…in Cape Town
(South Africa)

At the South African border the Police interrogated us about our trip;
"Angola?" No
"Congo?" No
"Nigeria?" No
"D.R.C, yeah D.R.C. Surely they mugged you there?"
I don't think he believed that our trip really had been free of violent crime, and his disbelief set us on edge thinking about what might lie ahead. Maybe he read our concern because as we pulled away he called after us "You won't have any problems here, but just look out for your belongings." Again we weren't reassured.

As soon as we crossed the border into South Africa we saw our first sign to Cape Town. It was quite an emotional moment, more than I thought it would be. It started to dawn on us that we really had made it, and soon we'd be going home. Although we've both become accustomed to living out of the car and sleeping in the tent, after 10 months we are looking forward to heading home. But I suspect that as soon as we get back to the UK we'll miss the freedom of this life more than we can imagine.

We stopped for a night on the way from the border to Cape Town and as usual it turned into two nights. We stayed at the Namaqua Game Lodge run and owned by Lynette and Dirk who were so friendly, spending the evening chatting with us and taking us out for a night drive on their Game Farm the next evening. Dirk was a former diamond miner and I was enthralled by his tales of a life spent hunting for "the big one". He never said if he'd actually found the big one, but from the size of his farm I guessed he'd at least found an awful lot of the small ones. He also told me smugglers tales of workers trying to get the stones out of the security mining areas. They all got caught, but the successful smugglers you never hear about.

The next day as we left for Cape Town Lynette and Dirk also left to drive to Kimberly. A friend had called him up and asked him to come and help out on a diamond field he wanted to work. Within minutes Dirk's eyes had been sparkeling at the prospect of getting back to the fields. "Mining has made millionaires but it's also broken a lot of men," he told me. It's a big financial gamble to set up an operation and if it doesn't pay off people lose everything they own. Dirk was going to look over the area and think it over. Our fingers are crossed.

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The region around the town of Springbok is red and rocky. It's dry semi-desert but for a few months a year it comes alive with colour as the unique breeds of desert flowers bloom into life. The drive was stunning, mountain sides covered in psychedelic colours and valleys of orange and purple.

Someone stole our Canadian flag. It was a cheap little flag which Esther's family had sent us for the trip. I'd absentmindedly slipped into a slot in the roof bars as we left the UK. I was amazed it hadn't blown away on the French motorways. Over the next 10 months it survived the bleaching desert sun, torrential rain, snagging branches and a Namibian customs officer cleaning his oily hands on it after an aborted attempt to find the chassis number. In all that time no one thought of sliding it out of its slot and stealing it until now.

The radio news catalogued the gang crime, police shootings, muggings and car jackings as we arrived. We rolled up the windows at the traffic lights. They call traffic lights "robots" here which makes me giggle each time we ask for directions. Slowly though, we're getting a feel for Cape Town and there seems to be a lot more fear of crime than crime itself. We've only been here a week so we can't speak with any authority but we've taken the local busses and trains after dark and didn't feel particularly threatened. In fact there is laid back cosmopolitan feel to Cape Town. It's just like any big European city, with nice areas and some dodgy ones, but also, to my surprise, shanty towns around the outskirts.

We've booked our flight tickets home so now we have time to relax in Cape Town and are looking for someone to drive the car back to the UK for us.

Esther is making up for a year of sitting in the car by daily visits to the Yoga studio and I am learning to fly a microlight. It's got me thinking; with a larger tank and maybe some warm gloves we could fly back in one…

12-07-06

Update 22-06-07

The car is now on its way back to the UK with Tim, Lurks and Stone at the wheel.

Find out all about them at www.africansurfer.com