In 2012 when I was recovering from double pneumonia in my Nairobi hospital bed in need of something to read, the honorary New Zealand consulate/representative Tom used to come and see me every few days if not every day or a family member would come and see me during this time would bring me some fresh fruit and a magazine to read, in one of these magazines there was a brief description of this book Trek by Paul Stewart about an early Overland trip from Kenya to London unfortunate things did not go to plan!
The article was so interesting that I actually found a copy of the book in one of the book shops in one of the shopping malls close to the Hotel that I was staying in recovering in Nairobi, Kenya which brought home to NZ with me to read the full story.
Below is a video talking about this story of adventure, disaster and survival in the Sahara desert.
I have read many stories about people in the 2000’s plus thinking they were the first to drive overland from London to Cape Town or Nordkapp to Cape Town in there modern four-wheel-drive’s.
This of course, is totally untrue, it has been plenty of other people venturing before these times even before the 50s traveling from one end of Africa to the other and all around the world.
I hope you enjoy this video so much that you might even try tracking down your own copy to read the full story.
If you like the story, then I might post another one with an old broken down four-wheel-drive truck that was rebuilt and driven from the United Kingdom to South Africa also back in the 1950s in the future.
1955, Kenya. A group of four British eccentrics set out to drive from Nairobi to London, via the Sahara desert, in an 8 horsepower Morris Traveller, Under the leadership of Alan Cooper, a down-on-his-luck farmer, the group was made up of a worldly field biologist who recorded the whole trip on her 8mm cine camera, a genteel schoolmistress of uncertain age and in search of romance, and a 17 year old boy whose mother had insisted that the trip would make a man of him.
What united them was an overwhelming desire for adventure.
As they set off through Equatorial Africa the omens seemed against them.
The Mau Mau uprising against British rule in Kenya was at its height and the days of colonial rule were ending.
Their journey was to take them through an Africa that very soon would cease to exist.
But it was the desert that turned their joyride into a nightmare.
What began as ari adventure ended as a desperate fight for life in the blazing sands of the Sahara. Trek brings this story to dramatic life and is a page-turning account of a fight for survival against all the odds.
