France (5)

Jools returned to a happy man with an enormous toe. Whilst she was away I met a man in a services who told me of a magical place full of Pinzgauers, it seemed quite close to where we were going so I convinced Jools we should pay it a visit. We pulled off the main autoroute at St-Jean-de-Maurienne and the village looked only a couple more kilometres on the road atlas. One hour and 52 hairpin bends later we landed in the small village of Albiez le Jeune and pulled up outside a house surrounded by ex-army trucks. No one was home. We decided to settle in for the night and wait, a friendly neighbour told us that Jean-Michel would be home the next day.

We spent the next afternoon in the company of Jean-Michel and Maryse Kern, a lovely couple and avid truck collectors. I thought ‘my uncle Martin would love this place’.


	JeanMichel has been collecting trucks for 10 years and now owns 30 Swiss army 712 Pinzgauers alongside a whole menagerie of other trucks. I told him he could get a small army together and start a little coup de tat. After looking over our truck, Jean had some grave concerns about our suspension, actually less grave and more humorous. An endless stream of jokes hammered home the reality to me that things were not all well with the truck. It was then that he recommended a good garage that we should use, in Switzerland, 500kms away!

	We are both quite Taoist when it comes to these kind of situations and though we were now just raring to head to Morocco we saw this as a kind of Omen, and as we had driven all this way for a bit of advice it seemed crazy to ignore it now. So we headed further north on our African adventure.

Switzerland is soooo tidy, I mean even my Aunty Bernie would be hard pressed to find anything to tidy here. It did make it rather difficult to find a place to park up for the night and go for a poo in the morning but we still managed. In each country we were visiting we tried to sample a little of what makes a country famous. In France, the cuisine, in Spain the fiesta, and in Switzerland we sampled the finest of engineering.

Güt Automobile was set up by Christoph Güt, and is a dedicated Pinzgauer garage. Not only was the engineering first class, the workshop was impeccably tidy and every tool was clean and in its designated place, but the hospitality we were afforded was beyond. We lived onsite for 3 days, Christoph made sure we had everything we needed and provided an electrical hook up for the truck (he even did our laundry for us). On the Monday we arrived, the garage was very busy so I was able to do a few repairs myself. One of the great things about the garage is the empathy shared with you as an overlander. Christoph has done over 200,000km in his diesel converted 712, and he has travelled with his wife and son, and knows what it is like to be on a budget, and he loves Pinzgauers. See Pinzgauer log for more info.