Outside Edge Expedition returns after 448 days circumnavigating Africa

On a cold, wet day in April 2007, Kingsley Holgate’s Outside Edge Expedition set off from Cape Point in three Land Rovers to travel round Africa. After 448 days, they were back in the Cape with their battered vehicles – and many stories to tell. Don Pinnock met them just before they re-entered South Africa.

We’re in a circle sitting on creaky, dusty chairs that have been taking strain. A stew is bubbling on the coals. High above, moonlight filters through the canopy of the sand forest where we’ve camped, just south of the Zambezi River. A bushbaby calls; an owl seems to answer.

It’s a scene freighted with magic – mystical almost – with roots deep in the dawn of our species and the taming of fire. For more than 400 nights, somewhere on the outer rim of Africa, Kingsley, Gill and Ross Holgate, Annelie Muller and Bruce Leslie have consolidated their day this way. It’s nearly over as Mozambique’s their last country – number 33. South Africa and the journey’s end lie across the border.

Kingsley’s looking worried. I’ve just asked him a question he might have liked to avoid: ‘How do you feel about this being over? About stopping?’

‘A month back, we were sitting round the fire, just the five of us,’ he says, ‘and we realised that getting back would be a delicate time emotionally. Right now, we’re tired and a little bit brain-dead. The adrenaline that kept us so fired up at the beginning is beginning to drain away. We have to be sure that how it ends is good for us as a family.

‘People have said that, here in Mozambique, we must be like a horse on an outride that’s turned and is running for home. They are 100 per cent wrong!

‘You know why? We’ve been living in this make-believe world and all of a sudden we have to face reality. It’s hard. Someone called me on a cellphone a few days ago and said they wanted to book a whole lot of talks. I know I need the bucks, but I had to say: “No, I’ll be in a postexpedition phase and I can’t take anything on.”

‘The end is a very special time to review this amazing journey and we must give ourselves that time. Other adventurers I’ve spoken to have had the same problem. Ending can be a big anticlimax. I’ve had urges, I must tell you, to write a final e-mail saying: “It’s been a wonderful journey and thanks for the thousands of e-mails, but we’re not doing any more. From now on, we’re only contactable through a third party via scribbled notes.”

‘Then maybe we’d put the laptop on the road and run over it with the Landy – and keep going into the Kalahari and kind of fall off the edge. It’s hugely tempting. So few summers left with just one pebble in my pocket and so many adventures ahead….

‘We’re also acutely aware that we’re doing something we will do only once in our lifetime – never again, it’s too big, too difficult. And we have to finish this in the way we started it and the way we have travelled – with the dignity it deserves.

‘Our sponsors are saying, hey guys, when are you getting to Cape Town? I say sorry, can’t give a date yet. I don’t want to tear down the tarmac. Once in South Africa, I want to meet the King of Tembuland and local chiefs and mayors. Go slowly. Kosi Bay, the dune forests, Lake Sibaya, the Pondoland coast, Coffee Bay, Hole in the Wall, Cape Agulhas. Stay true to the edge. I suspect they think I’m being hugely irresponsible. But a date might destroy us. We need to maintain the
purity of the journey and the rhythm of Africa, find the balance.

‘I must say, though, Gill (his wife) is starting to talk about her parrots and dogs and home. I have a book to write and we’re starting an Adventure Centre in Pretoria and the Kingsley Holgate Foundation to continue putting something back into Africa. Ah well….’

Kingsley stares at his beer can for a while as the fireside chatter ripples around him. Thinking forward is a lot more problematic than looking back, so I change tack: ‘Do any events or places stand out as journey high points?’

He chuckles behind his white duvet of a beard. ‘At Pemba, a young journalist asked me questions like that. She wanted to know what I thought our great successes had been. I’m not sure she really understood my answer. I told her it was just finishing each day. Can we get across this river? Is the ferry working? Can we get into Western Sahara or across the Moroccan border into Algeria? Will that bridge hold the Land Rovers? How do we move 10 bales of mosquito nets to a remote village? It’s never been the big successes like riding back into the Cape of Good Hope reserve in triumph. Successes – high points – have been little, bitesized things.

‘But of course the big things have been huge: North Africa, wow! Carthage, El Alamein, Toubruk, Tangiers, Alexandra, the pyramids. And those Roman ruins – and meeting the Sahrawi people in Algeria who’ve been exiled by Morocco from Spanish Sahara, the world’s last colony. Wonderful people out in the desert, waiting for the world to help them go home.

‘Okay, then there was the Skeleton Coast and that amazing trip round the Kunene River. And crossing the Congo River on a river pirate’s creaky barge – hell, that was a trip. The jungles of Gabon and those pygmy elephants with Mickey Mouse ears …I mean, I could go on and on.

‘Back home in Zinkwazi before we left, when we’d walk the dogs on the beach, with our feet in the sand and the waves washing the shore, I’d look northwards up the beach to Tugela Mouth, then south and wonder: could we join this line? ‘When we get home, I’m going to walk on the beach again and I’ll look north and south and know that line. Joining it has become a reality, embedded in my soul. It’s not an egotistical thing. It’s just that this edge, this beautiful, difficult outside edge, now has great meaning to me. Actually, it just goes on and on, there’s no end to it.

‘The journey has been a huge expansion of our understanding of Africa. I’m not sure there’s another continent that’s so vastly different from north to south, east to west. But I must say that all the bureaucratic hassles we’ve had in Africa – plus landmines, people pressure, anti-Western feeling, wars and policing – have shown us just how incredibly free we are in South Africa. I’m not sure South Africans realize how fortunate they are.’

Kingsley gives me one of his owlish looks that usually mean he’s about to shift the agenda. ‘But if I were 20 years old, I’d bounce right back to the line somewhere on the Tanzanian coast. Beautiful! Glorious!

‘Actually that’s what I’m going to do, in a way. I’ll be going up to my dhow berthed near Nacala in Mozambique. A team of us will be marking each rib and plank. Then we’ll take it apart for transport to the Adventure Centre in Pretoria. And the trade winds will drift in smells of the warm, tropical sea, the palms will rustle and I’ll hear the call of fishermen coming across the water….

‘Mmm. I think it’s bed time,’ Kingsley ends, easing himself up from the chair, looking across at Ross, ‘unless there’s still a bit of Captain Morgan left in the bottle?’