For this edition of Member’s Motor, we look at Mel’s Bay, called “Platybus”. This is what she had to say about it.
Back in 2010, my husband Mark announced one day that he’d always fancied getting an old camper van. This was news to me, but I figured it was just a passing fancy and that he’d soon get over it! Anyway, to cut a long story short, he did some research and after a couple of false starts, eventually found a van that someone in North Wales was selling.

The van had originally been imported from Australia and had eventually ended up in sunny Wales. She’d been converted to run on both petrol and LPG. Bearing in mind that Mark had never driven a camper van before, he persuaded a mate to drive him to Wales and then Mark would drive the van back! As you can imagine, my main concern was that the van would break down on the way back and I would have to go
and fetch him from goodness knows where. Fortunately, the van behaved itself and he got safely home, after an epic 5 hour journey. Over the next 3 or 4 years, our family had a couple of trips in it down to Wales and 2 trips to Devon. Despite a couple of hiccups, we got there and back in one piece. Then about 5 years ago, we went to an open day at Just Kampers down in Hampshire. We’d already discussed having a full restoration on the van and we met a chap from a company called Voodoo VW. We duly agreed to take the van down to his workshop in Newbury so we could talk about what we wanted done on
the van. We felt totally reassured that they would carry out the work we wanted done and basically left them to get on with it. You know the saying “be careful what you wish for?”.

Well, unfortunately things didn’t pan out the way we wanted them to; the company went bust and we had to fetch the van from down near Newbury and pay someone to fix the bits that hadn’t been done properly. We eventually got the van back and at present it’s sitting on the forecourt of a friend’s garage, waiting for the engine to be taken out to investigate an issue with the hydraulics. We love the van, she’s been brilliant when she works, but it’s like they say, it’s been a labour of love.

She’s called the Platybus, because when we were cleaning out the glove compartment, we found an Australian coin with what we thought had a platypus on it. It transpired that it’s actually a Spiny Anteater, but we decided to stick with Platybus.
I really hope that one day soon we can get to go camping again in the bus and that we can iron out all the little niggles we’ve discovered since the van was “restored “. We’ve since discovered that the chap who ran Voodoo VW is back running a company restoring camper vans, after declaring to us that he wanted nothing more to do with the VW scene… ! Hey ho…”
Best wishes,
Mel