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| In Romania, a Trabant's 26 hp. engine gets a three-kid-power push outside Dracula's castle. Courtesy of Trabant Trek |
On the road – from Germany to Cambodia – in a communist jalopy
Towed by camels and laughed at by pedestrians, the lowly Trabant is a modern-day Marco Polo for a good cause.
from the April 3, 2008 edition
Page 2 of 3
Fez's right door is pulled shut with a bungee cord tied to a seatbelt buckle. Windshield wipers on both cars expired in Siberia; you lean out and wipe manually. In blue Fez (named after a "That '70s Show" character), the foot brake no longer works. To slow down, Mr. Perez, an auto mechanic, yanks on the handbrake. (Fortunately, a Trabant can't get past 50 m.p.h.)
Chauffeuring silver-gold Ziggy (named after Ziggy Stardust), Drury tries a shortcut with an illegal U-turn. He creates a massive jam. Thai drivers in Toyotas and Chevrolets react ... delightedly. Even traffic cops find it hilarious.
"See what I mean?" Drury laments. "No one is taking us seriously."
The only time they got a ticket, he says, was in Mongolia – for not wearing seatbelts. That's because they'd cut them off for use as towropes.
• • •
Launched in 1957 as communist East Germany's answer to the Volkswagen Beetle, the Trabant a bare essentials-only design, was left unimproved until production stopped (after 3 million cars) in 1991, with the end of communism. Boasting a body built from cotton waste-reinforced plastic (Duroplast) and a two-stroke, 26 hp. engine, the Trabant rattles and shudders like a Soviet washing machine.
"I get kind of giddy whenever I see one," says John Lovejoy, the American who masterminded Trabant Trek after volunteering with street kids in Cambodia. He first saw a Trabant in 1989, just as the Berlin Wall was coming down – literally. Taken by his father, a US Army officer stationed in West Germany, to witness the dismantling of the iconic barrier, Lovejoy, then 10, peered through holes in the wall and was captivated.
"Everything was gray [on the other side] – the houses, the streets, people's clothes," he recalls. "But I saw these spots of color."
Trabants, yes: They came in off-white, smoky-gray and faded blue.
Mr. Lovejoy became a "Trabi" aficionado. In 2006, after his attempt to import a Trabant to the US foundered, he recruited Drury, a high school friend, for a road trip across Europe. They bought an old specimen for $60 in Hungary and covered the 450 miles from Budapest to Munich in about a week. (That Trabant later expired in Paris.)
Last year, on the Trabant's 50th anniversary, they hatched the transcontinental expedition-cum-fundraiser. Joined by six others they'd met on backpacking trips in Southeast Asia, Trabant Trek set out last July 15 from Zwickau, Germany, where the vehicle was manufactured.
"This trip," they promised well-wishers, "is going to blow your mind!"
But a carburetor blew a gasket first, near Dracula's Castle in Romania.
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