed a stock Jeep Wrangler, bought for $6,250, north to Alaska and then south until the road ran out in Argentina. The trip took 22 months and 17 countries, and at the end he sold her in Buenos Aires for $5,000. His time on the road cost $27,300, about $1,200 a month, and he published the breakdown.
For Africa he spent more: $18,000 on a used petrol Wrangler with about 100,000km on her, then built her into a house on wheels. She carried him down the west coast and up the east, through 35 countries in 999 days and more than 86,000km. He paid one bribe and caught malaria twice. By his account she never once left him stranded.
I should declare an interest. I am a Land Rover man, and I have been a snob for years about what a proper expedition vehicle looks like. The diesel Land Cruiser brigade swears a petrol Jeep cannot do Africa. Dan found diesel at the big truck stops, 300km–500km apart on the main routes, and petrol at every roadside, because the back roads now run on Chinese scooters.
Defender owners kept asking him where he found spare parts for that thing. “I don’t,” he told them, “because I’ve never needed any.” My own Defender is an old golden retriever. She lies at my feet and costs a fortune in vet bills.
A big Land Cruiser, Dan reckons, would have cost him $80,000–$100,000. “I would have spent so much money on the Land Cruiser,” he said, “I wouldn’t have had enough money to actually have the adventure.”
Every showroom has one of her. “Buy me,” she says, “and nothing will ever go wrong.” She leaves out the rest: nothing will ever happen either, because the money for the trip is now parked in the driveway.
Dan’s rule is that the right vehicle is the one you have now, the one that will actually take you. Swap the vehicle for a head office or a software suite and the sum holds. A budget is a jerry can. Whatever goes on the paintwork is not in the tank.
He is as hard on the small purchases. The overland trade, he says, will sell you a remote temperature monitor for your fridge. His own sat at 4° for the whole trip. “I don’t need to monitor it,” he said. “I just know that it works.” Every gadget has to be cleaned and not lost, and he has watched travellers take an hour to pitch camp and longer to strike it. He calls that mental load. I sell technology for a living, and my industry would have sold that fridge a dashboard and a support contract.
Frugality has a brochure too, and it skips Uganda. Dan’s handbrake had never worked well, and by then he reckons it was packed with Congo mud. Above Lake Albert he left the Jeep in first gear with the lever hauled up hard, and walked 20 paces off for a photograph. She rolled about 30m, hit a rock embankment and went over on her side. Had she gone the other way, there was a serious drop.
Villagers arrived within minutes. Once they knew nobody was hurt, they gave their verdict: it’s just a car. They helped him winch her upright. She started a few hours later, and he drove on with duct tape over the damage and a roadside weld on the mirror.
Buying modestly is a decision. Living with a known fault is a loan, and on that hill the Jeep called it in. The money has its own version. Dan left in 2009 with just over $10,000 for what he thought was a year, and part of the eventual $27,300 ended up on a credit card. He has not drawn an engineer’s salary in a decade. Books, YouTube, speaking and the odd day shifting bags of concrete pay for the road, and he admits to many hours spent looking at engineering jobs. Lean has no cushion.
So follow Dan if the money is finite and the trip is the point: the start-up, or the team choosing between the system it can run today and the suite it might deserve one day. Buy the one that leaves cash for the road, and fix the handbrake. Do not follow him where a failure lands on somebody else. When I flew helicopters, nobody called the instrument panel mental load.
Dan still has the Jeep. She was parked in his driveway when we spoke, seven years after she reached Egypt, and the last thing he said to me was that he ought to take her straight back to Africa. That is what $18,000 looks like when the rest goes in the tank.
Listen to the full episode on your preferred platform here.
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Johan de Villiers is the author of ‘Overlanding Through the Boardroom: Using Adventure Principles for Success in Business’, published by Rockhopper Books. An ex-helicopter pilot who has summited three of the Seven Summits and overlanded 14 African countries, he lives by his mantra: “Have more fun, take more risks, and be more substantial in somebody’s life."
