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......