The Next Couple of Weeks

I signed up with Jim Hyde and Ron Ayres’ combined little Discover Africa ride – Cape Town, South Africa to Windhoek taking in most of Namibia. All in all about 2,500 miles, mainly to places with dirt roads or no roads. Ron has promised that we will be “Dusty by Day: Dazzled by Night” so I assume I’ll be able to connect periodically and send photos along the way. Watch this space.

In preparation, to get my brain into Africa, a continent I have not visited before, I have been hitting the books and these are the highlights so far; hugely enjoyable whether you are heading for Africa or not. These are stories of extraordinary people in extraordinary times.

Into Africa by Martin Dugard – how Stanley met Livingstone and their fascination with Africa. Two Englishmen guided by very different histories and spirits but both drawn to Africa and adventure at the dawn of the European scramble for this continent.

West With The Night by Beryl Markham who grew up from the age of 6 in what is now Kenya. Spent life as a kid on the loose with the Masai, trained and bred horses, learned to fly and spotted elephants for Karen Blixen’s husband, and was the first person to fly the Atlantic solo from East to West. An interesting enough life but here is what Ernest Hemingway said about her in a letter to a friend … “Did you read Beryl Markham’s book, West With The Night? …She has written so well, and marvellously well, that I was completely ashamed of myself as a writer. I felt that I was simply a carpenter with words, picking up whatever was furnished on the job and nailing them together and sometimes making an okay pig pen. But this girl, who is to my knowledge very unpleasant and we might even say a high-grade bitch, can write rings around all of us who consider ourselves as writers … it really is a bloody wonderful book.”

The Mind of South Africa by Allister Sparks – tracing apartheid from the landing by the Dutch East India company at Cape Town in 1962 to the release of Nelson Mandela in 1991. An astonishing tale and a brilliantly written book.