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Getting from A to B
As you know, the plan is for us to head off to Southern Africa to cruise around and look at critters from early June to the end of August this year. We both feel that we are a bit too old/unsociable/judgemental/unwashed for the whole “group in the back of a truck trip” thing so decided to go independent. Don’t get me wrong, travel friends have turned into some of our best friends and K and I are all for singing kumbaya around the camp fire with new acquaintances (here’s hoping there will be a few) - but pretty much only when it is at the mutual choice of all kumbaya’ers and after a little bit of time has been spent sussing each other out.
So, what we are going to do is enter a “buy-back” arrangement through a company called Drive Africa from whom we buy 4x4 at the start of the trip, vroom around Southern Africa in it, and then sell it back to them at the end for a pre-determined price. This works out at about a third of the price of renting the same type of vehicle over the same time.
We were a little nervous about buying a car on sight-unseen basis, but we have some friends who have dealt with the same company and have nothing but praise for them.
The 4x4 is fully kitted out for safaris - pimp-my-ride Africa style. It has a long range fuel tank, drinking water tanks, camping gear and - best of all - a two person tent that pops out of the roof. It has an apple gun to distract elephants and a beer gun to distract Andrews (alright, wishful thinking there but I hear the mechanics in Africa are very resourceful…).
Having our own wheels will give us a lot more freedom but will also mean that we will have to be more self-sufficient in our travels - my Grand Theft Auto based driving skills may not be quite what the doctor ordered.
Two Ton Toboggan
To give us a head start with the whole 4x4 thing we decided to do a day long off road driving course. This was based on the thought that the best way for us to learn how to drive off road would be in someone else’s car. We combined the course with
a weekend away with K’s brother Richard and his partner Janet who are living in Bath, near where the course was held.
The course was brilliant. It was run by an outfit called Whitecliff Off Road Driving and was set in a huge abandoned quarry. It was 99% hands on with only a time for a coffee before we were churning around in mud, crawling up huge stony inclines and hurtling (carefully and slowly) across cratered tracks. All driving was done one-on-one with an instructor and they were excellent value, completely relaxed and full of good advice. Sure, the conditions were different to what we will experience in Africa but it gave us a real taste of the range of things you can and can’t do with a 4x4.
Each of us were marked on our driving performances and... (I am so going to get whacked for this)... according to the approved and accepted marking schedule used for international off road events and applied by our highly qualified judges I was the better driver - by ½ a mark. Mwahhaha! To be fair now, K was consistently better over the course but lost a swag of marks for
one incident when she turned her 4x4 into a two ton steel toboggan by free-wheeling it down a steep muddy hill in neutral. Amazing the speed it picked up. It certainly amazed those of us standing around at the bottom of the hill.
Wales
After the course we picked up Richard and Janet from Bath and headed up to the village of Hay-on-Wye on the Welsh/English border. It’s a lovely little village that reinvented itself as the second hand book capital of the world mainly through hosting a massive literary festival each year and having about 30 book stores there. Damn busy little place. K bought a nice dress there, I bought some sausages and Richard and Janet bought some fudge, so go figure.
We didn’t stay in Hay-on-Wye for the night but headed into Wales proper to camp in the Brecon Beacons national park and do a bit of walking. The camping was fun until the sun went down and it got fricken cold - we fought each other for the honour of
doing the washing up because the little utilities building for the campsite was heated.
The following day we had an excellent walk up
through part of the Brecon Beacons. The walk included a waterfall that you could climb up behind, which is always a bit of a kick. Walking in the UK is so different from walking back home. Here the walks are often a variety affair stitched together from short stretches of tracks, farm lands, and plain old roads. If you listen carefully you can almost always hear traffic (often being a fast approaching Land Rover that’ll force you to dive off the lane into the nearest patch of brambles). One of the coolest things is that there are blackberries everywhere, so if they are in season walking becomes a gorge-fest (unfortunately not the season yet but looking forward to walking in Scotland in september...).
So, that was our weekend. Spending heaps of times tying up everything here in London, but still time for one final weekend get-away to Venice, which I suspect will be the next entry.
Much love,
Andrew and Katherine
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