ROAD TRIP TO AFRICA - IN PICTURES

David Warren

Extracts alongside each picture are from the book Road Trip To Africa by David Warren which is not available from any publisher and never likely to be but I am sure he will send you a copy if you ask him nicely!

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ROAD TRIP TO AFRICA – IN PICTURES with extracts... “Fitted out with everything you might need including bunk beds, a shower unit, toilet, 240 volt supply, gas cooker and a kitchen sink, the former coal delivery lorry (with surprisingly small wheels I noticed) was to be our bedroom, kitchen, bathroom and office for the next three weeks, and home for Pete for the next four months. Chris would be sharing the lorry driving with Pete while Ben and I would take it turns trying to keep the Land Cruiser – or Tonka Toy as Chris would call it because of its big, bulging wheels - moving in a straight line.”
								PETE, CHRIS AND BEN “Weather-wise it was perfect for driving. Every day was clear and bright although to say it was nippy at night is a bit like saying Stephen Hawking is quite brainy. It was literally freezing. We were in the kind of climate where people use fridges to keep food warm (apparently Eskimos do!). I can’t vouch for the others but I certainly slept fully clothed for the first couple of nights inside a thick sleeping bag and with a woolly hat pulled down over my eyes to keep warm.”
					SPANISH LORRY MECHANICS “The journey to the south of Spain was uneventful except for one rear tyre blowout on the lorry which, from my viewpoint in the vehicle behind, looked like the whole rear axle had exploded in a cloud of black smoke. A close second after a spare pair of underpants, the most important thing to pack before embarking on a 4,000 mile road trip across Africa would be a spare tyre – you’d think! We didn’t have one. We had no option but to continue to the nearest town, Almendralejo, Spain, camp for the night and go looking for a neumático reparación garage the next morning. Almendralejo received a mention in our guidebook smaller than a dust mite’s eardrum but was notable in our eyes for the huge stork nests on top of the grain warehouse that we camped near and the endless shunting throughout the night of the locomotives on the nearby sidings.”
										BOUZNIKA, MOROCCO “We spent the first night in the grounds of a hotel and golf complex near a town called Bouznika. People peered out of windows or came out of their chalets to see what all the noise was as we reversed and shunted our vehicles into a comfortable sleeping position for the night. However, it appeared that the curious neighbours, Moroccan curtain twitchers, were house sitters keeping these expensive holiday properties secure during the winter months. “
MUG SHOTS “After a marginally warmer night with me still wearing the aforementioned woolly hat we got up the next morning, quickly ate a breakfast of muesli with UHT milk and Moroccan flat bread and butter, and decided – and I think I speak on behalf of all of us – that it was still too cold to wash.”
										FIRST DESERT STOP “There are many ways to prevent a long drive from becoming boring - wearing a chicken suit, keeping at least five cats in the car, collecting roadkill, waving at other drivers, then when they wave back giving them an obscene gesture – and although the subtly changing scenery kept us constantly interested we enhanced the driving experience by practising African drum rhythms on Ben’s darabuka.”
										FISH MARKET “Essaouira was a busy fishing town with an attractive harbour packed with bright blue fishing boats. The attractiveness of the place brought out the happy snapper in us all to the point where one poor local man wearing a fetching dark green cloak with a pointy hood à la Obi Wan Kenobi had to do a runner to avoid being caught on camera.”
ESSAOUIRA, MOROCCO “Jimi Hendrix apparently wrote his famous song, Castles Made Of Sand, on a beach near Essaouira, our next stop after Marrakech. Sure enough, there were castles and there was a beach made of sand. He was probably on LSD at the time and I was on the anti-malarial drug, Larium, but the effect was fairly similar.”
									“Even though visiting every electrical shop in Essaouira was not in my Rough Guide’s list of 10 Things You Must Do In Morocco it gave us an excuse to wander around the town for a couple of hours. We saw plenty of other weird and wonderful looking trans-Saharan vehicles in our travels so that Chris was able to happily snap away and add to his collection of vehicle porn. However, we didn’t have such a fruitless search for oranges (sorry, bad joke). Across West Africa it is orange season at this time of the year so we indulged in a glass of fresh orange juice (it doesn’t take much in Africa to make you think you are “indulging”) and then it was back to vehicles so that we could head off down the coast and look for somewhere to camp before it got too dark.”
									“After an hour travelling down a small road along the coast we found the ideal spot to camp: secluded, overlooking the ocean and bags of space to go off and find somewhere to “evacuate” and make good use of the spade we had brought with us. Believe me, these things are important on the road. Ben set about collecting firewood for the evening’s campfire while Pete, Chris and I settled into the folding chairs for an evening of wine, food and good conversation. Ben cooked another special, this time of pasta and the fish that we had bought in Essaouira with fried aubergine. Fish, to taste good, must swim three times: in water, in butter, and in wine, said a wag once upon a time, so Ben used up the remainder of the Don Simon giving us the valid excuse to open a new carton.”
MY BEDROOM “Pete, Chris and Ben as always clambered into their bunks in the lorry, and I spent a few minutes rearranging the rear of the Land Cruiser to create a space for me to lay out my mat and sleeping bag diagonally in order to achieve enough length. It might sound uncomfortable sleeping among half a dozen jerry cans, two large coils of towing rope and three gallon containers of engine oil but in all the nights I spent stretched out in the back of the Tonka Toy I never once had a bad night’s sleep.”
										GOATS IN THE TREE “On the way we passed a curious sight by the side of the road: goats in trees, about a dozen of them standing on the branches, chewing away at the leaves. Aware of the fascination this holds for foreigners driving through Morocco children and herdsmen tried to tempt us to stop and take photos for a small fee. Staff where I work had clubbed together to buy a goat for a village in Africa – maybe I had found it: in a tree in Morocco.”
										“There was nothing more we could do. We stocked up at the supermarket, had lunch (more bread and cheese), visited a Speedy garage (as always, any excuse to visit a garage for Pete and Chris and I cannot remember why we did this time but again it cheered them up) and left Agadir.”
BRRR! “There were times when I thought it resembled Great Yarmouth on a damp, cloudy day in October, especially when the donkeys walked past.”
			“Pete, the governor, boss man, chief honcho – though he never acted that way - and owner of the vehicles, was a thoughtful, determined individual who seemed to have an endless capacity to tackle problems. If he had been a one armed trapeze artist with an itchy bottom he would have solved the problem. Pete had a seemingly bottomless pit of funds to deal with the bureaucracy that we were to experience though he may well disagree, certainly by the end of the trip. And Pete had the biggest problem of all – to get an ex-coal delivery lorry with small wheels, stashed with a vast amount of smuggled equipment, beer and wine, through half a dozen notoriously bureaucratic African countries, into The Gambia, a country that had recently introduced a law which was almost to be his downfall. Still, if all difficulties were known at the outset of a long journey, most of us would never start out at all.”
				“Chris would be extremely useful in his knowledge of vehicle maintenance and his unquenchable urges to fix anything that went wrong made him invaluable. Even if I muttered something about not having checked the oil in the Land Cruiser for a while he would have the bonnet up and the dipstick out quicker than it takes a bald man to comb his air. He seemed to know and understand everything mechanical and despite a tendency to claim that peanut butter was the devil’s food (while tucking into a Marmite sandwich would you believe) was an excellent travelling companion - good company in a journey makes the way seem shorter as Izaak Walton once said.”
“Ben, an environmental science student and pretty decent cook, was the youngest of the group, a mere 25 years old but very experienced in world travel. Ben’s fluency in Spanish turned out to be extremely useful as was his general enthusiasm to get stuck in when problems arose, especially if an interpreter or someone with blonde hair was required. His cooking ability was popular too. Towards the end of many a long drive I heard him utter the following words or similar: “how does pasta with a French herb sauce followed by butterfish à la Cruissant sound for dinner tonight?””
											WESTERN SAHARA – BLOW OUT NUMBER THREE “Shortly after passing a slightly bizarre encampment of dozens of French and German motor homes, seemingly in the middle of nowhere, but no doubt here for a reason, our lorry in front suffered from another dazzling rear end explosion – a third tyre had blown out.”
							“Now we were in true Sahara desert. Yes! Camels, dunes, endless stretches of highway, lots of fine yellow stuff that found its way into the most personal of places, and more opportunities to get stopped for speeding as we hurtled across the desert to our next town, Dakhla. This is one of the longest stretches of desert road we will encounter, about 300 miles between major towns. There are many ways to prevent a long drive from becoming boring - wearing a chicken suit, keeping at least five cats in the car, collecting roadkill, waving at other drivers, then when they wave back giving them an obscene gesture – and although the subtly changing scenery kept us constantly interested we enhanced the driving experience by practising African drum rhythms on Ben’s darabuka.”
“Haiballa, a Mauritanian in a bright blue flowing tunic, saw our lights, wandered over and after a chat and a beer (and the inevitable teasing about being a Moslem and drinking) invited us to a wedding festival that he was going to that evening. Hang on a minute; let’s think about this. When was the last time that you were at a wedding and someone said: “hey, there are four Africans camping down the road! Let’s invite them to our wedding to see how we celebrate!”? Well, that, in reverse, is what happened to us in the Mauritanian desert.”
										ST LOUIS, SENEGAL “We had arrived in the dark so it was a pleasant sight of palm tree fringed beaches and the distant shore of the mainland that greeted us in the morning. The land we were camped on was also used as a cow field as we discovered on this Christmas Day morning when we looked up at one point to see grazing cows approaching - not the most threatening of sights.”
											ST LOUIS, SENEGAL “Across the river was the historic old town of St Louis. As well as being our first stop in Senegal after the crossing the border, St Louis was also the first stop for the French when colonizing West Africa back in the seventeenth century.”
“The historic old town built on an island in the River Senegal still retained its French characteristics, mainly in the architecture of the old buildings, but the newer town and the water front areas were resolutely African in flavour: horse and carts vying for space with heavy traffic, colourfully dressed women carrying large loads on their heads, sheep, goats and dried fish wherever you looked (or smelled) and traffic police at most junctions on the lookout for their next victim to extract a gift from.”
										“Surely not in your little Citroen 2CV? was the most common response I got when I told people that I was planning to drive to The Gambia from Chelmsford.”
											“Spectacularly weird baobabs dotted the flat landscape looking like trees that had been pulled out of the ground and stuffed back in upside down, with their leafless branches looking like roots. This was the hottest day yet and at lunchtime we pulled off the road, parked in the shade and set about the familiar routine of eating lunch off the bonnet of the Land Cruiser. Who was responsible for putting the butter on the bonnet we shall never know but it soon became a large yellow puddle of hot liquid.”
“Malamini Jobarteh, the head of the family, had a large family under the various roofs of the compound. Having three wives (Yanque, Futa and Koli Koli) and their children was like having three extended families to feed, not just one nuclear family as in the West. Some of Malamini’s sons, including the world famous kora players Tata Dindin and Pa Bobo, have their own families living in the compound too. Tata is married to Adama and Pa has two wives, both called Binta which must be confusing at times. Daughters normally leave the family compound when they marry and move into the husband’s family compound. Malamini seems to have a lot of sons – another reason why (on the last count) around 40 people lived under the roof.”
			JAMMING WITH REGGAE BAND, BRIKAMA, THE GAMBIA “The lasting memories were of the people we met, the vastness and peacefulness of the desert and how apparently easily we reached our destination. "You could do it in a 2CV" I thought to myself on more than one occasion. I might just do that one day. Now that was a plan!”

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