Island Trucks

[Tools R Us]

Back to reality, yep it sucks!

The islands get a bunch of cool trucks there that we don’t get here, unfortunately most of the time I didn’t have the camera handy, ready when they were spotted, here are a few that I shot.

In Old San Juan there were lots of 4Runners and the FJC appears to be a big hit, only saw a couple of 80’s.

 

[Tools R Us]

Land Cruisers are relatively rare, spotted a bunch of them, but didn’t get many pix. On the smaller islands, with their small cars, they look huge in traffic! This one was parked at Nelson’s Dockyard on Antigua, looks like a 70 series, had a Prado emblem on the back.

 

[Tools R Us]

Hiluxs are common, the new one is styled somewhat like the Taco, but smaller like the older mini. The first one was on St Lucia, the second Antigua.

 

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There are bunches of the older type Hilux, like our ’89-’95 style mini, with all cab types including quad cabs, most are straight axle. The last one has "TRD Toyota Radical Driver" on the tail gate, he lived up to his billing!

 

[Tools R Us]

This is a cool rig that we don’t get, called the Fortrunner, looks like a smaller version of the 4Runner.

 

[Tools R Us]

Most of the time we don’t do “canned, cattle call tours”, we know where we want to go with our group. It’s easy to do, when you arrive on the island there are mobs of tour operations, taxi drivers wanting your biz. We start by telling them where we want to go as a group, this gets rid of the majority of them, most only want to do “set” tours with full trucks. Then I ask, you drive a Toyota right, what year, model, rear A/C, etc? This narrows it down to just a few, the next step is ask to see their vehicles and make a choice depending on vehicle and driver. This process has always netted good drivers that are willing to work with us, most become almost part of our group and we all have a good time.

On Barbados our group wanted to go to a local beach, it’s a tourist trap type place, so Sue and I went to the new Concord Museum. We wound up with a little van that I hadn’t seen before, a Toyota Voxy, very small and ugly as sin, but perfectly suited for the job.

 

[Tools R Us]

The Toyota Hiace is the standard small group taxi on most of the islands, they range from plain cloth bench seat to high roof, dual sunroof, caption chair models.

 

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The smaller model is the Liteace, this one has the “Noah” upgrade.

 

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Most of the time we toured with the whole group and took the Grandace model, this was our wheels on St Lucia.

 

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The "big bus" is the Toyota Coaster, used for the big group tours.

 

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They get loads of small cars that we don’t see, here are a couple of Daihatsu's, the Hijet and mini “suv” Terios.

 

[phxtlc]

cool...I wish my rig had the Noah upgrade Though it would seem that the Noah upgrade should include a better rear bumper!

 

[Tools R Us]

A couple of shots for Patrol fans.

 

[medtro]

The smaller model is the Liteace, this one has the “Noah” upgrade.

Not sure how accurate this is "The Toyota Noah is an eight-seater compact MPV with two rear sliding doors built by Toyota Motor Company and sold only in Japan."

More info at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyota_Noah

 

[Tools R Us]

..."The Toyota Noah is an eight-seater. ...

Not with me in it!