10 August 2017 / leggypeggy

Travelling Africa—how and where it began

Africa, African Trails, Gibraltar, Gibraltar Rock, monkeys, overland travel, radiator

Looking up in St Michael’s Cave. It’s one of 150 caves in Gibraltar Rock

Back in 1973, Poor John travelled down the middle of Africa—on the back of an ancient Bedford truck. He remembers bouncing across 2000 kilometres of unsealed, corrugated road surfaces from Algeria to Kenya, which was where he could take a much-needed shower and collect mail before heading on to South Africa.

In 1977, I travelled down the east side of the continent, spending a lot of time traversing The Sudan from the top to the bottom. My travels were by train, ferry, car (Peugeots), camel (just a short stint), airplane and bus (it broke an axle).

After we married in 1980, we agreed it would be good to do an African overland journey again—together.

We never thought it would take 29 years to happen. But there were kids, jobs and much more. For example, Poor John’s Aunt Esther came to live with us early in the year 2000 when she was still 89. Plus, we had exchange students (more than 20) and dogs (not quite so many).

Soon after the internet was widely available (in the mid-1990s), I started researching the prospect of doing a longish overland journey in Africa. By the time we booked, more than 10 years later, there were two companies providing lengthy Trans-Africa trips—African Trails and Oasis Overland.

We signed up for the African Trails option. It would start in Gibraltar (although we camped first in Spain) and take us across the Mediterranean Sea (by ferry) to Africa then down the west side of the continent to South Africa. We’d do a U-turn there and head up the east side, finishing in Istanbul, Turkey. It would be 30 countries in 43 weeks.

It was never going to be easy, but it was always going to be fascinating.

Rock of Gibraltar from a distance

Rock of Gibraltar up closer

Even today, the Af Trails website says ‘We go through areas where no tourists go, the roads can be bad, food can be limited to what we have stocked on the truck, campsites are few and basic, visas can be hard to get, and communication to the outside world limited or unavailable at times.

‘We guarantee: we’ll break down, that we will have to wait somewhere we don’t really want to be for visas, spare parts or just for someone to open a closed road, and we’ll have to dig the truck out of mud and sand.’ It goes on to recommend not to book flights home until the trip is finished.

The website also reminds prospective travellers that they need to ‘be prepared to work as part of a team and to share with the others on the trip.’ There will be cooking over open fires, collecting firewood, washing in rivers, pitching tents (sometimes in the rain), sleeping under the stars, meeting unforgettable people, and seeing unimaginable and far-flung sights.

Guess what? It was all true.

Just reading the website advice reminds me of cooking a meal in Togo while standing in ankle-deep water in the pouring rain, pushing the truck out of sand again and again, sitting in Cameroon waiting for visas to Gabon, taking way too many cold showers, shopping in amazing markets, and oh-so much more.

It’s time to re-live those memories, so I’ll be writing more about our African adventures. These posts will be mixed up with our other—more recent travels.

Today I’ll start with Gibraltar, which isn’t Africa, but was where the trip began.

Overlooking Gibraltar Harbour

Barbary macaques grooming one another

We arrived a few days early and joined some fellow travellers at a campground in La Linea de la Conceptión, Spain (just metres from Gibraltar). That meant we had plenty of time to explore the British territory, and for me to catch up with Jane, who’d been an ‘imaginary’ online friend for many years.

Jane very kindly gave us a tour of her Gibraltar and showed us the wonderful sights. We had the chance to drive up the Rock for the view, meet plenty of the Barbary macaques that swarm over the Rock, and visit St Michael’s Cave, a network of limestone caves nestled within the Rock.

We also learned how to put up our tent, bought a couple of pillows to sleep on at night and sit on during the day, and discovered that at least two of our fellow travellers would be at one another’s throats about half of the trip,

On the official start day, we picked up the last of our fellow travellers, who had flown in to Gibraltar from London. The landing strip in Gibraltar goes across the main road, so all traffic gets stopped when a plane comes in.

So now we were 28 people in a truck built to hold 30. Ages ranged from 18 to 61 (Poor John was the oldest). Half the group was Australian or New Zealander, and the rest were a mix of Americans, British, South Africans and a Norwegian. There would be nationality changes along the way, but that’s enough of an intro for now.

The next African instalment will be to introduce the truck—which remained unnamed—and detail what we stocked up on at the beginning. The radiator got a name—George—but mostly because it was an ongoing problem.