Nick's Blog

Due to the Gregorian calendar, it is currently the year 2001 in Ethiopia. This means the War on Terror hasn’t happened yet and celebrity culture is in its infancy. Which, as you can imagine, is superb.

In fact, it’s so good that I’ve decided to put my head in the historical sand and move here; in an effort to avoid the Neo-Con killing spree and British culture dying on its arse, I am going to reside in Addis Ababa for the rest of my days.

Well obviously, not really. I couldn’t live in a city where everyone craps in the street and where the government limits free speech. Apart from London that is (a-ha, ha, ha etc. I bet Mark Thomas is shitting himself).

The food is also terrible, largely consisting of raw meet in a bland sauce served in a giant sanitary towel. As a cuisine it is unique, served nowhere else in the world. And given the state of my digestive system, this is no bad thing.

It’s not just the food that is distinctive. From my week stuck in this country waiting for visas and car repairs (you’ll be pleased to know, we both officially hate the car at the moment), it’s easy to conclude that Ethiopia is like nowhere else I’ve been to - and that includes Penge.

Despite its location firmly on the Horn of the continent, Ethiopia isn’t quite like the rest Africa. But then it’s not really like Arabia or Asia either. It’s stuck in its own bizarre wormhole.

This may be because Ethiopia is a hotch-potch of failed historical experiments; of Big Men committing mass-murder and subjugation. This country seems to have tried practically every form of despotism ever conceived from the feudalism of Haile Selassie, to the invasion of Italian fascism and the communism of Mengistu and the Derg. Naturally, these terrible egotists have left little idiosyncratic reminders of their rule.

You can turn the corner in Addis Ababa and arrive in a different era altogether. The brief Italian occupation means it’s possible to get a Starbucks-style Wankerchino on every street corner; the reign of the emperors has left behind a medieval gang of bizarrely robed priests, leprous beggars and conversations in the ancient Amharic language. Communism notches up a few points as monuments to collectivisation, fallen Cuban fighters and as pollution producing Ladas.

And then the modern world walks by in the foreground as an urban middle-class chatting away on mobile phones in Nike trainers. It’s not really 2001 here at all. It’s a combination of 1270, 1890, 1975 and a week ago last Thursday.

So we’ve spent our time doing the tourist bit, wondering round the museums and drinking our share of Wankerchinos. Despite the fact that the world’s first humanoid is on display here and there are loads of other top-class historical and ethnological artefacts to view, we really wanted to find a famous toilet.

The local story goes that Mengistu strangled the senile Haile Selassie with a bootlace and buried him under the en-suite toilet in his palace. Talk about a Royal Flush! (Yes. Sorry ‘bout that).

So we spent a few hours tramping round one of his palaces showing an unnatural interest in the bogs, looking for cracks in the floor to establish where the Lino concealing the Lion of Judah might be. Of course, we were in the wrong bloody palace and now look like a couple of perverts with an unnatural interest in Ethiopian lavatories.

Fortunately, we’ve done Addis to death now. When we get our car back tomorrow, we’re off to see a few things on the way to Sudan. We then plan to catch the weekly Wadi Halfa ferry to Aswan in Egypt on June 10th. This is going to be a tough 2,000kms in a short space of time but it needs to be done to get back by mid-July. Hopefully by then it’ll be sunny again and we’ll get our suntans back.

Bye.

I never write, I never upload what I’ve written and then suddenly I upload the three things I’ve written recently.

Given that I hate reading long emails, I’d wager this is like a band playing to an empty Odeon and that the audience really isn’t there.

But while there may be too many words to read in a busy week, I’m not going to write anything else for a while. So take your time ( he says, imagining that people do actually read this) and we’ll see you on the other side of the Ethiopian border.

Moron From Driving School

We were given a lift the other day by a man wearing the smallest shorts in the known universe. In his beige crack-grabbing hot pants, he looked like a bit like a leather loving Baydon-Powell.

Pair this with his unfortunate habit of being a touch too touchy-feely in female company, and he was pretty high on the social inadequacy scale. I imagine him at home now, wanking like an angry orchestra at his taxidermy collection.

To protect our female friends from his marauding hands, I sat in the front seat and, naturally, put on my seat belt. This caused our new chum to become outraged – I believe he said something like ‘take that fucking seat belt off’ as it was obviously an affront to his driving ability.

It was at this point I noticed a large hole in the windscreen. I asked how this had happened and he replied ‘that’s where my mother hit the window when my Dad had a heart attack at the wheel.’ It turns out that he was only keeping the car ‘for sentimental reasons’ and that his parents bodies were ‘in the boot until I can afford to get them stuffed and mounted.’

Okay. So he didn’t make the last comment, but he was an oddball who kept a car as a cherished memento to the day his parents very nearly died or very really died.

So if any young lady out there is interested, I’m pretty certain he’s single. I have his phone number so just let me know and he’s all yours.

Sex-Ban time bomb

The latest form of political protest to hit Kenya is a week-long sex ban by Kenyan women, which is being championed by the Prime Minister’s wife. It’s meant to encourage the PM and President to talk to each other as they seem to have fallen out quite badly and the business of government has ground to a halt.

As a result of the protest, the country seems to be a little on edge as sexually frustrated men roam the streets and write angry letters to the newspaper.

Their arguments for a reinstatement of their conjugal rights seemed fundamentally flawed. One of the top reasons is that a lack of action at home will lead to an increase in the HIV infection rate. Now I’m no immunologist, but that sounded like total balls to me - until I realised that all the men who would normally be shagging their wives will actually be visiting prostitutes instead.

And come next week, they’ll be back with their beloved, spreading AIDS to a whole new community of people.

But Ambassador, I’m spoiling you…

In the Bible, it is written that it is easier to pass a camel through the eye of a needle than it is to pass two idiots in a Land Rover through the Sudanese border. Amen, Ave Maria, etc., etc..

So it was always going to be a bit of a struggle to be awarded the right to drive across the desert to Egypt in 55 Celsius of sandstorms.

However, we have spent the last week scratching backs and hanging out with the big knobs until – suddenly, almost unexpectedly - we found ourselves in the Nairobi Embassy office of the First Secretary of the Republic of The Sudan. Our mission was to acquire a visa for his country; our tactic was to blow smoke up his nation’s backside until he acquiesced.

I thought that our enthusiastic eulogising may have been a touch over-the-top. Apparently, it was our lifetime ambition to see the confluence of the Blue and White Niles; we were keen amateur archaeologists who had always wanted to visit the pyramids of the Nubian Desert and we’d heard (and this is true) that the Sudanese are the friendliest people in Africa. Finally, we were big fans of the Mahdi and would love to see the place where he removed the pith-helmeted head of General Gordon with a big sword.

There then followed a brisk discussion about Indian democracy versus Sudan, Chinese economic reform versus Sudan and something to do with Malaysia versus Sudan. Frankly, after concentrating for so long I’d become a little geriatric, was more than a little confused and needed the toilet.

Despite this, it seemed to work out well because we’re the first Europeans in a long time to have been awarded visas to The Sudan in Kenya. Normally, only Kenyan citizens get them and it takes a month, so we’re very pleased with our networking and charming abilities.

And with that, we’re off to Ethiopia via Lake Turkana. If you want to know what Lake Turkana looks like, it’s the place where everyone gets murdered in The Constant Gardner. Although – family of mine – it is very safe now.

Bye.

It’s been a while. And a while ago I wrote some bollocks about climbing a mountain. It made sense back then but I’d had a hard time at high-altitude. It doesn’t seem to make much sense now though because I’ve had a very easy time by the sea - where there are useful things like oxygen and food.

So before we get to my aimless twatting about, it’s worth noting that for the last month we’ve been hanging around in Kilifi on the Kenyan coast. This has involved eating very edible fish curry cooked by very talented staff and being visited by all manner of charming and beautiful people. It has also meant night swimming in a phosphorescent ocean, throwing elephant shit at hippos to see what would happen (you can probably guess; our friend Neil doesn’t have to) and drinking gin and tonic while losing horribly at a new form of cards.

However, we’re in Nairobi now to try and persuade the Sudanese to let us into their country. We’ll also pop into the Irish Embassy to persuade them that I should be allowed to visit The Sudan because – apart from the Irish – nobody hates the Irish. Which means they’ll shoot that filthy British Imperialist Jake instead (he’s fine with this by the way).

However, the chances of this plan forming flawlessly is smaller than a gerbil’s genitals. If it doesn’t work out, we’ll try again in Addis, Asmara and Djibouti. Unfortunately, failure at this point could spell the end of our travels north and we may have to take to a pirate infested sea. Before contemplation of that possibility, we’re heading across the desert to Ethiopia in the next few days. The roads – where they exist - are meant to be the worst in Africa. Hoo-frigging-ray!

Right. On to mountains. For the definitive view, you probably want to read the first chapter of Mountains of the Mind and not what follows.

Fashion. It follows you everywhere. There is no escaping its vile grip on humanity.

In the UK, it finds form as a shower of Shoreditch shysters in champagne drainpipes; on Mount Kilimanjaro as American mountaineers in the most expensive and densest down a goose can produce.

Either way, there are groups of people who look and act the part; who seamlessly inhabit their environment and are prepared for all climatic and sartorial eventualities.

In Shoreditch, this has led to huge sales of twat hats to protect against the light London drizzle. On Kilimanjaro, it has led to groups of athletic Americans standing around talking about ice-climbing in 300 quid underpants.

Like the vast majority of people, I belong to the other group: those who think that men who wear drainpipes should be Sectioned or at least kicked firmly in the balls. And who also believe that turning up to climb a massive mountain in the correct clothes is at the very best cheating, and at the very worst, fascism.

It’s an opinion my climbing companion Bob, freshly flown out from Blighty to ascend Kilimanjaro, expressed perfectly (if a little too loudly) when he said: ‘So those Yanks have turned up. They’re physically fit, they’ve been ice-climbing and they’re wearing the right gear. Where the fuck is the challenge in that?’

It may have been at this stage that an unacknowledged competition broke out on Africa’s tallest peak. Like the American War of Independence, Britain would once again be fighting the USA, although this time the Sceptics couldn’t cheat by turning up with the French. But as lines were quietly drawn in the sand (or rather in the volcanic ash) our prospects looked bleak.

Mount Kilimanjaro is technically known in the mountain community as a Total Bastard. It is 5,895 meters high and has 70% less oxygen at the summit than at sea level; temperatures reach a chilly -20C and with a bit of wind chill thrown in, it can get quite cold. 10 tourists and around 20 porters die up there every year (although shamefully nobody officially counts porter deaths). It can be quite tough at the top.

To make it even more enjoyable, we’d also decided to take the challenging Machame Route having heard that the more popular routes were ‘like motorways of trekkers’. This meant camping; it meant hiring guides and porters and teams of cooks. It also meant our hand-picked and assembled crack squad had to carry all our food on their heads for six days. And come day six, I was a bit suspicious of the chicken which obviously hadn’t seen the inside of an egg for a while.

The Machame Route also meant scaling something ominously called the Branco Wall, spending a few too many days above 4,000 meters for it to be fun, and on the last cheerful afternoon out, walking for 17 hours up and down a big fucking hill.

But of course, as long as you’re prepared, all of this is a relative trifle.

I’d spent a few days in the Usambara Mountains climbing large hills in high temperatures to give my fitness level a bit of a poke. I then spent a day in Moshi, the town at the base of the mountain, trying to find something to wear other than swimming trunks. Fortunately, there has been an establishment renting out mountain gear since the 80s, which was the last time they washed the thermal pants I hired.

This ‘sweat resistant’ underwear was impregnated with the smells and stains of the 500 people who’d worn it before me. There were flecks of skin in the folds of the material and an unsightly hole in the crotch. This may have been an unfamiliar design feature for high-altitude flashing, or more likely, it was acquired through brisk scratching.

I was also equipped with a down jacket that made me look like a cross between Tim Westwood and a novelty sex toy. In all my get-up, I resembled a giant, dayglo inflatable dildo.

Bob’s preparation was somewhat worse than mine. After leaving Suffolk (altitude 7 meters, temperature 10C), travelling over 20 hours to Nairobi and getting the bus to Moshi (altitude 1700 meters, temperature 35C), he wasn’t exactly radiant with fitness.

We then spent an afternoon buying pharmaceutical sleeping drugs that are illegal in the UK and failing to rent cold weather sleeping bags. Then, in final preparation, we had a couple of beers. It seemed unlikely that Guinness were preparing to edit the record books, but Bob and I were to determined to defend our honour with vigour on the mountain and with lager in the bar afterwards. Go Team GB!

Before we set off for the slopes, we were given one of many briefings from our guide, a gentleman by the name of Future. As it turns out, Future did a nice line in prophecies and sage wisdom. Some of his inspiring high-altitude gems included:

Me: ‘Are you tired Future?’

F: ‘No. If I am tired, then the client dies.’

Me: ‘Oh. Good’

Me: ‘What’s happening tomorrow Future?’

F: ‘This is a mountain. Anything could happen.’

Which isn’t strictly true. Bumping into the Swedish Volley Ball Team and being served edible food seemed to be a long way down the list of possibilities.

So after our ‘briefing’ from Mr Mystic Meg, we set off for the mountain to begin the trek. The next few days went something like this:

7am – Get up after four hours sleep. Wonder why we haven’t rented cold weather sleeping bags. Accuse the other person of snoring / farting / talking in sleep and being responsible for warm sleeping bag acquisition.

7.30am – Make polite chit-chat with aforementioned Americans who were actually sickeningly nice and helpful. Consider bribing their guide to take a wrong turn.

7.35am – Say: ‘It’s not a competition, obviously – that would be dangerous and foolish. But we need to beat those fuckers up the mountain.’

7.45am – Begin daily 5,000 calorie intake by eating something that might be a sausage but tastes more like the inside of my long-johns.

8am – Start walking. Very, very slowly at the behest of Future who tells us we need to conserve our energy. Or die.

9am+ - Watch as Americans start clamouring all over the slopes trying to impress some girls from Norway.

12pm - Eat lunch. Probably themed around cucumber soup.

2pm - Camp. Eat second lunch. Probably themed around cucumber soup.

3pm - Play 30 games of Shit Head in tent while Americans leap athletically about while shouting ‘Yo! Team Norway! Over here!’

6pm - Eat dinner. Probably themed around cucumber soup.

7pm - Play 30 games of Shit Head.

8pm - Get high altitude hypochondria. Is that headache normal? Am I dying? Why is it so fucking cold?

9pm - Wonder why we haven’t rented cold weather sleeping bags.

10pm -Realise I need a piss but it’s also too cold to leave the tent. Convince myself I can make it until the morning.

10.05am - Take first of three pisses due to consumption of seven litres of water during the day.

7am – Get up with full bladder.

I’m sure you get the picture. The most important take-out is that we shivered all the time up there. My eyelashes froze together and my head torch got covered in ice. As a result, I wore and walked in all of my clothes at all times except when using the long drops – and after a few days I couldn’t tell where the smell of the latrines ended and I began.

And then came summit day.

The yanks seemed more prepared; they were toned and they were alarmingly sprightly. They wore the latest North Face weather-proof all-terrain gear and bragged about how well they slept because they were warm - then they laughed at us under their breaths for being cold and useless. They perspired healthiness and heartiness, whereas I perspired something the texture and taste of cucumber soup

To climb to the peak, we were awoken at midnight at 4,600 meters. After a brief round of worried diagnosis of our various medical ailments, we set off for the final push.

Unfortunately, Team America had a head start and gazing breathlessly up we could see the twinkle of their head lights a hundred meters above us. Fortunately, they also developed nose-bleeds and vomiting fits – largely because they had worn themselves out by trying to get into several sets of Norwegian knickers – and we were soon baring down on them.

Team GB, on the other hand, had realised Team Norway were not interested in any of the stinking male specimens of humanity on the mountain. So rather than trying to impress them with our lack of climbing skills, we boosted our morale with a continuing and uplifting commentary: ‘Hard work never killed anyone? What about the Burmese fucking Railway?’ And so on.

As a result, we soon overtook the exhausted Americans – and this was despite the fact that Bob was having quite a hard time. Convinced that one lung was filling with water and that he had ‘cancer of the malaria’, he dug deep to find reserves of energy that he never knew he had. For example, when he was worn-out at 5,500 meters and decided a little kip was in order, he was soon on his feet again when Future said ‘If you stop here you will die.’

Now, I’m not one to show-off, but apart from a headache and freezing my arse off, I felt only moderately shitty. But then in a display of huge weakness, I came down the mountain and was ill for three days with a viral infection or, in the considered diagnosis of various people, ‘with a hangover’.

However, 48 hours of hanging about on the bog was a joyous two days away. In the meantime we had a mountain to climb and some trans-Atlantic triumph to transmit. And so finally, after a six hour struggle up the side of something resembling a slag-heap at a 70 degree angle, we summited Kilimanjaro at 6am. We then spent three minutes at the top in a snowstorm in the dark. As you can imagine, the view was somewhat disappointing.

We passed the Americans on the way down with a cheery ‘morning chaps’ and tried our best to look excessively smug. We also passed other people in tears, with blue lips and failing lungs. We descended rapidly and celebrated out success with a round of cucumber fucking soup.

The next evening (well, lunchtime really), we met up with the Americans in the hotel bar. They had rather boastfully announced that they were going to drink all day and show all and sundry how to have a good time. Of course, they were pissed and jumping off the roof into the pool by two and were tucked up in their arctic weather sleeping bags by eight.

Naturally, like the true mountaineers we turned out to be, we carried on until the bitter end. But despite our celebratory state, we concluded that spending a grand on six days of grim predictions, grim weather and grimmer food while wearing grimy underpants was a bit of a waste of cash. It would be much better spent on renting a beach house for a month, sitting down for a bit and getting our bearings. Which – funnily enough - is exactly what we’re about to do.

[Okay. So we did it already. But you get the drift – don’t climb big mountains: they’re cold and shit].

In the Tanzanian town of Moshi a couple of nights ago, a bloke in a bar introduced himself to me as Sir Isaac Newton. He also informed me that he had a degree in English Literature and that he was a huge fan of William Shakespeare's works, particularly his favourite romantic play 'Romeo and Julian'.

'Isaac' also told me that he had trained Tanzania's only Commonwealth gold medal winner and that he was himself a keen mountain runner. Given that he told me all of this while chain-smoking cigarettes, you'd be forgiven for thinking that Isaac was telling a couple of tiny lies.

However, as his fag brand of choice was Sportsman and he was wearing a pair of slightly soiled tracksuit bottoms and a mouldy vest, I elect to believe there is a kernel of truth in all his claims: Perhaps his mother was a huge fan of gravity and named him after her hero; maybe there is a Lost Shakespeare Gay Play where Julian falls in love with Romeo. After all, the actors would probably prefer it that way.

Seemingly, Isaac is pretty representative of the Tanzanian population and their love of a good story. Wherever we have been in the last few weeks, there's always someone around to impart some tall tale or unlikely legend.

Admittedly, most of these are of the 'rural myths' type that would be told in a Cornish accent if we were in England and are changed on each telling to include each individual's embellishments. Which is probably why most of them appear to be total and utter bollocks.

It's the isolation of the places we're visiting that has led to this fine tradition of nonsense. Without the daily diamorphine of John Sergeant On Ice or Celebrity Spider Eating Twats, people are forced to make their own entertainment.

And we have been very isolated. We entered Tanzania from the south and decided that we'd be adventurous and head up the east coast of Lake Tanganyika. Very few people venture there because the roads are utter, utter shite and you can see the Congo quite clearly. And when it takes 12 rain-soaked hours to drive 180kms, you know the locals do not see many idiots in Land Rovers.

A measure of how rare it is to see a white face is the reaction you get from the local kids. One glimpse of my sweating and pasty boat race behind the wheel of a clapped-out 10,000 decibel diesel and they go shooting off into the bush screaming 'muzungu' (which means ‘exceptionally handsome white man’ in Swahili).

Thinking about it, their parents have probably been telling them tall tales in the traditional Tanzanian fashion: Stories of white people who will steal their land, convert them to Christianity, nick all their resources and name everything after dumpy German women before handing over to a drugged-up despot who will force-feed you amphetamines before sending you into battle in a mini skirt and wig. Oh come on. As if.

But then Tanzanians have never let facts get in the way of a good story. For example, there is the tale of the 65 year old, seven-meter long crocodile in Lake Tanganyika by the name of Gustave who is supposed to have killed over 300 people. The locals are apparently absolutely terrified of him - and I mean really fucking scared.

Personally I'm a touch suspicious of this one. When food supplies are a bit limited, anything over 30cms long usually ends up in the pot. Coupled with the fact that you'd get quite a few dozen handbags and pairs of loafers from Gustave's arse and it's more than likely he'd be Croc Casserole by now.

The vast majority of Lake Tanganyikan narrative is even more inconceivable because it largely concerns witchcraft. Just to give you some context, there is a national campaign running at the moment to stop people from killing albinos who many people believe to be witches. At home, these fuckwits would read the Daily Mail.

Anyhow, a few years ago in the Katavi region the Tanzanian government constructed a reservoir and wiped out a few villages / villagers in the process. The locals now believe that a woman roams the lonely road beside the lake, flagging down motorists for a lift before mysteriously disappearing from the passenger seat. This causes untold crashes and is obviously a car insurance scam.

The villagers who died are also meant to have possessed the souls of the local hippo population. They are said to leave the lake at night en masse before approaching people with strange glowing eyes. And they never do that normal hippo thing of mowing people down at 30mph or biting them in two.

Once again, I thought this might be cobblers until I was told there had been serious academic study of witchcraft in the Tanganyika region. Apparently five beautiful Dutch post graduate students turned up in the area a year or so ago and left utterly convinced that witchcraft is not only widely practiced, but that the embellishments to local stories are actually cold scientific fact

I know - unbelievable isn't it? Five attractive Dutch birds turn up and we miss them. Bloody typical.

So it was perhaps due to the large amount of witch-based activity (and the rain), that we left Tanganyika a couple of weeks ago. To give you a digest of what happened next, we went north, turned right, crossed the Serengeti, saw some animals, crossed Ngorogoro, saw some animals, went through Arusha, climbed some mountains and I am now in Dar es Salaam waiting for a dildo with a spanner to fix the car.

In the meantime, Jake has gone to Zanzibar to learn Swahili whereas I've decided that I know all an Englishman needs to when it comes to a foreign language. And in case you're wondering, 'two egg and chips love' translates as 'Umbili chipsey e mieye'.

My next stop is to climb Mount Kilimanjaro and I hear several Spider Eating Celebrity Twats have recently been successful. Obviously most of these people can't move without their PR, PA and pampering people (and in Chris Moyles' case, his lard butty butler on a leash), so it'll be a real pisser if I fail to summit.

So I'd like to enter a caveat now: I'm doing the harder route with tents and death thrown in and not the escalators Ronan and Cheryl took. If I fail, it's because of size of the challenge and not the size of the athlete. And if that isn’t convincing, I may just resort to the Tanzanian way and construct a good story of how I walked the whole thing on my hands.

And that's pretty much all I have.

I'm sure I'll write something else before we fail to get into The Sudan (via Kenya and Ethiopia). In the meantime, I'd just like to call the ICC a bunch of knob jockeys just in case it helps with the visa application.

We’ve spent the last couple of weeks travelling across Zambia in the direction of Lake Malawi with the intention of sitting down in something other than a hot car. In fact, I’m writing this in a place called Nkhata Bay whilst watching fishermen in dugout canoes paddle past.

Thinking about it, as they seem to be lacking any actual fishing gear, I’d wager they were ogling the scantily clad girls on the beach. Disgusting behaviour if you ask me and it’s obviously a complete coincidence we have chosen the same place for a moment of quiet contemplation.

To get here has been a real effort as the road conditions in Zambia have been truly terrible. On a couple of occasions, we’ve taken roads that locals have insisted we would never be able to negotiate, but, using a combination of determination, sweat and swearing, we’ve managed to get to our end destinations.

On one route, we were forced to climb a large and boggy escarpment because the local ferry had broken down for the third time that week. Facing a few days stuck at the swampy end of the Zambezi with nothing but a bus load of Swedish nurses for company, we called a Senior Management meeting.

After a couple of rounds of forcefully expressed points (‘I’m not fucking staying here another day. It’s really boring...’) we threw caution to the wind and hit the road-swamp. Cue a couple of bouncing hours of low-range hell, through rivers and under lightening felled trees with nothing but two packets of crisps and my tuneful accompaniment to NWA on the stereo for company.

Keen not to learn from this lesson, we also decided to visit South Luangwa National Park, opting to do the last 100ks or so near the end of the day after a couple of GPS / map mishaps (I hasten to add this was due to poor cartographical information, not our inability to read them).

We should have made it to the park before the sunset, but as it took about four hours to cover 60 miles, we drove through some very deep water and huge holes in the dark. This is lucky, because if we’d been able to see what we were driving through, we may have turned back.

In the local bar the next day, I got talking to the MP who – with a look of rapturous pride on his face – informed me we had just driven ‘the worst road in Zambia and one of the worst in Africa’. He was genuinely pleased that it was in his constituency and announced that the government had been talking about fixing it for 17 years. Although I believe he hoped it would take another 17 or so.

I am going to labour under the false apprehension that our highways of horrors have been good for us because it’s demonstrated that our car (and therefore us too), can get through nearly anything. Apart from one tiny incident where the Landy was driven into a large hole and needed to be high-jacked out, our mettle seems to be made of metal.

The real reason for this poor road predicament is bad planning on our part. Our idea was to have an endless summer, from the Southern Hemisphere in January to the Northern in July. Unfortunately, we forgot to factor in wet season. It’s been raining in a hardy tropical fashion nearly every day.

This also means that every flesh-eating flying beast known to humanity is airborne and looking to dine out at My Skin, the newest restaurant in town. There are some truly awesome biting bastards out there with the express intention of making me slap myself round the face 15 times a minute and providing me with a nice new line in hypochondria.

It’s a traveller tradition to swap proud anecdotes of the various diseases and ailments people have managed to acquire. In India, where most illness is due to consuming bad food and drink, many conversations are built around bowel movements. In Africa, where threats to life are created by a combination of smaller flying beasts and larger hunting animals, conversation is constructed around some horribly exaggerated threats to life.

I’ve heard tall tales of things that live under your skin until their young have grown to the size of semi-detached houses and pop out through your penis; or of people who have got tropical ulcers so large you could swim in them and others who have been rogered to death by a randy elephant who mistook their Land Cruiser for a sexy She-Elephant. While most of it is a load of bollocks there are things here that will zap you down with zest.

There’s obviously malaria, sleeping sickness, man-eating lions and all the other usual maladies but my current three favourites ways of dying are:

The Grey Flesh Eating Fly

A hitherto unheard of beast that I saw stapled to a board in Livingstone museum. Even though it was long dead, I was very happy it was behind glass because I read that it causes ‘intestinal sores and anal ulcers.’ In areas of high risk, some kind of preventative cork is probably in order.

The Hippopotamus

There are no statistics to prove it because nobody keeps any statistics here, but the humble hippo is meant to kill more people than any other animal in Africa. Zambia has the largest hippo population in the world and an average life expectancy of 33. Is this coincidence? I think not.

Having canoed past a few, I can confirm that they are not the happiest of beasts. Apparently, if you’re attacked by one the best thing to do is swim away from the canoe as it’s only interested in the boat itself and not the flapping, screaming fool in the boat. I haven’t managed to fathom whether this interest is a killing or mating instinct but I’m pretty sure the effect is much the same.

Hippos also do this brilliant trick of flicking their excrement in a thirty meter wide arc with their tails. Having seen it close up (although more than 30 meters back), I am very impressed and can forgive their occasional grumpy thrusts at passers by.

Anyhow, once in the water post-hippo attack, I am assured that a ‘casual’ swim to the bank is the thing to do. Which brings me to the last fucker on the list.

The reason you have to swim casually to the bank is because you don’t want to attract the attention of crocodiles. These are apparently ’shy’ creatures (I think the canoeing guide who told me this was expecting me to feel sympathy for their social inadequacy) who won’t attack you if you move stealthily through the water.

As I pointed out, this is highly unlikely if you’ve just been tipped into the water by a hippo and are screaming at the top of your lungs whilst simultaneously filling them with water.

Fortunately, there are no hippos or crocs in Nkhata Bay - just many, many ways of separating me from my money and billions of gallons of good, clean snorkel-friendly water. I’ve also just been told that the president’s first name is Bingu. This means that if he marries the former president of The Gambia he’ll become Bingu Um Bongo.

I am laughing quite hard at this fact. Which means it’s probably time for me to stop writing.

We’re going to stay here for a few days before heading into Tanzania and the hippo and croc filled Lake Tanganyika. If I mange to keep my swimming casual, I’ll write some more then.

I'm a bit tired today. Yes I know - poor diddums on his six month holiday.

However, we've driven about 2,000 miles in the last six days, largely across the barren featureless scrub of the Northern Cape and the endless orange granules of the Namib Desert. It's like being stuck in a huge egg-timer.

Unfortunately, it turns out that I am not the biggest fan of traveling through the desert in a car with loads of holes in it and no air-con. It was 48C a couple of days ago and my Irish lineage has not equipped me to deal with these kind of temperatures.

Then there's the dust. It secretes itself in every crease, crack and crevice of the body. It sticks to clothing, seats and even to the roofs of mouths; when I cough, passers-by are covered in grit. What's more, it's constant hair-drying effect has provided me with a rather sprightly hybrid of a quiff and an Afro.

It's also ruining my electrical equipment. If you vacuum-packed all your belongs in a hermetically sealed bag, there would still be a large enough pile of orange nonsense at the bottom of the fucker to build a school sand pit. And sand and iPods do not mix.

So it's a wonder why I keep going to the sandy regions of the globe. I've been to the high desert of California, the dry centre of Australia, the Kalahari and the Thar desert in India and Pakistan.

For some strange reason, lots of people - and perhaps me - are drawn to it a little bit.

I once read a book called Grains of Sand by a bloke called Martin Buckley who circumnavigated the globe by the world's deserts over a period of years. His 500 page homage to the arid regions of the world is really quite contagious.

Then there were all those hippies in the 60s - like Jim Morrison - who sought inspiration by consuming vast quantities of LSD in the desert. They'd then write endless rhyming couplets of mindless drivel before buggering of to Paris to die in the bath (he was probably trying in vain to get the sand out of his butt crack when he keeled over).

Perhaps then, I should concede that it has a couple of things going for it. For a start, there's the endless silence. It's really quite remarkable.

We were at Dead Vlei in the Namib desert at about 6am on Monday. It's a salt pan with lots of dead trees in it surrounded by very high dunes. You should look at the photos because my descriptive skills won't do it justice.

Anyhow, we climbed the largest dune, a 600 meter beast which lays claim to being the tallest in the world. This took about one-and-a-half hours of physical duress, accompanied by plenty of swearing and two small heart attacks each. We then ran down the steepest side in about 30 seconds while shouting 'weeeeeeee' - which I have to say is pretty much the most fun you can have.

After taking a moment to regain my composure and dust myself off in case any attractive ladies were nearby, I was distracted by the roar of jet engines. It was so loud, I thought a military aircraft was on a low-level exercise above us. But it was actually an airliner cruising at it's gin and tonic altitude and the vast nothingness let the sound travel very far. Once it had passed, the absolute silence was very, very weird indeed.

Now I'm no physicist, but it stands to reason that if sound can travel without hindrance or interruption, then so can light. Right?

So it's at night, that the desert really comes in to its own. If you're a fan of the cosmos, then there's no better place to see it - except perhaps from space, obviously. I actually got cramp in my neck from looking up and muttering 'Wow! Fuck me! That's amazing!'

It's an experience that does strange things to the mind. If you unleash your brain and get lost in its stream of consciousness, you can embark on some rather odd thoughts.

For example, the notion of singularity, which suggests that the entire universe emanates from a single infinitesimally small point which expanded in a way that cannot be explained. This means that everything and everyone in the universe is made from the same materials.

Hey! We're not that different you and I! It wasn't Einstein who had his finger on the celestial pulse, but that guiding light Moby. When he sung We are All Made of Stars, he was truly on to something.

Shit. One minute your a healthy cynic, the next thing you know you're whistling the intro to Ebony and Ivory. But that's the desert for you. It's a weird place.

I think I need a drink.

Two updates in as many days. I am surprising myself and probably boring you.

Some people will probably know that Jake and I have a reputation for attracting disaster, particularly when in close proximity to the Indian Ocean. There have also been individual moments of near-nastiness such as car crashes, people waving guns around in a threatening fashion and an incident in an exploding minefield.

Yesterday evening, we stayed in a town called Arniston. This is close to Cape Aghulus, the southern most point of Africa where the Indian and Atlantic Oceans meet. We thought it would be a good idea to drive from Cape Town to begin our journey at the very bottom of the continent. That way, we won't have to repeat the entire trip in five years time.

Arniston looks a bit like Wales with Ostriches. It's windswept, foreboding and when we arrived, it was raining. I imagine they love a spot of close harmony singing and grow a nice leek. We elected not to camp but instead slept at the backpackers because they served hot food and cold beer.

This turned out to be a wiser move than we thought: there was a huge thunderstorm overnight and the nearby town of Struisbaai took a bit of a battering. Some roads were washed away and quite a few houses flooded. When I asked one of the locals if this was a regular occurrence she told me that it had never happened before (if you feel like it, this is where you can hum some sinister music to yourselves).

Anyhow, we climbed the lighthouse, looked at the ocean(s) and set off north. About an hour later, a tree crashed into the road in front of us. The topsoil had been washed away in the storm and this huge bushy thing landed about 50 yards ahead of the Land Rover. If it hadn't been for my Lewis Hamilton style driving skills (or in reality, the fact we were doing less than 30) we'd have probably not needed a haircut for a while.

After the initial befuddlement, the residents of Napier asked us if we'd tow the tree out of the road. It's probably the most useful thing that car is ever going to do and I certainly felt a touch more rugged and interesting than when I woke up this morning.

We're in Paarl now. This is where Mandela was imprisoned before his release. It also has nice botanical gardens. I am going to pitch my tent for the first time. I imagine there will be some light to moderate swearing followed by some light to moderate drinking.

If anyone's been expecting me to actually write a blog, then you will have been sorely disappointed by the huge lack of effort on my part. But as we haven't really done anything yet, there's not much to report.

This is largely because the Land Rover only got here a couple of days ago – a considerable 12 days later than scheduled. In the meantime, our hours have been filled with visits to warehouses to buy tools, spares and other necessary equipment like a fridge for our beers. And then the beers to go in it. Obviously.

We've also gone out of our way to provide a huge stimulus package to Cape Town's ailing night time economy. Frankly, I've been taken aback by our generosity in this area. The Mayor of Cape Town almost certainly owes us a ticker tape parade.

The last three weeks (and a couple of previous visits) have given us enough time to get the tiniest of feels for the place. We know some of the city's back streets and shortcuts in a limited kind of way and some people even invite us for dinner (which would never happen in London in this short space of time). Cape Town has been kind and generous to us and it feels a little bit like home.

But if you believe what you read about this city, then it's not the 'real' Africa. Wanker anthropologists, some travel writers and adventurers with large beards and tiny shorts appear to dislike the temperate Mediterranean climate. They also look down their peeling red noses at a population of happy, svelte people drinking nice wine in excellent restaurants. They want their Africa to be one sweltering nation of famine and Kleptocracy, rather than the dozens of countries it really is.

There is a phrase in Afrikaans (which I've forgotten) which means salt penis. It's used to describe White Africans who, for all their proclamations of African ethnicity, still think and act European. And as they have one foot planted here and one foot in Europe their balls drag in the ocean and get slightly salty.

To the hardy-beardy brigade, Cape Town is Salt Penis City. It's simply too civilised: their heckles rise at the sight of a glass of decent plonk being poured and they go marching hurriedly into the bush to dangle their unsalted appendages into the mouths of crocodiles. Well, bollocks to you lot. I like cold beer, nice wine and nice people (as well as wrestling the occasional reptile).

Then there's the perspective most tourists export. On one hand, Cape Town is a mini-LA, where lots of people with lots of cash dedicate their entire existence to looking beautiful and roller-blading, causing an untold number of low-speed collisions in the process.

On the other hand, it's really, really violent. Muggers lurk on every street and carjackers wait to pounce on every corner. There's some truth in this as South Africa supposedly has the highest number of rapes in the world and the second highest murder rate, but Cape Town doesn't have the paranoid air of some other African cities.

For some, there is a definite and understandable anxiety. Crime - or at least the defence against it - is very visible and you take precautions you would never take in the UK.

For example, on my way here, I saw cash being collected from the Supermarket in a security van. Three large men with machine guns sprinted and spread out on the pavement, training their guns on all and sundry. It was like something from Northern Ireland in 1986.

It's little things like this, as well as the constant conversations about criminality, that remind you that below the surface there are genuine problems. If that's the real Africa that people seek, you can find it easily if you want to.

However, to lots of the population (the ones who don't live in townships) crime is just one tiny part of life that doesn't get in the way of having a good time. Being a victim of crime is simply a question of fate. In fact, one unlucky Cape Townian we know has been mugged three times: once in Barcelona, once in Florence and once in Athens. It really can happen anywhere.

What makes this city different isn't the voyeuristic violence that Ross Kemp is drawn to; nor is it big-breasted women jogging with tiny pointless dogs. What really strikes me about Cape Town is the infectious enthusiasm people have for the place, for it's enviable geography and how wonderfully open and friendly it makes the population here. The welcome we've had makes me more than a little sad to leave.

But leave we must. We're heading for the Namibian border in the next couple of days to hang out in the desert and ask people awkward questions about why their families left Germany in 1945.

In an Oscar-esque sign off, it only remains for me to thank all the people we've met here for their generosity and, in particular, for their noodles and their Goldfish (which will only mean something to a very select group, but there you go).

I'll write more when we've done more. Until then, have fun.