We were not looking for just any fridge. We need an “offroad” fridge and all the gurus left us with only the choice between two brands: Engel or National Luna. Everything else, according to the experts we consulted, would either fail, explode or leave us starving under a baobab tree. Both are fridge/freezers specifically designed to be left in the back of an offroading 4×4 plugged into 12v power supplies, keeping the Chardonnay at coiffable temperatures. My eyes glazed over listening to the sales talk of the relative benefits of “direct drive compressors” and I decided that I’d look for a second-hand fridge that would have the highest resale value after we used it on our trip, not realizing that they have high resale values precisely because they are impossible to extract from their current owners. Nonetheless, I needed a pre-owned Engel fridge.
Find one, I eventually did. Fiona and I hopped into the car to Somerset West (about an hour from Cape Town) to meet Clive, a retired police officer and his coveted Engel fridge. After being greeted by a rather aggressive German Shepherd intent on taking a chunk of my leg, we met Clive. Clive, it turns out, is an avid overlander who, upon hearing of our plans, quickly and rather uncomfortably cornered Fiona with photos of his newest creation: a 1980s vintage flatbed military 4×4 truck onto which he had welded the top half of a 1950s vintage caravan (like the ones you see outside Blackpool). A sort of freakish, horrific Mad Max vehicular cross-breed. He was planning an epic African trip with his very bemused wife in the thing and no longer needed the fridge as he was planning to put a full-size Westinghouse in the caravanish bit. To this point, we thought we were being a bit wacky and adventurous. Clive and his bizarre Caravruck contraption put it into a bit of perspective for us… perhaps not the last eccentric we will meet.