November 2000 - The decision is taken: we go for it !

We discussed once about that, trying to remember when this project actually came to our mind clearly. I guess that we all had it in mind in some form or the other, being in South Africa and enjoying it so much. On my side, I must say that Melina has had a lot of influence, this project being her dearest dream for many years, and knew how to communicate it greatly. Among others, Melina has an Italian friend who bought and restored a huge German 4*4 truck, completely kitted up (including a quadbike !!!), with which he aimed to cross Africa. And after seeing that, how not to dream of venturing for the same experience ?

The actual decision was taken at the end of the year 2000, for Damien and myself, when we both knew for sure that we could leave South Africa at the same time, early in July 2001. Melina was then working in Malta, and came back to South Africa for Christmas holidays. And it sure didn’t take much time to her to make up her mind and check if she could make it as well. Laure and Nicolas had to wait and see how Nicolas’s job was doing before deciding for it, which happened a few weeks later. I must say that we have been quite lucky, to all be able to leave at the same time, as it rarely occurs that things work out so well for every one !

"Laure and Nico are comming with us! Happy happy happy! joy joy joy!"

January 2001 - Check out the maps

Damien and myself moved together in a house in Observatory, in January 2001. The first thing we did was to buy a brand new (and a first edition of) “Illustrated road atlas of AFRICA”, showing the whole continent with great details (www.mapstudio.co.za). We spent hours studying the map, planning the itinerary, estimating road distances, dreaming of all the wonders scattered along the way. We initially had in mind to travel for about 4 months, from July to October 2001, due mainly to money and time restrictions (yes, we unfortunately have to earn a living as well…). It turned out that my boss accepted to grant me with a 6-month break (for which I will never be too grateful), and that Melina could afford this break as well. Damien initially planned to go up to Tanzania (which meant for him a trip until the end of September) and then to fly back to France, but it didn’t take long for him to change his mind and to go for the whole thing. The team was building up !!!

The decision-making process for Laure and Nicolas was a great one, where Nicolas proved to be a wonderful negotiator. Nicolas was very keen to join us, at least up to Tanzania, i.e. until the end of September, as he didn’t have any serious job constraint at this stage, and that you all know how much money the French government grants its young expatriates doing their civil service overseas, making the money constraint inexistent to a certain extent. Although she was at least as motivated as all of us to do this trip, Laure was less lucky, as doing a thesis on the grazing practices of the Namaqualand shepherds was not as remunerating as selling cabbage and melon seeds to South African boerwors eaters (that is, to South African farmers, i.e. the job of Nicolas). Then started the long and tedious convincing process by Nicolas, who worked on it very closely and intensively (under the duvet says the story). And it worked!!! And that is how we eventually managed to have our team of 5 adventurers. Melina, Damien and myself will go up to Cairo, whereas Nicolas and Laure will go up to Tanzania and then will fly back to France.

March 2001 - Buying the car

We are now in March 2001, and we think more and more about our trip. It is now time for us to look for our 4*4. That is when the first dilemma occurs: Toyota or Land Rover ??? Melina of course despised me for having such a dilemma, her dream having been nurtured by “Out of Africa”-like movies and other dreams, which obviously wouldn’t consider anything else than a sturdy Landy. The main objective was to have a car easily repaired by ourselves, and with spare parts readily available, which meant an old model of either a Land Rover or Toyota car. Land Rover is obviously a legend, but Toyota is said to be very robust and reliable. Of course Melina tried so hard to convince us (in particular me) that she managed, and we eventually set for a legendary Land Rover. I must say that those cars are quite common in South Africa, that they are slightly cheaper than Toyotas, and that the station-wagon Land Rovers were much better adapted to our big team.

Here we go!!! We then started with Damien to buy the Cape Ads magazine every Thursday, in search for our ideal vehicle. It took us about 4 weeks to find it, an old 1971 Land Rover Series 2A imported from England, that we bought on the 26th March 2001 for R 18,500 (around FF 17,500).

We bought it from a South African dude, who inherited it from his father, who deceased a few months before, and had been the only owner during all those years!!! The father was a fisherman, who used to go up the Namibian coast to go fishing with the car… The car was in very good general condition, especially considering its old age (30 years old!). There is no rust at all, no major leak (a no-leak situation being a complete utopia when talking about a Landrover…) and all was in good working condition, especially the engine, which is still running perfectly. It squeaks and grinds, but it works overall quite well!

April/May 2001 - Saving time, money and information

The agreed departure date gets closer day after day: around the 10th of July 2001. That is when you realise that project management requires a lot of organisation and work. The most time consuming activity is to gather information, considering that none of us knew anything about this whole adventure: nothing about mechanics, off-road equipment, driving and recovery skills… We just had this dream and now this car, a bit of time and a lot of motivation. I hope that’s all it takes, we’ll know that very soon, somewhere along the way…

We started visiting 4*4 shops, Land Rover specialists, motor spares shops, prop-shaft workshops, and any other place able to help us in our search for information and knowledge. We browsed through the Internet of course, to get hold of reports of people having done the same trip as us, we discussed a lot with some of them as well, as Cape Town is luckily a good starting point (or ending point) for this kind of adventure. Saying that we focused quite a bit on that project is a euphemism, ask our closest friends (who almost deserted us, bored by our repetitive subjects of conversation).

We had quite a huge constraint to work with, in our project: money. Luckily, we had quite some time, but we were restricted money-wise. As a consequence, we had to look for the best value-for-money options to repair and kit up our car. And it takes a lot of time and effort to gather information, and manage to make up your own mind when you are just a layman…

Anyway, by early June, we managed to know roughly what to do on the car, what to buy to equip it, and at what cost. Moreover, we had more or less sorted out the administrative stuff for the car (registration, Carnet de Passage, driving licences…), the visas, the health and car insurance…

1st-15th June 2001 - The countdown starts

We are now in June 2001, we leave in about a month's time and we still have loads to do before being ready. Obviously nothing goes according to the plan, everything takes more time and is more expensive and complicated than planned, but we control more or less the whole thing. The problem is that there are many things that you can't really do much in advance, you can only make sure that you know how to do them when time has come for them, for instance to organise visas, money, some equipment…

Anyway. We are now in the second week of June and we have a very tight schedule to finish. We still have a few heavy repairs to do on the car (mostly fixing the suspension system and fixing the roof rack), before we can go for 4*4 driving lessons and then go for a real test drive in the bush for a whole weekend. We will buy all the spare parts and the last tools, as well as the camping equipment and other necessary stuff in the next two weeks.

Regarding health, Laure and Melina have done their first-aid training lessons, which I hope we will very scarcely need in the bush…even though getting a stab on one's left bum by either of our two nurses should be quite a pleasant experience... We all have checked our vaccinations, including the real rip-off for rabies (three injections costing R180 each !!! I hope that I'll get it on the way, after paying that price for the vaccine !). We negotiated a stunning price for anti-malaria pills, Lariam, at one of the Cape Town pharmacist (R9 per pill, for 85 pills bought). We will probably subscribe to a French personal medical insurance cover (including repatriation, medical expenses…), either Labalette or AVA, both proposing roughly the same service.

The insurance of the car is more or less sorted out, except that we only found an insurance covering us up to Kenya, but not above. We tried to find a UK insurance company doing that, without success.

15th-30th June 2001 - The stress increases

Here we go, the stress increases more and more…
The past two weeks have been quite hectic but interesting, quite a lot of things have come up. We still struggle a bit with the car, mainly due to our lack of experience and of little things which break or get stuck when they are not supposed to. For example a bleeding nipple broke up in the front slave brake cylinder when we tried to screw it in, which required the help of a neighbouring engineering company. That was unfortunately not a great move at first, because they messed up the thread, and I had to rush and buy a brand new slave cylinder to finish with the brake system quickly. We now have a spare cylinder at least… Apart from that, we eventually gave up with the idea of fixing up the roofrack thanks to Damien's friend, it was becoming a real story to get this thing done. We eventually decided to buy an old one from Roverland, which is very strongly designed with mountings on the lower part of the body, and which should be fixed on the car early in July (when else ???). At least we'll have the roofrack and the ladder at the same time…

"After more than 2 month of heated debates,
a solid roof rack is finally fixed directly onto the chassis of the car!"
(Click on the photo to enlarge it)

We've redone the steering mechanism, and had to replace two steering ball-joints which were worn out. It was initially quite a mission to get them out of the rods without any specific tool, but we fortunately could borrow an appropriate ball joint extractor from a friend, which made it easy like nothing. We still have to have the wheel alignment checked, soon.

"Antone trying to identify something "clicky" under the dress of the blue lady"

And that's where I can mention the exciting new development in our project : we eventually met with Michelin mid-June, which proposed us to offer 6 brand new tyres, provided we can organize some sort of promotion to highlight the quality of their tyres, in particular with 4*4 clubs and fans. The tyres they propose us are the BFGoodrich Mud Terrain tyres, which are rated as a perfect option for hardcore off-road driving (isn't it exactly what we are looking for ???). Which implied a few things on our side : we will participate to a 4*4 event at Centuy City, in Cape Town, during the first two week-ends of July, where we will just have to talk about our project to whoever is interested, with our nice Lady Blue along !!! She'll have to carry some BF Goodrich stickers, I hope that will not offend her…

"4 stikers and 3 large smiles:
Lady blue is wearing with pride the BFgoodrich slippers"
(Click on the photo to enlarge it)

Then another way of promoting the image of Michelin-BF Goodrich was to have some sort of media coverage, which we managed to get (unless unforeseen change of decision on the part of the magazine) thanks to the South African 4*4 Magazine, which was interested in our story and accepted to write a 3-page article on us in their August issue !!! The deal is that they will write the article (and mention our main sponsor Michelin, satisfying them for the media hype), and then will publish some monthly updates on our trip based on email we will send them, in particular in terms of road conditions, border crossings, petrol matters, and all sorts of practical details. They have really been nice with us, and have even put us in contact with the Safari Center (in N1 City in Cape Town), which will give us a mechanical support to make sure that the car is in perfect working condition, and who will provide us with free off-road driving lessons !!! We couldn't expect more, and it all arrives at a perfect time. We also contacted a few other magazines, which might be interested in our story…after we've done it ! We'll see what we'll do about that.

"June, Century City.... lost in a commercial world?"
(Click on the photo to enlarge it)

Now we obviously have to rush and finish off all the other things. The health side is more or less sorted out, we just have to pay for our 6-month medical insurance through Laballette, in Paris. Regarding the car, we had quite a bad news last week, when the Automobile Association informed us that they wouldn't issue a Carnet de Passage valid for Egypt anymore…which was THE country for which the Carnet was really compulsory !!! We will still get it, even without Egypt on it, and trust that we will sort something out when we'll be up north… We had to eventually pay the full deposit to the AA, after different unsuccessful trials to get the indemnity form signed by one of our banks. Which means that we won't get any interest on this amount of money for the next 6 months. Too bad !!! Now we are early in July, and that is the last line before starting for real !!!

Guillaume

BlueLandRover web site
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