Readers' Africa: The light touch

Jean Wade looks back half a century to a trip from Uganda to the Cape in a classic saloon car

On February 24 1958 my husband, Rodney, my daughters, Jimpy, 8, Jelly, 4, and Jacky, 9 months, and I set off on holiday from Entebbe, Uganda, in a Citroën Light 15, heading for the Cape of Good Hope.

With a tarpaulin-covered roof rack and kids and luggage stacked in and on top of the car, we were off. There were very few tarred roads, no motorway services and no disposable nappies.

Rod had forbidden baby bottles and baby food and, apart from planned visits to family in the southern part of Africa, where we stopped was to be pot-luck.

We drove down the west side of Lake Victoria over pretty rough roads and arrived at Kigoma on the shores of Lake Tanganyika, having suffered one slow puncture and the silencer falling off. This we tied back on, frequently, and we got it fixed at the railway workshops before boarding the Liemba to sail down the lake to disembark in Northern Rhodesia.

There we stopped to see the Kalambo Falls, the second highest in Africa.

Then on southwards and I quote from my diary: "We slithered from Abercorn to Kasama and then to Chambezi, turned the car right round twice and nearly turned over, broad-sided the road countless times and nearly hit the bank."

Fifteen days into the journey, we reached Victoria Falls, where we caught up on our laundry and learnt to visit the rainforest in bathing suits.

En route to Bulawayo we saw the early signs of Operation Noah, where they were to evacuate the wild animals to make way for Kariba Dam. The car had a good going over in Bulawayo and we set off for Beit Bridge, where we stopped for lunch.

At the border, the car was searched and sprayed as part of the tsetse-fly prevention scheme. Here my diary says: "Through customs and immigration and on into South Africa: miles and miles of flat, straight tarmac."

We drove through Johannesburg to Durban, where we stayed with family and rested.

Then we meandered down the coast through the beautiful Transkei. We met gale-force winds at East London, visited the dolphin and snake park in Port Elizabeth and drove on via the Garden Route to Cape Town.

We visited Cape Point, which was a good 7000km from home when Jelly turned to her dad and said: "Can we go home now, Daddy?"

After leaving Cape Town, we drove up to Kimberley, where we visited the museum and saw a photograph of my mum as a little girl with Barney Barnato.

We found accommodation in a hotel full of rugby players, so all five of us shared one room.

Baby Jacky was used to starting each day with a cup of milky tea, but in the busy hotel all they could provide was black coffee, so we watered it down, laced it with sugar and fed it to her like that.

We drove through Southern Rhodesia via Salisbury and on into Mozambique. It was here that we met a lorry head-on round a blind bend on a single-track road with the early morning sun in our eyes.

Luckily we were travelling very slowly and no one was hurt, but the front of the car was dented and we got a lift to Blantyre over the border while Rod limped there in the battered, but not beaten, car.

The only after-effect of the accident was a dented front grill and the loss of two of our canvas water bottles, which hung on the front of the car to keep cool. We did give up a day's sightseeing in Zomba while Rod and I ground the valves.

From there, we sailed up Lake Nyasa and the car was off-loaded onto a very rickety ferry for landing in Tanganyika.

Driving up those dreadful roads, Rod and Jimpy had become experts at repairing punctures. I noted in my diary: "Seven punctures in one day, then Rod decided to race through a dry drift and burst a tyre!"

In Morogoro, the road had been washed away, but there was a convenient Land Rover, which would tow us through if we had a rope. Thank goodness for sturdy towelling nappies! We fished the dirty ones out of the boot, tied them together and were towed safely through.

Nearly home now, we drove through the Tsavo National Park in Kenya, which was drought stricken in 1958, and we had to distract the children from the sight of dead and dying animals. No "I spy" games there.

On we went to Kitale, where we celebrated Jacky's first birthday with my aunt.

Finally we arrived home in Entebbe on June 2, having survived a 68-day safari over rough ground and through unknown territory in a small, front-wheel drive, saloon car. - © Jean Wade

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