VW PEOPLE…
Nathaniel was sitting in the doorway of his Kombi when I encountered him, coffee percolator on the footpath beside him and spoon in hand having just finished his breakfast.

I was heading down to main beach in Port Macquarie that mild, sunny winter day when I stopped to talk with Nathaniel where his T3 model Kombi, with its roofrack that he had made, was parked on the street above the beach. He had just returned from a working stint in Katoomba in the Blue Mountains west of Sydney, where we had also camped only a couple weeks before.

We spoke for only a few minutes in the way that people on the road do, sharing a little about ourselves and the places we had been and of our intentions in the near future. Nathaniel’s intention was clear. Now that he was back where he usually lived he intended to have some work done on the van. Our intentions, my partner and I, were less clear and a lot looser. We still had some distance to go on our multi-month roadtrip and we would soon turn south to start the journey along the coast to where we hoped to find a new home.

VW people are usually happy to stop and talk about their vehicles whether they are mere transport around town or home on the road, destination only a vague idea in their heads.

#VW #volkswagen #kombi #VWKombi #vans #vanlife #travel

TODAY’S VW…

Glossy in its red and white paintwork, this example of the T2 model VW Kombi—let’s be honest and call it the 'original search engine'—is fitted out in the tradition of its type as a home on the road.

That was the role of so many of its type, like the high-roof campervan model my friend Yvonne had and the commercial model my partner drove when I met her (and which she was very reluctant to let me drive). The T2 and later variants took people along distant highways and backroads to places far from home—or they might have been home itself. Beach, town and dusty gravel roads were its destinations. High clearance and the weight of the air-cooled engine in the rear with its weight over the wheels gave the Kombi (and the VW beetle) the traction to go places that ordinary cars would find impassable.

The T2 ceased production in Europe and the US in 1979, in 1994 in Mexico and in 2013 in Brazil. That’s a longer life that most other vans and vehicles and attests to the functionality of the model and of Kombis in general.

I came across this fine example, fitted out with a mattress on the engine compartment and curtains for privacy, in the northeastern Tasmanian town of St Helens where it was taking a break in one of its natural homes, the coast.

#VW #VWKombi #kombi #tasmania #vans #vanlife #campervans

VW PEOPLE…
A smile adorns the face of a coinesseur of fine automotive engineering.

Her vehicle is a veteran T2 Kombi, a camper, as you see by the pop-top roof. To add authenticity and decorative elegance she has an arrangement of sea shells swinging from the rear view mirror and, behind her, we see the feathers of some other unique sculptural work. Such fine art enhancements have turned many a Kombi into home-away-from-home, or maybe just home, over the decades that the model has provided visual splendour along the nation’s highways and backroads.

Her resurrected vehicle provides living evidence that old can be made new again, that old vehicles, VWs for the most part, are living proof of the value of recycling what was into something that is.

#vw #Volkswagen #vwkombi #VW #vans #vanlife #vanlifeaustralia