In 1982, Kae and Evan Lewis set off from Europe to travel the length of Africa in their 1974 VW Kombie campervan with two wheel-drive. This blog includes the photos we took and excerpts from travel diaries and letters we wrote at the time. We left London in early January 1982 and reached a beach in Capetown in South Africa nine months later, after a journey of 20,600 miles. We averaged about 10-20 miles/hr and were seldom out of first gear.

Why choose to publish a blog now, so long afterwards? Much of the route we took, through the Sahara Desert, Nigeria, Cameroon, Central African Republic and the Congo (called Zaire in 1982) and on to Uganda and Kenya, has been closed off to overlanders since the 1990s due to various rebel and Islamic insurgencies with their associated terrorism, kidnappings and wars, the random terror acts and lawlessness of despot dictators, the terrifying increase in Ebola and Cholera in the Congo, and finally, because the road through Central Africa is now more impassable than it ever was, having returned to the jungle it came from only a few years after we passed that way.

In 1982, there was no web, no google searches for up-to-date information, no blogs, no cellphones or emails, no GPS or satellite communications and most of the post offices were not functioning or sending out mail only on a quarterly basis, if at all. Even international phone calls on public landlines were unavailable at these post offices. Once we left Europe, our family and friends had no idea where we were for months on end. Also, without GPS or even large scale maps, we ourselves often did not know where we were. We navigated by compass and degrees of latitude and longitude, calculated when we arrived at a city large enough to appear on the wall map of the entire continent of Africa that we had. There were few, if any signposts, and most of the locals we asked had very little idea in which direction you had to go to reach another town, even one only 20 or 40 miles away. We were on our own.

The free life and self-dependence, together with the fact that we never knew what tomorrow would bring, had an attraction of its own that can only be understood by those who have had similar experiences

Kae Lewis

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