There’s a place in South Africa called
Tweebuffelsmeteenskootmorsdoodgeskietfontain, which is quite simply translated as ‘two buffalo shot stone dead with one shot’. I know this because I’ve been there. Africa is riddled with curiosities like this as I discovered to my delight when I embarked on a nine-week overland trek from Nairobi in Kenya to Cape Town in South Africa.

Thinking about this mammoth journey now almost 18 months on, the memories it evokes are both magical and depressing. Magical because of the awesome beauty of living in the great outdoors for almost a quarter of a year, stripping back all the bollocks of modern living and just getting on with it. Depressing because I’m stuck in a gloomy office in east London, it’s raining sideways outside and my bank won’t give me any money. All I really want is to be back in the Serengeti, curled up under the huge African sky, a novel in one hand and a bottle of Tusker in the other.

The way the overland trip worked was very simple, 25 of us from all over the world (England, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, Belgium and Sweden) made our way to Nairobi where we boarded a massive truck, said hello to our diminutive and slightly odd tour guide and set off on a lengthy jaunt that would change our lives. Visiting Kenya, Tanzania, Malawi, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Botswana, Namibia and South Africa and all the wondrous sights these countries had to offer, it wasn’t so much a school trip scenario as a bloody great Apocalypse Now style adventure. While there was some sort of loose itinerary, it was more a case of ‘do we like it here..?’, ‘yes’, ‘then let’s stay a while longer’. For some bizarre reason this particular line of questioning kept cropping up while we were in Zanzibar sipping cocktails and eating crayfish in the toasty Indian Ocean. Can’t think why..?

It was in Zanzibar that we had our first period of R&R after three weeks of pacey, animal-filled adventure where we visited the utterly impressive Masai Mara and Serengeti game reserves. Witnessing with my own eyes a young female lion chasing, catching and ripping to shreds a gazelle is the most brutal yet outstanding thing I have ever seen. Within the first 48 hours of departing Nairobi we had seen the ‘big five’, that’s leopard, lion (two of which were mating), elephant, rhino and buffalo, plus numerous other species of wild animals including literally thousands of migrating wildebeest and a very comical warthog. We also bumped into the Australian cricket team on safari. No, really.

As for my fellow travellers, it was a huge relief that most of them were decent, like-minded people hell-bent on having the time of their lives, half of whom were voluptuous women with kindly natures. The fly in the ointment, however, came in the form of three pasty, chubby English girls who had clearly misread the tour brochure and were constantly moaning about the lengthy drives involved as the ‘overland’ tour progressed. Between refusing to help out with the daily tasks of cooking and tent pitching, whinging about the heat/dust/lack of beds (?) and longing lustfully for French pastries, they did a very good line in making the rest of our lives a living hell.

Thankfully, it’s easy to ignore such trivialities when you’re confronted with the sheer beauty of Lake Malawi or you’re paddling along the Zambezi in a dug-out canoe surrounded on all sides by hippo and elephant. It’s amazing how the great outdoors can pacify you.

In fact, the biggest problem the overland experience threw up was not annoying fellow passengers but an age-old inevitable dilemma. Because nothing the traveller does is ever strictly necessary, there’s no excuse for anything to be less than brilliant. This was absolutely true, making everything a once-in-a-lifetime experience and thus making everything an opportunity to do things to the absolute extreme. Not a day went by when you weren’t over-awed by the sights, the nature or the simple curiosities of an alien culture, this included petrol stations, border crossings and, of course, exotic drink and drugs.

Much of the trip was punctuated by the endlessly fascinating stream of local brews and libations we stumbled across and sought out wherever we ended up for the night. A particular favourite was Tanzania’s native Safari Lager, a peculiar brew that went down as smoothly as a stripper on a well greased pole and was a potent 6.5%. It was quickly nicknamed ‘fuck-knuckle’ and consumed at every available opportunity along with the far more alluring and dangerous brew Konyagi. A gin-based spirit that wasn’t very pleasant mixed with anything, Konyagi did have the unique quality of enabling all who consumed it to beat the locals at pool.

Now I don’t know if it’s culturally correct to rock up at a Tanzanian bar and challenge the local Masai warriors to a game of stick, but that’s what we did and despite their threatening pillar-box red battle wear and scary looking sticks (used for beating lions to death apparently) we invariably managed to fluke a win. A recurrent theme for the first few weeks of the trip was the ease in which we managed to upset the locals. This wasn’t intentional, of course, but did create some fine talking points. One poor girl, for example, was so unhinged by our presence in her local bar (The Highway Hotel in Karatu, don‘t go there) that she lashed out and had to be beaten off the premises by a very large woman with a large piece of rubber.

Boozing and fighting aside, the best and most memorable parts of the trip were the hard bits; the rough living, the long days and the isolation from the rest of the world. Two of our party got malaria, we got hopelessly lost more than once, there were baboon attacks and rogue hippos tearing up our campsite, some God-awful fireside singing and plenty of dysentery. Those are the bits that I laugh about now, and although it all sounds rather unpleasant, the rule of the great outdoors is that you just get on with it. Adapt and survive, after all where would you rather be, lost in the middle of the Kalahari Desert ‘till the morning with a roaring fire and a box of wine for company, or sitting at your desk wondering when you can sneak off to the pub.

That’s the unpredictable beauty of life on the road in a huge, unfamiliar and utterly beguiling continent. It was an achingly beautiful journey, a 10,000 kilometre trek that begs to be repeated one day. In the meantime, I’m filling up my iPod and planning the next magical mystery tour…

Chris Wilson