Almost Ready to Hit the Road!

Kuilsrivier, Cape Town, September 28

A Cape dwarf chameleon found living in a tree at African Overlanders

It's 8:30 pm and we're installed in our new home for the next four nights, a small guesthouse in the Cape Town suburbs. We are much closer to departing on our around-Africa adventure than we were two weeks ago; when we check out of this guesthouse on Sunday, we should be ready to start driving north towards Botswana.

My former physics student Michelle and her fiance Carl

Five new Goodyear Wranglers to carry Stanley north

When I last updated the blog, I was in a holding pattern, waiting for Terri to arrive, and waiting for our car to come back from the garage with a new differential. Terri arrived on time on Friday, September 16th, but our bakkie (as a pickup truck is called here in South Africa) did not arrive that Friday as originally promised. We waited, waited some more, did some video editing for our new YouTube channel, sorted through photos, got our Carnet de Passage en Douanes from the South African AA, and did a lot of reading, drinking tea and braaing (grilling) delicious steaks, boerewors sausages and sosaties (meat skewers). We also got to reunite with my former student Michelle to whom I taught physics in Switzerland 12 years ago, and who now lives and works in Cape Town; it was great to get away from African Overlanders and into the genteel surroundings of a Stellenbosch winery!

Stanley put back together again at DB Custom Welding

We ended up waiting an entire week longer than initially promised, until finally, late on the afternoon of Friday, September 23rd, we got Stanley back. It was a frustrating wait, but at least he came back in working order. We immediately raced out and got new tires installed (most of ours were pretty shredded!) and then, only a day and a half later, we handed over the vehicle again, this time to Dewald, an aluminum welder who repaired, strengthened and re-seated the camper canopy back in the loadbed of the truck. On Monday of this week (only two short days ago!) we finally got the vehicle back, its two halves reunited into one whole unit. An hour and a half of frantic wiring by Danie, the mechanic at African Overlanders, and we finally had a working camper.

Terri on top of the huge map of Africa at Cape Agulhas

Most of the gear that will get carted around in the camper is locked into a container at African Overlanders, as we were under instructions from our differential guys not to overstrain the new differential for its first few hundred kilometers. We packed a minimal kit into the camper yesterday morning and set off for Cape Agulhas, the southernmost point on the African continent. It was a longish drive (about three hours), good for testing out the diff, the engine and the general operational readiness of our setup. Stanley passed the test with flying colours, and we got to Agulhas happy with Stanley's performance.

Straddling two oceans at Cape Agulhas

Yesterday was a perfect day in terms of weather, and Agulhas looked stunning, with sunshine glinting on the big breakers crashing onto the shore. Big kelp forests bobbed in the water, streaming through the swell of the waves, while cormorants and gulls sat on the limestone rocks that studded the shoreline. There was a well-conceived monument to Africa's southernmost point, in the shape of a 16-metre-long concrete map of the continent, with a few big landmarks like Kilimanaro, the Zambezi, the Nile and the Atlas Mountains standing out. We wandered across the monument, visualizing our own upcoming journey, then drove a bit further along the coast to a picturesque shipwreck just offshore. It was a really beautiful spot, and put us in a good mood after too many days spent waiting for our vehicle.

That evening we drove partway back to Cape Town and slept in the beautiful tourist town of Hermanus. The town of Agulhas looked wealthy, with plenty of grand houses, but Hermanus looked even more well-to-do, with grand houses lining the clifftops that wouldn't have been out of place in wealthy New Zealand or Australian beach communities. Both towns run on tourism, both domestic and international, and also seem to attract well-off retirees from all over South Africa. They are also visibly less worried about crime than a city like Cape Town, with far fewer razor-wire-topped walls and security gates to be seen.

Sunset over Hermanus

The clifflined shore of Hermanus

This morning we walked along the cliff-top walkways that encircle the bay in Hermanus, past the hundreds of species of endemic plantlife that make the Cape Town coast one of the most biodiverse places of earth, particularly in terms of botany. There were a couple of dozen of species in bloom, and I took lots of photos of colourful flowers, as well as cute and cuddly rock hyraxes (dassies) who were soaking up the sun and munching on the vegetation. This was, however, only a sideshow; the main event was taking place out in the waters of the bay, where a couple of dozen Southern right whales were swimming along lazily, surfacing frequently, turning sideways to stick fins out of the water, blowing spouts of water into the air, and generally making great photographic subjects. It was really very pretty, and made for a memorable walk.

Thar she blows!

A pair of Southern right whales

A somnolent rock hyrax

Kelp forest

Then, after a luxurious seafood lunch on the shore, gazing out at the whales, it was time to head back to Cape Town. We still have a few things to do before leaving town: a small crack in Stanley's chassis needs to be welded, we have to get his steering tightened up, we have new stickers for his side hatch to be applied to smarten up his rather road-worn appearance, and we need to get all of our gear safely squared away inside the camper for transport, plus our diff guy wants to have one final once-over on the diff to make sure there are no unexpected problems in the future.

By Sunday we hope to be northbound, headed towards the Kalahari and wildlife. This two-day interlude in Agulhas and Hermanus has reminded us how much more we prefer beautiful open spaces and wildlife to the humdrum existence in big cities like Cape Town. We look forward to even more wide open vistas and more wonders of the natural world as we make our way north into Botswana and Zambia!

Me and Stanley at Cape Agulhas; it's all northbound from here!

Slowly Getting Underway

 African Overlanders, Stellenbosch Farms

My little rondavel

I have now been here at the venerable overlanding institution of African Overlanders on the outskirts of Cape Town for a week, staying in a rondavel, the small, round thatch-roofed huts typical of southern Africa while Stanley is repaired and improved. Terri arrives tomorrow morning on a flight from Switzerland and by the middle of next week, we should be moving, although I'm reluctant to commit to that as delays are almost inevitable.

It has been a busy week. I arrived on Thursday and staggered around in a jet-lagged fog, looking at Stanley (I last laid eyes on him in July of 2018, when we put him into storage here) until I fell into bed. 

First view of Stanley

Our battered hatch-cover stickers

Friday was spent getting Stanley's engine serviced: all the fluids and filters got changed, new (and expensive!) glow plugs were installed (only 1 of the 4 old ones were in operating condition!), new brake pads and rear shocks were installed, and Danie, the mechanic here, had a good look over the entire undercarriage.

Getting a throrough once-over

Danie at work on the shocks

The camper half of Stanley hanging forlornly

On Saturday we winched the aluminum camping canopy out of the bed of the truck so that it could be repaired and re-seated. It blew sideways and backwards in early 2017 in a huge gust of wind (we had our canopy deployed, and it caught and amplified the force of the wind), and as a result it was no longer seated in the proper position. This put a lot of strain on the 4 bolts that held the camper in place, and they slowly bent and pulled out of position. In turn the camper canopy itself deformed and buckled in places. It really got bad during our 2018 trip around northern Namibia, so we decided that it was time to get it seen to. It was a very strange experience to have the canopy sitting on a trailer in the workshop here, with the pickup truck looking small and very naked, with the rear end sloping upwards since there was no longer the weight of the camper and its contents to compress the burly leaf springs on the rear wheels.

Some bucked and cracked aluminum and a useless bolt

My first-ever view of the bed of the pickup truck

Sunday being a day on which nothing is open in South Africa, we resumed operations on Monday by dropping off the pickup truck at a gearbox and differential specialist. During his inspection under the vehicle, and while test driving Stanley, Danie had noticed that the prop shaft underneath the vehicle seemed loose, and that there was a definite "clunk" at times as the vehicle was put into gear. Then when he looked at the oil that he drained out of the differential, he saw the glint of small bits of metal, meaning that something metallic was grinding itself into nothingness inside. We dropped off the truck and they diagnosed that a new differential was going to be needed, as well as a re-balancing of the prop shaft. It's a relatively expensive procedure, but necessary to keep the vehicle a going concern; the mechanics figured that sometime in the next 5000 km the entire differential would have ceased working, and it's definitely better to have it diagnosed and fixed here rather than, say, in the middle of the Kalahari Desert in Botswana!

Later on Monday a specialist aluminum welder came to African Overlanders, but decided that he couldn't really do the job properly on site. Instead on Tuesday we rented a big trailer, transferred the camper insert onto it and drove it to the welder's workshop. It was supposed to be done by tomorrow, but I've just had a call saying that it can't be finished until next Tuesday for reasons unknown.

Trundling off to the welding shop

Tomorrow (Friday), the pickup truck is supposed to be released from the differential workshop, so at least we will have transport, although we won't be able to put the canopy back on the truck until Tuesday. Then there will be lots of reconnecting wires and making sure everything is in working order. On Monday we will put on an entire set of new tires (including the spare), as the tires we have on there now have been sitting for 4 years and are dry and cracked. 

On the paperwork front, we have gotten ourselves a Carnet de Passage en Douanes (a CPD or carnet), an expensive piece of paper that is essentially a passport for the vehicle, guaranteeing that if we drive it into another country, we will drive it out again and not try to sell it in the country. It involves putting down a really large deposit (in our case nearly US$9000!) that will sit in a bank account here in South Africa and which will be released once we return the carnet, properly stamped for its entries and exits, to the Automobile Association of South Africa. It's a bit nerve-wracking, because essentially it means that we can't have Stanley break down in (say) Kenya so completely that he can't be revived. Stanley needs to be kept running long enough to make it back to South Africa, and that's always a bit of a risky bet. 

Terri transferred the money to the AA yesterday, and today we got word that the carnet has been processed and is about to be sent here by courier. This is the first time that we've needed a carnet; on our two previous iterations of Stanley's Travels, we only ventured as far north as Zambia, and since we have South African license plates on the car, we didn't need a carnet (unlike overlanders with European-registered vehicles, who require a carnet for most border crossings). Apparently Kenya, Ethiopia, Sudan and Egypt are the four countries for which we most need a carnet, and we're hoping to hit all of them on this trip.

I've been messing around with video editing software lately, trying to get proficient enough that we can start putting out YouTube videos. I'm not sure we're going to become YouTube stars like the travellers that Terri follows, but it will be a new way to share the experience of overlanding, to go with our Facebook, Instagram and Twitter presences.

We're hoping to make it through Botswana and up to Livingstone, Zambia by late October to catch up on the goings-on at Olive Tree Learning Centre, the community elementary school that Terri has been funding, running and growing since 2007. Then our schedule is pretty open and flexible; we would like to spend a lot of time in Uganda, as well as poking around Rwanda and Burundi. We're not sure how long we'll spend in Tanzania and Kenya, as almost everything we're interested in (national parks, hiking, camping) is quite expensive, priced for wealthy Europeans and Americans who fly in for a couple of weeks. Then comes the more difficult part of the trip, as we're not sure that Ethiopia and Sudan will have their borders open for overlanders, as both countries are undergoing military and political turmoil. As I said, we will need to have a very flexible schedule, in case we need to turn around and drive back south from Kenya.

Tuesday was my birthday; I turned 54 and I keep shaking my head in wonder that I have somehow gotten so old without really growing up. I definitely feel my body more than I once did (my knees and elbows in particular), so I figure that's a signal that we need to get these big adventures underway sooner rather than later.

At any rate, it feels good to be back on the continent of Africa where Terri and I have built up such great memories. We will keep you posted on how things develop from here!

My morning view of iconic Table Mountain

Stanley's Travels About To Resume!

Lipah, September 1st

It's a lovely afternoon here on the northeast corner of Bali, and I'm sitting at my desk gazing out through some freshly-washed windows (the things I do to procrastinate!) at the Bali Sea. A few fishing boats are out, their colourful sails billowing in the stiff breeze, while the tide is low so the seashore across the road from our house is wide with coral boulders sticking up from the water. It's a distracting place to work at times, since I end up staring out of the windows more than actually typing!

I've been back in Bali for over a month now, relaxing, diving, kayaking, running, reading and generally enjoying being reunited wiht Terri after four months apart; after I left New Zealand in late March, Terri stayed on for another month of family visits before coming directly here. I spent April, May, June and most of July in Leysin, Switzerland, keeping an eye on my beloved mother while my sister Audie and her family, with whom my mom has been living for the past year, were on sabbatical in Africa. It was fun to be back in the mountains where I spent five memorable years from 2010-2015, this time free of the heavy workload that came with teaching at a boarding school. I did a lot of cycling, running, reading and spending time with my mother.

When Audie and her family returned from Africa, I leapt onto an airplane and came here. This is really our home base these days; with my mom having left Canada for good and my father having died back in 2017, I don't really have the familial home bases in Ottawa and Thunder Bay that were always an anchor point for me in my decades of nomadic wanderings. Luckily Terri has had this place since 2010, so we have used it as a home base ever since leaving Leysin back in 2015. We're absent from Bali for more time than we are in residence, but still it's where we leave our stuff and where we return to between adventures. It's a great place to call home, I have to say!

Our carefree Bali days are coming to an end very shortly though, as we are finally ready to resume our African adventures. We spent 2016-17 travelling throughout southern Africa in our amazing 4x4 camper Stanley (named after the explorer), and then another 2 months in 2018. We left Stanley in storage near Cape Town in June of 2018 with the idea that we would return after my two-year teaching contract in Tbilisi was over. The microbial world intruded, however, in the form of the covid-19 pandemic which made resuming our African travels impractical for over two years. We made the most of the enforced delay: a few months' overstay in Georgia, a few months in France and Italy and Switzerland in autumn 2020, nine months here in Bali, seven months in New Zealand, and then Switzerland for me, Bali for Terri. However, having essentially spent two years treading water instead of doing what we wanted, we are very keen to make up for lost time!

So the plan is to fly to Cape Town, liberate Stanley from his long-term storage, make sure he's in sound mechanical health, get all of our administrative ducks in a row in terms of carnets de passage, vehicle registration and all the other bits of essential paper needed to drive a private vehicle across a few dozen international borders, and then set off northbound. 

Our master plan is to circumnavigate the African continent, north up the east coast, and back south along the west coast. There is nowhere north of Zambia where you can connect the east and west sides of the continent (wars, closed borders and inhospitable environments make all the possible border crossings impractical), so once we get as far north as Sudan, we have to figure out what we're going to do. The ideal solution is to take a passenger ferry from Port Sudan to Jeddah, drive across Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Iraq (yes really! Overlanders are driving through Iraq without incident these days), into Turkey and then across Europe to Spain. If that doesn't work (which is likely since Saudi Arabia bans people from driving across it in right-hand-drive cars such as ours, despite having signed international conventions that say it will allow it), we might have to bite the bullet and drive into Egypt, which sounds like a dreadful place to drive your own vehicle, and then catch a boat to Greece or Italy from there. That part of the plan is a work in progress!

From Spain, we can catch a ferry to Morocco and start driving south. Sadly, the jihadi unrest and the kidnapping industry in the Sahara and Sahel mean that we will likely be restricted to the coastal route, leaving fascinating countries like Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger and Chad for another, more peaceful time. We might take a couple of airborne sidetrips along the way to Cabo Verde, Sao Tome e Principe, and even Equatorial Guinea. The hardest part of the route will be the Nigeria-Cameroon-Gabon-Congo-DRC-Angola stretch, with a series of countries that make it difficult to obtain visas and drive your own car across the border. Once we reach Namibia, we're home free, with only our favourite country in Africa separating us from our finishing point in Cape Town.

If you look at the three maps and do some arithmetic, you'll see that just driving the most direct route adds up to 33,500 km. We have never stuck to the strait and narrow, so I would estimate that with all the sidetrips we will tack on to see historic sites, national parks and locations of natural beauty, we will likely drive at least 50,000 km, which is a long way!

How long will it take? Much depends on how well Stanley (a 2002 Mitsubishi Colt pickup truck) holds up mechanically. As well seasonal considerations (the hot season in the Arabian and Sahara Deserts, the rainy seasons here and there) will play a role too. I imagine that we will make it to Europe by about May or June, 2023, and we might take a few months off at that point to hike (or to hang out in Bali!). Then in the early autumn of 2023 we could cross to Morocco and set off southbound. We might conceivably make it back to Cape Town by February or March of 2024, although that's really pretty speculative. We will take as long as we want!

I hope that you, my faithful readers, will follow along with us on the African roads. You can follow us here, or on a variety of social media:

www.instagram.com/hmstanleystravels

www.facebook.com/stanleystravels

www.twitter.com/stanleystravels

There will even be a YouTube channel, although we are still in the midst of setting that up; we are slowly joining the 2020s, so stay tuned for details!

We are both excited to get back to Stanley after 4 years apart, and to take him to new and exciting destinations!