Walking across Africa solo without any kind of support is a serious undertaking. The dangers, obstacles and difficulties include lions, snakes, scorpions, land mines, tropical diseases, heat, exhaustion, drunken drivers and bandits.
I’d given all these matters careful thought before setting out but the biggest single obstacle was one I’d never anticipated. For 10 weeks my whole expedition turned into a ghastly moral parable of wasted time, squandered money and unrealistic schemes aimed at making my life easier.
Starting on Namibia’s Skeleton Coast, I left the coastal breeze behind, the midday temperatures in the Namib Desert soaring – the surface temperature of the sand can reach 70°C. Carrying an 80lb rucksack through this heat proved so demoralising that I abandoned the trek temporarily.
The situation was serious and required lateral thinking. The problem was the weight I was carrying. A flash of insight produced the answer: if I bought a donkey, it could carry the gear. I’d do the walking and we’d be a great team.
Along the Kuiseb River Valley, a local trader sold me a small, mournful-looking creature called Tsondab (in the Nama language, it means Where You Get Stuck) after the notoriously muddy Tsondab River, where donkeys often get bogged down). In hindsight, the donkey’s name should have aroused my suspicions. I should have taken him on approval only.
As a trial run, I took him for a 20-mile walk through the desert. We crossed the dry Swakop River bed without a problem despite worries that Tsondab would prove true to his name and we’d flounder in the glutinous mud beneath. At first he was on his best behaviour, trotting along briskly across the vast empty gravel flats. An hour later our roles reversed and I was virtually dragging him along every step. Then he suddenly switched to full gallop and charged off into the desert like a racehorse.
After three hours, I abandoned the chase and plodded back to the coast alone, crossing a seemingly endless sea of light-apricot dunes, sinking up to my ankles at every step. Back on the coast I had to rehire the local guys who’d sold me the donkey. They tracked him in the desert and returned him to me long after midnight, much to general merriment.
After Tsondab’s failed escape attempt we made some small progress over the next few weeks as I trained him for his big adventure. Our daily walks around the outskirts of the small coastal town of Walvis Bay made us minor celebrities, especially after we appeared on the front page of the local paper under the headline, Tsondab is a naughty boy!
But when finally we set out inland, disaster struck. After covering less than one mile, Tsondab was ready to collapse and I realised that if I took him heavily laden into the desert he’d die. Fortunately a Good Samaritan farmer took pity on our plight and offered Tsondab food and shelter. Several days later, I learnt from a vet that Tsondab had caught an equine venereal disease.
“Man, you need a mule for your journey,” the farmer told me. “Mules are half-donkey and half-horse: they’re stronger and tougher than either.”
This sounded like the way forward. I bought a dark chestnut mule called Marieke, several times the size of the diminutive Tsondab. But the sheer strength of the creature unnerved me: when tethering a mule to a tree you have to choose the tree carefully or the mule will run off with the tree. They can also kill you easily with a well-placed kick. This may sound unmanly, I told the farmer, but I find mules scary. “Man, I’ve worked with mules all my life and they still frighten me!” he replied.
Then in a bizarre act of misplaced generosity the farmer presented me with a second mule. This new addition to the team, Lucifer, was completely untamed, jet black and evil-looking.
By this stage of my solo walk across Africa I was the owner of one donkey and two mules, and getting nowhere. My mule-training programme was failing utterly. A pack animal was meant to make my journey easier but the whole expedition was spiralling out of control.
I went into denial. Clutching at straws, I bought a donkey cart for the mules to pull. Terrified of the moment when I would have to set off with these creatures, I spent two weeks giving it a highly artistic paint-job, in the process creating the most beautiful donkey cart in Namibia. I was putting the cart before the horse, literally.
Finally, I accepted the inevitable: in two-and-a-half months with the animals, we’d covered only one mile. If I were to cross Africa on foot, this whole charade with animals had to end, immediately.
A return to Plan A – carrying all my gear myself – now seemed wonderfully simple. I jettisoned every item of kit I could possibly live without and the farmer kindly gave the three animals a home. I carried on alone, the relief so palpable I found myself singing “Morning has broken”.
I realised the moral of the story. I’d been my own worst enemy. The very appeal of walking across Africa had been to do something exceptionally difficult.
During the lengthy fiasco with pack animals, all my attempts to find the easy option had broken every ground rule of the expedition and left me with nothing except the knowledge that there aren’t any shortcuts on journeys like this. But I did eventually cross Africa on foot solo – exactly as I had planned it in the first place.
Fran Sandham’s account of his journey, ‘Traversa’, is published by Duckworth, £16.99
