The End

Colnago, Bianci, Scott, Specialized and many others are the brand names of the top end road bikes climbing up Chapman's Peak Drive, the terrifying toll road cut into the mountain of the Cape Peninsula. If we lose control of the car on the twisty bends here it's a 200 ft drop straight into the Atlantic. 

But as we approach Cape Town the road flattens out and smart bars and cafes start to appear, until at Lui Bay the scene is more like California than Africa. The broad white-sand beach is crowded with colourful umbrellas, and teenagers are playing multiple games of barefoot soccer. 

At Camps Bay there are spectacular modern apartments built clinging to the cliffside. Clearly this is where the very rich like to live. We seem somehow to have completly left Africa behind and are now in another place, monied and privileged. Beautiful hotels, chic bars and restaurants, art galleries, manicured public spaces,  and all the trappings of modern city living. The appalling shanty town we saw on the beach not 20km back is from a different world. 

But Camps Bay is where our journey ends. We crossed the finish line and were sprayed with Graham Beck Blanc de Blanc  - Alex's new favourite fizz. There was whooping, horn blowing, high fives, hugs, photos, many swigs of the Blanc de Blanc. Tracy and Jamie are there to congratulate us and take a ride on the footplate of Rhubarb and Custard. 

The cars were lined up for a concourse photo and the party was in full swing when one of the Alfa's started to smoke and the engine burst into flame. There was a scramble for fire extinguishers and two were used to put the fire out whilst everyone went in close for a look (not me - I moved as far away as possible). It was a sad moment for Philip and Eva, the Alfa's owners, and the car had to be towed to the hotel. But it kind of summed up the spirit of the rally. You never know what's going to happen next, but you can be sure there are plenty of friends who will be there with you - through the bad moments and the good. 

Keep Chooching. 

Last Day for the Beard

The Western Cape

At a certain point as you travel west across the Karoo  God throws a switch and suddenly the brutal semi- desert landscape becomes green and lush, with vineyards and cornfields and rich countryside. 

At first I thought this landscape was like England but on a giant scale - Duplo compared to Lego bricks perhaps.  But then the monstrous mountain ranges appeared, one after another, and I realised this was something ekse, a unique landscape - as if the Rocky Mountains had been plonked down across rural France. 

There are even French names on some of the vineyards, but I think this is a pretention as the only accents we have heard are Afrikaan. We did however get to talk the language of wine at a delightful tasting. I was driving but the Skall did a full and thorough review of the offer. His recommendation ("Bloody good stuff this") is Graham Beck Blanc de Blanc 2013 Vintage fizz available from Bibendum in Primrose Hill. 

We did great work in today's test sections but I think we are still lying third in our class. We busted a wheel today but it was bashed back into shape with a large hammer. 

Cape Town tomorrow.  

The Karoo

In December 1895 Leander Starr Jameson took an armed force from British territory into the independent Boer state of Transvaal, with the intention of a surprise raid on Johannesburg. The objective was control of the Transvaal's enormous gold fields, which Cecil Rhodes wanted to add to his De Beers diamond empire. 

To suprise the Boers, Jameson's men cut the telegraph wires to Cape Town. As a result they failed to get the British Government's urgent message to stand down. At the same time they mistook a fence for the telegraph line to Johannesburg so that the Boers were able to be warned in advance of Jameson's plans. 

Jameson was easily captured by the Boers, and his botched raid was the immediate cause of the terrible Second Boer War. The British relatively quickly won the battlefield but the Boers retreated into the Karoo - a huge semi desert area with terrifying mountain ranges - and fought a guerilla war. 20,000 Boers -  including many women and children - died in British concentration camps before a peace treaty was signed. 

It's almost impossible to believe that anyone can live in the Karoo. Temperatures rise to 45 degrees (only 42 on our visit) and the area is utterly hostile to life, with almost no surface water. Even today with modern roads the mountain passes (know as Drifts by the Boers) are hard work and slow driving. 

Before the Boers, the area was filled with game, but when underground water was discovered the land was turned over to sheep and ostrich farming - the feathers were incredibly valuable in European fashion salons. Diamonds were discovered in Kimberly and a railway line was built across the desert. 

The curious result of all this money flowing into the Karoo is that the little towns that sit on the insufferable plain are surprisingly cultured and elegant. Colonies of artists and writers sprung up, and even today the smart streets of Victorian properties support arts and crafts and delightful coffee houses. The homemade cooking is terrific everywhere.  It's as if the terrain is so harsh that the locals desperately need something soft and soulful in their lives. 

This is a brutal place with a brutal history. It's a landscape that made me shudder slightly, but this is also the kindest and warmest welcome we have had along the road. I like the Karoo very much. 

The Wild Coast

The Thembo family are the chiefly tribe in the village of Mvezo in South Africa's Wild Coast region. This is an area where several large rivers make their way to the Indian Ocean and as a result the land is deeply scored with valleys and steep sided hills. Even today the roads are tortuous and difficult. One we travelled had a sign for the local Spar supermarket announcing, 'Only 133 bends to go'. These are not roads you want brake failure on. 

It's perhaps strange then that such an isolated village as Mvezo should produce a chief of the Thembos who won the Order of Lenin and the Nobel Peace Prize and who became South Africa's first black President - Nelson Mandela. But maybe growing up in such wild country was good preparation for becoming a guerilla fighter. 

If you can bear the tortuous journey into and out of this region you are well rewarded. The amazing coastline means that today the area has a booming tourist industry. Along the coast there are long beaches disturbed only by the surf of the ocean. The rivers flowing down to the sea support abundant fish and fish eagles. It's a good spot to be an angler. 

Nelson Mandela left his home town for the big city. In his case Johannesburg. In our case we press on for Cape Town and the finish line. 

POSH

We are often singing as we travel the road and our favourite tune has become 'POSH', Caracticus Potts travelling song from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. 

Here are the lyrics:

.

This is livin', this is style, this is elegance by the mile

Oh the posh posh traveling life, the traveling life for me

First cabin and captain's table regal company

Whenever I'm bored I travel abroad but ever so properly

Port out, starboard home, posh with a capital P-O-S-H, posh

The hands that hold the scepters, every head that holds a crown

They'll always give their all for me they'll never let me down

I'm on my way to far away tah tah and toodle-oo

And fare thee well, and Bon Voyage arrivederci too

O the posh posh traveling life, the traveling life for me

First cabin and captain's table regal company

Pardon the dust of the upper crust--fetch us a cup of tea

Port out, starboard home, posh with a capital P-O-S-H, posh

In every foreign strand I land the royal trumpets toot me

The royal welcome mat is out

They 21 gun salute me

But monarchies are constantly commanding me to call

Last month I miffed the Mufti but you can't oblige them all

Oh the posh posh traveling life, the traveling life for me

Oh rumpetly tumpety didy didy dee dee dee dee dee

Oh the posh posh traveling life, the traveling life for me

First cabin and captain's table regal company

When I'm at the helm the world's my realm and I do it stylishly

Port out, starboard home, posh with a capital P-O-S-H

P-O-S-H, P-O-S-H...

Durban

Africa is the land of the bungalow. It’s extremely rare to see a two storey house here, never mind a block of flats. Villages are made up of various types and styles of single storey houses, ranging from mud huts with thatched  roofs  up to substantial dwellings of modern bricks built in an architectural style broadly based on 1960's Worthing or Eastbourn. 

It's quite a shock therefore to arrive in Durban at the Oyster Box Hotel. This is a proper old school Victorian five star hotel, complete with uniformed porters wearing pith helmets, a 'Chukka' bar for post polo snifters and an Oyster Bar overlooking the amazing beach and foaming Indian Ocean. There's even a daily and legendary curry buffet for dinner. 

Whilst the Oyster Box only runs to five floors, it is surrounded by blocks of luxury flats and along the beach front is a very fine and immaculatly clean paved walkway used by joggers and dog walkers. This is the first pavement we have seen, theses are the first joggers we have seen and the dogs in leads are the first pets we have seen. Is this really Africa?

In the distance lies Durban proper, a huge collection of tall steel and glass buildings. An actual real city - quite a shock to us after so many miles through open countryside. 

In the future will the rest of Africa start to look more like Durban and less like the sprawling villages that we've seen elsewhere?  I'm not sure. Durban has a magnificent port that connects it to the rest of the world and especially to the middle and far east. Most of Africa is remote and difficult to get to. My guess is that African towns will continue to be a mixture of mud, markets and minibuses and that the Durban world of millionaires and Martinis will be as alien to most Africans as it is to the residents of Worthing or Eastbourne. 

For now however we can enjoy a sundowner to the sound an smells of the sea, anticipating the very good dinner that is to follow. 

We wait for help

So, we lost our brakes on a regulatory or test section on a gravel track through the mountains yesterday. It wasn’t much fun as the edge of the track led to an unpleasant end for Rhubarb and Custard, and possibly us too. 

We finished the test (I didn’t tell Alex we had no way of stopping) and then tried to adjust the brakes without much luck. The professionals arrived and they had a go but that didn’t work either. 

However, we decided to drive the rest of the dirt without brakes and get the car onto tarmac where it would be easier to work on. But unknown to us one of the Bentleys had crashed and our suppprt vehicle left us to help the Bentley. This turned out to be a major effort and we didn’t see them again until the morning. 

By this time I had already cursed R&C to Kingdom Come and more or less had it heading for the scrap yard. But the team sorted us in the morning and we set off with the brakes repaired and only 30 mins late. 

So despite losing a lot of time on the regularity we are still lying 3rd in our class. 

School

Wherever we go people wave and whistle at us - everyone likes an old car. When we stop  people crowd around us and ask questions. Strangely, we are most often asked if we want to sell the car - I think they want to know what it is worth. 

Our biggest fans are schoolchildren. They really put some energy into their whoops and yells, they are brilliant whistlers, and they frequently run alongside us, trying to keep up. 

There are schoolchildren and schools everywhere along our route. At the end of the school day the sides of the roads are full of neatly uniformed children walking home from school - often long distances. Despite the heat they wear jumpers or blazers, whilst we swelter in shorts and T shirts. 

Some schools are little more than tin sheds but most are solid buildings with several classrooms and a playground. Back in Zambia Skall visited a school for 5-13 year olds. There was a classroom and teacher for each year and the school was well equipped. 

At the borders kids come around the cars asking for pens for school, but we think the pens are used as currency to swap for stuff they really want. There’s no real shortage of pens. 

One of our conclusions from this trip is that, if we want to give aid to Africa, then education is the thing to support. With education Africans can lift themselves  by their own bootstraps. 

But nothing here is easy. There used to be a Christian Aid slogan that ran, ‘Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day, teach a man to fish and you feed him for life’.  The trouble with that in Africa is that if everyone learns to fish they simply take all the fish out of the lake and you are back where you started. 

In the same way, it’s a great idea to educate everyone, but then they need jobs to go to at the end. Hopefully the bootstraps are strong enough to do the lifting. 

Brake Failure!

Disaster!  We have had break failure on one of the test sections of the rally. We still completed but it was a bit hairy. 

The sweeps (mechanics) helped us fix it but it failed again a few miles later. By that time they had gone to help another car. 

Hopefully it can be fixed this evening. 

An Update on the Rally

With only a few days to go Rhubarb & Custard is lying third in its class and provided we don’t break down or foul up that’s probably where we will end up at the finish line. We are simply too heavy to beat the faster cars on the speed sections so our only way of gaining on them are the regularities - but they keep getting cancelled. 

Breaking down is always a possibility. One of the Fangios has burnt out its clutch (again), one of the Mustangs lost fifth gear and reverse on the racetrack, the Ford Capri has retired hurt with a broken camshaft chain and the Shelby has lost an ‘H’ from its rear badge and so is now a Sell by. 

We have had problems with the passenger door starting to fall off, but we fixed that with a screwdriver. The handbrake has stopped working but that will be fixed later today. There’s oil leaking from the engine seals and the rear axle but not in a serious way. Otherwise all in good shape. 

Swaziland

We have discovered two other Buicks in Swaziland. One is a 1938 model and the other from the 1970s, both are huge limousines owned by Mswati III - king of Swaziland and kept in his car museum alongside the royal Cadillac. In fact that is the entire collection in the Museum, which is otherwise given over to pictures and statues of the royal family. 

Mswati has 17 wives and at least two palaces. We stayed in a third palace reserved for visiting heads of state. It’s set out as a series of houses in an estate, each one has a Royal Suite for the senior dignitary and smaller suites for his or or her (but this is Africa so his is correct) entourage. The Skall and I had the room reserved for the secret service detail, so we went around with our fingers held as guns and peering around corners. 

Swaziland shouldn’t really exist as the British plan was to make it part of S. Africa. But a combination of guile, legal manoeuvring and bribery kept most of the kingdom intact and independent. 

It’s a beautiful place, very hilly, a cross between Scotland and the lower parts of the Alps. The approach road into the capital, Mbabane, is terrifying in an old car steep and twisty. We were in second gear the whole way to save the brakes. 

Mozambique and S.Africa between them have pretty much got Swaziland by the political balls. They took some of the King’s power away a few years ago and the Swazi Lilangeni is pegged to the S. African Rand. 

Still, Mswati still rules the roost domestically - although, perhaps with 17 wives his domestic life is more complicated than we think. 

Gargantuan Opportunity

“Africa will enjoy the most rapid rate of urbanisation of any continent over the next 20 years. The working age population will increase to overtake China and India. The number of middle-class Africans will grow exponentially. Almost 60m tourists visited Africa last year. As people travel more and seek new experiences, we think that figure will double or treble over the next 20 years. Africa is like Asia was 20 years ago. There is a gargantuan growth opportunity. Off the charts.”

Chris Nassetta, CEO Hilton Hotels quoted in the London Times, 21st October 2018

Sunset

God

Moses, Lazarus, Thomas, Samuel, I t’s common here for men to have biblical names. Religion is really big here, there are churches of all kinds of denominations and there are religious slogans on many of the buses and lorries. Even some of the street food vendors have boards saying, ‘God is salvation’, or ‘Glory to the Lord’, or something similar. 

One of the team members at Sabi Sands told us he was also a church pastor, he trained for two years in Johannesburg in order to qualify. So as well as serving us at table he also led the staff in daily worship and had a congregation of 200 back in his home village. When we asked him what kind of church he led he looked slightly surprised and replied, ‘Pentecostal, of course’.  He preaches from the New International Version, which I think means his teaching is conservative. Maybe that’s what we expect in close knit rural communities. 

On Sundays we have driven past churches holding services out doors and featuring impressive loudspeaker systems and smartly turned out congregations. It looks much more fun than a Church of England morning service. 

In Nigeria things have gone to the next level and their TV is full of religious channels promoting evangelical churches - along the American model. We’ve seen nothing like that in the countries we have visited. Maybe that’s because TV isn’t yet part of the everyday experience. For the present churches here seem to be a simple and traditional part of village life. 

The Masai

In the game parks we stay in tents or lodges and (in case we encounter a wild animal) we aren’t allowed to walk from our lodge to the bar or restaurant without a guide. In the Kruger we asked our guide what would happen if we met a lion on the path, ‘I phone for car’ was his reply. 

Back in Tanzania our guides were Masai. When we said we were ready to go back to our tent after dinner the barman didn’t say that our guide would be with us shortly he said, ‘Masai will come’. 

And in all our journey across Africa so far the Masai are the only tribe that we can distinguish. They are immensely tall and slim, they wear a distinctive red and black checked robe and - if they are smartly dressed - white sandles. But, what really distinguishes them is that they always, always carry a stick. In a group of schoolchildren you can tell the Masai because they have a stick and the rest don’t. 

There are Masai children herding cows along the road - they have a stick. In hotels there are Masai doormen and they have a stick. When they dance (and Masai dancing is basically a massive pogo session) they have a stick. Whether the stick is to herd animals or kill them we do not know. 

Indeed we have met many Masai and have learnt almost nothing about them. Karen Blixen wrote that they eat only milk and the blood of their cows and that as a result the women are sterile. We don’t know if that is still true today, but she also wrote that the Masai are the most elegant and self contained of all the African people and that remains the case nearly 100 years later. 

An Investment Opportunity?

Clouds!

Cows

Here are two numbers -  1,600 and 7,500. The first is the US Dollar GDP per head for Zambia and the second for both Botswana and South Africa. 

So even by the standards of its neighbours Zambia is poor, and you see the difference as soon as you cross the border into Botswana. Suddenly the houses are better, the roads are better, the cars and trucks on the roads are better. And - thank god - there is less litter (Africa is one filthy continent); but this isn’t because of greater wealth or more litter collectors, it’s because there are hardly any people in Botswana. - just over 2 million in a country the size of France. There are more cows than people here, somewhere around 3 million (mind you there are 3.5 million cows in France so Botswana has scope for a few more).

There’s a step change again into South Africa. Now the public toilets don’t fill you with horror, there are dual carriageways (never thought I would be so pleased to see one), recognisably proper houses and - wait for it - shopping centres (whoopee!). 

But hang on. At the top I said that Botswana and S. Africa had the same GDP per head. So how can S Africa be so much more developed? Well, there are more cows for a start (13.5 million) but that surely can’t be the answer. No, it’s the fact that S Africa has 55 million people that makes the difference. This is a big country with a big population and a big economy. With all due respect to Botswana, S. Africa is a real place and Botswana is basically a big ranch with a diamond mine and a game reserve attached.  

S Africa may not be the ‘real’ Africa experience, but it’s bloody interesting. We shall enjoy exploring it. 

The Way of The Chooch: Part 2

Some more rules for life that we have taken from the road. 

Swerving - Some problems aren’t worth solving. We’ve realised that swerving suddenly is very alarming in R&C which doesn’t have modern levels of roadholding. Accordingly we have agreed to simply run over anything smaller than a goat. 

The Straights - we are often on perfectly straight roads for miles and miles and miles. Very boring. But sometimes that’s just how the road is - it’s not always a thrill ride. 

Other Competitors - cars go past us all the time, and sometimes we see them going in a different direction or even in the opposite direction to us. You can drive yourself mad thinking about what they are all up to. We’ve learnt to ignore what others are doing and focus on our own rally. 

This is the Way of the Chooch.