The Post Script

As the Jambanja team made its way straight back to Harare, we opted for the scenic route, taking in Fish River canyon, some of the Kalahari, the Magkadikadi Pans and the Matopos Hills in Zim. Africa has a way of thwarting even the best laid plans, and we were unlucky to discover that the Magkadikadi pans had had a freak rainstorm the previous week, leaving them underwater and completely impassable. Fortunately we were wise enough to turn back at the first sign of mud, rather than press on (a sure sign that I'm getting old, as I'd definitely have pressed on in my youth!). Lucky we did, as it turned out the only vehicles in the pans were three very stuck South African vehicles who had ignored all the warnings and carried on. Last we heard they'd been digging for 48 hours and hadn't moved.....

We were chased throughout by a very cold front that left our car ice-encrusted several times in the Kalahari. It didn't diminish our fun in any way, but it did mean we were less inclined to hang around than we might otherwise have been. Perhaps a divine sign that we do all need now to get back to reality?!

The return to Zim could have been an anti-climax but, thankfully, wasn't. We had our last night out at a bush camp in the stunning Matopos hills, completely on our own. Huddled round the fire, we played quiz games on our trip (e.g. "in what Egyptian town did we see a seafood restaurant whose menu included the tantalising offerings of Fresh Crap and Muck?"), wink murder (a classic game with a seven year old who can only wink by manually holding one eye open while blinking) and a review of our best and worst meals over the last six months (in which my meals appeared with monotonous regularity in the latter category!). It was an entirely fitting final night, and on Wednesday 1st July we drove back from Matopos to Harare, reaching home at 5pm for a joyful reunion with our friends, our pets and, in some cases, our bicycles. Oh the joy of young boys who haven't had their bikes for six whole months!

A few photos of highlights along the way:

Camping at the bizarrely-named Titties Bay on the west coast of South Africa. It was here we met the woman whose dad was the lighthouse keeper.

Staring down at the impressive but fearsomely chilly Fish River canyon in Namibia. Who needs school when you can get living geography lessons like this one?

Revisiting a favourite camp on the Botswana side of the Kalagadi Transfrontier park. As always, we had fabulous sightings of lion here, and woke up in the morning to find them all around our camp.

Green's Baobab, on the edge of the Makgadigadi Pans. Sadly we couldn't get any further into the pans, due to the heavy rains they'd had the previous week.

A close encounter with an ardvaark just outside Gweta. Botswana is like Texas. Everything here is unnaturally large!

Sundowners on our final evening at Matopos in Zim. We had the whole camp to ourselves for less money than it costs just to get one person into a national park in Botswana!

Home at last for joyful reunions with friends, pets and bicycles.

Some of our pets have grown quite a bit while we've been gone.....

As, indeed, have some of us!

And now we do indeed return to reality. I write this in the early morning from home before my first day back at work, and Jake has already donned his uniform, boarded a flight and gone back to his school in South Africa. Already, after a few days at home, the trip is beginning to fade into memory as what seems like little more than a very long weekend away, but there are many subtle ways in which we're all permanently and irrevocably changed. I might have a chance later this week to reflect on some of those. But there again, I might not!

So, for the time being, I guess "That's All Folks". This blogging lark has been an adventure!

The Penguins, At Last

It was our stated objective to see the penguins in Cape Town. Admittedly, not the sole objective of the expedition, but nevertheless an important one. And we duly did, at Boulders Beach near Simonstown. And very weird it was too, to be walking around on a beach in shorts and bare feet looking at penguins, given that the last time I personally saw penguins was in minus something degrees in the Antarctic! Mission accomplished, though, and deeply satisfying it was, too.



Naturally we had to make the pilgrimage to Cape Point and its famous lighthouse. We subsequently met a woman whose father had been its keeper for many years and who had grown up there, which was a fantastic addition to the record of People We've Met With Unusual Parents (a category into which none of us fall, and certainly none of our children fall!).

Our friends Lucy and Loki in Cape Town very kindly organised a welcoming party for the team, both to celebrate our arrival and to mark the 7th and 16th birthdays of Little Max and big Max respectively. Here, Little Max stares in satisfied wonder at the two enormous birthday cakes cleverly organised by Lucy.

Speeches were made, toasts were offered and a good time was had by all. Amazing how many friends we now have in Cape Town, all of whom were Zimbos once. An additional surprise guest was Phoenella Powles, whose former house on the slopes of Mt Elgon we had visited in Kenya. Touchingly, she had fond memories of my grandmother that were almost too much to hear...!

And then, suddenly, it was all over. We took leave of the others in Jambanja, who had to drive back to Zim immediately, and found we were suddenly and deafeningly On Our Own. Gosh, what a weird feeling that was!

And so now we too will make our way homeward, though taking a slightly lengthier route. Our plan is to come up via Fish River canyon in Namibia, then through the Kalahari in Botswana, and get home for early July when Jake goes back to school and I go back to work. Not long now...

Cape Town

Hi all

 

Well, with no small sense of achievement we reached Cape Town on Friday 12^th June. The objective of the trip was Cape via Cairo, and we did it! I can’t pretend we’re not a little sad that our gloriously happy time-out from life has drawn to an end, but we knew it couldn’t go on for ever. And yesterday (Saturday) we had a fabulous celebratory party with various assembled friends, hosted by Lucy and Loki, and the reality begun slowly to sink in. Against the odds, we took six months off, with our kids, and drove 33,000 kms across Africa. We had no major accidents, no major illnesses and no major disasters, and we all enjoyed every single moment of it, to the maximum. In your wildest dreams, you couldn’t hope for more than that! We also did something that we’ve never done before (and may never do again, although I REALLY hope we do!!). We spent six whole months solidly together as a family – all day, every day. In a way, that was more special than anything else. In the frenetic hurly-burly of our normal lives (in as much as our lives could ever have been described as “normal”!), we rarely spend an hour in each others’ company, let alone an entire day. To get the chance to spend six months together has been a real privilege, and none of us will ever be quite the same again.

 

Travelling with another family has added a further dimension to the trip, and it has been much the richer for it. Not only, on a very practical level, has it made it possible for us to go places we’d never dare go alone, but it has also created an additional set of social dynamics that have transformed the entire experience for everyone. The small boys have had friends to play with (and how they have played, turning the entire continent into one great big sandpit!), the big boys have had mates to share with, and the grown-ups have had other grown-ups with whom to laugh, cry and generally share the joys and the worries (such as they’ve been) along the way. We might have been able to do some of it without them, but we’ve done a lot more, and had a lot more fun, doing it with them.

 

Although the trip’s not technically over until we’re all back in Harare, it is now effectively over for Jangano as a team. The Harford-Adams family have a tighter deadline than us, and will drive straight back to Harare this week. We still have a couple more weeks ahead of us before we have to head home, and so we’ll amble up through Namibia and Botswana, winding gently down and preparing ourselves for the trauma of having to reintegrate ourselves into the world!

 

This isn’t the last from me, but it is a significant indicator that the end is nearly upon us…..

 

Gus

 

 

 

 

 

 

SA and Lesotho

And so, on the final leg, we pass from Mozambique (still very much real Africa) into the familiar yet enduringly surreal environment that is South Africa. And once again, especially after so many months in the rest of Africa, it is a shock. In Durban we went to the water slides at Ushaka Marine Park (fulfilling a promise I’d made to the boys way back in Uganda), and were stunned by the numbers of seriously overweight and unhealthy looking people we saw there (of all shades and hues). The aggressive consumerism that is the hallmark of so many western countries is glaringly apparent in South Africa too, and it really takes you aback when you haven’t been exposed to it for a while. We genuinely haven’t seen an obese person from Sudan to Mozambique. But the moment we get into South Africa, they’re everywhere! Scary stuff.

 

Not that South Africa isn’t a beautiful country because, of course, it is. From Durban we headed up the Sani Pass into Lesotho, a stunning drive through the Drakensburg. We nearly didn’t make it. I’d had Mahali’s joints greased in Durban and they garage had lubricated all the bushes with some kind of petroleum based lubricant designed to eliminate the squeaks (in itself a bizarre idea – I use the squeaks to tell me the car is still in one piece!). Unfortunately, the bushes in the panhard arm at the front were polyurethane, instead of rubber, and were completely dissolved by the lubricant. As this only became apparent doing 100kmh on the freeway near Pietermaritzburg, and as the result was a wheel shimmy of frightening violence, it was a somewhat unsettling experience.

 

Amazingly (and this is the counterbalancing joy of being in South Africa), there is a company in ‘Maritzburg (run, of course, by a sympathetic Zimbo) that manufacture polyurethane bushes, and we had new ones fitted and in place by 10am the next morning! Allowing us to make it up to Lesotho that same day. Sadly time didn’t allow us to traverse the country as we’d originally hoped, but the brutal fact was that we were ill-equipped to deal with the sub-zero temperatures we’d be encountering along the way anyway, so it was with some relief that we turned around and drove back down the Sani pass towards our next destination in Port Elizabeth.

 

PE is home to our great friends James and Colleen, and we took over their house and space for two wonderful nights in their company. The city itself may not be overly pre-possessing, but the neighbouring beaches are stunning, and we donned our fleeces for a bracing walk along Sardinia beach, where we encountered the biggest jelly fish we’d ever seen. PE is also home to Woodridge, Jake’s school. Not surprisingly, he wasn’t keen to visit it (school’s in session, and he’s missing it), so we passed reluctantly by (the rest of us being keen to go and have a look around).

 

From PE we drove down the Garden Route, overnighting in the national park at Wilderness (a less apt name for which would be hard to imagine, given that the N2 runs right through the park!), and then down to Cape Agulhas. This is the southernmost point in Africa and obviously a major landmark for us, marking the end of our southerly progress and the point at which we turned back north. We camped in a completely empty campsite right on the beach (it’s mid-winter in South Africa, and there’s nobody about in any of the tourist spots), and had a full fry-up breakfast right next to Cape itself. From there we had some emotional group photos together before we finally split up as a team, with Jambanja heading to one set of friends in Cape Town and us off to another.

 

 

 

Through the Great Lakes

Gosh, it’s been a while since I’ve had a decent update. Apologies for that. As we’ve headed south, we’ve had to accelerate, with the result that we’ve spent more time travelling and have had less time available for writing.

Not that the additional travelling has in any way detracted from the fun. We’ve seen many fantastic places, and the To Do list of sites we’ll come back to one day with more time is growing and growing. From Rwanda we came down through Burundi, where we met the northern tip of Lake Tanganyika. Stunning scenery, surrounded the mountains of the eastern DRC on the one side and the no-less-impressive hills of Burundi on the other side.

Visiting a friend's orphanage in Bujumbura, with the DRC mountains in the background.

Thence into Tanzania and down the eastern shore of Lake Tanganyika through Kigoma (definitely one of the most characterful towns in East Africa, with its little port, railhead and airport). We were able finally to tick off a long held personal ambition, which was to get to Katavi National Park (described by a friend who knows it well as the Best Game Park in Africa). We were not disappointed there, as we feasted our eyes on herds of buffalo, zebra and topi bigger than any we’d ever seen. Sadly, the prohibitive park entry fees prevented us from staying longer than one night, but even one night was a privilege.

Picknicking on the edge of a 450 sq km fllodplain in Katavi.

We’d hoped to go all the way down to Songea in south-western Tanzania and then to cross the Rovuma river into Mozambique. It turned out that the ferry at Mtwara had been sunk and river was too full for what the Michelin map describes enigmatically as “Crossing Par Pirogue”. So we chose the safe route through Malawi. And beautiful it was. Malawi’s a very familiar country to all of us (Nicky was even born there!), and we weren’t all that thrilled about going through it on this trip. But it remains a stunning destination, and we were all gently charmed by its friendly demeanour and glorious mountain backdrops.

Learning the secrets of woodcarving, Malawi-style

From Malawi we crossed into Mozambique and went back up north towards Lichinga, the highest town in Mozambique (at a dizzying 1400 metres above sea level!), and home to surely one of the continent’s strangest hotels. The chalets are built in the style of a railway signalman’s house (tall and thin, and serving no immediately recognisable function), while the piece de resistance in the garden is the shell of an old Mozambican airlines 737, some miles distant from the nearest airport.
Possibly the weirdest hotel in Africa (note the nose cone of 737 in the background!)

We’d also hoped to get into Niassa Game Reserve, but once again found we lacked the time to do it (another thing on to the To Do list), so we headed due east from Lichinga to Pemba (in part the finest and in part one of the worst roads of our entire trip!). Pemba was all too brief, through beautiful, and then we were down to Ilha da Mozambique, the little island off the coast that was once Mozambique’s capital, and many of whose buildings predate those of any other European constructions in the southern hemisphere (the church in the fort dating back to 1498 or so). We were utterly captivated by Ilha – it really is an incredible place, and were lucky enough to be staying in a friend’s beautfilly restored old house there.

One of several 500 year old buildings on Ilha - this one in better condition than most!

The stunning beach at Pomene - a clear contender for most beautiful beach in East Africa (albeit with some stiff competition!)

From Ilha we’ve driven 1500kms down to Inhambane, and we’re now girding our loins for the final assault on Cape Town, at which we’re expecting to arrive on or around 12th June. Horribly sad to think our trip is nearly at an end, but still plenty to see before we finally reach home. Yesterday we passed another landmark when we crossed the Tropic of Capricorn, into the temperate zones of the extreme south of Africa!

Images of Uganda

The volcanoes of the Virunga Massif, from the Ugandan side. Home to the mountain gorillas.

Our last time crossing the equator. From here, it's south all the way...

What happens when you squeeze a 200m wide river into a 7m wide gorge. Murchison Falls.

More kigelia than I care to think about!

The team viewing chimps in the Bugongo forest.

The Pearl of Africa

Hi all

 

Well, we’re in Rwanda, after a fabulous ten day stint in Uganda (surely the world’s greenest country). While there, we saw the other source of the Nile (the one that comes from Lake Victoria, and the one that caused poor Speke to come to grief on the day he was due to debate with Burton), the Murchison Falls (where the Nile gets squeezed into a narrow gorge only 7 metres wide), Queen Elizabeth National Park (where I once briefly worked as a consultant for CARE) and the Mgahinga Gorilla Park on the border with Rwanda and Congo. We caught glimpses of the Ruwenzori mountains (that’s on next year’s list for a return visit), and spent some quality time amongst a group of chimpanzees in the Bugongo forest (which I found to be an unnervingly familiar experience, perhaps a reflection on the less-then-immaculate table manners of my own three boys!). Oh, and we re-crossed the equator for the final time on the trip, signifying the fact that we truly are, now, on the home straight. We also, by the way, saw unnervingly large quantities of kigelia fruit. But I’ll perhaps keep that a secret for the time being….

 

Rwanda is an entirely different experience. Also stunningly green and beautiful, and clearly a country very much on the up. But the omnipresent reminders of its recent dark days are pretty stark. They are also, for us in Zim, a cause of some rather grim relief. Whatever we’ve been through in the last decade, thank goodness it never came to this.

 

On the positive side, though (there are many positives about Rwanda, fortunately), we managed to get some extremely hard-to-come by gorilla permits, and a select few of our party will be going to see the gorillas tomorrow, back up on the Rwandan side of the Virunga Massif. Sadly I’m not one of them, having already seen the gorillas before (many years ago, it has to be said). But I’m still thrilled that they’ll get a chance to do so. It’s an opportunity that simply can’t be missed.

 

From here our route is uncertain. We were planning to go down Lake Tanganyika and then over to Mtwara, hoping to cross the Rovuma into northern Mozambique. However, latest word is that the Rovuma ferry is now languishing at the bottom of the Rovuma river, and the only way across is by paying several enterprising villagers fairly substantial sums to lash their pirogues together and load the vehicle on top. This appeals to me enormously, but we’ve also heard that the river is in full spate at the moment and therefore not crossable. As it’s a very long way to travel to find out that we can’t cross the river, we may end up finding an alternative route down through Malawi. Ahh, the hazards of African travel. I love it!

 

More soon……

 

Gus