Category Archives: The First Adventure

Posts from the first overland trip in 2014

Out Of The Desert And Into The Freezer

August 27, 2014 Katana 1 Comment

The Sahara adventure is over. We escaped Wadi Halfa on Wednesday afternoon and drove all evening and night straight to Khartoum, almost in a convoy with the other two vehicles that were stuck on that barge with poor Troopy. The road was very smooth (in most places) and we managed to avoid most of the field desert mice that kept running across the road in the dark hours. The reason for this dash to Khartoum was to get to the Ethiopian embassy bright and early to get our next visas. We stopped at a sort of truck stop just outside the city and slept for a couple of hours.

In the morning, with some help from a tuk tuk driver and our friends Jack, Eneko and Alba, we managed to find the embassy. It was most certainly not where google maps or the gps said it was supposed to be, but that is becoming quite the norm in these parts. Sometimes I cannot rely on addresses and maps and directions unless they are coming from a local. There is also the added stress of not having a proper map for Sudan and Ethiopia but I seem to be managing navigating just fine.

The Ethiopian visa took about two hours from the moment we got paperwork to fill out until we got handed our passports back with the fresh new handwritten visa. Afterwards we said goodbye to our friends, who were all going to drive to the border, whereas we decided to chill out for the day at the International Camp south of the Khartoum airport, clean out the car, get some supplies, and drive to the border first thing in the morning.

The campsite was anything but luxury. We were told to park our car in some sort of open theater turned football field, and of course we were the only ones camping there, although there were other people staying in little accommodation houses. The facilities were clean but very drab, the many toilets were squats and some of them didn’t have running water. The showers were either ones that closed but had no water, or didn’t close and had cold water. But we made the most of what we had, we filled up our water supplies and I even did some laundry.

The next day we packed up, got fuel and zoomed off to the border. It was a very interesting drive, finishing the Sahara and seeing fields of green. My guess is they had a a very dry season just before this month, because all the greenery is fresh but there were so many dead animals in the fields, and the animals we saw grazing were very skinny. Some places were flooded with muddy water, but overall the scenery was overwhelming for the eyes, having spent over a month in the desert climate and seeing mostly yellow, orange and brown.

We got to the border just in time before they closed for the night. We had to dash around the small border town to get to immigration and customs on the Sudanese side, and then immigration and customs on the Ethiopian side. The border town was bustling with people and activity, and many stared at me as I sat in the car, waiting for Jonathan to get the Carnet stamped.

Finally after crossing the border we were in yet another country! Ethiopia was even more lush and green, almost immediately after the border. The animals looked very well fed, the people wore different clothing, many were waving as we passed, children ran around shouting “hello” and “you” (apparently the Ethiopian equivalent of “hey!”), women were not wearing headscarves and many were seen on the road, including police women! Such a change from the previous two Muslim countries. We stopped at a market town to get some fresh tomatoes and onions, and as we approached the veg stall, we were surrounded by fifteen or twenty children. All of them staring, pointing, saying something to each other, and two particular girls who stood right next to me kept poking me and stroking my wolf tattoo. Quite weird! Then we bought two veg samosas from a shy adolescent boy who hung around our car when we were getting ready to drive off again. The samosas were very good!

We camped just off the road by a stream, next to some trees. The bushes were alive with insects and sounds, so we had to close ourselves in the car, and even then a bunch of midges and a couple of moths got inside and hung around the lights. In the morning we were visited by three children, two girls and one little boy. They hung around looking at us and the car, and eventually I gave them some fruit in exchange for taking their picture. The bananas were eaten immediately, but the orange was still intact by the time we packed up and drove away. Some other villagers passed our car but all were polite and held their distance, unlike our previous village experience in Turkey.

As we continued to Gonder, we started climbing up in altitude and drove through clouds that passed the road. All of a sudden the road would almost disappear, and people or animals would emerge out of the white dense fog like ghosts. We got to Gonder in one piece though, and spent the day chasing spare tires. Two men were helping us out on this quest, and we were assured that the tires will arrive on Tuesday, and we were asked to pay half the price in advance. After all this we drove to Debark, the town with the Simien Mountains park headquarters, and camped in a really crappy parking lot of a dying hotel. There was no running water and the toilet.. well, at least it was just us using it. The night got very cold, I slept in a sweater and socks. Quite a change from sweating into the sheets in Wadi Halfa.

The next morning we went to the headquarters, got assigned a scout (it is illegal to access the park without a scout) and off we went! Our scout’s name was Frey and he spoke about 5 words in English. He brought only what he was wearing and his ancient rifle. Troopy doesn’t really have a second passenger seat, so me and Frey were cramped in the elongated front seat, luckily our scout was small and skinny. The mountains were absolutely nothing compared to any mountains I have seen before. They have flat tops, and rise up very high with long dramatic drops into nothingness. The clouds can be seen below, above and on the level of the road. Everything was covered in green and the earth was very wet. There were some patches of the road that was just mud and puddles, it was a miracle we didn’t get stuck like the other trucks we saw on the way carrying people. From the first impression, it looks like the mountains are lonely and empty, but in fact they are bustling with life: people, horses, mules, donkeys, sheep, cows, and then a whole lot of wildlife, the most impressive being the baboons. Those long-haired mammals hang around on hills and along the road, seemingly unafraid of humans. We saw a group of them grooming and fighting, then another group sitting around pulling out grass and eating it. By their scary large teeth you wouldn’t think these baboons were vegetarians!

We stopped to camp at Chenek, and spent the day making food, drinking hot tea and coffee, lounging around mostly. The weather was getting more cold and severe, so we had to climb into the car for all of evening to escape the rain. Eventually our scout said goodbye and left to go to the “lodge” where there were other scouts and some women who I am guessing live there. The night was very tough, the wind was insane, and with every gust we felt that the car would topple over. Or at least I felt that way. It was very loud, and unable to sleep, we moved downstairs and pulled the roof down to minimize the rocking and the noise. In the morning the hardest was climbing out of the warmth and into the chilling air.

We drove back to Debark and then south to Gonder, to spend the night and get our tires today. However, as we walked around the town last night, our previous “helper” informed us that there might be a problem with the tires. So it is with a heavy heart we start out today, hoping to get our tires, and if not, then get our deposit back and change our plans once more to get the tires first before heading to Mekele.

The First Adventure

Sweating it out in Wadi Halfa

August 18, 2014 Jonathan Leave a comment

Wadi Halfa has grown on me. It is still a searingly hot, dusty, ramshackle, sprawling collection of mud and concrete shacks deposited in the desert a few kilometres from the lake which drowned its original home. It seems even now to be finding its place, and half-built or half-demolished little buildings are thinly scattered across the grey-brown sand between the ‘centre’ – where we go for food when the sun goes down – and our hotel. But the people are what makes this place, and they are unfailingly good all round.

Wadi Halfa - Pink Hotel — Wadi Halfa – Pink Hotel

The improvement started after finding the fruit and veg market which gave us fresh food to eat – against a background of 2 meals a day and 2 vegan options available in town…ful (cooked brown beans smothered in vegetable oil), or falafel – both with pita bread. Its not even very good beans or falafel. We are losing weight while we wait, despite downing a couple of pints of mango/sugar juice each evening. But small things like fresh tomatoes make a big difference here.

It was all looking good when we boarded the ferry as I had my glass-half-full head on – no crowded stuffy cabin for us, we were given an area of deck by the bridge to sleep in and the front deck to ourselves. There was shade, and some rolled up blankets. Having slept on the deck of a Mediterranean ferry before, this looked like a top sleeping spot to me. It didn’t last. The private deck area (secured by our ‘fixer’ Kamal thanks to a 50 EGP each baksheesh to the captain) was soon invaded by a whole lot of other people…no doubt the further temptation of cash was too much to resist, but it soon turned into a fairly crowded and shrinking shady patch. Then some of the crew turned up and started shouting at us all to move and taking the blankets away…clearly the captain hadn’t let them in on the whole plan to sell their sleeping spot to a bunch of tourists. 18 hours on a hard metal deck was beginning to look like another ordeal to add to the Egyptian Experience so far, and only slightly improved by the kind donation from some other crew of a fleece blanket to sit on. Thinking we were going to be sleeping in a cabin (which we had paid for), we hadn’t brought a lot of stuff out of Troopy onto the boat with us.

Not bringing a lot of stuff with us was also looking like a strategic error as it became clear that we were going to be sitting in Wadi Halfa for the best part of a week before the barge with Troopy on board turned up. Just a change of clothes, our documents and valuables, and the washbag. But we’re staying in a hotel so thats OK? Hmm…well more on the hotel later, but lets just say its short on pretty much everything apart from a basic bed and soaring desert temperatures.

Back on the ferry, we finally set off down Lake Nasser as evening approached, and a cooling breeze made life more pleasant – though Katana was suffering from too much sun exposure (the factor 30 didn’t seem to be helping) and had to hide in the wandering shade and under her scarf. The sunset over the desert and lake was a long, slow transition through colours I wouldn’t know how to name as the light shrunk back through a diminishing letterbox in the West.

The toilets down below were avoided as long as possible – in the dark with no lights, and flooding the floor whenever flushed, it was not a place for the squeamish…or those with any sense of smell. We tried to sleep, with people climbing over and stepping on us, or coming to letch at the blond girl, or drop cigarette ash on us.

I gave up for a while and sat watching the stars and the smooth water of the lake passing by – figuring I’d take the first night watch to make sure nothing happened to us or our possessions – but had to lie down again after a bit to defend my sleeping space. In the early hours, Katana was woken shivering in the chilling breeze, but fortunately there was enough blanket available to roll her up and leave me a bit to lie on (there’s never been much fat on my bones, but I’m all out of padding after the last month in the desert, so that thin fleece was a sanity saver!). We got some much needed but bruising sleep.

In the morning we passed close by Abu Simbel – where temples rescued from the flooding of the lake have been recreated. And where there are some relatively new ferries bought to serve the short crossing here as part of the ‘new’ road route to Sudan. I don’t know how many years they have been there, but the completed road still shows no sign of opening and avoiding the need for this whole episode in getting from Egypt to Sudan. They lie moored up and rusting, waiting for the Egyptian army to agree to the road being opened.

Eventually we arrived in Wadi Halfa and the difference from arrival in Egypt was massive and in a very good way. We were met by Mazar, the local ‘fixer’ who was able to guide us through all the form filling and expedite our passage through customs, then take us into town in one of the numerous and ancient Land Rover taxis where we were delivered to our hotel.

Unfortunately for us, used to air conditioning and plentiful water, things here are a bit different. Our room was a basic box with a shuttered window with no glass, just a torn mosquito net and bars. The best they could do for cooling was a squeaky, wobbling ceiling fan which we dare not put above medium speed for fear of bringing the ceiling down.

The view from our cell as Tony prepares to escape.

We slept at night on top of the single sheets, and merged into the sagging foam ‘mattress’. A brief window of operable temperature in the morning allowed for a breakfast coffee, before a day of hiding in the room with doors and windows open to catch any light air movement, sweating into our beds waiting for the sun to go down. The facilities consisted of dilapidated cubicles at the end of the corridor, each combining a squat toilet and bare shower head…efficient I guess, everything in 1 place. I even wash my 1 set of clothes each morning at the same time. Frogs hop in and out of the cubicles and venture up the corridor at night.

After about 5 days, some rooms with evaporation air-cooling and a private ‘bathroom’ (see above) became available and we moved upstairs to luxury. With a fridge! This was borrowed from another room, and powered by shoving the bare wires into a socket…plugs are obviously scarce. Perspectives and standards change.

Upstairs - The Luxury View! — Upstairs – The Luxury View!

First impressions of the people here were of genuine goodwilll and friendliness, with none of the hassling or trickery we had become used to in Egypt. The week here has only gone on to expand that feeling of friendliness and welcome – the people making up in a huge part for the inhospitable desert environment. Make no mistake, this a harsh place to live with little in the way of comforts. But life thrives here and the people go about their business with smiles and good humour; they ask where you come from not as a precursor to selling you useless tat or pulling a scam, but because they are interested. Egypt could learn a big lesson from the Sudanese people if this is anything to go by. Maybe we can too.

Meanwhile, it is now a week since we arrived and the next ferry from Aswan is due any time now. The barge with Troopy onboard is slowly making its way down the lake and should arrive tomorrow night. In some ways our enforced stay has been like torture – the hotel room for the first 5 days was just an oven we lay in waiting for the sun to go down; we don’t have an unlimited time for the trip and each day spent here was 1 day less for watching elephants or swimming in the sea. But if we hadn’t been stuck here, and instead blown straight through and into the desert again towards Khartoum, we would have missed getting to know these people a little; we would not have been invited round to Mazar’s house for tea and met his wife (and cats) in the tranquility of his walled garden home.

It is a deliberate choice here not to follow the Egyptian practice of charging visitors inflated prices, in the hope that more people will come and visit when they understand how honest and fair these people are, and because they just think its the right way to go about life. I really hope that they succeed for their sakes and ours – we really don’t need more charge-what-you-can-get-away-with consumerism in the world. Personally – and I am surprised to say this after my first impressions of this hostile desert environment – but I’ll be a little sad to leave. I do look forward to some more variety in the diet though!

The First Adventure

The Rest Of Egypt

August 14, 2014 Katana 1 Comment

After the fiasco with two roads through the Sahara that we couldn’t take because we didn’t have various permits, we tried to cross the desert for the third time, north to south. We started out of Giza’s Meridien Hotel with soured hopes, I was feeling really ill all morning, and we had to postpone our start until early afternoon. As we drove out of Giza and onto the desert road south, my mood perked up. We headed to Bawiti and hoped to camp there for the night, starting out to the Black Desert and the White Desert the next day. Having passed a few checkpoints on the way with no problems (finally!), we rolled into Bawiti just before sunset. The town was busy with other “Troopys” flying over speed bumps, getting fixed in garages and people shouting, relaxing and shopping. I was particularly in awe of a huge Fanta mountain outside one shop – a massive construction of boxes of many soft drinks, mostly Fanta. We saw a shop with a “Stella” sign outside of it, and Jonathan went in to buy five bottles of this Egyptian drink. I personally wouldn’t go as far as calling it beer. The first time you try it in a Muslim country, after having searched for alcohol for days in vain, you fall in love with it. The consequences of the next morning hit you pretty hard, and every time you drink it again, the less of it you consume and yet the more drunk you get. It is quite vile tasting and the night spent in the White Desert will become my last night of drinking it.

We checked into a really quaint dusty hotel on the edge of town, called Desert Safari Home. The rate was cheap, and for some reason I opted out of the air-con option, thinking the fan would suffice. The owner – or somebody who spoke English – was very kind to us, explained everything, and the next morning accompanied us to a car parts shop and helped Jonathan buy a tyre pressure gauge, all out of the goodness of his heart. We were really impressed by this little oasis, so unlike the busy hassles of Cairo and most of the populated areas of Egypt, where kindness comes with an expectation of a monetary reward. After settling in, we walked around the town looking for food, but ultimately Jonathan had to cook dinner in the car. The night was hot but the breakfast was very nice, the caretaker even went out on his motorbike specifically to buy us coffee.

As you leave Bawiti, you technically enter the Black Desert, although visually it starts some kilometers before the oasis. It is called “Black” partially in contrast to the whiteness of the White Desert, but also because the sand is covered in black pebbles and rocks. The sand of the Black Desert is strikingly dark yellow, almost orange, and contrasts nicely with the black crackle on top. There are tall cone-shaped “mountains”, formed out of sand and covered tightly in black rocks on the top. These reminded me of volcanoes more than of anything else I’ve ever seen. We stopped at one of those cone shapes and decided to climb it to take in the view of the whole desert. Some might say this was a ridiculous idea to go climbing up the sand in the middle of the day in the open sun in the hottest time of the year for the desert, and having done this, I am partial to that opinion. We didn’t take nearly enough water with us, but once we had climbed, the view was spectacular. Because the ground is flat, we had an aerial view all the way to the horizon, with these black cone shapes, which added a degree of alien to the landscape. This wasn’t quite like Mars; this was, for sure, a planet from another galaxy.

Climbing up a small mountain in the Black Desert was excruciatingly hot and difficult

After the Black Desert came the White Desert, with its own checkpoint on the way in and out. To experience the White Desert properly, you are allowed off the main road and into the sand. The map at the entrance of this rough-track journey was too old and quite unhelpful. There are three “tracks”, but only one of them was marked clearly on the ground. We started following the track that goes all the way south passed the “Mushroom” rock formation and then north-east and then west, and comes out a few kilometers north onto the main road. Jonathan let me drive for a while, as he took in the view and did some video taping. I enjoyed driving in the flat sand, it was softer than anything I’ve ever driven on. Oh, but the scenery! I don’t think words can do justice, and neither can photographs. The chalky white and peachy stones interspaced with yellow sand create such a unique landscape, I don’t think any place on Earth looks like this. At first the structures remind you of mushrooms, but then they get totally weird. Not even the craziest abstract artist could create these on a whim. The stone is actually very fragile and can turn into a white dust cloud if you accidentally drive over it.

Of course we got ourselves “lost” – not quite lost because we knew exactly where we were and had a compass, but we lost the main track and got ourselves stuck in the sand. Jonathan went around digging out the car while I ventured out on a short walk to find the lost track, but without results. Once the car was released, we had to drive back a few kilometers and start following the well-known track instead. By well-known, I mean that it was clearly marked and there were many wheel tracks visible in the sand. I remembered our friends’ advice, who were driving around the same tracks just a few days before us, and headed for the acacia tree, and from then on back to the main road through some really rough black rocks. From there we decided to go up north and try out our firstly chosen track backwards, from north to south. The track was not marked, so with a lot of guess work we re-entered the rough patch from the main road and finally came to a beautiful valley, the ground of which was covered in dark yellow sand, with fading tyre tracks leading forward, and massive stone structures overlooking the valley. Here I could really feel small and insignificant compared to these white giants, centuries old and untouched, with only sand, wind and the sun for company. I couldn’t imagine rain ever coming down here.

The rest of the journey on that side of the main road was about the same: we got stuck, we dug ourselves out, we drove with trepidation through patches of tricky sand, and with hearts jumping up and down through stony patches. We had to rejoin the track we had taken before (with the acacia tree) because it was easier to get onto the main road and find ourselves a camping spot for the night. Off the main road on the other side (the west side) there were even less tyre tracks, and having driven through really disjointed white rocks on the ground, we came to a place under a massive white structure, which shielded us from the sun somewhat, and had a spectacular view of other, smaller, white giants. Unfortunately, we also endured crazy sand-blowing wind, and I slept very little because the car was rocking side to side, the wind was mostly hot and full of sand, and the car felt like a sauna.

The next morning I felt ill again but we continued to drive onwards towards the left-over oases, finally coming to Kharga. Here we stayed in a “fancier” hotel – with air-con, TV and a fridge, and I ended up just watching a dumb movie and sticking to a liquid diet of soup and guava juice, trying to get better for the next day. We were afraid the direct road from Kharga to Luxor would be closed, according to our friends Jack and Cynthia who drove through a few days before us, but we got lucky that the road was miraculously open and we got to Luxor and then Aswan in no time. Sometimes in Egypt it seems as if things happen randomly, somebody sits in a room making decisions based on nothing, like pulling cards out of a pack, although I am sure it is more complicated than that.

This Luxor kitten came to suckle on my trousers, but when a bowl of milk was brought, forgot all about me. Scam Cat.

Our first visit to Luxor flew by us as we only stayed for tea to visit our friend Jane, (on that later) and from Luxor we took the desert road to Aswan. In Aswan we rejoined Cynthia and Jack, and met Tony, another overlander, and Nick, a sort of guide who drives 17 people around Africa in a truck. Nick was waiting for his truck to arrive from Wadi Halfa (Sudan) on a barge, while all of us overlanders were waiting for a barge to sail south. Poor Tony had been in Aswan for almost a month, being promised at least 3 times that the barge was going to sail, but it never did, and Nick was there for two weeks waiting for his barge to arrive, apparently it was stuck somewhere with a broken engine.

Aswan, just like the rest of Egypt, is dirty and there are a few hasslers as well. The hotel had excellent internet connection though, and “Stella” beer – which I didn’t partake in any more. After spending a day in bed really ill, we (as a group) discussed that I should take antibiotics or anti-parasite medication, and I bought pills from the pharmacy that happened to have both in one. After a few days I finally recovered, having sufficiently killed whatever was living inside of me. Our “fixer” Kamal took me and Jonathan to the Sudanese embassy for our visa, after two day we got our visas (with another marriage proposal under my belt), and as there is nothing to do in Aswan, we decided to go back to Luxor to visit Jane properly and do some sight-seeing.

Jane is in charge of “Flats in Luxor”, an apartment building for visitors, sort of like a hotel but with your own kitchen, bedroom, bathrooms, and so on. There was even an outside pool, which is surely a luxury in the 42+ degree heat. We visited the Valley of the Kings, a spectacular ancient burial site for 18th, 19th and 20th dynasties of pharaohs, and we were able to visit 4 of the tombs there. Then we visited the Temple of Hatshepsut, a magnificent ancient building with many features intact, built just at the foot of the major cliffs on the outside of the valley, making it appear to be built right out of the cliffs instead of next to them. We also passed some more derelict ancient temples on the way and visited the Luxor Temple on the east bank of the Nile. There is a row of sphinxes that apparently used to stretch for 3 km, a long straight road with identical sphinxes evenly spaced out, staring dead ahead, and now there are still a lot of these left, although not for 3km, but the impact remains the same.

After two nights in Luxor we went back to Aswan and were told that our barge would be loading the next day and we would be getting on the passenger ferry the same day also. We ran out of luck on the way back to Aswan: we got a flat tyre whilst we were on the desert road. It wouldn’t have been such a big deal, but it was midday heat, no shelter, busy windy road, and as we had only one spare, we don’t have a spare tyre any more, and this variety is very hard to come by, at least here. But otherwise we really did load our car onto a barge on Sunday, spent basically a day at the port dealing with various bits of bureaucracy, and then got on the passenger ferry, and now we are stuck in Wadi Halfa in Sudan. I think these particular experiences require their own post.

"The pains of being... in Egypt": the passport photo guy in Kodak got carried away with his photoshopping — “The pains of being… in Egypt”: the passport photo guy in Kodak got carried away with his photoshopping

The First Adventure

Africality Interview

August 6, 2014 Katana Leave a comment

Vegan Without Frontiers is about spreading a positive message about all aspects of veganism, whether it is choosing not to eat animals, or saving endangered species from poachers in Africa. We met Humperdinck Jackman and Cynthia Gibson on our ferry journey to Port Said and spent a considerable time with them at the port getting our documents sorted. Humperdinck is traveling through Africa with his charity Africality to raise money for game rangers and save elephants and rhinos. This was a good opportunity to learn more about poaching and Humperdinck agreed to be interviewed for our blog.

Humperdinck: I am Humperdinck Jackman and I am driving from Europe and around Africa on behalf of the charity Africality.

Katana: Where have you been already and what have you experienced? The good bits.

Humperdinck: So far I’ve driven about 10,000 miles in my Land Rover from England, two months in France, Italy, and then around the Balkans and Turkey, now sitting in Egypt (Port Said).

Katana: First let’s talk about Africality. Could you talk a little bit about what it does?

Humperdinck: Africality is a British charity with one purpose, which is to raise money to employ more game rangers in Africa, particularly in Kenya and Ethiopia. When people talk about saving the elephants and saving the rhinos, this is very specific. For every thousand euros we raise, that enables us to hire one more game ranger. That is the salary for the whole year, accommodation and food. This is for people who are going to get shot at.

Katana: Why especially are the game keepers so important to stop the elephants being killed?

Humperdinck: Because poaching is out of control. In 2013 it was the worst year of elephant poaching in history. Just looking at elephants for a moment, the latest census is that there are about 400,000 elephants left in Africa. And in 2013 the most conservative estimate is that 40,000 were poached. So we have the year 2023 until there are no more elephants left, if it is left unchecked, and history shows that it could well go to that point. When the elephant population drops below 150,000, they are effectively extinct. One female elephant gives birth three or four times a lifetime.

Katana: Only one baby elephant per time.

Humperdinck: When you look at the extinction of an animal, of a species, there has to be enough of the herds left, or they are effectively extinct, they are doomed. So the next five years are absolutely imperative, or elephants will be only seen in zoos. What prompted all this was when I planning the trip. I wanted the trip to be more than just me being a “rich tourist” in Africa, looking at an elephant and knowing that I will be one of the last people to see this. And I looked at many different causes, female slavery to female genital mutilation to all sorts of things. In August of 2013 there was a particular incident in Zimbabwe when 300 elephants were poisoned by cyanide. A few weeks later, although officially it happened a year before, (it only became widely publicized last August or September) the West African Black Rhino was declared extinct. I looked at how one person making a journey could make a difference, so we came up with an idea, using the statistics available, that a game ranger costs about 1,000 pounds or euros a year. Then raise 75,000 pounds for a journey that is 75,000 miles, join the dots and not just go to the fun parts of Africa, make it a whole circuit in navigation, and that was the basis for a charity. Raise 75,000 pounds, one person doing a 50 nation journey that was 75,000 miles over one or two years.

What’s happened in the last year is that now the official policy for game rangers, in Botswana and Kenya for sure, is to shoot poachers on sight. There is no trial, there is no arrest. If they are in a gun battle, they shoot to kill.

Katana: Before our trip I was reading about going on safaris to look at animals, and tips on how to spot potential poachers, because a lot of them go in with the rest of the tourists, but what they are actually doing is scouting potential elephants for poaching.

Jonathan: One of the useful tips is to turn off geo tagging on all your photographs, because if you end up posting those online, they are basically pinpointed targets for poachers to go and kill.

Humperdinck: It is a crisis, and I am not going to change the destiny of elephants, but if people like me, and there are so many people like me trying to make a little difference… Governments can only do so much to stop the trade. In 1965 there were roughly six and a half million elephants roaming Africa, and we are now at 400,000. They are doomed without help.

Katana: The lions are getting shot by stupid people hunting big game, thinking it is a big deal to point a gun at an unsuspecting lion and come out victorious in this ridiculous “battle”.

Humperdinck: Also the lions are getting shot by pastoral farmers who get upset over a lion having attack one of their cattle. So they go out and they hunt down the lion and kill it. What we’ve been doing (and this is in Kenya) is trying to encourage these same farmers to view a lion as an asset in their land. If you have a sick cow, it is going to die anyway, you can’t sell it. Maybe it has TB, which is epidemic in Africa. What you could do is drive it out of the pasture land to where the lions are, and feed the lions. Then you have the lions which bring the tourism, and it is what they eat. One of the leading conservationists has taken a slightly different approach. She funded somebody to create a cartoon series about an elephant, about how great they are, with magical powers, you know, a friendly caricature. These comic books have been given to school children in Kenya. So over the next few years these children are going to be saying, “No, you can’t kill elephants!”

Katana: Are you planning on visiting some of the game rangers?

Humperdinck: Africality has been endorsed by the Born Free Foundation, whom we support fully, and Born Free have invited me to visit them in Ethiopia, Kenya and Burkina Faso. I will spend a week with each of their groups of game rangers, and what they want me to do is add some publicity to what they are doing and also when I am there to video them, and send an edited video back to their offices so they have more up-to-date material for their website. Our charity, because we are small fry, as we raise more money, we will be giving grants also to Born Free. Because one thing about Born Free is you know the money is going exactly how it is needed. Their offices are extremely modest, every penny is watched. Our intention is also to hire game rangers ourselves, so direct employment, no middle man. This will be in Kenya, where myself and one of the other trustees of the charity have been invited by the local government to manage a large game reserve, to make a difference, to bring the tourists, and when the local people see that there is tourist money coming in from the wildlife, then the local people are more likely to turn on the poachers.

Katana: Why are there so many poachers, or rather why are so many elephants and rhinos getting killed?

Humperdinck: There aren’t that many poachers, but it only takes a few. The trade is largely the Chinese, Vietnamese, the Taiwanese and the Thais, for traditional medicine and for carving. They cut the tusks and they abandon the rest. They chop the tusks off with axes or chainsaws. You might find one poacher with 150 tusks, 75 elephants slaughtered. Here is something for you: you might have heard of a tusker. It is also the name of the beer in Kenya, it means elephant. And the joke is, “let’s go kill a tusker”, let’s go kill an elephant, aka let’s go sink some beers. But until the beginning of this year, there were thought to be seven “tuskers” left in Africa. A tusker is an elephant whose tusks are so fantastically long, three meters or so, that they actually start to join. There were seven left. Two of them in Kenya, guarded 24 hours a day, have been killed so far this year. And some people think, we can just sedate an elephant and remove their tusks, but the stress this causes an elephant through the sedation… elephants are very delicate creatures, so when they are drugged and fall over, they cause themselves tremendous injury. What they are doing with rhinos right now is they are putting RFID tags into the rhino horn, so they can at least identify where the rhino horn came from. Did you know, the rhino horn trades at 65,000 US dollars a kilo? That’s between gold and cocaine.

Katana: That’s a lot of money for poachers to be had.

Humperdinck: Most people don’t realize what rhino horn is.

Jonathan: Compacted hair, isn’t it.

Humperdinck: Yeah, it’s toenail. It has no value to anybody or anything except the rhino.

The First Adventure

Cairo to Cairo

August 3, 2014 Jonathan 1 Comment

Finally we are on the road again! It felt really good to be driving out of Cairo into the desert – we were back on track after an extended period in hotels and cities. This is what we came to do and it was with a positive attitude and smiles that we drove North West towards the coast. The plan was to take a big loop through the desert via Siwa to experience the Sahara and see the giant dunes of the Great Sand Sea, before heading South again towards the White Desert.

We stopped by the memorials and cemetery at El Alamein after a few hours, and then Katana was into camp-site navigation mode. We took a track off the main road which led through some low sandy hills, past a wandering flock of sheep and a slightly surprised shepherd down to the sea. In the line of dunes bordering the sea we found a cleared parking area providing shelter and mostly hidden from the surroundings. The dunes were a mixture of soft sand and crusty sandstone formations sculpted by the wind, and the beach was wide and deserted as far as the eye could see in either direction. Sadly, as with much of Egypt where people have been, it was liberally decorated with plastic bags.

We were pretty starving by this point so Katana set about making a spicy lentil and tomato ‘thing’ (we eat a lot of made up ‘things’, according to what veg we have available and how the day’s chef feels at the time). After dinner we were pretty much ready to sleep so settled in for the night, with the breeze in the dunes and the faint breaking waves the only sounds.

All was peaceful, even when I got up before dawn as I couldn’t sleep and went for a walk around – trying to take a photograph of the pre-dawn glow on my phone camera (not successful!). So I just sat in a camp chair to look at the fading stars and take in the beauty of the desert. In the dunes behind me I heard something move. There was a time I would have been jumpy about this – Katana got fed up with my paranoia before I settled into the wild camping and relaxed more – but I had seen animal footprints and figured it was a fox or a dog. Anyway it seemed to wander off, and walking around I couldn’t see it and went back to Troopy and sat down again. Minutes later though I heard what sounded like more solid feet in the sand, and turning round I saw the silhouette of a person against the lightening sky on top of the dunes. Shepherd maybe I thought. He seemed to turn and go back away and out of sight, so I left it a couple of minutes and then climbed up the dunes to see if there was anyone there, but there was nothing to see and again I went back to Troopy. At this point though, I thought I saw movement again…something low on the ground silhouetted against the sky again, and began to feel uncomfortable so stood behind the back of the car to watch. Movement again – 2 or more people perhaps, watching our camp. Alarm level was going up at this point, but moments later it went to absolute terror. All of a sudden there was a lot of harsh shouting in Arabic from above and 2 figures appeared coming down the slope towards me with assault rifles pointed right at me. Throwing myself face flat in the sand and expecting to hear gunfire at any moment, I repeated back ‘English…I don’t understand….English’. The shouting continued as one went round behind me and the other stood 20 feet in front of me.

The next hour or so featured varying levels of fear, panic and calm…the 2 figures turned into combat clothed lads in their late teens I would guess. No markings on their ‘uniform’, but they soon said they were Egyptian Army and one spoke English. Katana was told to come out…but then sent back inside Troopy.

“I was woken up by some shouting, and unable to see anything, I figured it was bad anyway, so I just lay as still as possible, blending in with the sleeping bags upstairs. I was told to come outside, but since it was a hot night, I was only wearing minimal clothing, so I ended up coming out covered in two towels: might as well respect the level of decency appropriate for this country, even if we were perhaps about to get shot. When I was sent back in, I lay there pondering where my set of car keys were, in case I had to do a quick getaway if Jonathan got shot or if bullets came flying.” Katana.

I was told to sit, and whilst one in front of me loaded more bullets into his magazine the other wandered off out of sight. He came back a bit later and asked if I had a charger for his phone so he could call in for backup. Phone plugged in, he called and we waited for someone else to turn up. The one who didn’t speak much English explained while we waited that he thought we were terrorists wanting to kill soldiers, and that he was a maths teacher really when not doing his national service. In the end an officer turned up and questioned me before telling us to pack up and go back to the road.

So we found ourselves making an early start for our trip across the Sahara to Siwa Oasis. The long road South from Marsa Matrouh took us the best part of the day – stopping to take pictures of camels (alive and dead), and experiencing the oppressive heat of the vast sand and gravel desert for the first time. It was a strange feeling after the start to the day, as we were stopped again at several checkpoints along the way. It became clear that the forces were a little nervous about something, but pretty much universally friendly and cheerful. Rolling into Siwa late in the afternoon we were again looking for somewhere to camp, but our route was intended to be East across the edge of the area of really big dunes towards Bawiti so we headed out along that road. This is however as far as we would ever get on our outbound trip from Cairo. We were stopped at the first military checkpoint and sent back to Siwa, needing a permit to use the main road East.

The short version – we didn’t get a permit, and after spending the night in the garden of a nice little hotel in Siwa and having a tasty couscous and vegetable meal cooked by the Bedouin owner, we had to turn North again and cross the Sahara back to Matrouh. This we did with closed windows and aircon – we didn’t feel the need to ‘experience’ the heat of the desert on this enforced retrace to El Alamein where another road heads South to Bawiti. So as the next day trailed off into evening we found ourselves bumping along on and off what passes for the main road South of El Alamein – off into the desert when it was smoother than the road. We passed through 40km of oilfields and some pretty desert scenery and spirits were once again repaired after the previous day’s scare and disappointment. Then we hit the military checkpoint. They were all very friendly and gave us water and juice and chatted about our trip, and then sent us back to El Alamein under escort as we didn’t have a permit for the road. At least we made it 40km further than Rommel. The escort obviously took the ‘drive it like you rent it’ approach so we go back very quickly, but the bumps had left our stuff in a heap of jumble in the back of Troopy. After that there was only 1 option – back to Cairo and start again.

The final episode of this saga saw us being made to wait in the lobby of Le Meridien Pyramids hotel for an hour and a half until after 11pm to be checked in.

“I have never been so rude to hotel staff before. He kept saying something about five minutes, so I showed him my watch and said that I was timing him.” Katana.

Cairo to Cairo – we had been frustrated, covered in dust, turned back twice and feared for our safety. But through all of it until arriving at the hotel the people we met were friendly, generous and cheerful (once they weren’t scared of us) – Cairo is different and neither of us was in any way happy to be back.

Vegan Adventure Travel – Holidays, Expeditions – Overland Africa