Trabi-Safari
(images via: ASTORIA Blog)
Bored with the Wild West and angling for a little Wild east instead? Then sign on the dotted line: Trabi-Safari is here to show you the best and wurst, er, worst of old East Berlin! Tours dubbed The Wall Ride, Berlin Classic and the aforementioned Berlin Wild East take tourists to locations of note via East Berlin’s version of the double-decker bus, the Trabant. Naturally seating is limited and the speed is slow, but as befits a safari some of the Trabants are painted up in wild zebra and cheetah color schemes.
(images via: Dreamstime and Picture Colors Library)
It might not still be there but at one time, a black-painted Trabant sat regally atop a stout red tower just outside the Trabi Safari HQ, beautifully complemented for photographers by the stunning Die Welt globe just behind it. Trivia note: while Trabants came in a wide variety of colors (green was said to be lucky), black wasn’t one of them. Legend has it the communist bureaucrats in charge of Trabant production wanted no comparisons made to ultra-capitalist Henry Ford and his “any color you want as long as it’s black” Model T Ford.
The Long, Long Trabant
(images via: Süddeutsche.de, Thomas Ackroyd and Erento)
By the end of 1989, the long-in-the-tooth Trabant 601’s wheezing two-stroke engine was putting out a mere 19 kW (26 horsepower) of power so the mere thought of a Trabant limousine is, well, a big stretch. Nonetheless, a host of ultra-long Trabants roam the highways, byways and autobahns these days though one reckons their engines have been seriously upgraded.
Gentlemen, Stork Your Engine!
(image via: Dirk Huijssoon)
The name Trabant means “satellite” in German, having been inspired in late 1957 by the world’s first orbiting satellite, the Soviet Union’s Sputnik. The latter burned up after just three months while the Trabant smoked and sputtered on for more than three decades. A tip of the hat to Flickr user Dirk Huijssoon, who captured a rare environmentally-friendly Trabant in the image above near the town of Neuruppin.
(images via: Only Silver and Boreme)
One of the few positive features of the Trabant was that it was capable of hauling over 1,000 kg (454 lbs) of cargo… or roughly three smuggled adults. Bearing the weight of the stork parents above plus their nest and eggs/offspring should be a piece of cake. As far as being smokey, until VW built the final series of Trabants in 1990-91 all Trabants ran on two-stroke engines. The model above, on the other hand, has a two-stork engine.
