James E Southern (known as Jim in Australia, N.Z., and South Africa)
Cape Town to Tunis
driving almost all of the way
To accept the offer of technical training or to take the R1000 severance package, that was the decision that I was making. If I accepted the offer, it would most probably mean working after the training, thus continuing to live in South Africa. It was a pleasant country in which to live. On the other hand, a thousand rand added to my savings would suffice to buy a van and drive up through Africa. That was my dream.
I was one of the mainframe computer operators being laid off after training navy girls to replace us. This was at Silvermine, deep inside a mountain near Cape Town. There the South African military monitored sea and air traffic for hundreds of miles all around the Cape. Working there had been a good job, but it was coming to an end.
Perhaps because I had voiced my opinion about apartheid to the wrong person, but probably because I was too slow completing all the paperwork required when applying for permanent residency in South Africa, I received a letter saying that my application had been turned down. Thus it was decided that I would travel on.
I bought a kombi (a VW van) fitted out as a camper from a German couple who had driven from Berlin to Cape Town. It was just what I wanted—the steering wheel on the left, foreign license plates, and a carne de passage. Carne de passages are supposed to prevent the owner from selling the vehicle in a foreign country. Thus I became not the owner but the designated driver driving the kombi back to Berlin.
I was hoping that a nice young lady would accompany me on my trip. But nice young ladies probably shouldn’t accompany men like me on voyages like mine. Also there was another problem. Although I had met some nice young ladies at the church that I was attending, they were South African. If one of them had accompanied me, she couldn’t have gotten far up through Africa with a South African passport. So I set off on my own from Cape Town one day in May in 1975, having previously driven around the park on the Cape so that I could say I had driven from the tip of Africa.
Not far from Cape Town, the motor started sputtering. Not an auspicious start! As it was pouring rain, I pulled under a shelter and got out the mechanic’s manual that I had just bought. The symptom suggested a carburetor problem and that is what it was. I found a piece of fluff stuck in the needle valve. I removed the fluff, replaced the valve, started the motor, and continued on my way to South-West Africa (now Namibia). Plans to visit the Fish River Canyon got set aside when the dust inside the kombi got too thick. It was an unpaved road to the canyon and there were many cracks and holes in the body of the old kombi.
I had been given the name and address of a Christian man in Windhoek. He allowed me to park my home on wheels in his driveway. As I was headed for Angola and he had contacts there, he gave me the names and addresses of a couple of churches. He also gave me Christian literature in the Bantu language of southern Angola. Although I didn’t doubt the truth of whatever it was that was written, I disliked the thought of handing it out, recalling my past aversion to intractable tract distributers. (They refused even to discuss whether or not Adam had a bellybutton.) However the attitude of locals receiving any literature in their own language would probably be more favourable than mine. When I got to Angola I did distribute the literature.
I spent a while in Windhoek waiting for a new Alberta driver’s licence to arrive by mail. My old driver’s licence had expired. In the end I decided to leave without it, so I would be driving all the way through Africa with an expired driver’s licence.
In the north of the country is the game park of Etoshapan. I spent a couple of days there. Photos are nice to have to show to people when telling about my travels in Africa, but it would have been nicer at the time to have had someone to ooh and aah with me.
Now or never. The civil war was on in Angola, but I needed to pass through on my planned route up the west coast of Africa. I drove to the border. Looking across, I could see Angolan soldiers. I asked a South African border guard what he thought of the situation in Angola. Stressing the “I”, he replied,“I wouldn’t go in there!” I went in.
Immigration officials sometimes ask for a contact address within the country. I don’t remember if the Angolan immigration officials asked me, but I was headed for an address in Lobito on the coast, even though that wasn’t the shortest way north. The immigration officials gave me no problems.
The pastor whom I contacted in Lobito couldn’t speak much English and I couldn’t speak much Portuguese even though I had lived almost a year in Brazil. He put me in touch with a Portuguese family who could speak good English and I stayed with them a couple of days.
The southern part of Angola, under UNITA control, was actually quite calm at that time. In the north MPLA, helped by Cuban troops, was fighting FNLA. The Portuguese in the north were trying to leave the country but the family with whom I stayed were relatively unaffected by the turmoil. One of the teenagers in the family was an MPLA party member, and this was in the middle of UNITA territory. He probably didn’t continue attending MPLA meetings as MPLA was shortly to attack UNITA, dragging UNITA into the war.
According to my Michelin map, the road to Luanda first wound inland. Along the way, I got onto a newly paved highway. It wasn’t going in quite the right direction (more west than east) but it was so nice driving on it that I kept going. Late in the evening I ended up at Porto Amboim back on the coast.
The next day, after enquiring, I learned that it might be possible to get permission to drive up the coast through the national park to Luanda. I did get the permit so set off north following the coast. At times the road was just a trail with two wheel tracks with grass in between. Locals whom I picked up along the way guided me in the right direction. When I arrived in Luanda I learned that fighting had broken out along the road that I had originally been planning to take.
A comparatively peaceful spot in which to camp was on Luanda Island, connected to Luanda by a short bridge. Several wrecked cars lined the road to Luanda Island. As the Portuguese were fleeing the country, they were selling their cars to locals who hardly knew how to drive.
I contacted missionaries in Luanda. They helped me in such things as advice on where to get the best rate when changing money on the black market. On one matter I didn’t follow their advice. They were advising everyone not to go to see a movie that was being shown, The Exorcist. They thought it was demonic.
On learning that it was being shown, I went to see it, treating myself for my thirty-second birthday. Almost all of the audience were Portuguese. In the middle of the movie, in not too scary a spot, I heard the whole audience groan. Why? I listened more carefully to what was happening other than on the movie screen. In the distance I could hear the sound of mortars. After a short truce, the fighting had broken out again.
On a subsequent day, I stopped at a garage in a dangerous part of Luanda. I was in the garage when I heard an explosion just outside. A mortar had hit. A Portuguese woman was rolling in pain on the sidewalk. Men from the garage ran out to help her. I ran to the kombi and drove a few blocks to a safer part of the city. People were strolling along the sidewalks as if nothing had happened.
It was too dangerous to drive north of Luanda—that was the FNLA stronghold. Anyway, there was the problem of getting around the strip of the former Belgian Congo between the Congo River and the Angolan province of Cabinda. I decided to go by ferry from Luanda to Cabinda.
The ticket agent for the ferry was a young Portuguese man who spoke excellent English. As the ferry wouldn’t be leaving for a few days, he invited me to accompany him to an island off Luanda where a friend had a cottage. During our stay there we went water skiing. I remember skiing around on the ocean to the sound of shooting on the mainland. My ticket agent friend confided in me that even as little as a year earlier if someone had predicted what was happening right then in Angola he wouldn’t have believed it.
Departure day arrived. As the ferry wasn’t a proper drive-on ferry, the kombi was loaded by crane onto the ferry. Then a sports car was loaded beside it. The ferry wouldn’t be sailing for a few hours so I walked to a shop to buy some provisions. When I returned, I found that bundles of cargo had been piled all around the kombi, but thankfully leaving enough of a passage on one side for me to be able to open a door to get inside. That was where I would be sleeping. Beside the kombi was a huge pile of bundles. “Can’t even see that sports car!”
I was the only foreigner on the ferry. The Portuguese were staying in cabins but the blacks and I, travelling deck class, had our own sleeping arrangements. Because of limited deck space, I let a couple of men sleep on the roof-rack of the kombi while I slept on my fold-down bed inside.
At the mouth of the Congo River we were stopping at the Angolan town of Santo Antonio do Zaire. A Portuguese pilot came on board to steer the ferry into port. I was on the bridge which served as sort of a lounge for first class passengers. (Although I was travelling deck class, my ticket agent friend had made an unofficial exception for me to go into the lounge.) The pilot, while steering the ferry, was chatting and joking with the captain. Then we felt the ferry ease to a stop. We had run onto a sandbank. The pilot tried reversing but we were stuck fast. He was no longer chatting and joking with the captain. It was decided to wait several hours until high tide. At high tide the pilot again tried to back off the sandbank. He again failed. Meanwhile a small boat was carrying people and goods to and from the ferry. At the next high tide the pilot wasn’t aboard. The captain tried reversing, swinging the stern from side to side. Slowly we backed off the sandbank, turned around, and headed for Cabinda.
In Cabinda a crane unloaded the ferry, first clearing the huge pile beside the kombi where all the time I was thinking a sports car was buried. No sports car! It must have been either moved to another part of the deck where it was still buried under bundles, or else it had been off-loaded for some reason while I was buying provisions in Luanda.
My first night in Cabinda I parked within the compound of a bible school, having gotten the address from the missionaries in Luanda. However all the foreign staff had left because of the unrest. Those remaining were not so amenable to my camping in their compound and using their facilities. It’s true that I was thinking mostly of how they might benefit me, whereas they seemed to be thinking of how I might benefit them. I moved on.
I was one of the mainframe computer operators being laid off after training navy girls to replace us. This was at Silvermine, deep inside a mountain near Cape Town. There the South African military monitored sea and air traffic for hundreds of miles all around the Cape. Working there had been a good job, but it was coming to an end.
Perhaps because I had voiced my opinion about apartheid to the wrong person, but probably because I was too slow completing all the paperwork required when applying for permanent residency in South Africa, I received a letter saying that my application had been turned down. Thus it was decided that I would travel on.
I bought a kombi (a VW van) fitted out as a camper from a German couple who had driven from Berlin to Cape Town. It was just what I wanted—the steering wheel on the left, foreign license plates, and a carne de passage. Carne de passages are supposed to prevent the owner from selling the vehicle in a foreign country. Thus I became not the owner but the designated driver driving the kombi back to Berlin.
I was hoping that a nice young lady would accompany me on my trip. But nice young ladies probably shouldn’t accompany men like me on voyages like mine. Also there was another problem. Although I had met some nice young ladies at the church that I was attending, they were South African. If one of them had accompanied me, she couldn’t have gotten far up through Africa with a South African passport. So I set off on my own from Cape Town one day in May in 1975, having previously driven around the park on the Cape so that I could say I had driven from the tip of Africa.
Not far from Cape Town, the motor started sputtering. Not an auspicious start! As it was pouring rain, I pulled under a shelter and got out the mechanic’s manual that I had just bought. The symptom suggested a carburetor problem and that is what it was. I found a piece of fluff stuck in the needle valve. I removed the fluff, replaced the valve, started the motor, and continued on my way to South-West Africa (now Namibia). Plans to visit the Fish River Canyon got set aside when the dust inside the kombi got too thick. It was an unpaved road to the canyon and there were many cracks and holes in the body of the old kombi.
I had been given the name and address of a Christian man in Windhoek. He allowed me to park my home on wheels in his driveway. As I was headed for Angola and he had contacts there, he gave me the names and addresses of a couple of churches. He also gave me Christian literature in the Bantu language of southern Angola. Although I didn’t doubt the truth of whatever it was that was written, I disliked the thought of handing it out, recalling my past aversion to intractable tract distributers. (They refused even to discuss whether or not Adam had a bellybutton.) However the attitude of locals receiving any literature in their own language would probably be more favourable than mine. When I got to Angola I did distribute the literature.
I spent a while in Windhoek waiting for a new Alberta driver’s licence to arrive by mail. My old driver’s licence had expired. In the end I decided to leave without it, so I would be driving all the way through Africa with an expired driver’s licence.
In the north of the country is the game park of Etoshapan. I spent a couple of days there. Photos are nice to have to show to people when telling about my travels in Africa, but it would have been nicer at the time to have had someone to ooh and aah with me.
Now or never. The civil war was on in Angola, but I needed to pass through on my planned route up the west coast of Africa. I drove to the border. Looking across, I could see Angolan soldiers. I asked a South African border guard what he thought of the situation in Angola. Stressing the “I”, he replied,“I wouldn’t go in there!” I went in.
Immigration officials sometimes ask for a contact address within the country. I don’t remember if the Angolan immigration officials asked me, but I was headed for an address in Lobito on the coast, even though that wasn’t the shortest way north. The immigration officials gave me no problems.
The pastor whom I contacted in Lobito couldn’t speak much English and I couldn’t speak much Portuguese even though I had lived almost a year in Brazil. He put me in touch with a Portuguese family who could speak good English and I stayed with them a couple of days.
The southern part of Angola, under UNITA control, was actually quite calm at that time. In the north MPLA, helped by Cuban troops, was fighting FNLA. The Portuguese in the north were trying to leave the country but the family with whom I stayed were relatively unaffected by the turmoil. One of the teenagers in the family was an MPLA party member, and this was in the middle of UNITA territory. He probably didn’t continue attending MPLA meetings as MPLA was shortly to attack UNITA, dragging UNITA into the war.
According to my Michelin map, the road to Luanda first wound inland. Along the way, I got onto a newly paved highway. It wasn’t going in quite the right direction (more west than east) but it was so nice driving on it that I kept going. Late in the evening I ended up at Porto Amboim back on the coast.
The next day, after enquiring, I learned that it might be possible to get permission to drive up the coast through the national park to Luanda. I did get the permit so set off north following the coast. At times the road was just a trail with two wheel tracks with grass in between. Locals whom I picked up along the way guided me in the right direction. When I arrived in Luanda I learned that fighting had broken out along the road that I had originally been planning to take.
A comparatively peaceful spot in which to camp was on Luanda Island, connected to Luanda by a short bridge. Several wrecked cars lined the road to Luanda Island. As the Portuguese were fleeing the country, they were selling their cars to locals who hardly knew how to drive.
I contacted missionaries in Luanda. They helped me in such things as advice on where to get the best rate when changing money on the black market. On one matter I didn’t follow their advice. They were advising everyone not to go to see a movie that was being shown, The Exorcist. They thought it was demonic.
On learning that it was being shown, I went to see it, treating myself for my thirty-second birthday. Almost all of the audience were Portuguese. In the middle of the movie, in not too scary a spot, I heard the whole audience groan. Why? I listened more carefully to what was happening other than on the movie screen. In the distance I could hear the sound of mortars. After a short truce, the fighting had broken out again.
On a subsequent day, I stopped at a garage in a dangerous part of Luanda. I was in the garage when I heard an explosion just outside. A mortar had hit. A Portuguese woman was rolling in pain on the sidewalk. Men from the garage ran out to help her. I ran to the kombi and drove a few blocks to a safer part of the city. People were strolling along the sidewalks as if nothing had happened.
It was too dangerous to drive north of Luanda—that was the FNLA stronghold. Anyway, there was the problem of getting around the strip of the former Belgian Congo between the Congo River and the Angolan province of Cabinda. I decided to go by ferry from Luanda to Cabinda.
The ticket agent for the ferry was a young Portuguese man who spoke excellent English. As the ferry wouldn’t be leaving for a few days, he invited me to accompany him to an island off Luanda where a friend had a cottage. During our stay there we went water skiing. I remember skiing around on the ocean to the sound of shooting on the mainland. My ticket agent friend confided in me that even as little as a year earlier if someone had predicted what was happening right then in Angola he wouldn’t have believed it.
Departure day arrived. As the ferry wasn’t a proper drive-on ferry, the kombi was loaded by crane onto the ferry. Then a sports car was loaded beside it. The ferry wouldn’t be sailing for a few hours so I walked to a shop to buy some provisions. When I returned, I found that bundles of cargo had been piled all around the kombi, but thankfully leaving enough of a passage on one side for me to be able to open a door to get inside. That was where I would be sleeping. Beside the kombi was a huge pile of bundles. “Can’t even see that sports car!”
I was the only foreigner on the ferry. The Portuguese were staying in cabins but the blacks and I, travelling deck class, had our own sleeping arrangements. Because of limited deck space, I let a couple of men sleep on the roof-rack of the kombi while I slept on my fold-down bed inside.
At the mouth of the Congo River we were stopping at the Angolan town of Santo Antonio do Zaire. A Portuguese pilot came on board to steer the ferry into port. I was on the bridge which served as sort of a lounge for first class passengers. (Although I was travelling deck class, my ticket agent friend had made an unofficial exception for me to go into the lounge.) The pilot, while steering the ferry, was chatting and joking with the captain. Then we felt the ferry ease to a stop. We had run onto a sandbank. The pilot tried reversing but we were stuck fast. He was no longer chatting and joking with the captain. It was decided to wait several hours until high tide. At high tide the pilot again tried to back off the sandbank. He again failed. Meanwhile a small boat was carrying people and goods to and from the ferry. At the next high tide the pilot wasn’t aboard. The captain tried reversing, swinging the stern from side to side. Slowly we backed off the sandbank, turned around, and headed for Cabinda.
In Cabinda a crane unloaded the ferry, first clearing the huge pile beside the kombi where all the time I was thinking a sports car was buried. No sports car! It must have been either moved to another part of the deck where it was still buried under bundles, or else it had been off-loaded for some reason while I was buying provisions in Luanda.
My first night in Cabinda I parked within the compound of a bible school, having gotten the address from the missionaries in Luanda. However all the foreign staff had left because of the unrest. Those remaining were not so amenable to my camping in their compound and using their facilities. It’s true that I was thinking mostly of how they might benefit me, whereas they seemed to be thinking of how I might benefit them. I moved on.
my kombi, Cabinda
Because of the fighting in Angola, the border was closed to what I called the French Congo. (The French Congo was at that time under a Marxist regime and called the People’s Republic of the Congo. It is now called simply the Republic of the Congo. It is distinct from the former Belgian Congo which at that time was called Zaire and is now called the Democratic Republic of the Congo.) While waiting there in Cabinda I worked on the kombi, principally fibreglassing over every crack and hole where dust might seep inside. I painted BERLIN OR BUST on the back.
Overnight I parked either in the middle of an open area within the town of Cabinda or outside the main gate of an oil company compound near Cabinda. It was in Cabinda that I lost the black suitcase that had accompanied me around the world and then from Alaska to Patagonia. I had it stored, empty, on the roof-rack of the kombi along with several empty containers. Another problem was hub caps going missing. Later, at an auto wreckers, I bought some scraped-up hub caps in the vain hope that they would last longer than shiny new ones. I learned also not to keep sunglasses within easy reach through the driver’s-side window. My biggest loss however, and this was toward the end of my African trip, was a bag containing my address book and notes and expense records.
Finally the border crossing opened to the French Congo. I drove north and exited strife-torn Angola. As I was driving down the highway toward Pointe Noire, feeling safe at last, an army jeep overtook me, drove ahead, and then stopped. Out jumped some soldiers and knelt down beside the jeep, their rifles pointed directly at me. I stopped. I learned, through my limited French, that I had driven right past a police checkpoint. One of the soldiers accompanied me back. A small sign beside the road directed those who could understand it to a shack a distance from the road. To the chief within the shack I explained, as best I could, that it was all too easy to miss the checkpoint. He made me leave my passport with him, saying that he would send it to a certain office in Pointe Noire. I didn’t like leaving my passport behind, but had no choice. I drove on to Pointe Noire. There I located the office, ready to pick up my passport the next morning.
Meanwhile a local man was trying to befriend me, inviting me to park outside his house. I did, but he wanted monetary compensation for the favours he was doing. I was reluctant to pay him.
The next morning I checked at the office but my passport had not yet arrived. My “friend” invited me to visit his extended family in a neighbouring village. We drove there—it was far from neighbouring. I wanted to return in the afternoon before the office closed to see if my passport had arrived. Half his family, it seemed, crammed into the kombi for the drive back to Pointe Noire. When we arrived, I noticed him collecting money from the passengers. So he did get paid in the end.
My passport wasn’t at the office. The next morning it still wasn’t there. So I drove back to the checkpoint. I walked right up to he desk where the chief was sitting. There, on the desktop, was my passport. Sometimes angry white men get their way. I got my passport back.
There was a problem with my passport. It was full, including an insert added to the passport. I understood that there was a Canadian Embassy in Brazzaville so that’s where I was headed. The corrugation on the road was terrible as the road was used by logging trucks. After an hour of driving super slowly, I thought I’d try another trick I had heard about—driving fast and just gliding over the top of the corrugation. I tried it. The poor kombi suffered a broken fan belt pulley. I was finally able to get the pulley welded together at a camp where Russians were living while building a nearby dam.
On the road again, I slowly made my way to Dolisie. There I again contacted missionaries. They were in a delicate situation, being foreigners promoting an ideology that Marxists considered harmful. Actually the social structure of the early church might have been similar to communism, but the spirit was different. Sharing is good, but it needs to be with the right motive. In the People’s Republic of the Congo, for example, all fruit trees belonged to everyone. Consequently picked fruit was not quite ripe as, if a person tried waiting until it was ripe, someone else would have already picked it.
I was told the road to Brazzaville was impassable so I left my home on wheels under guard at the church and took the train to Brazzaville, thinking that I would be gone only a few days. But when I got to Brazzaville, I found that there wasn’t a Canadian embassy there. The embassy in Kinshasa, just across the river, served Brazzaville as well as Kinshasa.
Diplomatic relations between the two Congos were strained. Consequently the Zaire embassy in Brazzaville was closed. The French embassy in Brazzaville was handling diplomatic affairs for Zaire. So I went to the French embassy to get a visa so that I could cross the river to Kinshasa. They weren’t issuing visas. What could I do then? I was told that I could fly back to Canada, go to the Zaire embassy in Ottawa, get a visa, fly back, and then I could cross the river to Kinshasa. I decided to try another angle. I would phone the embassy in Kinshasa.
I went to the post office where long distance calls could be made. But I couldn’t phone to Kinshasa as the phone line was down. When would it be working again? “Peut-être demain?" (Perhaps tomorrow?) I asked in my limited French. “Peut-être.”
Meanwhile I was staying at a Catholic seminary on the outskirts of Brazzaville. www.lasemaineafricaine.net (Le Grand Séminaire de Kinsoundi) The priests there were hospitable, even lending me a moped to go into town. I checked regularly at the post office to see if the line had been repaired. Several days later I learned that the line had been down for nine months. I decided to try another angle.
A letter sent from the post office there in Brazzaville would have taken weeks to get to Kinshasa as it would have first gone to France and then come back to the other side of the river. There was a quicker way. I wrote a letter to the Canadian embassy explaining my situation, and then went down to where the boats, carrying locals, were crossing to Kinshasa. I picked out an honest-looking man and approached him with an offer. I would give him ample money for a Zaire postage stamp and extra for his trouble if he would post the letter for me when he got to Kinshasa. He agreed.
Within a week a representative of the Canadian embassy came to see me at the Catholic seminary. However I didn’t happen to be there at the time. The priests told me that he would return a few days later. I made sure that I was there then. Over the next few weeks we worked at getting a new passport. Ordinarily simple things such as getting the right passport photos took quite some time.
In between the representative’s visits, rather than just wait at the seminary, I hitchhiked around the countryside. On one tour I happened to meet a student from the seminary. He invited me to his home. Our conversation was limited because of my poor French, but I did understand his invitation for me to stay for supper. I accepted, hoping that wouldn’t make me late returning to the seminary. Our subsequent conversation was disturbed by a chicken squawking. His younger brothers were chasing the chicken all around the yard. The squawking reached a crescendo. They had caught the chicken. Then there was silence. Only then did I realize that I would be very late returning to the seminary.
Finally the representative came with my new passport. I thanked the priests and took the train back to Dolisie. On the train I met a Frenchman who could speak some English. He, like me, was heading for Gabon. Thus it was that he accompanied me after I retrieved the kombi.
We took some back roads that weren’t so well maintained but also didn’t have as much corrugation as the main road. In what seemed to be a remote area of the jungle we came across a battalion of army ants crossing the road. We got out of the kombi and stood beside them. They paid no attention to us. I was reminded of army ants in Central America. There I stood beside a road observing frantic cockroaches escaping the ants by crossing the road, but being picked off by birds circling above the road. There in the Congo, to stir things up a bit, we tried dancing in the middle of the ants. That caught their attention. As we returned to the kombi we noticed, amongst the trees, locals watching the strange antics of us white men.
We made it to Gabon. As this was not the main border crossing, customs and immigration officials were unaccustomed to foreigners. A guard let us through the gate into Gabon and we drove ahead to the immigration building. While we were getting our passports checked and stamped, another guard ran up, quite agitated. He made us return to the gate where a sign pointed to “douane” (customs). But we hadn’t seen it when coming through the gate as, from that angle, we saw only the back of the sign. We should have gone to customs before immigration. The guard who had let us through the gate accompanied us to customs. A big customs official berated us. We explained that we had missed reading the sign as we hadn’t looked in our rearview mirrors. We may have further explained that even if we had looked in our rearview mirrors, we weren’t good at reading backwards. Finally the customs official switched to berating the guard who had let us through the gate. He should have directed us to customs first.
I left the Frenchman in Franceville and drove west toward Libreville. Whenever a logging truck overtook me, I would pull over to the side and slow down. I heard a story of a log falling off and flattening a car that the truck was passing.
Along the way I stopped at a game park. The rangers wouldn’t let me just drive around by myself. They piled into my kombi, three of them carrying rifles. We came across a herd of antelope. The three with rifles got out of the kombi, sneaked through the waist-high grass toward the antelope, and positioned themselves to shoot. Meanwhile another ranger was trying to persuade me to take photographs. I pretended that I knew even less French than I did. I didn’t bring out my camera. I didn’t want to take a photo of an antelope being shot. It wasn’t that I cared so much for the antelope. It was that I was realizing that I would most probably have to pay for the privilege of photographing an antelope being shot. They did shoot without me photographing. Fortunately they missed. I insisted that I had to be on my way so we drove back and I dropped them off and continued on my way, thankful to be out of there.
In Libreville I camped by the beach. There I met other travellers waiting to travel south. I had up-to-date news—it was no longer possible to drive down the west coast. I was the last to travel up. When I had been waiting in Cabinda the ferry had arrived from Luanda—its last trip. There were no foreigners on it. Thus the overlanders there at Libreville had to continue waiting for the end of the rainy season before crossing to East Africa.
Travelling on, I knocked out the clutch on the kombi when trying to board a ferry to cross a river. I helped a mechanic remove the motor to repair the clutch. By the end of my trip I could remove the motor myself, with a little help from my friends.
That was one of several rivers that I had to cross. Another ferry crossing over a fast-flowing river had a unique method. A large raft was attached to a pulley on a cable strung across the river. To cross the river one direction, the raft would be angled so that the river current pushed it across. To return, the raft would be angled the other way.
Cameroon, the next country north of Gabon, is bilingual—French and English. There I got visas for countries that I was planning to visit next. If possible, I got visas at a French embassy or a French consulate rather than the embassy of the country for which I needed the visa. Visas issued by the French were cheaper as there weren’t the extra charges often added at the proper embassies.
The wettest month of the year in Cameroon is August. I was there in September. The coastal plain is the wettest part of the country. In fact, a section of the coastal plain is one of the wettest places on earth. To continue travelling north I first needed to go west to the coastal plain. The road from Yaoundé to Douala was said to be impassable, but I couldn’t wait for it to dry up. I began the drive to Douala. Along the way I picked up a couple of locals who were trying to get to their village near the plain. They said they knew a way around the muddiest stretch of the main road. I followed their directions and we did manage to get through on a side road without getting stuck. I drove them to their village, they thanked me, I thanked them, and then I drove on to Douala.
From Douala I drove north along the coastal plain to Cameroon’s mountainous north-west. I could communicate better as I was back among English-speaking people. Some elders from a church, when interviewing me, apparently decided they wouldn’t invite me to speak in their church. I was in a rather poor state spiritually, the result of neglecting prayer and meditation.
The road to the Nigerian border was almost as muddy as the road to Douala. One hill was impossible to drive up but a tractor stationed at the bottom of the hill towed me up. So I finally arrived at the Nigerian border.
As my papers weren’t in order, I had been showing my English and German papers in the French countries. Now I was showing my French and German papers. The Nigerian immigration official examined the papers carefully. He questioned me as to where I had begun my travels. I explained that I had spent some time in Angola before travelling on to the Democratic Republic of the Congo. I needed a new passport because my old passport had been full, mostly with visas and entry and exit stamps from my trip through Central and South America. I had learned Portuguese from living in Brazil. Too bad the Brazilians and not the Cubans hadn’t been “helping” in Angola.
My diversion seemed to work. However, although in my new passport there was no sign of my having been in South Africa, in my health certificate, for a typhoid-paratyphoid inoculation, there was a clear stamp—DURBAN. The immigration officer stopped at that page. He either didn’t recognize it or did recognize it but decided to let me through never-the-less. He gave back my health certificate, stamped an entry permit in my passport, and returned all my papers.
Paved roads again! However the pavement was deteriorating. Hitting a pothole in asphalt gave the poor kombi more of a jar than hitting a pothole in a dirt road. There was the tendency to speed on the good stretches but then a stretch of potholes had me swerving all over the road trying to avoid them. The poorly paved roads could have been the result of foreign road-building contractors taking advantage of the Nigerians.
Early in my trip through Nigeria I picked up a Dutchman who travelled with me throughout Nigeria and on my side trip to Ghana. I had the address of a missionary who knew someone whom I knew back in Canada. We visited her at a mission compound near the Jos Plateau. She gave us the address of missionaries running a leprosarium on the Jos Plateau. That was our next stop.
Leprosy is a problem in Africa. Lepers suffer a social stigma. One good thing about being ostracized is that it tends to make people look for approval from another source. God judges people more by their character than their appearance.
From Jos we drove north to Kano as I wanted to find out more about the direct route through the Sahara even though I wasn’t planning on crossing the Sahara just then. From Kano we drove west to Niamey in Niger and then on to Ouagadougou in Upper Volta, now Burkina Faso.
Overnight I parked either in the middle of an open area within the town of Cabinda or outside the main gate of an oil company compound near Cabinda. It was in Cabinda that I lost the black suitcase that had accompanied me around the world and then from Alaska to Patagonia. I had it stored, empty, on the roof-rack of the kombi along with several empty containers. Another problem was hub caps going missing. Later, at an auto wreckers, I bought some scraped-up hub caps in the vain hope that they would last longer than shiny new ones. I learned also not to keep sunglasses within easy reach through the driver’s-side window. My biggest loss however, and this was toward the end of my African trip, was a bag containing my address book and notes and expense records.
Finally the border crossing opened to the French Congo. I drove north and exited strife-torn Angola. As I was driving down the highway toward Pointe Noire, feeling safe at last, an army jeep overtook me, drove ahead, and then stopped. Out jumped some soldiers and knelt down beside the jeep, their rifles pointed directly at me. I stopped. I learned, through my limited French, that I had driven right past a police checkpoint. One of the soldiers accompanied me back. A small sign beside the road directed those who could understand it to a shack a distance from the road. To the chief within the shack I explained, as best I could, that it was all too easy to miss the checkpoint. He made me leave my passport with him, saying that he would send it to a certain office in Pointe Noire. I didn’t like leaving my passport behind, but had no choice. I drove on to Pointe Noire. There I located the office, ready to pick up my passport the next morning.
Meanwhile a local man was trying to befriend me, inviting me to park outside his house. I did, but he wanted monetary compensation for the favours he was doing. I was reluctant to pay him.
The next morning I checked at the office but my passport had not yet arrived. My “friend” invited me to visit his extended family in a neighbouring village. We drove there—it was far from neighbouring. I wanted to return in the afternoon before the office closed to see if my passport had arrived. Half his family, it seemed, crammed into the kombi for the drive back to Pointe Noire. When we arrived, I noticed him collecting money from the passengers. So he did get paid in the end.
My passport wasn’t at the office. The next morning it still wasn’t there. So I drove back to the checkpoint. I walked right up to he desk where the chief was sitting. There, on the desktop, was my passport. Sometimes angry white men get their way. I got my passport back.
There was a problem with my passport. It was full, including an insert added to the passport. I understood that there was a Canadian Embassy in Brazzaville so that’s where I was headed. The corrugation on the road was terrible as the road was used by logging trucks. After an hour of driving super slowly, I thought I’d try another trick I had heard about—driving fast and just gliding over the top of the corrugation. I tried it. The poor kombi suffered a broken fan belt pulley. I was finally able to get the pulley welded together at a camp where Russians were living while building a nearby dam.
On the road again, I slowly made my way to Dolisie. There I again contacted missionaries. They were in a delicate situation, being foreigners promoting an ideology that Marxists considered harmful. Actually the social structure of the early church might have been similar to communism, but the spirit was different. Sharing is good, but it needs to be with the right motive. In the People’s Republic of the Congo, for example, all fruit trees belonged to everyone. Consequently picked fruit was not quite ripe as, if a person tried waiting until it was ripe, someone else would have already picked it.
I was told the road to Brazzaville was impassable so I left my home on wheels under guard at the church and took the train to Brazzaville, thinking that I would be gone only a few days. But when I got to Brazzaville, I found that there wasn’t a Canadian embassy there. The embassy in Kinshasa, just across the river, served Brazzaville as well as Kinshasa.
Diplomatic relations between the two Congos were strained. Consequently the Zaire embassy in Brazzaville was closed. The French embassy in Brazzaville was handling diplomatic affairs for Zaire. So I went to the French embassy to get a visa so that I could cross the river to Kinshasa. They weren’t issuing visas. What could I do then? I was told that I could fly back to Canada, go to the Zaire embassy in Ottawa, get a visa, fly back, and then I could cross the river to Kinshasa. I decided to try another angle. I would phone the embassy in Kinshasa.
I went to the post office where long distance calls could be made. But I couldn’t phone to Kinshasa as the phone line was down. When would it be working again? “Peut-être demain?" (Perhaps tomorrow?) I asked in my limited French. “Peut-être.”
Meanwhile I was staying at a Catholic seminary on the outskirts of Brazzaville. www.lasemaineafricaine.net (Le Grand Séminaire de Kinsoundi) The priests there were hospitable, even lending me a moped to go into town. I checked regularly at the post office to see if the line had been repaired. Several days later I learned that the line had been down for nine months. I decided to try another angle.
A letter sent from the post office there in Brazzaville would have taken weeks to get to Kinshasa as it would have first gone to France and then come back to the other side of the river. There was a quicker way. I wrote a letter to the Canadian embassy explaining my situation, and then went down to where the boats, carrying locals, were crossing to Kinshasa. I picked out an honest-looking man and approached him with an offer. I would give him ample money for a Zaire postage stamp and extra for his trouble if he would post the letter for me when he got to Kinshasa. He agreed.
Within a week a representative of the Canadian embassy came to see me at the Catholic seminary. However I didn’t happen to be there at the time. The priests told me that he would return a few days later. I made sure that I was there then. Over the next few weeks we worked at getting a new passport. Ordinarily simple things such as getting the right passport photos took quite some time.
In between the representative’s visits, rather than just wait at the seminary, I hitchhiked around the countryside. On one tour I happened to meet a student from the seminary. He invited me to his home. Our conversation was limited because of my poor French, but I did understand his invitation for me to stay for supper. I accepted, hoping that wouldn’t make me late returning to the seminary. Our subsequent conversation was disturbed by a chicken squawking. His younger brothers were chasing the chicken all around the yard. The squawking reached a crescendo. They had caught the chicken. Then there was silence. Only then did I realize that I would be very late returning to the seminary.
Finally the representative came with my new passport. I thanked the priests and took the train back to Dolisie. On the train I met a Frenchman who could speak some English. He, like me, was heading for Gabon. Thus it was that he accompanied me after I retrieved the kombi.
We took some back roads that weren’t so well maintained but also didn’t have as much corrugation as the main road. In what seemed to be a remote area of the jungle we came across a battalion of army ants crossing the road. We got out of the kombi and stood beside them. They paid no attention to us. I was reminded of army ants in Central America. There I stood beside a road observing frantic cockroaches escaping the ants by crossing the road, but being picked off by birds circling above the road. There in the Congo, to stir things up a bit, we tried dancing in the middle of the ants. That caught their attention. As we returned to the kombi we noticed, amongst the trees, locals watching the strange antics of us white men.
We made it to Gabon. As this was not the main border crossing, customs and immigration officials were unaccustomed to foreigners. A guard let us through the gate into Gabon and we drove ahead to the immigration building. While we were getting our passports checked and stamped, another guard ran up, quite agitated. He made us return to the gate where a sign pointed to “douane” (customs). But we hadn’t seen it when coming through the gate as, from that angle, we saw only the back of the sign. We should have gone to customs before immigration. The guard who had let us through the gate accompanied us to customs. A big customs official berated us. We explained that we had missed reading the sign as we hadn’t looked in our rearview mirrors. We may have further explained that even if we had looked in our rearview mirrors, we weren’t good at reading backwards. Finally the customs official switched to berating the guard who had let us through the gate. He should have directed us to customs first.
I left the Frenchman in Franceville and drove west toward Libreville. Whenever a logging truck overtook me, I would pull over to the side and slow down. I heard a story of a log falling off and flattening a car that the truck was passing.
Along the way I stopped at a game park. The rangers wouldn’t let me just drive around by myself. They piled into my kombi, three of them carrying rifles. We came across a herd of antelope. The three with rifles got out of the kombi, sneaked through the waist-high grass toward the antelope, and positioned themselves to shoot. Meanwhile another ranger was trying to persuade me to take photographs. I pretended that I knew even less French than I did. I didn’t bring out my camera. I didn’t want to take a photo of an antelope being shot. It wasn’t that I cared so much for the antelope. It was that I was realizing that I would most probably have to pay for the privilege of photographing an antelope being shot. They did shoot without me photographing. Fortunately they missed. I insisted that I had to be on my way so we drove back and I dropped them off and continued on my way, thankful to be out of there.
In Libreville I camped by the beach. There I met other travellers waiting to travel south. I had up-to-date news—it was no longer possible to drive down the west coast. I was the last to travel up. When I had been waiting in Cabinda the ferry had arrived from Luanda—its last trip. There were no foreigners on it. Thus the overlanders there at Libreville had to continue waiting for the end of the rainy season before crossing to East Africa.
Travelling on, I knocked out the clutch on the kombi when trying to board a ferry to cross a river. I helped a mechanic remove the motor to repair the clutch. By the end of my trip I could remove the motor myself, with a little help from my friends.
That was one of several rivers that I had to cross. Another ferry crossing over a fast-flowing river had a unique method. A large raft was attached to a pulley on a cable strung across the river. To cross the river one direction, the raft would be angled so that the river current pushed it across. To return, the raft would be angled the other way.
Cameroon, the next country north of Gabon, is bilingual—French and English. There I got visas for countries that I was planning to visit next. If possible, I got visas at a French embassy or a French consulate rather than the embassy of the country for which I needed the visa. Visas issued by the French were cheaper as there weren’t the extra charges often added at the proper embassies.
The wettest month of the year in Cameroon is August. I was there in September. The coastal plain is the wettest part of the country. In fact, a section of the coastal plain is one of the wettest places on earth. To continue travelling north I first needed to go west to the coastal plain. The road from Yaoundé to Douala was said to be impassable, but I couldn’t wait for it to dry up. I began the drive to Douala. Along the way I picked up a couple of locals who were trying to get to their village near the plain. They said they knew a way around the muddiest stretch of the main road. I followed their directions and we did manage to get through on a side road without getting stuck. I drove them to their village, they thanked me, I thanked them, and then I drove on to Douala.
From Douala I drove north along the coastal plain to Cameroon’s mountainous north-west. I could communicate better as I was back among English-speaking people. Some elders from a church, when interviewing me, apparently decided they wouldn’t invite me to speak in their church. I was in a rather poor state spiritually, the result of neglecting prayer and meditation.
The road to the Nigerian border was almost as muddy as the road to Douala. One hill was impossible to drive up but a tractor stationed at the bottom of the hill towed me up. So I finally arrived at the Nigerian border.
As my papers weren’t in order, I had been showing my English and German papers in the French countries. Now I was showing my French and German papers. The Nigerian immigration official examined the papers carefully. He questioned me as to where I had begun my travels. I explained that I had spent some time in Angola before travelling on to the Democratic Republic of the Congo. I needed a new passport because my old passport had been full, mostly with visas and entry and exit stamps from my trip through Central and South America. I had learned Portuguese from living in Brazil. Too bad the Brazilians and not the Cubans hadn’t been “helping” in Angola.
My diversion seemed to work. However, although in my new passport there was no sign of my having been in South Africa, in my health certificate, for a typhoid-paratyphoid inoculation, there was a clear stamp—DURBAN. The immigration officer stopped at that page. He either didn’t recognize it or did recognize it but decided to let me through never-the-less. He gave back my health certificate, stamped an entry permit in my passport, and returned all my papers.
Paved roads again! However the pavement was deteriorating. Hitting a pothole in asphalt gave the poor kombi more of a jar than hitting a pothole in a dirt road. There was the tendency to speed on the good stretches but then a stretch of potholes had me swerving all over the road trying to avoid them. The poorly paved roads could have been the result of foreign road-building contractors taking advantage of the Nigerians.
Early in my trip through Nigeria I picked up a Dutchman who travelled with me throughout Nigeria and on my side trip to Ghana. I had the address of a missionary who knew someone whom I knew back in Canada. We visited her at a mission compound near the Jos Plateau. She gave us the address of missionaries running a leprosarium on the Jos Plateau. That was our next stop.
Leprosy is a problem in Africa. Lepers suffer a social stigma. One good thing about being ostracized is that it tends to make people look for approval from another source. God judges people more by their character than their appearance.
From Jos we drove north to Kano as I wanted to find out more about the direct route through the Sahara even though I wasn’t planning on crossing the Sahara just then. From Kano we drove west to Niamey in Niger and then on to Ouagadougou in Upper Volta, now Burkina Faso.
me and my kombi
Somewhere along the way I somehow got diesel instead of gasoline in the gas tank of the kombi. It wasn’t at all good for the motor. We limped south into Ghana. I remember the kombi almost stalling going up one hill. If we hadn’t made it I don’t know what we would have done. We didn’t want to venture outside as the tsetse flies were so thick. But locals were standing there beside the road, not looking all that sleepy. We finally made it to Accra where the Dutchman left, perhaps happy that his trip with me was over.
In Accra I took the kombi to a backyard mechanic who did a valve job on it. Perhaps because I was watching the process, he sent his kid brother to rub the valves on the cement wall around the back yard. Afterwards, to seat them properly, he twisted them vigorously in their seats. He put the motor back together and it ran perfectly.
Ghana was a mecca for travellers looking for a cheap place to sunbathe. Since I had transportation, I was popular. A group of us toured the beaches all along the coast. In Cape Coast we stayed in a slave traders castle converted into a youth hostel. Most Ghanaians were friendly though I remember one man in Cape Coast who seemed to associate us westerners with slave traders.
In Accra I took the kombi to a backyard mechanic who did a valve job on it. Perhaps because I was watching the process, he sent his kid brother to rub the valves on the cement wall around the back yard. Afterwards, to seat them properly, he twisted them vigorously in their seats. He put the motor back together and it ran perfectly.
Ghana was a mecca for travellers looking for a cheap place to sunbathe. Since I had transportation, I was popular. A group of us toured the beaches all along the coast. In Cape Coast we stayed in a slave traders castle converted into a youth hostel. Most Ghanaians were friendly though I remember one man in Cape Coast who seemed to associate us westerners with slave traders.
During that trip to Cape Coast I met a Canadian teaching at the university there. On a subsequent visit, the two of us drove to a village in which he had lived when with CUSO (Canadian University Service Overseas). The drive involved taking a ferry on Volta Lake, the lake created behind the Volta Dam. The forest behind the dam hadn’t been logged before the dam was built. Consequently all around the perimeter of the lake, tree tops were sticking out of the water. The ferry had a set route avoiding the rest of the trees that were completely submerged.
In the village we two visitors were invited to offer something to the spirits guarding the village. My companion was prepared, having brought a small bottle of schnaps. In a little ceremony in a cave, the bottle was presented, the contents, however, not being poured out. Perhaps it was drunk later.
Local visitors would offer palm wine. Palm wine was fermented palm sap. I accompanied one of the villagers collecting palm wine. Earlier he had cut down some palm trees, then hollowed out troughs in their trunks. Sap collected in the trough and the fermenting sap was a delicious wine. One tree had little sap in its trough but many grubs which I later learned were the larval stage of the rhinoceros beetle. They are delicious, so I've been told, tasting much like shrimp minus the sea flavour. www.cec.vcn.bc.ca/cmp/ (Community Empowerment Collective)
Not in that village, but in another West African village, I was rounding the corner of a hut when I almost bumped into a little girl. At that time I had long hair and a beard. The girl ran away screaming. Her big sister came to the rescue, smiling as she explained to her sister that I was just one of those white men.
Back in Accra I was invited to speak to the youth group of an evangelical church. Just judging from my appearance, I seemed unsuitable to speak to the whole congregation. Pastors and others who might address a congregations would wear suits and ties even in hot weather. I wore my traditional African shirt. My talk probably didn’t inspire the young people to follow the Lord more ardently.
Also in Accra I hung around a lot with an English missionary. But he wasn’t an evangelical missionary. He was of a sect called the Emissaries. I was, subsequently, to associate with the Emissaries quite a bit. One good emphasis of the Emissaries is their concentration on the present—making the most of the moment.
The Englishman was particular about food. He disliked the tiny sugar ants that seemed to be able to climb even underneath a loosely screwed on lid to feast on the contents of the jar or bottle. I told him what I had been told. After you have been in Africa a year you stop picking the ants out of your food. After you have been in Africa two years you start adding ants to your food.
I and some fellow travellers wanted to visit Lomé in Togo. Getting a visa for Togo was a lengthy process. We went back to the Togo embassy day after day, each time being told to return the next day. Finally we gave up and paid the bribe. We got our visas the next day.
At the zoo in Lomé, a friend and I were approaching the monkey cage. I noticed onlookers jumping back, giggling. My friend failed to notice that a monkey was throwing poop through the bars of the cage. The monkey got him in the leg. I understood how the monkeys could get annoyed with people watching them all the time. I did too. One time I was sweeping the dust out of the kombi. A crowd of children hung all around the sliding door. I was sweeping the dust out the door, purposefully vigorously to send it into the air, but the children in the front row wouldn’t give up their positions even when getting dust in their faces.
After a relaxing half-year in Ghana, I decide to travel on, first returning to Lomé. There I met an American lady who agreed to accompany me but on only part of my onward journey. She would travel with me to Niamey in the south-western part of Niger. We first visited Benin. One of my memories of Benin is trying to play bridge with her and an American couple. I was a disappointing partner.
Returning to Togo we arrived at a northern border crossing during siesta time. The two border officials puzzled over our passports for quite some time, discussing the situation in French, the common language between people of different local languages. Although the American lady spoke French, she was pretending not to understand as we were both using our single-entry Togo visas for the second time. Finally the two officials figured things out, causing her to giggle. They stamped our passports. Back at the kombi I asked her why she had giggled. She explained that they had finally figured out which direction we had come from, and thus to stamp entry permits in our passports rather than exit permits.
At the border crossing from Togo to Upper Volta she hid in the kombi while I went through immigration as she didn’t want to use up her single-entry Upper Volta visa. In Upper Volta we picked up an American just finished his Peace Corps service and in Niger we picked up yet another American also just finished his Peace Corps service.
In the village we two visitors were invited to offer something to the spirits guarding the village. My companion was prepared, having brought a small bottle of schnaps. In a little ceremony in a cave, the bottle was presented, the contents, however, not being poured out. Perhaps it was drunk later.
Local visitors would offer palm wine. Palm wine was fermented palm sap. I accompanied one of the villagers collecting palm wine. Earlier he had cut down some palm trees, then hollowed out troughs in their trunks. Sap collected in the trough and the fermenting sap was a delicious wine. One tree had little sap in its trough but many grubs which I later learned were the larval stage of the rhinoceros beetle. They are delicious, so I've been told, tasting much like shrimp minus the sea flavour. www.cec.vcn.bc.ca/cmp/ (Community Empowerment Collective)
Not in that village, but in another West African village, I was rounding the corner of a hut when I almost bumped into a little girl. At that time I had long hair and a beard. The girl ran away screaming. Her big sister came to the rescue, smiling as she explained to her sister that I was just one of those white men.
Back in Accra I was invited to speak to the youth group of an evangelical church. Just judging from my appearance, I seemed unsuitable to speak to the whole congregation. Pastors and others who might address a congregations would wear suits and ties even in hot weather. I wore my traditional African shirt. My talk probably didn’t inspire the young people to follow the Lord more ardently.
Also in Accra I hung around a lot with an English missionary. But he wasn’t an evangelical missionary. He was of a sect called the Emissaries. I was, subsequently, to associate with the Emissaries quite a bit. One good emphasis of the Emissaries is their concentration on the present—making the most of the moment.
The Englishman was particular about food. He disliked the tiny sugar ants that seemed to be able to climb even underneath a loosely screwed on lid to feast on the contents of the jar or bottle. I told him what I had been told. After you have been in Africa a year you stop picking the ants out of your food. After you have been in Africa two years you start adding ants to your food.
I and some fellow travellers wanted to visit Lomé in Togo. Getting a visa for Togo was a lengthy process. We went back to the Togo embassy day after day, each time being told to return the next day. Finally we gave up and paid the bribe. We got our visas the next day.
At the zoo in Lomé, a friend and I were approaching the monkey cage. I noticed onlookers jumping back, giggling. My friend failed to notice that a monkey was throwing poop through the bars of the cage. The monkey got him in the leg. I understood how the monkeys could get annoyed with people watching them all the time. I did too. One time I was sweeping the dust out of the kombi. A crowd of children hung all around the sliding door. I was sweeping the dust out the door, purposefully vigorously to send it into the air, but the children in the front row wouldn’t give up their positions even when getting dust in their faces.
After a relaxing half-year in Ghana, I decide to travel on, first returning to Lomé. There I met an American lady who agreed to accompany me but on only part of my onward journey. She would travel with me to Niamey in the south-western part of Niger. We first visited Benin. One of my memories of Benin is trying to play bridge with her and an American couple. I was a disappointing partner.
Returning to Togo we arrived at a northern border crossing during siesta time. The two border officials puzzled over our passports for quite some time, discussing the situation in French, the common language between people of different local languages. Although the American lady spoke French, she was pretending not to understand as we were both using our single-entry Togo visas for the second time. Finally the two officials figured things out, causing her to giggle. They stamped our passports. Back at the kombi I asked her why she had giggled. She explained that they had finally figured out which direction we had come from, and thus to stamp entry permits in our passports rather than exit permits.
At the border crossing from Togo to Upper Volta she hid in the kombi while I went through immigration as she didn’t want to use up her single-entry Upper Volta visa. In Upper Volta we picked up an American just finished his Peace Corps service and in Niger we picked up yet another American also just finished his Peace Corps service.
local girls, Niger
In Niamey we parted, the American lady preparing to return to Upper Volta and the other two Americans and I heading for Agadez in the middle of Niger. We were passing through the Sahel, the edge of the Sahara. For a long stretch there was no road, just posts as markers every couple of kilometres to indicate the right direction. It was almost like driving on a super-wide highway, the sand was so hard. As we were driving through this stretch, a sandstorm blew up, limiting our vision. We kept going in the direction of the tracks in the sand where other vehicles had driven. Every couple of kilometres we looked out for a post. Fortunately the speedometer/odometer on the kombi was working. It broke later while crossing the Sahara. If we hadn’t seen any posts for several kilometres we would have stopped and waited out the storm. But in one sense it was nice driving in the sandstorm as the sand shaded us from the hot sun.
In Agadez we prepared for the Sahara crossing. As our next fuel stop would be in Tamanrasset in Algeria, nine hundred kilometres away, we filled gerry cans with gasoline, storing them under the bed rather than on the roof-rack. We also carried an equal quantity of drinking water.
Single vehicles were not permitted to attempt the crossing. We were expected to travel in a convoy of at least two. A German couple in a Land Rover was looking for someone with whom to make the crossing. We joined them.
Not far from Agadez the tire that I had had repaired in Agadez went flat again. So I put on the spare tire and continued without a spare. I deflated all the tires a little to help with traction in the sand. I was also carrying two sets of sand ladders. My plan was, if needed, to have the guys, one on each side of the kombi, laying the ladders in front of the wheels. However, when we came to a stretch of soft sand, it was faster for the German couple to tow us with their four-wheel-drive Land Rover.
When it wasn’t sand that slowed us down, it was stones and corrugation, though it wasn't as bad as the corrugation on the logging roads in the Peoples Republic of the Congo. Occasionally we came to a fork in the track. Then we took the one that seemed the most used. The other track probably rejoined the main track further along, perhaps at one time being the main track till a sand dune shifted over it.
My kombi was a dull grey colour, not a reflective silver colour. Consequently it absorbed heat. Inside the kombi it was hot. We drank gallons of water and took salt pills to replenish lost salt. The heat was hard on air-cooled motors too. We passed several skeletons of vehicles along the way. Any abandoned vehicle would soon be stripped of everything removable, leaving just the shell.
Finally we reached the Algerian border. Algerian customs and immigration officials noted two vehicles with German licence plates but only the couple with German passports. At that time Algeria was making it difficult for Germans to enter Algeria because, after the shootings at the Munich Olympics, Germany was making it difficult for Algerians to enter Germany. The German husband didn’t have an even-willing-to-kiss-boots attitude. Consequently they were giving him a rough time, demanding that he take everything out of the Land Rover and lay it on the ground for them to inspect. He at first refused, but we convinced him that he had no other option. We spread a tarpaulin on the ground and he and his wife piled the contents of the Land Rover onto it. Customs carefully inspected all their possessions and then immigration stamped entry permits in their passports. After they reloaded we were on our way.
Tamanrasset is an oasis in the middle of the Sahara. On reaching Tamanrasset we felt as though we were back in civilization. We were treated like tourists, having to pay an exorbitant price for gasoline. Locals must have paid less.
In Agadez we prepared for the Sahara crossing. As our next fuel stop would be in Tamanrasset in Algeria, nine hundred kilometres away, we filled gerry cans with gasoline, storing them under the bed rather than on the roof-rack. We also carried an equal quantity of drinking water.
Single vehicles were not permitted to attempt the crossing. We were expected to travel in a convoy of at least two. A German couple in a Land Rover was looking for someone with whom to make the crossing. We joined them.
Not far from Agadez the tire that I had had repaired in Agadez went flat again. So I put on the spare tire and continued without a spare. I deflated all the tires a little to help with traction in the sand. I was also carrying two sets of sand ladders. My plan was, if needed, to have the guys, one on each side of the kombi, laying the ladders in front of the wheels. However, when we came to a stretch of soft sand, it was faster for the German couple to tow us with their four-wheel-drive Land Rover.
When it wasn’t sand that slowed us down, it was stones and corrugation, though it wasn't as bad as the corrugation on the logging roads in the Peoples Republic of the Congo. Occasionally we came to a fork in the track. Then we took the one that seemed the most used. The other track probably rejoined the main track further along, perhaps at one time being the main track till a sand dune shifted over it.
My kombi was a dull grey colour, not a reflective silver colour. Consequently it absorbed heat. Inside the kombi it was hot. We drank gallons of water and took salt pills to replenish lost salt. The heat was hard on air-cooled motors too. We passed several skeletons of vehicles along the way. Any abandoned vehicle would soon be stripped of everything removable, leaving just the shell.
Finally we reached the Algerian border. Algerian customs and immigration officials noted two vehicles with German licence plates but only the couple with German passports. At that time Algeria was making it difficult for Germans to enter Algeria because, after the shootings at the Munich Olympics, Germany was making it difficult for Algerians to enter Germany. The German husband didn’t have an even-willing-to-kiss-boots attitude. Consequently they were giving him a rough time, demanding that he take everything out of the Land Rover and lay it on the ground for them to inspect. He at first refused, but we convinced him that he had no other option. We spread a tarpaulin on the ground and he and his wife piled the contents of the Land Rover onto it. Customs carefully inspected all their possessions and then immigration stamped entry permits in their passports. After they reloaded we were on our way.
Tamanrasset is an oasis in the middle of the Sahara. On reaching Tamanrasset we felt as though we were back in civilization. We were treated like tourists, having to pay an exorbitant price for gasoline. Locals must have paid less.
We made it!
The paved highway south from Algiers wasn’t finished all the way to Tamanrasset, but we didn’t anticipate any problems reaching the highway. Without the German couple, we set off again north. But before we reached the new highway the kombi started running roughly and finally stalled. I spent a few hours trying to find out what was wrong, finally finding it was an easily fixed electrical problem. We continued, soon reaching the new highway. Driving in the cool of the evening at the break-neck speed of 80 to 90 km/hr, I was on a high, “We’re going to make it!”
We spent the night in In Salah, then drove on north the next morning. Bypassing Algiers, we headed for Tunisia. My Michelin map showed two highways to the border. I chose the coastal highway. Arriving at the border, we noted that we were the only ones passing through. We had taken the less frequented route. While crossing at less frequented crossings had been an advantage in other African countries, it was not so in Algeria. Immigration officials had lots of time to examine my papers carefully, and caught one of the discrepancies. I had to accompany an immigration official to a nearby town to see his boss. After I apologized for my negligence, he let me return to my kombi and the two patiently waiting Americans and we crossed through into Tunisia.
Tunis was the end of my trans-African trip, though not my final destination. On the ferry to Palermo in Sicily I watched Africa fade away into just a romantic memory. I can imagine how Africans living abroad must be perpetually homesick.
The rest of the journey included repairing a breakdown in Palermo, braving the traffic in Rome, getting visas in Vienna, circumventing Prague, and camping overnight in East Germany. As we had entered East Germany rather late in the day, there was no hope of reaching the West Berlin border before it closed. After dark, we pulled well off the road by some trees, a perfect spot to spend the night. Early in the morning, before setting out again, I thought it would be good to lubricate the reduction gears as we had been doing every once in a while since a breakdown in Niger. One of the Americans was half under the kombi when a helicopter flew over and hovered for a while. Before we managed to get away, police cars pulled up. We did know that our transit visas didn’t permit us to stay overnight in East Germany. The police interrogated us but didn’t learn much as they didn’t speak much English and we didn’t speak much German. I did manage to get across that we were having mechanical difficulties. Eventually they let us go and we drove on to West Berlin.
Made it! But within ten minutes of driving in Berlin, the police pulled us over. “Why is the insurance sticker on the licence plate two years out of date?” . . . “No insurance?” . . . “Are you the owner of this vehicle?” . . . “Drivers licence?” . . . “Do you realize your licence expired a year ago?” . . . “Follow me to the police station.”
At the police station we were interrogated by an officer who spoke flawless English. I explained that the kombi had made an epic journey to the tip of Africa and back. He was polite but firm. My Berlin-or-Bust kombi had its licence plates removed.
Later that day a friend towed the kombi to his place. I had met him in West Africa and he had given me some containers which I had agreed to return to him when I got to Berlin. I sold the kombi for parts, saying goodbye to the home in which I had lived for a year.
Although the end was somewhat of a letdown, I had achieved what I had set out to do—drive up from the tip of Africa. Setting goals and achieving them can make a person feel good, but it is probably not good to dwell on the past. It is better to make the most of the present.
the end, though not the very end
We spent the night in In Salah, then drove on north the next morning. Bypassing Algiers, we headed for Tunisia. My Michelin map showed two highways to the border. I chose the coastal highway. Arriving at the border, we noted that we were the only ones passing through. We had taken the less frequented route. While crossing at less frequented crossings had been an advantage in other African countries, it was not so in Algeria. Immigration officials had lots of time to examine my papers carefully, and caught one of the discrepancies. I had to accompany an immigration official to a nearby town to see his boss. After I apologized for my negligence, he let me return to my kombi and the two patiently waiting Americans and we crossed through into Tunisia.
Tunis was the end of my trans-African trip, though not my final destination. On the ferry to Palermo in Sicily I watched Africa fade away into just a romantic memory. I can imagine how Africans living abroad must be perpetually homesick.
The rest of the journey included repairing a breakdown in Palermo, braving the traffic in Rome, getting visas in Vienna, circumventing Prague, and camping overnight in East Germany. As we had entered East Germany rather late in the day, there was no hope of reaching the West Berlin border before it closed. After dark, we pulled well off the road by some trees, a perfect spot to spend the night. Early in the morning, before setting out again, I thought it would be good to lubricate the reduction gears as we had been doing every once in a while since a breakdown in Niger. One of the Americans was half under the kombi when a helicopter flew over and hovered for a while. Before we managed to get away, police cars pulled up. We did know that our transit visas didn’t permit us to stay overnight in East Germany. The police interrogated us but didn’t learn much as they didn’t speak much English and we didn’t speak much German. I did manage to get across that we were having mechanical difficulties. Eventually they let us go and we drove on to West Berlin.
Made it! But within ten minutes of driving in Berlin, the police pulled us over. “Why is the insurance sticker on the licence plate two years out of date?” . . . “No insurance?” . . . “Are you the owner of this vehicle?” . . . “Drivers licence?” . . . “Do you realize your licence expired a year ago?” . . . “Follow me to the police station.”
At the police station we were interrogated by an officer who spoke flawless English. I explained that the kombi had made an epic journey to the tip of Africa and back. He was polite but firm. My Berlin-or-Bust kombi had its licence plates removed.
Later that day a friend towed the kombi to his place. I had met him in West Africa and he had given me some containers which I had agreed to return to him when I got to Berlin. I sold the kombi for parts, saying goodbye to the home in which I had lived for a year.
Although the end was somewhat of a letdown, I had achieved what I had set out to do—drive up from the tip of Africa. Setting goals and achieving them can make a person feel good, but it is probably not good to dwell on the past. It is better to make the most of the present.
the end, though not the very end