Apologies for the brief hiatus in posting. The AfricanSurfer crew has had to give in to The Man for a few months to pay off the indulgences of our 15-month trip.  Don’t worry, it’s not all over just yet. There are a few exciting projects in the pipeline, so watch this space.

For those of you who haven’t seen our article in GolfPunk yet, i finally got my hands on the PDF (although that shouldn’t stop you from buying South Africa’s best golf mag).

I’ll upload the PDF as soon as i work out how to, but in the meantime, here’s a full text of the article…

At a certain stage in our lives, a young South African’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of London.  And so, each year, work visas in hand, thousands of our best and brightest troop onto the rain-drenched pavement of Heathrow airport to spend a few years in a land where the most important item in your golf bag is your umbrella and a pub lunch in any club house canteen costs more than a 2-year membership to the Royal Johannesburg.

Stricken by this same strange affliction, two friends and I decided to join the temporary migration to the UK last year. But, because we were all too aware of the dreary hardships of life on the ‘mud island’, we wanted to make our trip there as entertaining as possible. Twelve hours in SAA’s economy class versus six months cruising along the beaches of West Africa? No contest. After all: why fly to London when you can drive?

We had a three-step approach to planning our trip from Cape Town to London. The first was to procure a vehicle. An ancient Toyota Landcruiser was all our meagre budget would allow, so we relied on the fact that we could get her across the Orange River and into Namibia before the traffic cops could discover her lack of roadworthiness.

The second step, vehicle-preparation, involved spending lots of time ensuring we could get six surfboards and two roof tents onto the roof, and buying loads of Pronutro.

The third was to plan a route. Twenty-one countries in six months? No problem. We can get through the Congo in three days, right? Sure we can…

Finally, in March 2007 we set off from Cape Town and headed north. Our nerves about the road ahead began to dissipate as our old truck managed the first two thousand kilometres without a hiccup.  “Maybe it won’t be so difficult after all”, we thought. Then we crossed into Angola.

There wasn’t much talking in the Landcruiser as we inched our way over the ribbons of tar that linked the potholes making up the road into southern Angola. What little talk there was dropped to nothing as the sun began to set on our first day in “Africa-proper” and we faced the prospect of finding a camp in the landmine-littered bush.

Our spirits were buoyed slightly when we came across the wrought-iron gates and palm-lined driveway of a commercial farm.  But when we headed up to the farmhouse and a scarred and muscle-bound Angolan war veteran stepped out of the entrance hall (in which he and his men had built a campfire) and growled “we live here now” in broken English, we were sure the game was up.

Then, as pretty much everyone else we met on our trip did, he grinned, and offered us a place to stay.

This hospitality continued in Luanda - where a new friend Paulo repaired our broken suspension for free; in the DRC - where three Catholic priests took us into their bombed-out cathedral; in Nigeria - where we stayed with Zimbabwean farmers recently given land and capital by the Nigerian government to start commercial farms after theirs were stolen by Robert Mugabe; in Cote d’Ivoire - where our new friends guided us to surf spots that have hardly ever been surfed before; and all along our route.

It wasn’t all fun and games though.  Parts of Northern Angola, the DRC, Congo and Cameroon have no roads to speak of and it took days of low-range driving to get through them. In Gabon we had to be rescued by a national park official when we became hopelessly stuck in a deep puddle in the jungle. In Togo we were presented bowls of food confidently identified as ‘beef’ by the cook, only to find ourselves picking out miniature ribcages belonging to some unidentified and  hapless rodent.

‘Lurks’ the trip mechanic who used to be a Chartered Accountant, got malaria in Benin and again in Mali. ‘Stone’, who left a promising audit career to take a post as the trip chef, battled a vicious ringworm infection for weeks in The Gambia and Senegal. In Morocco I got jailed briefly for a visa infraction.

Overall, however, our experience of the rest of our continent was overwhelmingly positive.  In a village in the south of Cameroon we surfed with Peggy - the only surfer in the region - who rides a 10-year old board, broken in the middle.  In a village in the north of Cameroon we swam in volcano lakes with our new friends Francis and Fidelis who cooked for us every night while we stayed in a spare room of their seminary.

We camped on the beaches of West Africa with Kingsley Holgate, and in the deserts of the Sahara with poetry-writing freedom fighters.  We didn’t pay any bribes, experienced no crime to speak of, and made hundreds of friends all the way up the coast.

So next time you’re looking to book a flight to London, consider taking a drive up the coast instead. It takes a little longer (our trip ended up talking fifteen months instead of the six we initially intended), but it will almost certainly be worth it.

If you really need to get on the course:
Morocco is your best bet if you want to get a round in on your way up the west coast of Africa. This North African country has 20 golf courses but the most famous course is the Robert Trent Jones-designed Royal Dar es Salaam Golf Club in Rabat.

The popularity of golf in Morocco is attributed to the previous King of Morocco, Hassan II, who was described as “an internationally ranked player”.  One fears that the journalist who wrote this may have been to the same school as the North Korean journo who wrote that that nation’s leader, Kim Jong-Il, shot “five holes-in-one during his first try at the game and finished 38 under par”. Jong-Il and Hassan II do, after-all, share a similar human rights record.

Thankfully, modern day Morocco is run in a much more enlightened manner by their new King, Mohammed VI who is more keen on water sports (he founded Morocco’s first surf club after he met a young Moroccan surfer while he was out jet-skiing).

He is still seen on the golf course every now and then, however, so look out for him and his entourage while you’re on the 3 courses and 440 hectares of the Royal Club.