An origin story: Frodo Jaggins (the FJ)
an evolutionary tale
Frodo Jaggins - our home on wheels, our go anywhere vehicle. Our 2012 Toyota FJ Cruiser.
I bought her in August 2016 and this was her first night home. Let the adventures begin!
My first offroad adventures. This was done over a few weekends in late 2016. The first trip was to the Glasshouse Mountains (Sunchine Coast Queensland) to tackle a few of the less “hectic” tracks. I have the quotation marks highlighting hectic because still to this day I have a big scrach on one of the back fenders. At this stage I had a reasonable amount of 4wding experinece, but it was limited to the passenger seat. Essentially these were my first real offroad driving experiences and I was smitten.
As you can see very stock and very basic setup. The FJ is a very capable vehicle offroad with a powerful enough V6 petrol engine and great clearance, however, it doesn’t matter how much power or height you have, traction is alwasy number one. The tyres on Frodo here were the stock factory ones. Great for highway driving, but terrible for offroad, made all the fun (sometimes scary) by sliding around on some of the hills.
Driving on sand though is a completely different beast to gravel and/or rocky terrain trails, but lost of fun if you are prepared for it.
It is circa autumn 2017 and Sundown National Park, camping and 4wding paradise. The first proper 4wding overnight trip. I was quite nervous doing this trip because it’s quite an isolated place. Unless it’s a long weekend, the park isn’t very busy generally and this time round we were the only ones in the park, or at leas our section. It was quite exhilerating knowing you were all by yourself, but jeez scary at times too.
Again, stock FJ and we didn’t have any issues mechanically. You can see the red jerry can on top of the roof rack (roof racks at this stage were RhinoRack Whispbars and a roof carrier cage). Now FJ’s are known to be fuel hungry and Frodo was no exception. With it being an auto petrol and a 4L V6 she is thirsty! At this point in time i think on the highway she was doing 11-12 litres/100kms. Offroad was about 14-16 litres / 100kms depending on the terrain.
May 2018, I’ve decided to permanently relocate to New Zealand and yup, Frodo is coming with me! At that time (and I’d still assume now) the second hand car market in New Zealand was outrageously expensive. It was cheaper for me to ship her across, over selling her in Aus and then buying an equivalent FJ Cruiser in NZ. A few months of planning and finally I dropped her off at the Port of Brisbane. Another month and a half later and she touched rubber on on NZ earth. I was beyond excited. I was finally going to get my car full time after only being able to drive her sporadically when I was back in Brisbane a few days out of the month. NZ is also an unbelievably good country to 4wd through. So different to what I’d been used to In Australia as well.
Wellington, in my opinion, is one of the great cities of the World (or the ones I’ve been to at least). Where else can you do your day job, have a swim at the beach, hike, mountain bike and 4wd all within the city limits - not to mention ending the day with an epic meal and slurping down some of the best craft beers worldwide. All the photos, except for the 4th from the left, were taken within 5kms of the city centre. It’s a city that has some fond memories for me and would happily go back and live in again.
Just north of Wellington, at a place called Tora (where the 4th photo from the left is taken) is where I had my scariest experience to date with the FJ. They say that things happen in three’s. Well it rang particularly true that illuminating weekend. A gaggle of us headed out that way for one Saturday night. As you can see in the photo the weather had turned it on for us that weekend and we decided a camping and driving adventure was needed. But it was deceptive. Tora is located on one of the more wild coastlines of the North Island. Keeping up to that when we pulled down onto the coast road that runs parallel to the beach, the wind was absolutely puffing. Anyway, we’d friven for 2.5 hours and decided we’d just rough it out. While setting up camp our brand new tent split down the middle - because of the wind. Strike 1. Once we’d tried, failed and packed away the tent we noticed that my rear tyre was flat. Strike 2. Our friends had rolled in by then. So while they were setting up their Taj Mahal tent, I swapped the flat tyre for the spare on the back. Positivity is always key as they say - with that in mind we decided to take Frodo for a beach drive. By that stage I had complete quite a few beach drives back in Australia and one in NZ, shown in the photos above. I was quite confident we’d be fine. Queue third strike and within 10 minutes of getting into the car and being on the beach we were stuck. So so stuck. I had just made two of the most rooky errors you can make while 4wding. One - always inspect the terrain you are going to be driving on and two - let down your tyres. I was overly confident with my beach driving skills that it almost cost me my FJ.
Four hours later. Not an exaggeration and Frodo wheels her way out of her sandy stony prison.
So we know how we got here (me being a brainless rookie), but how did we get out - luck. I got stuck a few metres from the tide line. I got out the car the most stressed I have (yes still to this day nothing has beat this) ever been. I realised the enormity of the situation. What was going through my head was that I would be in the news on Monday “dumbass tourist loses his car on the beach”. That I would lose my car that I had literally a few weeks ago spend time and effort and money bringing across the ditch. I would then have to pay for recovery and towing and all the other costs involved in hauling a submerged vehicle 2-3hours back to Wellington.
Anyway a combination of letting the tyres down to 8 Psi, wedging wood under the wheels, digging out sand and stone, finding a long enough rope from a nearby shed, some super nice batch owners and one 40 year old 4x4 perched on the nearby sand dunes and Frodo managed to escape. I recall it was about 430PM when we rolled onto the beach. By the time we got into camp, cranked the fire back on and cracked the best tasting beer I have ever tasted, it was about 830PM. I can say that to this day I still get a bit of PTSD going back onto a beach. Lessons learnt for sure! As you can imagine, the rest of my NZ driving adventures we quite a bit tamer. My favourite experience driving in NZ, and even still to this day, would be driving her up to the mountains for a ski weekend. Never in my wildest dreams did I ever think I would drive my very own vehicle up to a ski resort, through the snow. Whether you’re driving on rock, gravel, mud or sand, it’s different, but still kind of the same, being a different type of dirt. But snow is completely different. It makes a different kind of noise when you drive through it. The car feels different and less together - traction is lost here and there and the car jerks or skids frequently. Man it sets the heart pumping. Being a 4wd chains were not mandatory most times. Only the terrible sleety days did chains become a requirement for 4wd vehicles - but then those were the days that you wouldn’t go skiing anyways. So I never put chains on, but there were times I wished we had when suddenly you would lose a bit of traction, skid a metre and look over the edge of a steep cliff rolling to the valley below. That might be a tad dramatic, most times there was a railing, but not always. I wonder when the next time I’ll drive her up the snow?
Fast forward to March 2020 and Frodo touches back down on Australian soil. Home. It’s great to have her back, but I’m now wanting more. While she had been on the high seas I had been tinkering with modification ideas and various setups with how I thought I could get the most out of her. I won’t go into too much detail here as I think the process will be another whole blog. My aim was maximising solo off-road capability and touring. Most people would agree that the FJ is a more than capable off-roader, but would not say that it is the ‘ideal tourer’. That was the challenge. How do I keep the capable off-roader, enhance that even, but then also build a tourer? I am yet to find that out , however, I think I’m close.
2020 was the year of the mods accumulations.
2021 was the year of the tinkering and testing.
2022 was the year of re-jigging and re-evaluating.
2023 and beyond will be the ultimate test.
