Africa S Great North Road In A Vw Camper

Emma and I most cordially invite you to accompany us as our special arm-chair guest on an overland journey through the most exciting continent on the Planet Earth. We shall begin our journey in Cape Town, South Africa in the fall of 1964. During the following ten months we will travel and camp along Africa's Great North Road. A variety of recently created nations and peoples, a few still struggling to be free, will be visited, among them, South Africa, Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), Zambia, Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda and the Congo. There are, at present, more than 700 separate tribes living south of the Great Sahara Desert. Obviously all of them cannot be included. However, we will visit and camp-out with the typical African where he lives, whether it be an Afrikaner living in one of the exclusive multi-level homes cut into the rock cliffs overlooking the Bay of Cape Town surrounded by twelve-foot walls capped with broken glass and razor wire or a Wanderobo tribesman dressed in a loincloth and carrying a bow and sheath of poisoned arrows met along a primitive dusty track running through the Bush country of Tanzania. Our self-contained VW camper gave us the freedom to camp along the streets of any city or village or along the track where Native Africans were living much as they have for many hundreds of years. Please be prepared, watching people and so-called "wild" animals can take many hours and, in some instances, the supply of daylight runs out. Frequently camp was made along the track out in the Bush and was visited by elephants during the night or a pride of lions stopping by to sharpen their claws on our tires. In one instance several elephants stripped branches off a tree under which we were camped - not one of them touched the camper! It was not unusual to be awakened early in the morning by curious men, women and children who wondered what we were doing; curious but quiet and polite. We never experienced an unpleasant incident while camped out in the Bush. Getting lost in the Congo could have been a fatal mistake! My lack of attention exposed us to an outlaw group of renegades left over from the Tanzania-Uganda War. A serious effort has been made throughout to record the details and opinions as the events took place and our conclusions were formulated. The events, we think, have been accurately recorded. The opinions represent our personal interpretations and tentative conclusions. It is our sincere hope that an open-minded reading of our book will increase the degree of public conscious awareness, with respect to the critical predicament of the African peoples, their culture, environment, wildlife and other natural resources.

Emma and I most cordially invite you to accompany us as our special arm-chair guest on an overland journey through the most exciting continent on the Planet Earth. We shall begin our journey in Cape Town, South Africa in the fall of 1964. During the following ten months we will travel and camp along Africas Great North Road. A variety of recently created nations and peoples, a few still struggling to be free, will be visited, among them, South Africa, Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), Zambia, Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda and the Congo. There are, at present, more than 700 separate tribes living south of the Great Sahara Desert. Obviously all of them cannot be included. However, we will visit and camp-out with the typical African where he lives, whether it be an Afrikaner living in one of the exclusive multi-level homes cut into the rock cliffs overlooking the Bay of Cape Town surrounded by twelve-foot walls capped with broken glass and razor wire or a Wanderobo tribesman dressed in a loincloth and carrying a bow and sheath of poisoned arrows met along a primitive dusty track running through the Bush country of Tanzania. Our self-contained VW camper gave us the freedom to camp along the streets of any city or village or along the track where Native Africans were living much as they have for many hundreds of years. Please be prepared, watching people and so-called wild animals can take many hours and, in some instances, the supply of daylight runs out. Frequently camp was made along the track out in the Bush and was visited by elephants during the night or a pride of lions stopping by to sharpen their claws on our tires. In one instance several elephants stripped branches off a tree under which we were camped not one of them touched the camper!

Dot Bekker was born and raised in Bulawayo in the south-west of Zimbabwe. After thirty-eight years away ¬- twenty of those in Europe - she decided to return to the country of her birth; however rather than hop on a plane, Dot chose to drive there: all by herself at the age of sixty, in a twenty-year-old 2WD Ford Transit van that she converted into her home. Dot spent eight and a half months covering 20,000km of some of the toughest overlanding routes in the world, through West and Central Africa. This is her story.Follow Dot's extraordinary 20,000km adventure in her first book, Going Home to Africa, where she describes the ups and downs she faced over the course of her grand expedition: the countries, the people, insane traffic, corrupt borders, marriage proposals, perilous potholes and good old Africa Roadside Assistance.Her fascinating journal also highlights the varied landscapes and cultural history of Africa that she discovered along the way, the strange, funny and sometimes terrifying situations that she encountered, and the numerous challenges that she and BlueBelle endured - all the while navigating her own personal internal journey.At the time of writing Dot still lives in and travels with BlueBelle whenever possible and can be seen out and about meeting people and making things happen in her beloved Zimbabwe. Since her return to Bulawayo, Dot has been tirelessly seeking ways to improve the future for rural communities in Zimbabwe. Her twenty years of business coaching experience is helping to enhance their traditional lifestyle with 21st Century technology in order to actively encourage sustainable development. Another of her passions is giving vulnerable and disadvantaged girls access to education, to which end she created the non-profit organisation, Kusasa. She very much believes that making progress in the gender equality/equity agenda through education is vital for her country.She is also already working on the sequel to Going Home in Africa, which will detail the experience of returning to her homeland and the many joys and challenges she has faced since her return, it will be titled Being Home in Africa.Alongside all this, she has also decided to encourage more women to visit Africa and will be running small women-only group tours from 2022 in Zimbabwe, Namibia and South Africa. Watch her Facebook page for details of Going Home to Africa Tours.To find out about Dot's journey as it continues, look at @goinghometoafrica on Facebook and Instagram or on the website www.goinghometoafrica.com for blogs and updates. To find out about the girls' education fund, look at @kusasa.africa on Facebook and Instagram or on the website www.kusasa.africa.

It was invented immediately after the war, in the factory a far-sighted English military man had set up to turn the German economy from making machines of warfare to more pacific products. By the seventies that dream had been amply fulfilled, as the VW Campervan became the conveyance of choice for West Coast hippies, Australian surf bums and Europeans taking the overland route to find enlightenment and good karma in India. It had also become – indeed, still is – the first choice for any couple, or family, seeking a cheap camping holiday with wheels attached. So never mind the oddly off-centre driving wheel, the vagaries of the aircooled rear engine – the VW Campervan had become more than a vehicle – it had truly become a way of life. Mike Harding’s first ride in a Volkswagen Camper Van was back in 1961, when it was the carrying around the gear and bandmembers of his rock band the Manchester Rainmakers. Finally, in 2009, he could wait no longer, and bought his own, a 2001 Type 2 bay window Brazilian import Danbury conversion in hot orange and off white. Add in the endless curiosity of the author of eight monographs on church architecture, and the hilarious sense of humour of one of Britain’s best stand-up comics, and you have a wonderful social history of the postwar years through the prism of a single transport icon.

Join photographer Dan Grec on his epic 999 day expedition circumnavigating the entire African continent. With vibrant images from 35 African nations, Dan beautifully captures the warmth and happiness of everyday people, the wild surprise of safari and the astonishing landscapes found throughout the mighty continent. Covering 54,000 miles, Dan fulfilled his life-long dream of exploring Africa while living, cooking, sleeping and traveling at the helm of his Jeep Wrangler Rubicon. A must for any adventurous spirit, you will be captivated by images of Africa and her beautiful people, and may just begin your own grand African adventure.

In their book Drive Nacho Drive, Brad and Sheena Van Orden traded the American Dream for the open road, and set off in their temperamental 1984 VW van named "Nacho." After thirteen months of humorous and sometimes demoralizing misadventures along the Pan-American Highway, our intrepid subjects eventually arrived at the southernmost town in the world in Tierra del Fuego. This is where 927 Days of Summer picks up the trail. After shipping Nacho from Argentina to Malaysia on a container ship, Brad and Sheena resume their journey, this time with the ambitious goal of driving all the way around the world. When they roll out of the shipping container onto Malaysian soil, their odometer turns over 300,000 miles. Is Nacho really up for the brutal journey ahead? This hilarious and harrowing tale cuts through the sweltering jungles of Southeast Asia to the buzzing hornet's nest of India, from the remote Nepalese Himalayas to the stony hills of Anatolia, on to the Sahara Desert of Africa, through Europe and beyond. Whether dodging rickshaws on crater-filled roads, defying Maoist rebels on cliff-hanging Himalayan tracks, getting hopelessly stuck in the desert on the Pakistani border, or becoming the subjects of an international missing persons case in the remote mountains of Laos, there is never a dull moment in 927 Days of Summer. Come along as a diverse cast of characters guides our determined travelers through a world of unfolding landscapes and cultures on the road trip to end all road trips, and then ask yourself: can you really just go home, unpack, and eat a sandwich?

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A searing, deeply moving memoir of illness and recovery that traces one young woman’s journey from diagnosis to remission to re-entry into “normal” life—from the author of the Life, Interrupted column in The New York Times ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post, Bloomberg, The Rumpus, She Reads, Library Journal, Booklist • “I was immersed for the whole ride and would follow Jaouad anywhere. . . . Her writing restores the moon, lights the way as we learn to endure the unknown.”—Chanel Miller, The New York Times Book Review “Beautifully crafted . . . affecting . . . a transformative read . . . Jaouad’s insights about the self, connectedness, uncertainty and time speak to all of us.”—The Washington Post In the summer after graduating from college, Suleika Jaouad was preparing, as they say in commencement speeches, to enter “the real world.” She had fallen in love and moved to Paris to pursue her dream of becoming a war correspondent. The real world she found, however, would take her into a very different kind of conflict zone. It started with an itch—first on her feet, then up her legs, like a thousand invisible mosquito bites. Next came the exhaustion, and the six-hour naps that only deepened her fatigue. Then a trip to the doctor and, a few weeks shy of her twenty-third birthday, a diagnosis: leukemia, with a 35 percent chance of survival. Just like that, the life she had imagined for herself had gone up in flames. By the time Jaouad flew home to New York, she had lost her job, her apartment, and her independence. She would spend much of the next four years in a hospital bed, fighting for her life and chronicling the saga in a column for The New York Times. When Jaouad finally walked out of the cancer ward—after countless rounds of chemo, a clinical trial, and a bone marrow transplant—she was, according to the doctors, cured. But as she would soon learn, a cure is not where the work of healing ends; it’s where it begins. She had spent the past 1,500 days in desperate pursuit of one goal—to survive. And now that she’d done so, she realized that she had no idea how to live. How would she reenter the world and live again? How could she reclaim what had been lost? Jaouad embarked—with her new best friend, Oscar, a scruffy terrier mutt—on a 100-day, 15,000-mile road trip across the country. She set out to meet some of the strangers who had written to her during her years in the hospital: a teenage girl in Florida also recovering from cancer; a teacher in California grieving the death of her son; a death-row inmate in Texas who’d spent his own years confined to a room. What she learned on this trip is that the divide between sick and well is porous, that the vast majority of us will travel back and forth between these realms throughout our lives. Between Two Kingdoms is a profound chronicle of survivorship and a fierce, tender, and inspiring exploration of what it means to begin again.

Searching for even more wild places and new experiences, Dan became determined to explore 'off the map' in Africa. From the mighty Sahara Desert in the north to the dense equatorial jungles of the Congo and the open grasslands of Southern Africa, Dan turned his biggest dream into reality. Over the course of three years Dan's second major expedition spanned fifty-four thousand miles through thirty-five unique African countries. THE ADVENTURE WAS A THOUSAND TIMES BIGGER THAN HE DREAMED POSSIBLE. After exploring the Pan-American Highway from Alaska to Argentina Dan became hooked on the freedom of global overland travel, and he only wanted more. New languages, exotic foods, stunning landscapes and local people with an entirely different outlook became Dan's everyday life. As the months turned into years, through highlights and despair Dan gained a new appreciation for what it truly means to be alive. Viewing our modern world through African eyes gave Dan a new perspective, and he was pulled in by the endless joy, laughter and kindness at every turn. While the landscapes and wildlife are undeniably breathtaking, it is the natural warmth of the African people that is truly unforgettable. All across the continent Dan was welcomed with love and generosity, and now he will never be the same.