Blog

The last of the fresh meat. I don’t take a fridge along on my journeys; just a coolbox, for what that’s worth in the African heat. So, perishable food only lasts for the first day, or three, while still passing through the Middle World. Here, one can supplement with food bought from the locals – coal-fried chicken, some wonderful coal-fired buns, grilled maize cobs, cassava, wild spinach… After that, once I get into the wilderness proper, the mainstay becomes dry food, like grains, nuts, cured fruit, and what the wonders of preservation technology can bring to the palette. Most...

Getting to those truly untouched parts of wilderness that I prefer, means eventually running out of any form of road or track. Then starts the undertaking of moving through bush. Moving through virgin African bush is not for the faint-hearted. It is an undertaking that pushes human and machine close to their limits. Sometimes, for stretches where the terrain is not steep and the growth not too dense, one is able to meander along quite pleasantly in roughly the desired direction, even if it means setting the Old Man to run over a few shrubs or young trees. Sometimes...

I am careful to either avoid places where I might get stuck, or work on crossings beforehand to ease the passage. But sometimes it just takes fate, or a slight error in judgement, and then… This little ditch seemed minor. The front wheels actually mounted the step-up quite gamely, but then the rear end of the body caught on the slab of rock with the rear wheel spinning in fresh air. The jack point was too low off the rock to get the hi-lift in, and there was simply no space to crawl under the vehicle to get a...

Now that The Time has drawn close there is, wedged between the not-so-routine-routine of farm life, those special-flavoured stretches, when I pull the old bush truck over the pit in the workshop to check for play on bushes and bearings, or something that had come lose, or tell-tale signs of oil or fuel or water seeps, or troubling sounds, and to carefully repair or replace, and to service. I allow myself a some indulgence, to fiddle unhurriedly; to make that special bush tool, just for the sake of its elegance, or to tinker with something that is  already working,...