Travel Notes Paula Snyder and Bob Swain travelled with Encounter Overland from Cape

Travel Notes Paula Snyder and Bob Swain travelled with Encounter Overland from Cape Town through Namibia and Botswana to Harare in Zimbab-we. The five-week trip costs £1,285, including all food and game park fees but excluding air fares. Three square meals a day included regular cooked breakfasts, an apricot crumble, chilli con carne, beef stroganoff, spaghetti bolognese and ostrich steaks in garlic sauce. On Christmas morning we breakfasted on chilled champagne and barbecued chicken at Sossuvlei in the Namibian desert, in the shadow of the biggest sand dunes in the world.So if you prefer your adventure to be laced with the odd luxury here and there, a truck company could be just the thing to tempt you from the safety of your armchair.! The second edition of `Through Africa – the Overlanders’ Guide’ by Bob Swain and Paula Snyder, retitled `Africa by Road’, will be published in November by Bradt Publications. Everyone got the chance to do cooking duty on a nine-day rota that left us plenty of time to plan what to cook next for 21 people on a wood fire, not forgetting the vegetarian option The standard of food was unbelievably high.

The truck carried enough stores to feed everyone for days on end; and with a cook tent, weather was never a problem. With just the two of us there were times when we went to bed hungry as well as tired – defeated by fate, the weather or a straightforward unavailability of food. “I’m sorry,” I said, thanking him profusely, ” we haven’t a big enough pot to cook it in.” In truth, I couldn’t bring myself to strangle my dinner.What you end up eating every day is one of the biggest differences between travelling on your own or with an organised truck. “To thank you for bringing my son to see me, I have brought you a chicken,” he said, holding out the unfortunate bird by its bound feet I crossed my fingers in the dark.

Matthew’s father was interested in everything we had to say about British life, but the thing he found hardest to accept was the price we paid for bananas.Just as they were leaving, the strange muffled squawks that had punctuated our conversation were explained. We discussed what sort of houses people lived in in England, the differences between social security in Britain and Zare and the kind of food people ate back home. They gave us glasses of chilled grenadine and graciously invited us to camp on their lawn – an unbelievable luxury in a country where the best camping spots we had found were gravel pits at the side of the road.That evening Matthew brought his father to chat to us in the gathering dusk, fingers of mist creeping slowly down through the rainforest that surrounded us. The sisters had never come across a single traveller in the 30 years they had been there. In return, he asked, could we give him a lift to see his father? We were more than happy to oblige.Matthew’s father turned out to be a laboratory technician at a remote mission hospital run by Italian nuns. The fact that it had no batteries didn’t seem to affect its power as a status symbol – and at least he could hear what we were saying. He helped us buy petrol from a local trader and insisted on accompanying us to the local market to shop.

Instantly we were befriended by Matthew, a young student with the earphones of his Walkman permanently plugged in. Twenty people in a bright orange truck with an experienced guide can generally look after themselves; two people in a Land Rover pulling into a village might need help finding the market or directions to the road out of town.Crossing Zare on our earlier trip, we stopped in Bumba, a fair-sized town on the main road east to Kenya, only to discover that the petrol stations had run dry. This meant there was no need to stop in African bars, one of the best ways of dipping into local life, catching up on politics and just generally passing the time of day with new friends.The sheer size of the group acts as another barrier to experiencing African life. Having voted for a bar on the first night of the trip, we made regular stops to stock up with beer, soft drinks and blocks of ice to keep everything chilled. With three real-life nurses on the trip Albert, a Dutch systems analyst, soon discovered his job involved nothing more than handing out the malaria pills every morning and promptly spent the rest of the trip helping everyone else do their jobs as well.But there is a down side to the sort of self-sufficiency you build up on a truck. Rescuing a forgotten passport at a border post constituted the sort of emergency when the trailer had to be opened in the middle of the day.