To Nairobi!

Wow, one week down and we've already managed to squeeze in 2,650 kms (including three days of over 700kms a day), a trip to a farm in Zambia, Christmas on the beach in Tanzania, the first oil change on the cars in Kenya and a glorious afternoon with Chris Stephenson, an old mate from Uni, pouring over maps of Ethiopia. If we were to sustain this pace (which thankfully we have no intention of doing!), we'd be in Oslo by mid Jan, and probably approaching the outer reaches the Nebulon galaxy by March. Definitely time to SLOW DOWN!

On Saturday we had a glorious but gruelling drive from the coast all the way to Nairobi. We passed Kili en route, scene of an earlier triumph this year for Mands (a triumph truly put into perspective by the awesome sight of this humungous mountain!). However, having slightly underestimated the distance to Nairobi, we broke our own golden rule (for the second time within a week!) and ended up driving long after dark, finally arriving at after 9pm.

We're now taking brief respite in the home of our wonderfully thoughtful (though conspicuously absent!) friends Matthew and Alice, who left us not only with four pages of detailed instructions covering everything from operating the walkie-talkies to finding the best camping shop in Nairobi, but even blagged us an invite to go round to their neighbours (who we've never met) for drinks. Where else but Africa do you get invited into the homes of complete strangers and treated like old friends!

Tomorrow we begin the journey up one of my favourite roads in Africa - the epic one that leads through the Chalbi Desert, past Marsabit mountain and terminates in the Ethiopian border town of Moyale, generally acknowledged to be one of the world's least lovable tourist destinations. But, as we all know, it ain't the destination, it's the journey that counts. And this particular road never fails to deliver on that score. Personally, I can't wait!

Tearful farewells...

...is possibly overstating it, but it was nevertheless a sobering moment today, realising that's it. Said goodbye to everyone at PhytoTrade and now we're really off. Tomorrow, Saturday, is packing day, and Sunday, 5am, we depart. Ain't nothing gonna stop us now!

The Final Week...

.....is upon us, and goodness, it's shaping up to be a frantic one. Spent last week with my Phyto team-mates planning for next year (odd, given that I won't be there for much of it). But I felt actually much happier at the end, knowing that PhytoTrade's a big, solid machine that'll keep rolling on, with or without me. And hopefully it won't have picked up so much momentum by the time I get back that I can no longer hop back on!

Weekend was hectic but REALLY enjoyable. On Saturday we had a leaving do with a few of our friends. In keeping with the spirit of the expedition, we invited some of our closest friends to join us on a trip up Ngomakurira, a famous landmark outside Harare. It's a granitic inselberg, very classically Zimbabwean, and our plan was to drive up to the top and have a braai there. Driving up there is a bit of a mission, and we were expecting this to deter quite a few. But not at all. Just about everyone we invited turned up, and it was a hoot! Sadly I can't show you any photos yet, as I clean forgot to take a camera in all the excitement, but I'll swipe some from one of the many others who were there and who did remember to bring their cameras.


Yesterday passed in a blur doing last minute things to the car, trying to figure out how we're going to pack for 6 months in a car that we usually fill up on an afternoon outing to the animal shelter, going through old tins of tomato paste and deciding whether they really merit a trip to Cairo etc etc. All good stuff! I went out to the microlight club in the evening to bid a sad farewell to my plane, which I won't see again for a very long time. Pete, my hangar mate, took this photo of me coming in for my final landing, which I'll include here in lieu of any trip-related photos.

Today marked the official start of my Last Week at Work, which was only mildly scarey. I stopped off at the engineering shop on my way into the office to get some hi-lift jacking points welded onto the car. A side-trip to a workshop always sets me off in a good mood, so I knew it was going to be a fine day. Strangely, though, that was about the last cogent thought I remember having had during the day, as the rest of it just rushed by in a mad whirl. Now sitting alone in the office, long after dark, and thinking I really ought to be off home. At which point, therefore, I'll bid you farewell.....!

Last minute jitters

Starting to send out the e-mails to friends and colleagues telling them I'll be away for the next six months, and it all makes it seem very imminent. Which, with only just over two weeks left, is probably a fair reflection of the truth!

I can't pretend I'm not having the odd jitter about how everything's going to run in my absence. I've got my board arriving today for our final meeting of the year, as well as all the PhytoTrade staff from SA and London. 20 people in total. We'll spend the next week going through the plans for next year and hopefully we'll all feel a bit calmer after that. On the one hand it feels very normal - we always do our annual planning in early December. But on the other hand, it's very weird indeed planning for a year, half of which I know I won't be around for!

Doubt there'll be much time for blogging while they're all here, so if I go silent for a while, it's because I'm dealing with Very Important Stuff. Or something.....

Currency Carry-ons

Just collected our passports from the Egyptian embassy. Our visas were charged in Zim dollars, so ended up costing us the equivalent of US$0.03 cents each. You gotta love this crazy Zim currency, hey! One of the things we'll miss about Zim most while we're travelling - the palpable sense of excitement every morning as we check in with the "central bank" (the newspaper vendor on the streetcorner near our office) to find out what today's exchange rate is. You'd think we'd have got used to it, but we still ooh and aah every time!

Monday the soldiers rioted in town - the daily withdrawal limit from a bank is Z$1 million (about US$0.50c). Which means you queue for the whole morning to withdraw money from the bank, and all you can take out is $0.50c. Finally somebody got sufficiently fed up with this that they rioted. As they happened to be soldiers in uniform, the government took notice.

The result? Today, a new Z$100 million banknote has been introduced and the daily withdrawal limit has been increased to, you guessed it, Z$100 million.

My prediction. By Monday next week, Z$100 million will be worth US$0.50c.

You read it here first....!

The sixth team member

Before I forget, one other important introduction. Although she's the junior of the two females on the team, she's at least as important in terms of reaching our objectives. Her name is Mahali, and while she may not have the poise and grace of the senior female team member, she has about her an air of reassuring solidity and robustness. As a means of travelling from A to B via Z (essentially our route), she couldn’t be better. Mahali is a 1992, 80 Series Land Cruiser, tough as old boots and almost as attractive. To date, she's clocked 258,000 kms (the Land Cruiser equivalent of turning 40), and is therefore just about sufficiently run in to start a trip of this magnitude.

Mahali, by the way, is the Swahili word for “place”, as in “mahali pa kupiga hema” (a campsite, literally a place for putting up a tent). It also means a "destination". As, in our case, the journey IS the destination, it seems appropriate to label our mode of transport thus.

Mahali is also, by the way, evocative of one of my favourite places in Africa, the Mahale mountains on the eastern shore of Lake Tanganyika. Somewhere I hope we might get a chance to visit on this trip......

The Route (maybe)

It is, of course, important to have a route. But, as any African explorer will tell you, this is, at best, a guideline. There are a number of countries in what might politely be termed as "flux" at the moment (not to mention our beloved home in Zimbabwe!), and we'll have to pretty much take it as it comes. Since we started planning this route a year ago, there have been tourists kidnapped in Egypt, bombs in Khartoum, aid workers kidnapped in Ethiopia, severe post-election violence in Kenya and a major eruption in the eastern DRC. Who knows what further delights await us!

Oh yes, and three weeks ago our ship up to Alexandria was cancelled due to pirates off the Somali coast.

As to why we're driving both ways, I've already partly answered that question. The original plan was to ship up and drive back, but that didn't work out, so now we're driving up as quick as we can and driving down again in a more relaxed fashion.

It makes more sense to drive downhill, as it were. North Africa is new territory to all of us, so we'd like to spend the bulk of our trip there, and preferably while we're still fresh and enthusiastic. It also means we'll be heading south to avoid the northern summer. The 50 degree heat of a Sudanese summer isn't something any of us especially long to experience and, if all goes well, we'll be into the cool of a southern winter by then.

Approximate milestones, for those of you really interested in dates and locations, are as follows:

21 Dec: Harare

21 Dec- 5 Jan: Harare- Addis

5-22 Jan: Ethiopia

23-31 Jan: Sudan

1 - 28 Feb: Egypt

1-10 Mar: Sudan

10-25 Mar: Ethiopia (including Omo Valley)

25 Mar - 15 April: Kenya

15 April - 1 May: Rwanda, Burundi, Lake Tanganyika

1 May - 10 May: Southern Tanzania

10 - 31 May: Mozambique

1 - 10 June: SA to Cape Town

10 - 30 June: Namibia and home

I seriously doubt that any but the first two or three of these dates will bear any resemblence to what actually happens, but hey, it's a guideline!

Introductions

Since we’re going to be together for a while, I should probably start with some introductions. Presumably you know me (otherwise you wouldn’t be looking at this). But here’s the rest of my family.

First up is Amanda. She’s the only female in the family. She’s also, perversely, the only one that ever gets called “Sir” (as in “Jake, tidy your room immediately!”, “Yes Sir!!”). It would be reasonable to conclude that she is, therefore, the Most Important Person in the family. I usually call her Mands, as do most of her closest friends. But when she gets that glint in her eye, I’m also inclined to call her Sir.

Next comes Jake. He’s the Family Teenager. To be fair, he only turned 13 in July so he’s still getting used to the role. So far he’s mastered the monosyllabic grunt in five different languages and he’s just starting work on his yawns. If eating ever becomes an Olympic sport, he’ll do Zimbabwe proud.

This picture is of Jake showing off a hole in his leg, acquired from our pet warthog, Lucy. As you can see, he's not unchuffed with it.

Ben is 8, and he’s the only male in the family who’s not only aware of how he looks, but actually cares about it. This is pretty amazing. In common with most Zimbabwean males, the rest of us are entirely oblivious to fashion. Ben, however, is super-trendy and really rather cool. He’s also incredibly lucky that his best friend Alexander is coming on the trip with us too. They’re inseparable, those two, and we don’t anticipate having to do much, if anything, to keep them entertained.

And finally there’s Max. Or, as he shall be known throughout this blog (and without even a trace of irony), Little Max. Little Max is anything but little. He’s six years old, built like a Ukranian tank but blessed with the kind of cheeky grin that gets you through roadblocks and border posts with the minimum of hassle. He is, in short, a huge asset. He’s called Little Max because the other Max we’ll be travelling with is 15 years old, and therefore entitled to the epithet Big Max.

20 days to go

The time is nearly upon us. After more than a year of planning, the families Le Breton and Harford-Adams are about to embark on a shared adventure driving up the length of Africa and then, just for good measure, driving back down again. Our mission is to get to Cape Town, but our route takes us there by way of Cairo. And Khartoum, and Addis Ababa. And Nairobi, Kampala, Kigali, Bujumbura, Maputo and Mbabane...

Departure date is Sunday 21st December. We'll head north as quick as we can, and hope to reach a beach in Tanzania by Christmas Day. Our target is Pangani (south of Tanga), but we're from a landlocked country so, hey, any beach will do!

With 20 days to go, we're into the final frenzy, getting visas, sorting out our vehicles, wondering how on earth we're going to fit 9 people plus kit for 6 months into 2 vehicles etc etc. And I'm also tying things up at PhytoTrade to hand over to a group of my colleagues who, as you can imagine, are chuffed to bits at the prospect of having to cover for me for 6 months. (Thanks, guys, I'm going to owe you all so many beers when I get back, we'll be on liquid diet for a month!).

A lot to think of, and not much time for blogging then. But I wanted to at least get this started, which I have now duly done. More soon! Gus