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 […]
We were almost going to give Zanzibar a miss. We had been having a bad week: Dave grazed Big Bertha against a gate post, our boiler had started to leak water, air had begun to escape from Big Bertha’s air suspension bellows and we received a large bill from MAN for last year’s wheel hub works. Oh, and did I […]
Prompted by my good friend Gary, here is our small missive on our remaining time in Kenya, having now crossed back into Tanzania. After journeying south from Lake Turkana, we visited Nanyuki and then around to stay on the southern slopes of Mount Kenya. It was whilst here that the Kenyan government invoked a blockade around the five counties surrounding […]
In the far north of Kenya, lies a very barren, arid area with the vast Lake Turkana at its centre. The wind blows incessantly (the only wind farm we have seen in Africa is here) and temperatures hover around 40c in the day and not much less at night. To stand outside is like having a very powerful hairdryer pointed […]
Uganda surpassed all our expectations. From the lush mountainous forests of the southwest to the dry plains of the north, Uganda has much to offer the Overlander. We spent eight weeks in county and circumnavigated nearly all of it. From our entry near Makasa, we journeyed to the southwest to visit the famous mountain gorillas that reside in the volcanic […]
Leaving the gorillas in Mgahinga National Park behind, we headed north through the Biwindi Impenetrable Forest and then the endless tea plantations in the hills of southwest Uganda, before entering Queen Elizabeth National Park. Here we camped for three days on the bank of a river full of hippos, eying cautiously the Democratic Republic of the Congo, which lay just […]
Sorry, you have to be British and of a certain age to understand the title of this post. Although not a lifetime’s dream, we both wanted to go gorilla trekking while in Africa. Our original plan was to visit them in Rwanda, but after being denied entry (Covid) we chose Uganda instead. Luckily, the eye watering cost has been reduced […]