Sometimes there's a very thin line indeed between adventurous and reckless. Believe me, I could tell you stories... Sometimes I think it is a minor miracle that my friends and I survived our teenage years. In fact, one can't really have a great adventure without a little recklessness and a dash of poor judgment tossed in. After all, no really great story ever begins "Hey, this one time we were sitting around reading some Hemingway, when..." But any story that starts with "Did I ever tell you about the time we tried to drive Stan's Pinto across Muddy Creek during a hundred-year flood?" Now that's going to be a tale worth hearing.
This brings me to two intrepid adventurers, an Englishman named Ollie Jenks and a Canadian guy named Seth Scott. While mooching around London, these two happened upon a Reliant Robin, a three-wheeled, cheaper-than-dirt setup that may well be one of the worst cars ever made outside of a communist country. So, instead of looking at the Robin as a curiosity that probably shouldn't be driven any farther than one was willing to walk home, these two decided to go further afield - to Cape Town, South Africa. This would award them the title for the longest journey undertaken in a three-wheeled vehicle.
“It was so ridiculous I couldn’t say no,” Jenks said.
The proposal by his Canadian buddy Seth Scott, a fellow lover of cars and crazy adventures, was for them to drive a decades-old British-made Reliant Robin car from London to the southern tip of Africa — a 14,000-mile (22,500-kilometer) journey through 22 countries — to set a record for the longest trip in a three-wheeled vehicle.
Reliant Robins have cultlike status in the U.K. as humble three-wheelers that, in Jenks’ words, were designed to go to the shops and back in 1970s Britain. They went out of production in the early 2000s but remain loved in British culture, especially after a Reliant appeared as the Trotter brothers’ trusty but battered yellow van in the hugely popular sitcom “Only Fools and Horses.”
Yet you couldn’t find a less suitable vehicle to take thousands of miles through tropical jungles, mountain ranges and deserts down the west side of Africa. And that’s precisely why Jenks went for the absurd plan.
The Reliant Robin is such a bad car that it was repeatedly lampooned in Rowan Atkinson's long-running BBC comedy, Mr. Bean. It had a fiberglass body and was designed, reportedly, for running to the market and back. It did have one advantage over a more traditional vehicle; it was, under the British rules of the road, a tricycle, not a car. That meant it was cheaper to drive, incurring a lower road tax, and one could drive it with a motorcycle license. They sold 65,000 of these, proving once again that the American car companies that turned out wonders like the Chevette and the Pinto didn't have a monopoly on the "it's a piece of junk, but it's cheap" market.
But that journey, from London to Cape Town, that's taking reckless to a whole new level. Mind you, this would be a risky undertaking in an armored personnel carrier with plenty of guns and ammo. But these characters attempted it in their Reliant Robin, which they named "Sheila." And it wasn't an easy trip.
They arrived in Benin during an attempted coup. They skirted through northern Nigeria as the U.S. launched airstrikes on Islamic State targets. They were given a military escort for about 300 miles (480 kilometers) through a region of separatist violence in Cameroon.
“Imagine this car in a military convoy,” Jenks said.
And there were many brushes with traffic-related danger, including when an overtaking bus almost flattened Sheila against a cliff face in Congo.
True to form that Reliants are sometimes not so reliable, there were also countless breakdowns on the punishing roads.
Sheila needed her wheel springs replaced in the first two weeks. The gearbox broke in Ghana, leaving them with only fourth gear. In Cameroon, there were clutch and distributor problems and then the big one: the engine blew up.
Still, it's not really an adventure without adversity. Think of the the great American journeys from the pioneer years: Wagon wheels broken, oxen dying, disease, attacks by natives; it's not an adventure unless there are challenges to overcome, and since much of the world's frontiers are settled now, it seems some folks just have to dream up new ways to challenge themselves, as well as challenge the boundaries of prudence and good sense.
Read More: Ford Now Dropping All-Electric F-150 Lightning Amid $13B EV Losses
Trump Ditches 'Green New Scam' – Ford Predicts Cheaper Wheels Ahead
But, in the end, Jenks and Scott made it. Barely.
More than 120 days after setting off, she rattled into Cape Town last month on an engine that began badly overheating in the Namibian desert and had been touch and go for about 1,000 miles (1,600 kilometers).
“This is a great underdog story,” said Graeme Hurst, a South African car lover who followed them on Instagram and came to see Sheila. “I see the farcical kind of comical nature of it ... but also the sheer admiration. I mean, they have utter tenacity.”
True enough.
Look, I get the appeal of adventure. I live in Alaska, after all, a place whose name is often associated with adventure. The history of the United States, most especially the western expansion, is one of people who, many would say, took leave of their good sense and struck out across a continent. So, perhaps Jenks and Scott had a little of that spirit. Or, perhaps they were just reckless. But in the end, they made it; they succeeded, against all odds, and that may well be something that the American Kit Carson may have looked on with an admiring smile.
