Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me Simon Calder and I'm delighted

to be speaking to Charlie Hopkinson who is the founder of Dragon Man Overland. Now if you're not

familiar with this fantastic adventure company, it's one that I've travelled with, I heartily recommend,

but also one that, well, was badly affected by COVID.

Charlie, tell me what happened.

Well, when COVID hit in March 20, we had 27 trucks in the fleet,

and they were everywhere in the world. So I was actually

on one in India at the time and we literally, one evening we were just in Mysore doing our thing

the next day. Our local guy said, sorry guys, you have to leave the country. So we turned

the truck round back to Bangalore

airport and left the truck in a truck compound and that was the last we saw of that

truck for two years well tell us what happened about all your other trucks because they're

scattered across Africa Latin America America and so on.

Well, it was just basically get them to somewhere safe, somewhere where we knew they were

going to be looked after. There's certain countries that we knew were really good places to have

them. There were certain countries we knew were really bad places

like Ethiopia, for instance, and we've got one truck, our best truck, which we are still trying to

rescue as we speak. It is sitting in a hotel car park somewhere in Gondar and it's got

£100,000 worth of parking fees on it.

Or that's what we were told.

We've now negotiated that down to 20,000.

And we're still trying to rescue, there's probably six or seven still out there that we need to.

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