Leysin,
Switzerland
As I sit
here in my friend Julie-Ann’s apartment, looking out at a drab, rainy day, it
doesn’t look or seem Christmas-like. I always think back to my childhood Christmases
in Thunder Bay in the 1970s and 1980s, which were (in my recollection anyway)
always white. Over my decades of travel, I have had a number of Christmases in
the tropics or in the Southern Hemisphere which were green, but I love snow
and an attractive white covering on the ground, and so to be in a Northern Hemisphere
ski resort on December 22 and see green grass and grey drizzle coming down depresses
the spirits. Nevertheless, even if the surroundings don’t look like it, it’s a
few days before Christmas and time for my end-of-year summary of 2023, with its
ups and downs, its travel and its landmarks.
The year began for Terri and me at Bullbush Camp in Uganda, camped on a rapidly-eroding riverbank that had us worried about waking up very wet. We spent most of January exploring Uganda, visiting a number of national parks in search of new animals and birds. Highlights included visiting wild chimps in the Kyambura Gorge in Queen Elizabeth Park, walking in the Ruwenzori Mountains (the fabled Mountains of the Moon), camping amidst the playful monkeys of Lake Nkuruba, and going on safari in fabulous Kidepo Valley National Park in the far north of the country. Uganda was definitely our favourite country and the major highlight of our time in East Africa in 2022-23.
We then
retreated to The Haven, a legendary overlanders’ spot outside Jinja, to
contemplate our next moves. We had wanted to drive into Kenya and then on
through Ethiopia and Sudan to Egypt, but Ethiopia’s new and ridiculous customs
rules (which would have required us putting down a deposit of tens of thousands
of dollars at the border to guarantee that we wouldn’t sell Stanley inside the
country) put the kibosh on that plan. We toyed with the idea of paying an Ethiopian
tour agency US$ 1200 to arrange a “tour” of the country to get around the
problem, but after due consideration, we thought that it left us too vulnerable
and opted against that plan. (This was just as well, as we might well have been
in Sudan in April when the civil war kicked off, which would have been the end
of our trip, the end of Stanley, and possibly the end of us.) Instead we
decided to drive around Kenya and then retreat south to Zambia to store Stanley
for a few months.
We had a limited
time budget left for Kenya, so we just hit a few highlights of this intriguing
country. We started with a white-knuckle drive (with Terri at the wheel) high
up Mt. Elgon, one of the highest peaks in the country, for a day of hiking in
the Afro-Montane heathland with its distinctive lobelia and giant groundsel
plants. We braved the bandit-infested road north of Kitale to reach Lake
Turkana, a place famous for its remains of early hominins and for its unruly
local herders. I had wanted to visit there for decades, so I really enjoyed our
time camped beside the unearthly blue of the lake. We retreated south, then
across to wonderful Ol Pejeta Conservancy and its rhinos (including the last
two northern white rhinos in existence). From there it was time to begin the
retreat south, via lovely Kichaka Camp and into Tanzania.
We sprinted
through Tanzania, stopping to visit our Leysin friend Nathalie in Arusha, hike
in the Usumbara Mountains and then spend a few days on Zanzibar. In Dar Es
Salaam I wallowed in nostalgia at the Sno-Cream ice cream parlour I loved 41
years before, and then we drove to Morogoro, where my family lived for two
years in 1981-2. It was my first time back since then, but I still remembered
the way to our old house, where we were allowed to look around by the professor
living there now. Morogoro had transformed over the past four decades, growing six-fold
in population, with houses sprawling far up the forested Uluguru Mountains
behind our old house. It was fun to see the places of a formative period in my
youth that probably ignited the desire to travel that has consumed my life
since then.
From
Morogoro, we took six long days of grinding slowly through convoys of
heavily-laden trucks to reach Livingstone, Zambia. It was unrewarding, tedious
travel, but at least we arrived safely, unlike the hundreds of crashed vehicles
that littered the roadside all the way. We parked Stanley at our old faithful
home-away-from-home, the Tabonina Guest House, and flew away to wait out the
rainy season elsewhere.
I flew to
Canada to visit my mother, who had just moved into an assisted-living facility
in Ottawa after 18 months of living at my sister’s place in Leysin,
Switzerland. She had declined visibly in the eight months since I had last seen
her in Leysin, with her cognitive decline, attributed to vascular dementia, evident.
She hated living in the assisted living place, surrounded as she was by people
in a far more advanced state of dementia who provided her with an unwelcome
vision of her future. My brother Evan was visiting her faithfully at her
facility, but it wasn’t enough to counteract the depressing reality of her reduced
mobility, her confusion and the inevitability of further inexorable decline.
She had decided to apply for the MAID (Medical Assistance In Dying) program,
and while I was there we had the first telephone consultations to start the
application process. It was heart-breaking to see my mother in such distress,
and I fully supported her decision to seek a dignified way out of an untenable position.
I paid a
visit to Toronto for a few days to visit a number of friends there; Toronto is
the sort of city that attracts people from all over Canada for work, and a
number of friends from high school and university have ended up there. After a packed
social schedule, I flew up to my hometown of Thunder Bay for my first visit
since my father’s death six years previously. It was another nostalgic visit,
seeing old friends for the first time in years, and visiting my father’s grave
for the first time since the funeral. Late March was a fun time for outdoor
activities in Thunder Bay, and I got out cross-country and downhill skiing. It
was a poor time for visiting a grave, as the small headstone is level with the
ground and hence under a layer of melting snow, covered with mud once I had shoveled
it out. I left Thunder Bay in a pensive mood, wondering when I would return to
a town that had been my pole of stability for decades in my peripatetic existence.
From
Thunder Bay I flew to Bali, where two months of intensive rest and relaxation
awaited. With Thunder Bay and Ottawa no longer really “home”, Bali is now where
I consider my home to be, although I don’t actually spend that much time there.
Terri and I took advantage of the perfect weather to swim, snorkel, dive, kayak,
trek and cycle, and the two months passed in a flash. Before I knew it, we were
on an airplane again, bound for Cape Town.
Terri flew
directly to Livingstone from there, but my plans had changed. I had a sad duty
to perform first, so I jumped onto a plane bound for Ottawa, where my mother’s
application for MAID had been accepted and she had chosen the date of June 9th
to end a life that had become intolerable to her. My sisters and I gathered at
my brother’s apartment for a couple of last days with my mother, celebrating
her 82 years. Our childhood friends Hans and Jiska, along with my cousin Chris,
joined us, and we visited my mother’s sister who was declining in a nearby
nursing home for a sisterly farewell. On the appointed day we four children
gathered in my mother’s room and held her hand while the MAID doctor
administered the drugs that ended her suffering. It was almost unendurably sad
for us survivors, but it was the way my mother wanted to go, with dignity. We
stayed on for a few days in Ottawa, talking things over, having a wake and
generally trying to process what had just happened; I will always be grateful
to Hans and Jiska for their support in a difficult time. I got onto a plane for
Livingstone in a very subdued mood.
Our time in
Livingstone was a flurry of activity, getting Stanley in shape for a long road
trip and working on projects at the Olive Tree Learning Centre, the community
elementary school that has been Terri’s focus since 2007. We saw new
construction projects get underway, new textbooks and shoes get delivered and an
air of comparative calm envelop the school. We also had a chance meeting with a
member of the Tony Robbins organization which resulted in a completely
unexpected fundraising appeal and substantial donation to the school.
On June 28th
we loaded up Stanley and drove west into Namibia to begin our long drive up the
west coast of Africa. It began well, with a fun time visiting old haunts in
Namibia (Ngepi Camp and Etosha National Park) followed by a month in Angola,
which ended up being our favourite new country of the entire West Coast trip.
We loved the Namib Desert in the southwest, the dramatic escarpments near
Lubango, the stark cliffs of the Atlantic Coast, the central highlands around
Morro de Moco, and the magnificent Calendula Falls. We spent days in Luanda
collecting visas for upcoming countries, and more days waiting for Godot (or
for the ferry to Cabinda, which was much the same thing) in the dismal oil port
of Soyo.
When we
finally got to Cabinda, the northern bit of Angola, an oil-producing enclave nestled
north of the mouth of the Congo River next to DRC and the Republic of Congo, it
was time to start moving more quickly. We had been warned to be out of Gabon
before the elections on August 26, and it was already August 5th,
with two full countries to go before the deadline. The Republic of Congo was
enjoyable, as we spent a couple of days at the Dimonika Biosphere Reserve and a
couple more at the Lesio-Louna Wildlife Reserve. Lesio-Louna was particularly
memorable as we visited some lowland gorillas being rehabilitated for life in the
wild after years in captivity, either as pets or as zoo inmates. The roads in
the Republic of Congo were also in spectacular shape, with most of the country
being traversed by a four-lane divided highway almost devoid of traffic.
Gabon was a
country of extremes. We started off camping in the spectacular badlands of the Red
Canyon near Lekoni. From there we continued to the wildlife reserve of Lekedi
Park, where we were lucky to see a troop of habituated wild mandrills, an
animal that is very hard to see in the wild, and whose colours make it look
like a cartoon character. From here we drove west towards Lope National Park,
and the travelling became a lot harder.
The road
through the centre of Gabon was (and is) in dreadful shape. It’s a dirt track
full of projecting cobbles and boulders that bashed Stanley’s undercarriage
without mercy. Terri drove skillfully, but there was no escaping the relentless
back-and-forth swaying and solid impacts, and Stanley’s entire structure
creaked and groaned. We managed to make 100 hard-won kilometres before camping
in an old road-construction site in the middle of a vast rainforest full of
tiny stingless bees, monkeys and colourful birds. The next day we jolted a
further 100 dreadful kilometres, with the noises coming from the car becoming
steadily more alarming, until, just outside the village of Lope, we heard a
terrible crack and discovered that we had suffered every overlander’s worst
nightmare: a broken chassis. We limped into town, found a welder and had the
crack welded, crossing our fingers that it would hold.
It didn’t.
After a slightly underwhelming safari the next day through Lope National Park,
we drove off the following morning towards Libreville. We barely made it 30
kilometres before more dramatic sound effects notified us that we had cracked
the other side of the chassis. We settled in at a train station and tried to
summon the welder over the non-existent phone network. We ended up staying there
for three days, with me hitchhiking back and forth to Lope, before we finally
got the car moving again. We were running out of time, so we were relieved when
we made the final 70 bumpy kilometres to the tarmac. After a beautiful campsite
beside the Ogoue River, we set off to the Cameroonian border, making it with a
day to spare.
Our hurry
to leave Gabon was vindicated when the country sealed its borders for three
days during and after the election, trapping several overlanders within the
country. The borders re-opened for a day before the army staged a coup d’etat
and the borders were re-sealed. When the new military junta opened the borders
again, they promptly arrested the first few groups of overlanders who crossed
into the country, holding them almost incommunicado for over a week. We were glad
to have escaped this fate!
In Cameroon
we spent almost a week getting Stanley repaired at Didier’s Garage, a legendary
institution among West Coast overlanders. We got various problems resolved and
met several other groups of overlanders: Cor and Grietje, Bruno (all three were
among those detained in Gabon the following week) and Mark and Benjamin, who
would accompany us through Nigeria, saving us numerous times. We drove out of
Yaounde keen to get to the infamous Banyo-Nguroje “crossing”, the only practicable
route into Nigeria for overlanders, as a low-level civil war further south in Cameroon
has seen the main road closed to foreign tourists, while Boko Haram makes the
far northern route too risky. The drive north was pleasant, if not spectacular,
with the Ekom-Nkam waterfalls and the peaceful Koutaba Monastery the highlights.
The road deteriorated steadily as we approached the town of Banyo, and we rendezvoused
with Benjamin and Mark at a quarry just to the south of town.
The driving
from this point on became extremely difficult, between ruts, rocky sections, mud
wallows and river crossings. It was easily the longest stretch of hard-core 4x4
driving that we ever did in Stanley, and it was mentally and physically taxing
on Terri, who drove all of it. We were incredibly fortunate to have Benjamin
and Mark travelling with us in their indestructible powerhouse of a Toyota
Landcruiser, the Codiwompler. They had to haul us out of the deep mud several
times with their winch and their tow rope. Stanley’s welded chassis was put
through an extreme test by the rough road and the side-to-side jolting, and it
eventually failed, cracking through at the site of the first fracture just
after crossing into Nigeria. We also had our radiator crack, probably due to a
severe impact at the front, and we had to keep refilling it every few
kilometres. We limped into Nigeria hoping that the worst was behind us, only to
find another 80 incredibly rough kilometres ahead of us. It took us three full
days to get to Nguroje, plus another half-day of driving followed by an
afternoon of welding and repairs.
After this
rough introduction, Nigeria continued to be hard going. Team Codiwompler stuck
through us through thick and thin, including two more radiator repairs and a failed
pair of U-bolts that saw the truck fall right off its rear axle, pulling out the
drive shaft in the process. We braved a notorious kidnapping-prone stretch of
road together, slaloming at speed between potholes and getting waved through
checkpoints so that we could arrive before dark. After the U-bolt incident, we
left a repaired but frail Stanley parked at a friendly local man’s house and
climbed into the Codiwompler to visit the most interesting place we went to in
Nigeria, the Drill Ranch, established as a safe haven for endangered drill
monkeys. It was a spectacular place, but the experience was somewhat diminished
by being chased along the track to the ranch by three drunk hooligans, representatives
of the “Youth Development Council” who demanded large sums of money and who
threatened to slash the Codiwompler’s tires. Benjamin did an exemplary job of talking
our way out of this situation, and we ended up un-robbed with tires un-slashed.
The rest of
Nigeria, which we drove on our own after our routes diverged, was a grim slog
of mud, closed roads, potholes and endless police checkpoints manned by
larcenous cops. The last day, coming through Lagos, we had an hour-long
standoff with ten Lagos State Police officers who threatened to impound the
car, and then survived some of the most brutal traffic of the trip, followed by
50 checkpoints in 50 kilometres, to finally reach the promised land of Benin,
where we met up again (by chance) with the Codiwompler to camp together on the
beach.
Benin and
Togo were oases of civilization after Nigeria, and we spent some time getting
visas for Ghana and visiting sites sacred to vodun (aka “voodoo”). It was
culturally interesting, but a bit grim to contemplate the vast numbers of
animals, some rare and protected, whose dried cadavers were for sale in the vodun
marketplaces. We had another series of breakdowns, including rebuilding our
main drive shaft, throughout Benin and Togo, before limping into Ghana.
Ghana was
the last country where we really had some fun. We camped on the beach in the
east, nearly getting swept away in the middle of the night by a rampaging king
tide. We stayed with my childhood friend from Morogoro, Alex, and his wife,
reconnecting after not having seen each other for 41 years. We flew out to Sao
Tome for a week of rest and relaxation, birdwatching and hiking, before returning
to Stanley. We were seriously considering shipping him back to South Africa
from Accra, but after some overpriced car repairs, we decided to limp onwards
as far as we could, returning to Ghana only if necessary. An enjoyable couple
of days of visiting slave castles along the coast and birdwatching at Kakum
National Park was followed by our clutch failing and another three days of
stressful repairs, this time on the surfing mecca of Busua Beach.
We drove
off from Busua with a rebuilt clutch and a determination not to deviate too far
off the direct road to Morocco. Ivory Coast was a blur of good roads, the
amazing and extravagant Yamoussoukro Cathedral and a panic about no diesel in the
border town of Danane. From there we entered the last long stretch of bad
roads, across the length of Guinea. We had five days on our visa, and we made
it by the skin of our teeth, late on the afternoon of the fifth day, after some
grim driving and dodging around trucks mired in mud. It would have been nice to
stop and see more, but the clock was ticking and the roads were dismal.
Once we
were in Senegal, we were more confident that we would likely make it to Europe.
We left the car for a couple of days of an ill-advised side-trip into Guinea-Bissau,
then returned to enter the tiny riverine strip that is Gambia. Here we
encountered more tourists in an hour than we had in four months since leaving Namibia;
Gambia is a package-holiday destination with charter flights direct from
numerous European cities. A further sprint across Senegal and we were in Mauritania,
where we would have loved to explore the Sahara if we had had a reliable car.
As it was, we headed to the capital Nouakchott, where Terri came down with both
amoebic dysentery and falciparum malaria, spending three full days in hospital.
From there
it was a final long grind, along paved roads, through northern Mauritania, Western
Sahara (illegally occupied by Morocco) and Morocco proper to the ferry at
Tanger. Two days on the ferry to Barcelona, two days of chilly, windy driving
to Leysin, two more to Rotterdam, and Stanley was safely delivered to a container
to be shipped back to South Africa. Just like that, after 21,000 kilometres,
the final leg of Stanley’s Travels was over. I visited with family in the Netherlands
and friends in Germany and then retreated to Leysin to relax and do some
planning and administrative tasks, as well as to attend a big fund-raising
event put on by Regina and Stacey, two of OTLC’s biggest fundraisers without
whom the school would struggle to survive.
This past
year, with months and months of hard travel, interspersed with grief and
emotional upheaval, was by turns exhilarating, saddening and exhausting. I am
hoping for a slightly less demanding 2024! The plan is for me to work from
January to June at my old school in Tbilisi, filling in for a mid-year opening.
Then: who knows? There will be travel involved: stay tuned! This year’s odyssey brings my lifetime country count up to 149 countries visited, so I’m starting
to get up towards the goal of 203 countries or semi-countries, but with a lot
of harder destinations still left. I was sad to have to skip a number of
countries along our route (Equatorial Guinea, Sierra Leone, Liberia and the
whole Sahel belt) because of visa and/or security issues; I felt I was leaving
a job unfinished.
I hope that
this update finds you all well, happy and enjoying the holiday season. May 2024
live up to all your hopes and plans! Peace and Tailwinds.
Click here for a map of our East Africa trip.
Click here for a map of our West Africa trip.
We slept a bit poorly, perhaps thanks to the altitude, perhaps due to the cold, but we awoke to birdsong and blue skies. We put on hiking boots, grabbed our binoculars and bird book and set off on the Sabinyo Gorge hike. The most famous thing to do in Mgahinga is to go look for mountain gorillas, but this is a seriously pricey activity and as both Terri and I had seen mountain gorillas in the past (me in DRC in 1995, her in Rwanda in 2006) we elected to give it a miss and go for a hike to look for rare birds. We picked up our two armed guards (it seemed a bit of overkill, but the park insisted), collected our local birding expert Noah, paid our money (a rather steep US$ 70 per person) and set off. It was a pleasant hike, up through former farmland, then into dense bamboo forest. We heard a lot of birdsong and saw a number of brightly-coloured sunbirds, but the special birds of the forest (mountain greenbul, various babblers and the Ruwenzori turaco) stayed stubbornly hidden. After a couple of hours of steady climbing, the trail began to peter out, with the ladders and boardwalks sinking into disrepair and the path becoming smothered in dense vegetation. This was not the main hiking trail of the park (leading up towards the summit of Mount Sabinyo), and the park staff had let it fall into disuse and dilapidation, to our frustration. We eventually gave up on further progress, stopped and ate some lunch in the forest, listening to birdsong and chatting with Noah and our park rangers. On the way back downhill, we noticed the tracks of a side-striped jackal (and its baby), and found the tracks and droppings of buffalo and bull elephants (the presence of these two species is the ostensible reason for requiring armed guards while hiking). 
We took the next day off from driving and serious exploration, sitting at the lodge and watching birds for a while, and then doing various chores, including me sorting through recent photos on my computer; with the miraculous repair job a few days before by the Wizard of Kigali, I could once again use my laptop to process the reams of photos I had accumulated over the previous weeks. The weather continued pleasant, and Terri and I ventured out mid-afternoon for a stroll around the village, where we found a spectacular chameleon that the villagers had spotted, and walked towards the Batwa village that was nearby. We were followed by a band of annoying children that tried to beg from us, but Terri engaged them in conversation and we ended up having a fun conversation with them. In the late afternoon the heavens opened and torrential rain continued for most of the evening. We huddled indoors around a wood fire chatting with the cavers as well as a BBC wildlife producer and a family of Aussies.
