Our founder’s overland years
In the early 1970s, Jim first encountered Mercedes‑Benz UNIMOGs while exploring the vast hinterlands between Istanbul, Turkey and Kathmandu, Nepal. He’d founded and operated a medical “free clinic” for Tibetan refugees in Nepal and drove the 6,000‑mile Asian “Highway” (such as it was) once or twice a year for about a decade, using Mercedes‑Benz trucks and UNIMOGs to pioneer remote desert tracts and haul gear and supplies.
Those long expeditions over the most severe terrain taught him what matters when roads vanish and conditions deteriorate: robust reliability, serviceability, and life-saving traction you can count on.
On a return to his home base in Bavaria, he and his German partner Birgit purchased and modified a ’60s vintage four wheel drive UNIMOG‑S with a van body, and outfitted it as a self‑sufficient motor home featuring a galley, auxiliary heat, and spare parts for the road and wildland tracts ahead. Temperatures on that first foray dropped to thirty below along the arc from the Black Sea, around Mt. Ararat in eastern Turkey, to the Caspian Sea in northern Iran. The “Mog” didn’t flinch.
During trips back to Europe from his clinic, he made sorties into remote areas to source hard‑to‑find artifacts, textile weavings and nomad handicrafts for resale in the markets of Europe. The proceeds paid for the clinic’s existence. Often inhabited oases were accessible only by tracks that turned to mud or snow without warning. The cable winch, tow bar, and tire chains were called upon frequently. In rough stretches through high passes and desert basins—the fabled Hindu Kush Mountains included—the UNIMOG rescued stranded trucks: Land Rovers, Toyotas, and even a bus that had sunk to its axles.
One convoy stands out. Jim helped shepherd a mixed group of a dozen “tourist” vehicles roughly 100 miles through the desert during a period of social upheaval and political revolution in Iran. Foremost, all the while provisioning for scarce fuel, food and water. The UNIMOG lived up to its reputation by keeping the evacuation convoy moving when the alternative was getting bogged down – risking life and limb.
“During our overland years, the region shifted under our feet. Iran’s monarchy fell; Afghanistan re-entered its age-old cycle of conflict shaped by outside powers, including the U.S. and the USSR. Borders closed and the Asian Highway became impassable. We paused our Asian travels and returned to the U.S. We refocused our work—roots that eventually became EuroTech Services International in the USA. Those years, above all, taught us humility regarding the arc of history, and respect for the people who have lived it.”
Looking back, memories aren’t just of where we went and the people we met, but also what legendary German machinery had made possible. The UNIMOG’s portal axles, wide gearing ranges, articulating frame with deeply extending coil springs, locking differentials and powerful diesel engines rendered capabilities that projected us into primitive lands far from modern civilization and supportive mechanical workshops. That blend of superb engineering and noble purpose is why and how EuroTech evolved into services focused on the needs of owners and operators who depend upon these all-terrain trucks when conditions quite predictably don’t cooperate.
Originally drafted in the mid‑1990s; edited for clarity in 2025.
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