Rusting land yachts at the Wijnlands Motor Museum

Posted on by March 28, 2014

The Red GM 1Some evocative shots showing the passing of time on several different levels, from an amazing auto graveyard outside Cape Town

 

 

 

I had read about the Wijnlands Motor Museum on the web, and seen some shots of the cars, so on a recce last December to scope out Babylonstoren (needs a separate post – amazing), I called by.  I wanted to get to the museum at the end of the day, for the evening light, and was irritated to find, at 5 pm, that it closed at 4.  Fortunately, the affable owner saw me, let me in, and let me wander around as long as I wanted – which was in fact until well after dusk.  This is a strange place indeed.  There are over 400 cars here – almost all in astonishingly poor condition.  It’s the antidote to the gleaming surgeries of most modern car museums, but a bit of a shock in terms of the condition of the vehicles.

There is a huge range of cars here – mostly from the 40s, 50s, and 60s.  They are uniformly beaten up, rusting, and semi-destroyed. A very few are in sort of OK shape – and strangely, these are not really the most interesting ones.  Why on earth, I asked the owner, do you have all these wrecks here?  He told me that they are all for film production – if someone needs a car of a particular vintage, they will quickly duffy it up, and get it running.  When you see the state of most of them, this seems a bit unlikely  – I think it’s more a grand and very eccentric obsession, that may be marginally supported by renting a few movie cars.  Either way, it’s a wonderful place to visit if you like this kind of thing.  The only equivalent I can think of is the vast aeroplane graveyard by the airport at Tucson – somewhere else I would dearly love to visit again and photograph.

I took my Nikon D600 and the 85mm 1.8 lens on this trip, and was very glad I had.  The light turned out to be perfect, and the shallow depth of field helped me to hide the background of jumbled rusting hulks.  Anyway, here are the photographs.  As usual, instructions on viewing them are at the end of the post.

Wijnlands Motor Museum

The Red GM 1
The Red GM 1
Fin 1
Fin 1
Ultra convetible
Ultra convetible
Lets have look inside this here hood
Lets have look inside this here hood
Lets go for a spin
Lets go for a spin
Mercury
Mercury
NIce Rad
NIce Rad
Low slung S-type
Low slung S-type
Nice Rad 2
Nice Rad 2
Roof and screenline
Roof and screenline
Screenline
Screenline
Fenderline
Fenderline
Unusually nice headlamp, given the remainedr of the car.
Unusually nice headlamp, given the remainedr of the car.
The ghost of Chrysler
The ghost of Chrysler
Nice Rad 3
Nice Rad 3
Lets go for a spin 2
Lets go for a spin 2
The Red GM 2
The Red GM 2
The line to Eldorado
The line to Eldorado
Windows
Windows
Chrome trim adds sophistication to today's vehicles
Chrome trim adds sophistication to today's vehicles
The Fin 2
The Fin 2
The Red GM 3
The Red GM 3
Took that corner a shade too fast there.
Took that corner a shade too fast there.
The Red GM 4
The Red GM 4

To View: If you have Flash the photos are best seen in full screen (press FS in the bottom right hand corner), and in slide show ( press SL).   If you don’t have Flash, i.e if you are using an Apple iPad/Pod/Phone, or a Nexus 7/10 tablet, or any Android tablet running 4.1 +, you can now see them as well.  Just click any of the thumbnails and a full screen slide-show should start. Information on each photo can be seen by clicking on the ‘i’ symbol in the upper right corner of the screen show.

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