Three weeks ago we made it to the 14. Berlin VW Bus Festival! A very big thank you to the organization team to make this happen despite the COVID19 pandemic. It seems most other German VW Bus festivals had been cancelled this year, so everyone was even more excited that this one was happening. The number of participants was limited to 500 and the big Saturday night party had to be dropped, but it was fantastic to have a long camping weekend with so many friendly and relaxed people and their beautiful busses. For us it was the second Berlin Bus festival with our little QEK caravan Henrietta. And we are now a well-practiced team, with our two kids (5 and almost 9) and one of their friends sleeping in the kombi and us parents having their own space in the little camper.
Taiga Lily and our little camper Henrietta, ready for the Berlin Bus Festival!
Below are some photos of the amazing bunch of buses at this meeting, with the usual bias towards the air-cooled ones. Ten years ago this meeting was almost exclusively T3. But this year I noticed it has clearly shifted to T4 buses. My selection below is, again, biased towards the air cooled T2s and the one T1, but it is cool to see the different generations of VW buses mix and mingle.
Big thank you again to the organizers that they made this fbestival possible in difficult times! And now on to the photos!
Very cool early bay window T2a Westfalia camper imported from the US last year, which we also saw at last year’s Berlin Bus festival. This year it has received four layers of clear varnish to preserve the beautiful patina burnt into the white paint job by 50 years of Californian sun:
The next one is a T2a early bay window in great shape and with some unusual rebuilds: The engine has been swapped to a water-cooled VW 4-cylinder engine from a 1970ies Golf (perhaps a GTI, approx. 1.9 L). To enable the water cooling, the engine bay has additional air vents in the rear right corner for a first water cooler, and in addition a second water cooler installed under the car. The cool looking orange seats are from a SMART:
And the only T1 split-window bus visiting this year, a 1962 model with the (in Germany quite rare) Dormobile roof from the UK which folds sideways.
With the air-cooled fraction sorted, now to a number of beautiful T3 and T4 buses:
Here is a T3 with another one of the East german QEK Junior mini caravans, like our Henrietta:
The next one is a T3 Vanagon with an unusual story: This beige 1985 window bus was originally sold to the father of the current owner, in 1985, in East Germany. Being able to buy a West German car in East German when the Iron Curtain was still down must have been extremely rare. But apparently a series of T3 busses was officially imported by East Germany and sold this way, often to tradesmen as work vans. This bus was officially meant to become such a tradie van, but instead was from the start only used for holidays, always parked in a garage, and already in the last years of the DDR self-converted into a campervan (except for the pop-up roof which was added only a few years ago). As was custom in East Germany where cars had to last very long, the first owner properly sealed all cavities and the under floor area so that the car now, 35 years later, is still in very good condition. The front grill with the double front lights is a later addition. A reminder of the East-West-German past is the cover plate on the dashboard in front of the passenger seat. It is from an old Trabbi and covers the place where in 1985 the original East German-sized radio had been built in.
“My house – my car – my kombi”
The next one is not a Volkswagen bus, but still a very unusual and impressive campertruck that started its live as an East German army truck: The unit in the back is called LAK for “Leicht absetzbarer Koffer” (German for “easily removable unit”). Apparently this unit was, when taken from the truck, a self-sufficient and fully sealed base (with its own electricity generator and heating unit) that was “ready” to survive in nuclear, chemical and biological warfare. Or so they hoped. Here it is mounted on an IFA L60 truck which according to Wikipedia was introduced only in 1987 and so was built just in the last three years of the DDR, from 1987 to 1990.
Next to it was one of its smaller East-German brothers, a Robur truck. The Robur was originally introduced in 1961, while this model here, judging from the Wikipedia article, looks like a Robur LO 2002 A, an all-wheel-drive variant from the 1980ies:
Let’s end this beautiful camping weekend with a few overview pictures – thanks for popping in and having a look around!
Campervan Crazy 