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!
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