This is Gigi, an Austral Pacific manufactured in Brisbane back in ’97.  It was chosen among other brands for the characteristic that made them famously enjoyable to work with and to drive. Large displacement engine with large size fuel tank, fibreglass skin and roof plus full size bins with three axles for better side wind stability, high driving position and a strong Scania K113 chassis. Purchased in mid 2017 to replace the ’88 Austral Tourmaster so to fulfil the original project…

It took more than 3 years to get this project completed, but it was worth it. There were plenty of ups and downs along the way, lots of modifications, few lessons learned and lots of changes from the original plan. It all started with a laugh and a bet between mates, that it wouldn’t have happened. Challenge accepted!!!

You can follow the birth and full story of Gigi’s construction HERE

A Little Introduction

I wanted a place where to keep track of my day to day work on the motorhome conversion and allow my family and friends overseas to also follow the progress. The original forum, was not really friendly therefore a choice was made to use WP. This site is now, for all those people who did made the choice of living “on the road” and enjoy their time travelling around Australia.

Grey Nomads  Gypsy  Travellers  Wanderers  Rovers  Vagabonds and Bus Nuts, they are all welcome here..

 

Started in 2012 as a simple forum il Mozzo has evolved to what it is today. Here you will find a shared lifetime of stories & experiences, that hopefully may help make your next trip or vehicle project an enjoyable adventure.  In December 2016 il Mozzo went under a complete redesign, and it is still evolving today. New articles new product’s reviews and new technical “How To” are added daily.. Finally, the Utilities Section is just that!  A collection of useful tools ranging from links PDF documents to Excel spreadsheet designed to make our daily project easier…

L a t e s t   B l o g s

Top Ten Reviews

“To my mind, the greatest reward and luxury of travel is to be able to experience everyday things as if for the first time, to be in a position in which almost nothing is so familiar it is taken for granted.”

Bill Bryson

“Travel does what good novelists also do to the life of everyday, placing it like a picture in a frame or a gem in its setting, so that the intrinsic qualities are made more clear. Travel does this with the very stuff that everyday life is made of, giving to it the sharp contour and meaning of art.”

Freya Stark

“Our battered suitcases were piled on the sidewalk again; we had longer ways to go. But no matter, the road is life.”

Jack Kerouac

“No one realizes how beautiful it is to travel until he comes home and rests his head on his old, familiar pillow.”

Lin Yutang

“Tourists don’t know where they’ve been, travelers don’t know where they’re going.”

Paul Theroux

Life is a trip. If you travel, you live twice!

Unknown

“The best education I have ever received was through travel.”

Lisa Ling

“Like all great travellers, I have seen more than I remember, and remember more than I have seen.”

Benjamin Disraeli

“Is not the mountain we conquer, but ourselves.”

Edmund Hillary

“The world is a book and those who do not travel read only one page.”

St. Augustine

“One’s destination is never a place, but a new way of seeing things.”

Henry Miller

“Travelling is not something you’ re good at. It’s something you do.

Like Breathing”

Gayle Foreman

“ Travel makes one modest. You see what a tiny place you occupy in the world.”

Gustav Flaubert

“Wandering re-establishes the original harmony which once existed between man and the universe.”

Anatole France

“One day your life will flash before your eyes. Make sure it’s worth watching”

Unknown

“To awaken quite alone in a strange town is one of the pleasantest sensations in the world.”

Freya Stark

“To move, to breathe, to fly, to float; to gain all while you give; to roam the roads of lands remote; to travel is to live”

Hans Christian Andersen

“A journey is best measured in friends, rather than miles.”

Tim Cahill

“For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move.”

Robert Louis Stevenson

“The use of traveling is to regulate imagination by reality, and instead of thinking how things may be, to see them as they are.”

Samuel Johnson

“A mind that is stretched by a new experience can never go back to its old dimensions.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes

“Don’t just dream about it… Go out and do it!”

Anonymous

“I soon realised that no journey carries one far unless, as it extends into the world around us, it goes an equal distance into the world within.”

Lillian Smith

A Nomad is not homeless, just houseless!

Frances McDormand

“There are two kind of people in this world… The ones busy living and the ones busy dying… The choice is yours…”

Quoted from Shawshank Redemption

“Rise free from care before the dawn and seek adventures. Let the noon find thee at other lakes, and the night overtake thee everywhere at home.”

Henry David Thoreau

“It feels good to be lost in the right direction.”

Unknown

“A journey is like marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it.”

John Steinbeck

“To travel is to discover that everyone is wrong about other countries.”

Aldous Huxley

“What you’ve done becomes the judge of what you’re going to do – especially in other people’s minds. When you’re travelling, you are what you are right there and then. People don’t have your past to hold against you. No yesterdays on the road.”

William Least Heat Moon

“I would rather own a little and see the world than own the world and see a little”

Alexander Sattler

“When we get out of the glass bottle of our ego and when we escape like the squirrels in the cage of our personality and get into the forest again, we shall shiver with cold and fright. But things will happen to us so that we don’t know ourselves. Cool, unlying life will rush in.”

D. H. Lawrence

“All the pathos and irony of leaving one’s youth behind is thus implicit in every joyous moment of travel: one knows that the first joy can never be recovered, and the wise traveler learns not to repeat successes but tries new places all the time.”

Paul Fussell

“Your true traveler finds boredom rather agreeable than painful. It is the symbol of his liberty-his excessive freedom. He accepts his boredom, when it comes, not merely philosophically, but almost with pleasure.”

Aldous Huxley

“I have found out that there ain’t no surer way to find out whether you like people or hate them than to travel with them.”

Mark Twain

“You don’t need magic to disappear…   All you need is a destination.”

Unknown

“All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveller is unaware.”

Martin Buber

“A good traveler has no fixed plans and is not intent on arriving.”

Lao Tzu

“Travel and change of place impart new vigor to the mind.”

Seneca

“Travel far enough, you meet yourself.”

David Mitchell

“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness.”

Mark Twain

“Adventure is a path. Real adventure – self-determined, self-motivated, often risky – forces you to have firsthand encounters with the world. The world the way it is, not the way you imagine it. Your body will collide with the earth and you will bear witness. In this way you will be compelled to grapple with the limitless kindness and bottomless cruelty of humankind – and perhaps realise that you yourself are capable of both. This will change you. Nothing will ever again be black-and-white.”

Mark Jenkins

“Traveling is a brutality. It forces you to trust strangers and to lose sight of all that familiar comfort of home and friends. You are constantly off balance. Nothing is yours except the essential things – air, sleep, dreams, the sea, the sky – all things tending towards the eternal or what we imagine of it.”

Cesare Pavese

“Travel is more than the seeing of sights; it is a change that goes on, deep and permanent, in the ideas of living.”

Miriam Beard

“Once you travelled, the voyage never ends, but is played out over and over again in the quietest chambers. The mind can never break off from the journey.”

Pat Conroy

“Do not follow where the path may lead. Go instead where there is no path and leave a trail”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

“A journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step.”

Lao Tzu

“We live in a wonderful world that is full of beauty, charm and adventure. There is no end to the adventures we can have if only we seek them with our eyes open.”

Jawaharial Nehru

“Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines, sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.”

Mark Twain

“It is not down in any map; true places never are…”

Herman Melville

“All travel has its advantages. If the passenger visits better countries, he may learn to improve his own. And if fortune carries him to worse, he may learn to enjoy it.”

Samuel Johnson

The best way to realise your dreams, it’s to wake up..”

Paul Valéry

“The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land; it is at last to set foot on one’s own country as a foreign land.”

G. K. Chesterton

“People travel to faraway places to watch, in fascination, the kind of people they ignore at home.”

Dagobert D. Runes

“There is no moment of delight in any pilgrimage like the beginning of it.”

Charles Dudley Warner

“A life of travel is one you’ll never want to escape from.”

Bertahan Luxing

“If you reject the food, ignore the customs, fear the religion and avoid the people, you might better stay at home.”

James Michener

“Too often travel, instead of broadening the mind, merely lengthens the conversation.”

Elizabeth Drew

“A wise traveller never despises his own country.”

Carlo Goldoni