1: Who In Their Right Minds?

Who in their right minds would put their family home on the market; sell it; pack and shift almost everything they own into storage; move into their motorhome to live; search for a property to buy - whilst at the same time planning to ship their off-road vehicle - Rocky - to Africa?

Surely no one would do such things……oh wait….. that’s exactly what we have done!

The plan? To travel round Namibia, Botswana and Zimbabwe for two and a half months.

The hope? That the purchase of the new house will go through while we're away so that we, and our younger daughter Katie, have a home to go to when we get back!

We move out of our house at the end of March after a very stressful five months house-selling experience with the solicitor-from-hell acting for the purchasers.

Now effectively homeless, we feel we’ve earned a few weeks of much-needed rest and relaxation in Lionel at the lovely Sumner’s Ponds campsite in Barns Green, not far from our former home in Horsham.

How wrong we were!

Not long after we arrive, Nick falls victim to fraudsters who hack into his email account and take control of his phone. They hack into our bank accounts and other finances and set up a couple of credit cards using Nicks identity. It takes a solid week of full time effort and a LOT of stress to sort it all out. Thankfully the hackers don’t manage to steal any of our money - but it is a close thing.

The business of planning an adventure like this isn’t new to us but it is bad timing that our house sale goes through at the very time that we really need to be focusing on pulling together the fine detail of the trip.

Honestly? If we could have delayed this trip we would have done but we have made arrangements to meet and travel with friends along the way and so we need to make it work. Unfortunately, much of the time our attention has had to be elsewhere and our focus hasn't really been on this - which is a great shame as we have wanted to do this trip for a long time.

Janette plans the route and campsites and Nick takes the lead on all things tech and vehicle-related. He purchases a satellite phone and downloads varous maps onto the satnav. Rocky is prepared, making a few adjustments with the solar panel and water tank. But Nick is driven to distraction by all the red-tape involved.... the various shipping agents, legal documents, insurance issues, customs requirements and conflicting information that is coming his way - mind boggling!

We work together on packing the vehicle and prepare detailed lists of the contents for customs - that makes everything more real. For reasons known only to those in the world of freight shipping, we are asked to get Rocky to Tilbury Docks about two weeks before he’s due to sail.

Nick drives Rocky and Janette follows in her Mini and what an experience that is! Tilbury Docks isn’t anything like arriving at a ferry port where direction signs are plentiful - at Tilbury there’s nothing. At one point we find ourselves in a queue of traffic and the only sign we see says that leaving the area will result in a £200 fine; inevitably we are in the wrong queue and leaving is the only option - fingers crossed we don’t find ourselves £400 poorer!

Eventually and more by luck than anything else we find the shipping agent in a portacabin surrounded by freight to be shipped. It’s all very casual and not what we had expected at all; we just hand over the paperwork, leave the keys and head off hoping for the best!

A few days later we receive a photo from the shipping agent of Rocky loaded into the container and he’s off!

Nick downloads an app which allows him to track Rocky’s progress on the 4 week journey - and becomes slightly obsessive about it, giving Janette almost hourly updates whether she wants them or not!

A huge stroke of luck for us - and at this stage we really feel like we need one - is to have made contact with a wonderfully kind person, Mark Hofert. Nick and he made contact via an VW Amarok group on Facebook, he lives in Namibia now but for many years made his home in the UK.

Not many people are willing to reach out the hand of friendship to strangers to the extent of really putting themselves out, Mark proves to be one of the few. We have a video call with him and he gives us invaluable advice about preparing for the trip and he even arranges to collect us from the airport in Windhoek when we arrive and take us to stay in his amazing looking family home that he's built recently.

Mark, we are so grateful to you, you are an exceptionally kind person and we look forward to meeting you soon.

We head off from Gatwick in a couple of days, so our next blog will be about the first leg of our trip in Namibia - see you soon!