This Land Rover 110 looks resplendent with its glowing orange paint, not a colour that you would find at the back of the Land Rover brochure, but there is a very good reason why this 110 glows in this way. It resides in Portugal and orange is one of the national colours. It is owned by a very good friend of mine Joao Campeao who is as proud of being Portuguese as I am as proud to be English.

Joao and I met a few years ago when he was one of my clients on an adventure to Morocco and he and his half English wife Zizi (great name) became good friends of both Louise and I.

One very interesting adventure that Joao and I had together in his orange 110 was enjoying a few hectic days following The Dakar, when it was still in North Africa. We were part of the team of marshals in Portugal, where, I remember we got very little sleep but enjoyed some very close up views of the bikes, cars and truck’s of The Dakar as they passed at great speed through our post. We then followed the Dakar to Africa, driving through the night to get to the end of the first stage. As the sun rose, we sat exhausted on the warm African soil and waited for the competitors to arrive. The bikes came first followed by the cars and finishing with the leviathans (trucks) mixed up with the stragglers from the first two groups. One extraordinary sight was the dust which was created. As the volume of passing traffic increased the dust rising into the air became as thick as an English November Fog, hanging for hours, lit by the sun shining through it.

This picture is from one of the river crossings on our adventure that Joao ran with some of our clients in Portugal itself and I will be running such an adventure again, hopefully in 2013 after a reconnaissance with Joao in his orange 110.