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.