Introduction

This is an account of a journey made across Africa between March and October 1988 made by two friends Leigh Williams and Jeremy Leach. The trip was made on two small motorbikes – single cylinder Honda 250s (CB250RS) – and covered around 16,000 miles from Morocco, south through the Sahara Desert, east through Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo), south to Botswana and then back north to Kenya.

The account was written in 1989 but was then forgotten as life got in the way. Now with more time, there is the chance to publish it along with the photos that we took along the way.

The idea for the trip came to us both in a curry house in Cricklewood in the autumn of 1987. Leigh was despatch riding ahead of going to college at some point in the future and I was selling cat litter and pet products to shops around London. There was not a lot to hold us back from making a break. We had known each other for 10 years or so, our lives glued together by motorcycling and previous camping trips in the UK, Europe and even as far as Romania. We planned the trip over the next 6 months taking the motorbikes that we both knew from despatch riding even though we knew that people generally took larger off-road bikes for such a trip. We bought some books – really useful was Stay Alive in the Desert (KEM Melville) and Africa Overland (David Brydon) along with the two Michelin maps covering northern and southern Africa – 953 and 955. South of the Sahara we had little or no idea of what things would be like.

For the bikes there were spare inner tubes, Pirelli MT40 Trail tyres, some oversized petrol tanks – we cut back our seats to get them to fit – along with a trip to a welder in south London who made us each a carrier for a jerry can of petrol and a durable water container. There was a Katadyn water filter, various pills for malaria and documentation for the bikes with the main requirement being a Carnet de Passage to allow us to bring the bikes into countries temporarily.

That was about it really – all very much in the spirit of plucky Brits setting off under-prepared on an adventure. Almost entirely thanks to the kindness and generosity of the many people that we met along the way we emerged pretty much unscathed.

Re-reading the account thirty-five years later the sense of naivety and optimism still comes across but the shortcomings of the trip are also clearer. We had a huge number of conversations with African people but for the most part the ones mentioned are those with expats and fellow overlanders. There is a strong sense of this being a trip that we were making for our own enjoyment and benefit rather than as a way of genuinely engaging with the people and places that we passed through. The trip was made too quickly – again we should have stopped and spent time in more of the places and got more out of the experience. This is made all the more poignant by what has happened and is still happening in many of the places that we were fortunate enough to visit. It feels unlikely that one could travel so freely in and across the Sahara now. Only a few years after we travelled though the eastern parts of what was then Zaire conflicts would begin that continue to have a devastating impact on the entire area to this day.

The photographs too are telling as they feel strong on landscape and the character of the incredible places that we visited but weak on depicting the people that we met. I can understand why we may have been reluctant to photograph people but it feels that it is a major shortcoming of this telling of the story.

But, those significant reservations aside, Leigh and I were fortunate to have made what for me remains the trip of a lifetime and to have benefitted from the unstinting generosity and kindness of the people that we met on our travels. This is especially true of the African people who invariably treated us as visitors rather than tourists and were always interested to stop and help on the many occasions that we asked for it.

In retrospect, huge thanks go to the forbearance of our families who in days before mobile phones and texts had to wait for the arrival of extremely intermittent air mail letters and the gaps between them did nothing to allay their fears of the foolhardy journey that they thought we were making.

Apologies that there are few photos of the journey back north to Kenya. By then the trusty Olympus Trip had expired from sand and general neglect.

Thanks go to Alan Green from Scan-Van for his digital scans of all the original photos from the trip.

As an aside and recognising that the world has changed immeasurably since it was written, I would recommend the c1979 book The Road to London by Eric Attwell which I came across while we were staying in Botswana. It is a remarkable story of a bicycle ride by Eric and Jack Attwell from Gqeberha, then Port Elizabeth in South Africa to London just prior to WW2. The brothers’ journey between 1936 and 1938 took almost two years to complete.

The route we took through Africa in black

This account is dedicated to the memory of Gwyneth Skye Williams.