From rainforest to roadside

Coringa Vans started before the workshop existed. It started in a carpentry shed in the Amazon rainforest, where a grandfather was teaching a grandson to read wood — to spot the direction of the grain, to know when to cut, when to wait, when to leave the tree alone.

Gean Dieckmann grew up in Rondônia, in northern Brazil. He learned the craft before he knew he'd ever live from it. He worked at other things, tried other paths, until a simple idea brought him here: build a van, climb in, go photograph the world.

He built the van. He started the trip. And along the way something nobody had planned happened — he fell for the build itself. The carpentry learned from his grandfather, the patience of the forest, the taste for detail done by hand. Everything he thought he'd left behind was right there, inside a van, on its way to becoming his life's work.

The workshop sits in Vendas Novas today. Solid wood, electrics in-house, one van at a time. The distance between the Amazon and Portugal is still nine thousand kilometres — but the hand, the patience, and the grain of the wood crossed over with him.