PLACE: NAIROBI
ROUTE: LAKE TURKANA, NORTHERN KENYA
DATE: CHRISTMAS TIME 1986
With my ‘better half’ in Johannesburg being fattened up for Christmas, I was left in Nairobi to sell the old truck and to ensure that the French shorty, which we’d been asked to deliver to France, was made ready for the desert. Apart from a flimsy aluminium roof rack, the French 88-inch had been left bare. The tyres were bald, there was only one spare, the springs were flat, and the shocks finished.
I set about planning how we were going to travel in the little Landy: where to sleep (we hated ground tents), and where to store fuel and water for an extended Sahara trip, along with food, spares, clothes, tools, the cooker, the cool-box… Unlike the French,…