Stories
The BJ45 That Travelled the World for 21 Years
Some Land Cruisers become famous on rally stages, in films or because they sit immaculate in collections.
Others earn their reputation the slow way.
One border crossing at a time. One mountain pass at a time. One breakdown, repair shop and unexpected friendship at a time.
That is how a 1984 Toyota Land Cruiser BJ45 known simply as “the BJ” became one of the most recognisable overland Land Cruisers of its generation. For more than two decades, it carried Dutch couple Coen Wubbels and Karin-Marijke Vis through Europe, Asia and South America, becoming as much a character in their story as the people behind the wheel.
A Land Cruiser and a plan
Coen and Karin-Marijke were the couple behind Landcruising Adventure, the travel and photography project that documented their life on the road.
Coen was a photographer, designer and self-taught mechanic. Karin-Marijke was a writer. Together they built a following through thoughtful photography and unusually honest accounts of what long-distance overland travel actually looked like.
They were not racing from landmark to landmark. Quite the opposite.
They jokingly described themselves as “the slowest overlanders in the world”, and their motto was simple: the journey is the destination.
In 2013, Expedition Portal named them Overlanders of the Year.
The Land Cruiser at the centre of it all had been bought used in Germany in 2003.
It was not a pristine collector’s car. It was rough, needed work and gradually evolved into a dependable long-distance home on wheels.
The BJ45 was a long-wheelbase 45 Series powered by a naturally aspirated four-cylinder diesel. Its appeal for this kind of journey was straightforward: relatively simple mechanicals, little dependence on electronics and the sort of engineering that could be understood, repaired and kept moving a very long way from a Toyota dealership.
Coen carried out much of the work himself, and the BJ’s repairs and rebuilds became part of the story rather than an interruption to it.
Two years became twenty-one
The original plan was a two-year journey.
They left the Netherlands in 2003.
They came home more than two decades later.
Over approximately 21 years, the BJ45 covered around 200,000 miles, travelling through dozens of countries including Bolivia, Kyrgyzstan, Jordan, South Korea, Russia and large parts of Central Asia.
But the mileage only tells part of the story.
Their style of travel was deliberately slow. If somewhere interested them, they stayed. Sometimes for weeks. Sometimes for months.
And when the Land Cruiser broke down, which old Land Cruisers occasionally have a habit of doing, a mechanical problem could become the beginning of a new friendship.
Local workshops, roadside repairs and strangers willing to help became part of the journey.
That is perhaps why the BJ resonated with so many people. It was never presented as an indestructible machine effortlessly conquering the planet. It needed maintenance. It went wrong. It got repaired. Then it carried on.
Rather like the people travelling in it.
Their photography also gave followers a remarkably intimate view of life on the road. One of their best-known projects photographed the world through the BJ’s windscreen, placing the viewer almost directly in the driver’s seat. Their stories became widely read within the overlanding community and even found their way into a classroom in the United States, where they were used to help teach students about Iran.
The last journey
By the spring of 2024, the old BJ was showing its age. Water leaked into the cabin and repairs had become an increasingly large part of life on the road. Coen and Karin-Marijke decided it was time to retire it. They planned to continue their travels in another BJ45 and found one in France that June.
Then, in July 2024, Coen was diagnosed with an aggressive brain tumour. Their plans changed, but they still wanted to give the old Land Cruiser a fitting home.
The Land Cruiser Heritage Museum in Utah had expressed interest in preserving it years earlier. In February 2025, Coen and Karin-Marijke drove the BJ into a shipping container in Turkey for its final journey to the museum. Coen took the wheel for those last few feet.
“Our journey will continue,” they wrote. “Just at a different pace.”
Coen Wubbels died in 2026.
He left behind an extraordinary archive of photographs, stories, mechanical adventures and memories from a life spent travelling differently.
And he left behind the BJ.
A 1984 Toyota Land Cruiser that began as a tired second-hand truck in Germany and ended up in a museum in Utah after roughly 200,000 miles of travel.
Its fame was never really about horsepower, rarity or concours condition.
It became famous because of where it went, how long it kept going, and the people it met along the way.
That feels like a very Land Cruiser way to become famous.