People who hunt animals for sport are more environmentally conscious than vegetarians. There, I said it. Veggies won’t eat cows because they think they are killed inhumanely. Let me tell you I’d rather have a deadbolt (a technique no longer used I may add) through my face than a pack of jackals tearing strips off my haunches while one of them tucks into my entrails. If we didn’t kill cows and sheep for food imagine the savage deaths they would suffer in the wild. They wouldn’t stand a chance. Your cat is less domestic. Similarly, hunting buck in the wild with a crisp, clean kill I guarantee is a better fate than being a walking buffet for Wild Hunting Dogs.
By Gavin Williams
You see vegetarians and vegans will generally never cease to remind you why they’re salad botherers, whereas not one hunter I’ve met gloats about the act of killing, but rather gives reverence to something they see as a very challenging sport. Something I never understood until I took a Nissan Patrol 4.2 Turbo Diesel Pick-Up to a game farm in The Valley Of Desolation, about 80kms outside of Graaf-Reinet.
This car’s personality is the hunter, whereas a lot of others out there in the market are hypocritical vegans: claiming to be something for the sake of some blinkered environmental philosophising. Like a Prius whose factory has a bigger carbon footprint than Mothra or Godzilla. Let me explain. Someone might claim to be an earth-first goodie two shoes who only eats plant matter and then drives a car in traffic for 50kms a day and vacations on a Golf Estate in reclaimed wetlands. The Patrol is built for the farm where you’ll only drive the 120km radius of your land once a week. It’s for the hunter. It’s rugged, no-nonsense and unashamedly John Rambo. It’s egg, wors and koffie instead of chamomile and juniper with free-range asparagus.
Unbelievably there’s air-con and electric windows but the only other thing involving a button is a switch for the sub tank. Yip, this bakkie was equipped with TWO 90 litre tanks, which is something I needed on the seemingly endless road to Graaf-Reinet. The whole trip cost about R3000 in juice as the rudimentary inline-6 plodded its way to the game farm and back to Cape Town.
Everything is geared towards low-end grunt but on the open road it was shall we say… adequate. Like John Rambo at a desk job. He’ll get it done but knows he’d rather be in the jungle bowie-knifing his way through an ambush of Cambodians. The design is about the same age as Stallone as well, and I can’t help but think Nissan recognised that the agricultural segment doesn’t necessarily like change (probably because it’s usually the precursor to land reforms) so they kept the car Spartan, hard and steely as a Klein Karoo dawn. Farmers just want a new Patrol to replace their old Patrol.
We’re a funny bunch us South African males – especially bakkie enthusiasts – and when I first picked up the beastly Patrol I got more than a few respectful looks from guys in all manner of 4X4s. But the Patrol does look the business by being completely white with a giant rear wheel slung out at the back and a gaping snorkel dominating the roofline.
It’s winch ready and looks like you could bolt anything from a sub-machine gun to a housing development onto the back of it. That’s what I’ve always like about Land-Rovers, the fact that they’re basically Meccano for grown-ups. You can drill through them and modify them anyway you see fit. The Patrol has the same utilitarian feel, which makes it hardly surprising that its one of the UN’s vehicles of choice.
Funnily enough the father of the mate I was following (he was in a Landy) works for the United Nations. So Davide, a nutcase of an Italian, thought it prudent to put a UN flag on his aerial. We stopped for fuel and a family in a Land-Cruiser just kept staring at us. We passed them at a rest stop a few k’s down the road and they waved like those Americans you see bleary eyed at a NASCAR race as the Tomcats do the fly-by. I’m sure Davide’s Italian accent didn’t help things and they obviously thought we were Peace Keeping forces on our way to oust Mugabe or some such. Felt good.
Now the last time I did the road between Beaufort-West and Aberdeen I was in a truck with Ciro. It’s a long story that one day will be told but essentially we had to hitch a ride with some truck drivers on the world’s dullest road. It was like watching Top Billing in slow motion.
The driver set the cruise control to 80 and we hit the road toward the horizon, which only bends to compensate for the curvature of the planet. It wasn’t that much more exciting in the Patrol, but then it wouldn’t be that exciting in a Bugatti Veyron. The Nissan Patrol doesn’t come with a radio presumably because out in the farmlands the only signal you can pick up is an old woman telling Spook stories late at night. Ingeniously though I hooked up some tunes; the trip would have been suicide without them.
In order to have music I first had to go and meet a Russian named Pavel down at the waterfront to pick up a transponder. Meeting a Russian down at the docks to pick up a Transponder just sounds cool, but wasn’t anywhere near as sinister as it should’ve been unfortunately. I then managed to plug the laptop into the transponder, which was hooked up to the ciggie lighter, and then plug my iPod into the laptop, which then played tunes through my iTunes program on shuffle. Rather crafty, huh? Got me some pretty mesmerized looks at the many fuel stops though, but it kept me sane.
Once off-road on the farm the Patrol was simply epic. It’s an absolute joy as it comes into its own on the loose gravel that tripped up Madame Q7. It bounded through mountains and sucker punched hillocks. It gave some sweet chin music to rivers and threw rocks at rocks until they called their mothers, weeping. It gouged the eyes of valleys and laughed in the face of -3 degree dawns (it has a choke. I’m not shitting you, it actually has a choke) It simply feels indestructible all the time, like it wants you to try and hurt it so it can fly into a rage and destroy an escarpment or two. It’s immense, immense fun and you’d do well to try and forget about its impenetrable nature when you’re back in the city and just gagging to trample over another bloody Polo and Emo kids on Long Street.
The Patrol reminded me of a time when men were men. It’s not metrosexual, its retrosexual. It has a moustache and wears Blue Stratos and builds fences for fun. I’m starting to see why so many SA males love the 4WD bakkie, because in many ways it’s the only way to properly see and appreciate the vast beauty of our country.
It’s great to get back to basics in nature in a car that is basic to its core. And that’s the point: less to go wrong. And if something does get knocked loose by a Sidewinder missile in the Congo, you can fix it with some bark and a bit of old fashioned man-logic. Now that’s fun.
And on a final note if you happened to be a vegetarian who drove one of these, it would not be because you loved animals, but because you hated plants.
