This is the fourth instalment of a four-month trans-Africa trip from Johannesburg to London that I did with Exodus Expeditions in 1980, travelling by ex-army truck and camping. We were not sightseeing, though we did see some incredible sights. Our goal was to see and experience Africa from south to north by whatever route was open. Four months. Twelve people. One truck. Fifteen countries. 18,000 kilometres. You can read the first instalment here (Botswana and Zambia), the second here (Tanzania), and the third here (Kenya).


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. . . . . We also got to wash body and clothes in a tiny stream just out of the village; all of us standing or squatting in a line in the narrow stream in various stages of undress. I bet the villagers have never seen so many white bums in their lives. Another time we took over the local well. I can never truly express what heaven these washes are! You’re sweating all the time, and all day as we’re driving dust and grass and leaves and insects blow in on you, and in your hair. And then it rains and everything gets covered in mud. And you never change your clothes because there doesn’t seem any point when you’re so dirty.

Sitting on the vinyl seats in the truck and you get up and find the dust on your legs has turned to mud with sweat, and the sweat runs down your body in rivulets picking up grit along the way, and your whole body feels sticky and greasy and clammy until you’re just about at screaming point. No wonder such excitement at getting clean, yelling and laughing and shouting. Such joy! Such a treat! Such a feeling of relief!








On travelling days we usually stop in the middle of nowhere for lunch. We’re all sitting around on the ground at the side of the road, and those on cooking duty have put a big communal plate of finger food in front of us. Cameron is the first to reach for some. Like a bullet I hit him with it:
Have you washed your hands?!
No.
Then get your hands out of my food!
It’s one of the most important rules of the expedition – never never go near food without first washing your hands, with soap. No matter what, there’s always water for hand washing. It’s the first rule of staying healthy. The water tank is behind the cab, and we fill it wherever/whenever we can – from streams, from village wells, from waterfalls, and then it has purification tablets added to it to kill the bugs.





Teamwork is essential. Some people are better team members than others. Some go above and beyond. Some do the minimum they can get away with.

At the pre-departure meeting we’re given a list of chores – necessary activities to make the expedition functional. Cameron, he of the unwashed hands, announces I’m not doing any chores. I’m on holiday! It’s interesting how a person’s personality is heralded by pretty much their first words. One morning we’re all packed up and ready to leave and Cameron is still asleep in his tent. A couple of the guys take the tent down around him. That wakes him up.





As mentioned in a previous post Helen’s first words are I’d like a non-smoking seat please! As for me, my language is, um, salty, and I think it’s because of this, with nothing being said, that at least one person doesn’t really warm to me. But the journey is so rough even with lazy Cameron and entitled Helen and me swearing a blue streak, we manage to make it work. We have no choice. Most of us most of the time enjoy each other and work well together. There’s a fight one night. More on that in a future post.

We’re divided into pairs and rostered onto a cooking schedule. In rotation one pair cooks and another cleans up. Post-lunch dish washing at the side of the road can look like this:





We’re also all given an extra chore. Steve and Eric are responsible for getting the tents down from the roof of the truck’s cab at the end of each day and strapping them back up there in the morning. We erect our own tents and pack them back up. No, I’m not about to clock Helen over the head. I’m about to climb out of the truck with one of the mallets to join Gail to pitch our tent.








Mary’s responsibility is to monitor and organize the bulk food stocks, moving food from bulk containers to smaller ones for daily use. Here she is digging deep into the storage bins in the truck.





Someone else does the food budgeting, calculating in the local currency how much to spend each day so that the food kitty lasts the whole trip. Butter? You have butter?! This is Craig, the expedition leader, towards the end of the trip. There’s judgement in his outburst, but we’ve budgeted so well that somewhere in Morocco we could afford butter, a true luxury.

There are two large fold-out tables stored behind the water tank. Two people are responsible for getting them out and putting them away at meal times. It’s everyone’s job to collect firewood at each campsite, and to collect as much as we can, especially if there’s an abundance of dry wood lying around. Surplus is strapped on top of the water tank for future use.

I choose to run the bar. I ran a bar on the four-month South America trip I’d taken two years earlier so I know what to do. I’ll just say that it was a whole hell of a lot easier to get liquor in South America than Africa. Usually I can find soft drinks, especially coke and sprite, and most places have local beer. In Tanzania there are vineyards so I buy wine; I manage to find a bottle of scotch in Dar es Salaam; I pick up some liquor in Nairobi; in Juba, southern Sudan, I score a case of Heineken through a couple of westerners who live there; I meet a man from the World Health Organisation in Central African Republic who sells me some of his liquor ration that he gets through diplomatic channels; in Kano, Nigeria, we camp in the grounds of the house of a man who works for another international aid organisation and I’m able to buy some liquor through him. And so it goes – Cinzano, Jim Beam, Dubonnet, brandy, vodka, Drambui, Advocat, whatever I can get – soft drinks and alcohol for four months for twelve people through twelve countries.

I start with a kitty, in US dollars, the same amount from each person. In each country I convert to the local currency, buy what I can, and figure out how much one drink would cost in US dollars. I have an on-going (and constantly changing) list of prices. When we stop to camp I set out what’s available. It’s an honour system. Everyone has a page in the bar book, and writes down each drink they have with the price next to it. This is of one of my pages. The prices just kill me! 40 cents for a shot of scotch! 35 cents for a coke!





A couple of people don’t drink much, but most of us drink quite a bit. The honour system works well most of the time. After one night of particularly heavy drinking by Cameron and Brett I see the next day there’s not much scotch left, and not much written in the book. Too drunk to remember or care. Grrr. I trust Brett when he’s drinking with Craig. When he’s drinking with Cameron not so much.

After dinner drinks – you can see the bottles clustered at the end of the table.





We usually camp in the middle of nowhere, wherever it’s safe to drive a little way off the road, away from villages, away from thieves. We are completely self-sufficient. In the middle of the  jungle in central Africa we come across a church – it’s a clearing in the ever-encroaching greenery with a makeshift alter from wood, and logs laid on the ground as pews. There’s no one around. It’s the perfect place to camp.





Every travelling day, as we’re trundling along, inevitably the conversation turns to food. For hours. We’re living on an adequate, if not sparse then certainly uninteresting diet. We dream of, and talk about, all the things we can’t have, like bread, like butter, like steak, and ice cream, like treats and desserts. It is here in the middle of Africa that I first learn about Nanaimo Bars, a staple of Canadian bakeries and coffee shops. Along with what’s going in, or we wish was going in our bodies from the top, we also talk a lot about what’s coming out the other end. Speaking of which, the toilet is behind whatever convenient bush you can find a little way from camp. Unless there are no bushes.





The non-perishable food stocks on the truck include tea bags, instant coffee, milk powder, cocoa, flour, sugar, oats, pasta, rice, some herbs and spices, cooking oil, vinegar, salt and pepper, canned mystery meat, canned tomatoes and other vegetables, and tall cans of things I call frankfurts. Americans would call them hot dogs, perhaps others would call them sausages. Either way they’re dire.

We stop almost every traveling day at a local market to buy whatever fresh food we can find to augment the truck stocks. There’s meat available, often goat, but we never buy it, not trusting the cleanliness of the butchering process. Also the skinned monkeys look far too much like babies to even consider them.











At a small deeply-shaded market in the middle of the jungle women are sitting on the ground, their items for sale displayed on banana leaves. One women has tomatoes, maybe six or seven of them. They are the only tomatoes available. We buy them all.

A man walks down the quiet road carrying an entire stem of bananas. He is happy to trade it for a couple of our large empty cans.

We cook with fire. The sand-mats that hang on the side of the truck for crossing the Sahara are raised each end by metal storage boxes, and the fire built beneath, thus creating a surface for pots and the kettle.





Sometimes we stop just to make a cup of tea: build a little fire at the side of the road and put the kettle on. It doesn’t take long to get the caffeine hit we need.





Lunch prep at the side of the road:








Dinner is served:





What we eat is not memorable. Breakfast is almost always porridge, with some raisins if we’re lucky. Lunch is frequently some kind of cold rice salad with bits added to it – tomatoes, pineapple, onion, peanuts. Dinner is pasta and something, rice and something, some kind of stew. It’s all very basic but nourishing enough. I figured out the best thing to do with those dire canned sausages was to mash them up and add onions and canned tomatoes and make a kind of spaghetti bolognese.

Apart from my own birthday, there are four more birthdays during the four months we are on the road. I make birthday cakes on the campfire. Like this: beat up a batter of flour sugar baking powder oil cocoa. After dinner get a big pile of red hot coals. Put the biggest pot on the coals. Put the batter in the smallest pot with the lid on and put it inside the biggest pot. Surround the smallest pot with coals and cover its lid with coals, put the lid on the biggest pot and cover it with coals. Bank the coals up around the biggest pot. Wait. When it’s time (intuition) I pull the oven apart there’s the cake. Mary’s birthday:





Cameron’s birthday:








The truck is our home. Our personal gear is stowed under the bench seats. There is always an assortment of laundry and towels hanging from the ceiling. We do laundry wherever/whenever we can. One morning Brett hangs his laundry in the truck. Lynne and I pull it down piece by piece and wring it out. Brett sees us and thanks us. No Brett! We’re not wringing out your laundry for you. We’re doing it so it doesn’t drip all over us. And so it goes. All of us crowded into a truck discovering foreign lands and each other.





The truck has long-range fuel tanks; extra suspension springs are strapped to the exterior, and other spares including gaskets, filters, oil and grease are stowed away on board.

In various places we find banks to cash travellers’ cheques. In a few places we go to the local post office to mail letters home, ever hopeful they will be delivered, and ever hopeful there will be a letter at poste restante waiting to be collected. There rarely is.

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It all seemed normal to me, this camping, and cooking over fire, washing where we could, peeing in the bush, and living with a bunch of strangers in a truck. I think it did to all of us, if not initially then certainly by the end. We were on this huge amazing adventure, and if it presented us with challenges, well that’s what made it an adventure and we just got on with it. We drove for days through mud. We literally built a bridge, and repaired another. We crossed the Sahara. We encountered interesting and curious and helpful people. And then there were the many  conversations around the campfire, sometimes rowdy and hilarious, sometimes quiet and contemplative. We traversed the entire continent being almost completely self-sufficient. It truly was epic. Four months, twelve people, one truck, 18,000 kilometres.







Next post:  we go straight west across the south of Sudan – one of the locals gets sick eating our food, most of us get sick eating theirs; a curious local appears in the night, and returns next morning with friends and family.

Disclosure:
1. I’ve changed the names of everyone involved for privacy
2. Obviously any photo with me in it was taken by another member of the group, but I’ve no idea who.





All words and images by Alison Louise Armstrong unless otherwise noted
© Alison Louise Armstrong and Adventures in Wonderland – a pilgrimage of the heart, 2010-2024.