North Africa - 1

In the early summer of 1964 Michael Atkinson, an Etonian whom I had worked with at Bernard Mizeki, hitched up to visit me at Keele from Cambridge, where he was reading classics. He came to discuss the proposal that we should spend the three-month summer vac travelling down to Southern Rhodesia to revisit the school. We would do it overland, crossing the Sahara on one of the great highways through Algeria, then making our way through Central Africa - somehow avoiding the Congo, which was a mess - to Uganda and Kenya, after which we would follow the route we had hitched together the previous year down to Southern Rhodesia.

It was a ludicrous plan, given the time we had and the fact that we would have to be back in England by October, but we set about implementing it with innocent - or was it almost criminally careless - enthusiasm. We did little research, relying on the sort of day-to-day luck we had enjoyed on our previous expedition. We had no fixed route, no plan for if anything went seriously wrong, no insurance that would get us home if we were ill, and the only way of contacting home in an emergency would have been by telegram.

However, we agreed that to hitch the whole way might be difficult so we made it a load harder for ourselves by buying a vehicle, which I financed by asking my great uncle, Sir Stanley Reed, for £500, a very large sum in those days, which he happily gave me on condition that I wrote to him so he too could enjoy the adventure. With £350 of the money I bought an ex-War Department Land Rover which, for some obscure reason, I named Olga Omo. Within days of buying her she began emitting clouds of dense white smoke: she had a cracked cylinder block which resulted in rapid corrosion of the cylinder head gasket which allowed the cooling water into the cylinders. It was a major problem but, undeterred, I bought some extra gaskets and, on 5th July, we left Amberheath for the Dover-Calais ferry.

By the 9th we were in southern Spain where Olga broke down. Neither of us had any mechanical knowledge but a local garage fixed the problem - a minor one involving the points in the distributor - and we....

....crossed from Gibraltar to Tangiers the following day. I was ecstatic, back in Africa in a part of the continent I had not visited before, at the beginning of another great adventure which might, just might, enable me to find a job and not have to return to England.