Demountable camper group

Hi all,

We are Ralph & Belinda and for the last 20 years we have been a pretty dedicated Land Rover owners. For the last 6 years we have been overlanding to Morocco, Iceland, the Arctic Circle and, most recently, into Asia via Greece and Turkey. We have done all this in a 21 years old 300tdi Discovery. We have documented our trials, tribulations and travels here: http://www.overland-rovers.com/ralphs-pages/.

Due to health reasons (impending knee replacement), continuing to use a rooftent is going to become difficult in the near future and so we decided to look for a replacement vehicle that I could fit a decent demountable camper on.

We were not in a rush and so, while I was researching the right vehicle, I also started to look for the accommodation options.

I discovered the Gazell (http://www.gazell.fr) camping cell which seems to ✔ all our boxes. And we have now aquired this:
for it to fit on the back of

We are planning a few mods to make the vehicle more 'overland friendly' such as snorkel, winch, underbody protection, AT tyres, etc. Nothing too radical as I want to keep it fairly standard.

In the future we have plans to tour more of Europe including the more remote eastern countries like Romania as well as ship the truck to Namibia and maybe even to Oz when funds and time allow.

We are hoping to attend the Bad Kissengen show but plan to travel over to France and view the gazell early in the new year. Does anyone on here have any experience of this cell? We would really appreciate any info that anyone may have on its quality and space

Good morning to both of you, that blog looks quite snazzy and I shall be reading that later today thanks,
although the Gazell are known here I don't know anyone that yet bought on, I looked around one at overland a couple of years back and thought them well made and clever ideas inside,

the ranger however is quite commonplace here and a a proven good vehicle for this activity.

Welcome to the group Ralph and here is our facebook page
if you prefer instead


Zildjian

Hello Ralph I am a new member here as well,
just been looking at your web-site in the link and it looks quite far flung so its back to that for another read

I think i saw a post on a landrover fb page from someone leaving the fold and buying a bronze Ranger. Guess that was you.
We have a few diehard landroverists on here too.

#onlycomeoutatnight

Hello and Welcome

And me too, hi and weclome to the forum

Hi and welcome from somerset

Thanks for the welcome and the comments about the blog. If you want an interesting read then I suggest you have a look at our 2009 Morocco trip. Absolutely everything that could go wrong did go wrong. It just might make you smile

I have now created http://www.overlandranger.com for this new phase of our adventures. It's only a few days old so there's not much there yet

Yes I am a long term Land Rover fan and when we started to look for a replacement vehicle that I could fit a decent demountable camper on I immediately knew that it had to be a defender. So we took a 2013 110 Utility for a test drive. The engine was definitely quieter and quite nippy (it was the 2.2 TDCi) and we both liked it. It had covered 8000 miles and was just under £28000. However we realised that a 110 wasn't big enough and we needed a 130. Searching online turned up very few TDCi 130s but we were not in a hurry so I set my search criteria and sat back to wait for the perfect car.

I eagerly started to do my research for all the mods I would want; how to improve the headlights, how to improve the turning circle, how to improve the seats, how to add soundproofing, getting it waxoyled, possible auto box conversions etc. etc. I started to have it all planned out

At the same time I also started to look for the accommodation options such as the Globe Camper, K-Hutte and Gazell.

Whilst looking at these I noticed that many were fitted to Toyota Hilux and Ford Ranger Double Cabs. So just out of curiosity I started to have a look at them in turn.

Suddenly I started to realise just what my ‘love’ of Land Rovers was going to cost me!

For the price of a 3 or 4 year old 130 I could get a virtually brand new Ford or Toyota. They were fitted with just about every driver aid, safety feature and convenience possible. They had headlights that didn’t need upgrading, they had room for you right elbow, they had comfy seats, they had a good turning circle and they came with an auto option and a 12 years corrosion warranty. They also came with plenty of cabin storage, USB charging sockets, bluetooth, cruise control, etc. etc.

I started to think that it was unfair to compare the Defender with these vehicles but then I realised that they also had airbags and ABS, as standard, two safety features you cannot get on a Defender 130 (ABS is only available on 2015 models) but they are fitted on my 21 years old discovery!

It became obvious that a brand new defender was a backward step, in so many ways, from what I already had; let alone what I could get for the same money.

Anyway, cutting this long and boring story short, we test drove a 2015 hilux, an Isuzu D-Max and a Ranger and, as you can read, the Ranger won.

If I was spending 10K then a Defender would have still been a contender but it just simply wasn't worth the money.

Zildjian, thanks for the comment about the Gazell. It does look well thought out and seems to have everything that we want. We shall try and arrange a weekend in France to visit the factory and see one in real life.

Well Ralph on the Gazell trip, that would be of interest i'm sure here so please jot down what you see, (and photographs too please)

On the UK market the choice is limited to essentially less than a handful of importers, the same people (all members here)
will give you all the advice you'll need beforehand and try where possible to supply you a used unit so might save you some miles,
what we don't have yet is anything comparable to Gazell, that particular genre of camper seems to have largely passed the UK by sadly, I think we have a large collection of the UK owners of demount's here although new ones keep appearing.

Meant to show you this and then forgot!