Most people buy a 4×4, drive it on tar for two years, and then take it somewhere hard with no idea what any of the buttons do. We were most people. So before the trips got more ambitious, we spent a day at Kungwini with Dimitri, who has been doing this for fifteen years and has the scars and the stories to show for it.
Radios first
It started before we’d even left, with a lesson nobody thinks about: how to talk on a radio. Short, clear, and never your real name over the air, because you have no idea who else is on the channel. It sounds like a small thing. It’s the thing that keeps a convoy together when it matters.
What the numbers mean
At Kungwini, Dimitri got technical. Approach angle, departure angle, break-over. Where the car will touch first and why. Once you’ve had those explained with your own car standing in front of you, you look at every obstacle differently for the rest of your life.
The kit you hope you never open
Then the recovery kit. Straps, shackles, where the rated recovery points on your car actually are, and why the tow ball is not one of them. You carry this stuff for two reasons: so you can get yourself out, and so you can get someone else out. On the day you need it, you will be very glad you were paying attention.
The course
After the talking, the doing. Kungwini’s terrain is a natural obstacle course, and it threw everything at us: hill climbs, log runs, and the one nobody enjoys, the wall tilt, where the car leans further than your stomach thinks it should. Getting through it teaches you something you can’t learn from a brochure: the car is far more capable than you are nervous.
Water
We finished with the water crossing. Everyone loves the water crossing until they see what it does to the underside of the car afterwards. It’s still worth it. There is nothing else in off-roading that feels quite like pushing a bow wave in front of you.
We ended the day on a lookout with the sky going orange and a lot of laughing about who’d been the most scared on the tilt. If you’ve just bought a 4×4, do this first. Do it before the pass, before the kloof, before anything you’ll be telling stories about. You’ll enjoy all of it more.
