Land Rover looks back on 70 years of adventure and expedition

Created to mark the anniversary, the clip features several adventurers recanting their 4x4 endeavours through some of the world’s most inhospitable terrain. Tim Slessor was part of the famous Oxford and Cambridge Far Eastern Expedition that travelled from London to Singapore by road in 1955-56, a journey that had never been made before. The six-man team was supplied with two Land Rover Series 1 Station Wagons, one painted in the blue of each university. Leaving Hyde Park in September ’55, they arrived in Singapore on March 6 the following year. It’s a journey that simply couldn’t be made today given the hostilities in the Middle East and the closure of the Ledo Road between India and Myanmar.

In 1971, Gavin Thompson took part in the British Trans Americas Expedition, driving two Range Rovers from Anchorage in Alaska to Cape Horn, virtually the entire length of North and South America. The expedition included traversing the notorious Darien Gap that links Panama and Columbia. Home to political insurgents and drug runners, the dense jungle is the only break in the Pan-American Highway, and the expedition averaged just two and half miles a day when hacking its way through. According to this account of the adventure, petrol, mail and supplies were parachuted into the team by the Army Air Corps, and rafts were used to ferry the vehicles across some of the area’s more deadly swamps and rivers.