A Saharan sketchbook - Olivia Willes

A journey through inhospitable landscapes proves to be challenging in the extreme. While employed by the Cameroons Development Corporation (CDC), the author, who finds herself drawn to hot, arid and sandy places, cherishes a seemingly impossible ambition to return to Europe via the Sahara when her contract ends. As the Fates would have it, a Dutch journalist materialises one day in this small, close-knit Cameroons community. Named Pete, he has just traversed the Sahara in a southerly direction, alone, with a motor-cycle with sidecar. Serious planning began, and an apparently suitable pickup truck became available in Douala. Travel of the kind envisaged was quite unusual at the time, something definitely unorthodox compared to the ways of the British colonials -- ways in which they were perhaps too set! What was expected to take a leisurely three months eventually took seven. No amount of planning could have avoided the mechanical failures and other setbacks. Yet, what transpired was a hugely rewarding experience. The story proceeds stage by stage, involving the reader in the catastrophes, the moments of hilarity, the fatigue and despair, and the prevailing satisfaction for the author of achieving her aim against all the odds. Throughout this book everything is recorded with complete accuracy, unembroidered and not fictionalised. It opens our eyes to how people and places were when travel had not yet reached the mass commercial levels of today, effectively recreating encounters and interchanges, welcoming or otherwise, that coloured this remarkable journey.