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 […]
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 […]