Having left Lesotho behind, we headed for the foothills of the Drakensburg to meet up with our friend Bud and go hiking together. The scenery in the Garden Castle was spectacular, but the weather was so-so. Good enough to hike though. From the Drakensburg we headed towards the Wild Coast. Our first stop was the remote coastal village of Mboyti. […]
Landlocked by South Africa, Lesotho, an enclave, is situated in the Maloti Mountains – the highest mountains in Southern Africa. Crossing at Foriesburg in the north we immediately realised we were back in the ‘real Africa’ – mud huts, outhouses and donkeys. We were initially disappointed by the copious amounts of rubbish strewn around – but this got better as […]
Between eSwatini and Lesotho are South Africa’s historic battlefields. the Zulus vs the Boers, the Boers vs the British, and the British vs the Zulus. But not necessarily in that order. We first visited Isandlwana – the site of the first major encounter in the Anglo-Zulu War between the British Empire and the Zulu Kingdom on 22 January 1879. 20,000 […]
Big Bertha is around ten years old now and, given the next leg of our journey will be in South America, where there is no MAN presence, we decided to treat BB to a top to bottom full service. Choosing the right garage that would not treat BB as just another truck was not easy. However, I asked for recommendations […]
Zimbabwe: a country with recent troubles; should we be here at all? After our 47 day tour of this intriguing country – I can categorically say ‘yes’. We crossed into Zim over the magnificent dam at the north eastern end of Lake Kariba. This is a very quiet border post and entry was relatively easy. After a week at a […]
The rainy season was late in ending this year and, unfortunately, we decided to leave Namibia prematurely to head east into Botswana before it had departed. This led to a change of plans and instead of heading onto Zimbabwe from Botswana, we returned to Zambia to stay with Dylan and wait the rains out. More on that in another blog. […]
Big Bertha, our expedition truck, has travelled a whopping 250,000km!! BB left the MAN factory in Germany on 13 February 2012 before travelling to Bocklet in Koblenz, Germany, to have the body fitted. This took around a year and BB’s first owners, The Overlanding Family, registered BB in the UK on 21 February 2013 and covered 199,608km before handing BB […]
Sorry for the delay in posting – our last post was in July 2021. At that time we had rushed back to Zambia so that we could fly home for David to say good bye to his Dad. We returned to Lusaka in late November, just as the latest mutation of Covid, Omicron, surfaced and we decided to make a […]
Having returned from Zanzibar and fitted Big Bertha’s new suspension air bags, we set off for Malawi. But Covid rules changed and after having purchased our Malawian visas, the borders closed overnight. At the same time, David learnt of a family illness necessitating a prompt return home and so we instead headed back to Dylan’s farm in Zambia. We would […]
Big Bertha has been on the road since 2013 and some parts are coming to the end of their useful life. BB has air suspension (springs) on her rear axle and the air bellows that support the weight of the truck eventually wear out. We noticed that BB sometimes sank overnight on one rear side and on investigation Dave found […]