Preparation

In the run up to the event, preparation had not been going well.  The car had had an intermittent engine miss for some time, and this had been diagnosed both by Bush Rover and CMC (the main Land Rover dealer) as a faulty distributor.  CMC had kindly offered to source an OE replacement part, but a week before the event finally admitted defeat and told me they couldn’t find one.  That left me with plan B, and BushRover fitted one complete with a new coil and a new oil pump – it necessitated a new oil pump as the one on my engine was so old, despite it being a post ’87 3.9 V8 Range Rover engine.  I had bought it as a short engine, and the oil pump from my old Tanzanian engine had been transferred to it.  The problem was I now didn’t have any time for testing, as the installation was completed on Monday and the car had to be delivered to the transporter on Tuesday night as it was leaving for the event early Wednesday morning.

I had taken Tuesday afternoon off work to take the car to the industrial area for loading onto the transporter, and despite being lovely and sunny all morning, by the afternoon it was a drizzly miserable day.  I held out for as long as I could, but eventually had to drive the car there in the rain.  The canvas roof was still being made and so all I had was a weld-mesh frame to keep the rain out.  I decided that it would be a good idea to try and drive it with the tarpaulin in place, and this plan was going quite well until it blew off in the heavy traffic of Mombasa Road.  I managed to grab hold of it with one hand, and so arrived at the transporter soaked, driving one-handed, both me and the car filthy, with the tarpaulin dragging along the ground.  The drivers and turn-boys looked at me as if to say “These mzungus are crazy!”

Pre-event

Fortunately it was not far to the event – an easy four hours – and so we were able to leave early Saturday morning and still arrive with plenty of time to finish off the car, go through scrutineering and hand in all our money from the fundraising.  Mike DuToit, the MD of CFC Stanbic Bank, had secured a large donation from the bank in exchange for the promise that the company’s stickers would be prominent on the car.  He is evidently a man of his word, as he proceeded to plaster the car in stickers – I managed to drag him off it when he started sticking them to the wheels!  We decided that the car had contracted a new disease – CFC Stanbic pox.

At the drivers briefing Anton Levitan, the clerk of the course, reminded us that we should drive on the roads as little as possible, and then handed over to the official doctor who warned us about a particularly nasty wild animal that we must be aware of in this area – bees!  We were in bee country, with honey being a major export for the local community, and each participant was issued with a preventative antihistamine to take the night before. As usual, supper that night was spent plotting the guard-posts on the map and trying to remember how to program the GPSs. Once all they were al plugged in, we did a round of GoTos to check we had plugged the co-ordinates in correctly – one of mine turned out to be over 9,000 kms away, which earned me much derision and abuse from the rest of the team.

A pre-dawn start saw us lined up behind the clerk-of-the-course Anton Levitan’s car on our way to “Pies-to-go” although we were disappointed to find that pies were not on the breakfast menu, so we resolved that we HAD to finish otherwise we would not get the chance to sample the pieman’s wares.  We had decided to head to Procraft first, and it just so happened that the access road to Pies lined up exactly with the route to Procraft, so under Anton’s scornful eye we headed back down the road when the whistle was blown.  I drove through a bush on the way out to try and make it more convincing, but I don’t think Anton was fooled!

Once we broke off the road and headed through the bush, we tried to go as straight as possible – a route that would take us up a very steep hill almost immediately.  I changed to low second, locked the diffs and headed up the hill, only to have the miss return under high revs!  I couldn’t believe that it had come back after all the trouble we had gone to in the run-up to the event, and it was to plague us for the rest of the day.  To make matters worse, a water pipe blew off the engine and sprayed boiling water through a hole in the bulkhead all over my legs.  The jubilee clip was nowhere to be seen, so I had to make a bodge repair by twisting two lengths of fencing wire around the pipe with my leatherman.  After a rather hairy three-point turn, we headed back down the hill and around the brow on towards Procraft.

After a quick turn-around, we were on our way to KWS, which we did fairly straight – it was rocky and rough, but the huge ground clearance provided by our Unimog axles was making light work of the boulder fields.  We met Patrick Garner and Ian Duncan at KWS, where Patrick told us that his new distributor had also failed on his way to his first guard post; he had spent two hours fixing it and didn’t start his charge until 9:30 – there is always someone with worse luck than you!  One if Ian’s team members pointed out that we had a flat tyre, so we had to change that before continuing – no easy feat with the huge Unimog wheels!

KWS to TMAM was again quite straight, but we chose to take the road up to Brookhouse for the start of the gauntlet, which was pretty much in exactly the right direction.  

My heart sank as we approached the gauntlet only to see a queue of cars waiting to go through.  That sinking feeling got worse when we were told that the car currently stuck had been there for over 45 minutes already, but we figured that the quickest way through would be to get them through first.  They were very stuck, with their short wheelbase Landcruiser wedged on the rocks by its front and rear bumpers with its wheels spinning freely.  They were trying to winch themselves free, but it wasn’t working, so we got their hi-lift jack under their bull bar and jacked it into the air.  We then pushed it off the jack, effectively moving the front of the car sideways by about a foot.  We repeated this three more times and they were off the rocks and on their way.  Another car was in front of us in the queue, and I asked if I could go in front of them, as I knew that we would have no trouble getting through.  Sadly they declined, and we had to watch them struggle through for the next 45 minutes – they were eventually pulled free by the organiser’s unimog.  It took us about five minutes to drive through, and despite the crowd’s cheering, I was feeling pretty sore  about the delay.

The Goodyear control was manned by friends of ours, and it was good to see them and cram down some bourwurst before heading off to Copy Cat.  This route took us through the village of Barsemoi, were we had arrange to meet our supporters, who had our second spare wheel with them.  We swapped the flat tyre for a fresh one and headed on our way to copycat.

From Copycat, we decided to head back down towards Vineyard Church using the lugga which was surprisingly good going, although at one stage we had to leave it as it turned into a narrow rocky gorge.   While we were waiting for our runners to find a way over the crest and back into the lugga, I decided to go for a small wander to water the garden.  Whilst idly passing the time, one of the dreaded bees we had been warned about settled on my face and stung me on the forehead.  It felt like the little bugger had injected its load of venom straight into my brain, but being a man I dealt with the situation in the stoic manner to be expected.  When I had finished screaming and thrashing about, Cor – our navigator with a steady hand, deftly removed the sting from my forehead, and restrained me from calling in the chopper medevac.

With the runners having found a way back into the lugga, we proceeded on our way, but the drop back in was very treacherous and steep, and we managed to dislocate our steering with the full weight of the vehicle pushing the rim of the front right wheel hard against a boulder and jamming it on full lock.  There seemed no way out, but after a good deal of cursing and wheelspin in reverse, we managed to inch the car back just enough to straighten our wheels and head on down the slope.  We had lost the line we had chosen and were forced to pass under a low tree that subsequently ripped the roof half off.  Cor and I admired our new sunroof, but were not so impressed by the hailstorm of leaves, thorns and caterpillars we experienced for the rest of the day every time we pushed through any thick vegetation.

Our hosts at the Vineyard Church guardposts were as hospitable as ever, and we enjoyed the refreshments they had to offer whilst trying to remember not to swear.  Vineyard to Land Rover was a tiger line with a lot of gulleys and nasty little luggas.  At one point we were traversing a side-slope, which with our ground clearance is always a hair-raising experience, so I decided we needed the 200kgs provided by Richard and Bernard on the running board to stop us rolling down the hill.  As we crawled forwards, I looked down the hill, only to see one of the Unimogs down the bottom looking very bent and sorry for itself!  We then came across the team in some shade, waiting for a recovery vehicle.  Their driver had been airlifted out, but the rest of them were just a bit shaken up.  We came across the second Unimog shortly afterwards, sporting battle scars where it had been hit by the first as it rolled.  They were also shaken up, and let us past so that they could negotiate the next side slope very slowly!  We later heard that the driver had been discharged from hospital so nothing too serious.

From Landrover we roaded it to Hardi, mindful of the hour that we had lost in the gauntlet, but found that our car wouldn’t go in high ratio, so we crawled along the road in low 5th!  Hardi attacked us with their ice filled Hardi knapsack sprayer – instant brain freeze – and their delicious ice creams.  We always try to plan our route so that we get to Hardi at the hottest time of the day, when the ice creams really boost morale!

From Hardi, we headed back south along a huge wide sandy lugga, which was very good going, and allowed our engine temperature to fall below 100 for the first time since mid morning.  We held onto the lugga for as long as we could, in fact we came across the access road into the guardpost before breaking out and heading up to Brookhouse.

Having bashed our way through the bundu, we came across one of the RC officials who told us not to proceed as there was a huge traffic jam of cars and we wouldn’t get through.  His rationale was that he didn’t want to have another car to rescue after dark, but it meant that we had to do a huge diversion through the bush – we would have been better off following the road.

At Satao we were behind another Unimog who was preparing to winch up a lugga out of the control.  We were pretty desperate for time at this stage as it was 4:45pm and we only had 45 minutes to go, with the next stage being a tiger line into the final control so decided to take the lugga once again towards Pies.  We had to finish, at all costs, so we went for it. This was a bit of a gamble, especially as we had to winch ourselves up the hill at one stage, and the clock was ticking.  Our engine problem was also getting really bad, with a constant misfire plaguing us. We had winched to the brow of the hill, and were following a single track through very dense terrain.  We started going faster and faster with 20 minutes to go, following Mike DuToit, when we realised that we had lost our three other runners.  They had GPSs so we figured that they could walk into the final control, and we pressed on to try and get the car in by the 5:30pm deadline.  As the terrain opened out, Mike climbed into the back of the car to direct us from his higher vantage point.  I could tell that one of my break pipes had been torn off underneath, as the car lurched to the right every time I braked and after a short while pressing the brake pedal got no response whatsoever.  I decided to keep this latest development to myself as we pressed on, crashing through the bush and over boulders in a desperate bid to finish.

A nasty lugga hove into view and Mike yelled from the back “Stop. Stop! STOP!!”  I had no brakes at all, and we had no choice but to drop into the lugga with a sickening crash into the rocks as Mike leapt clear.  “That’s it then.” Said Cor, to which Mike replied, “You’ll never get out of there.” while he dusted himself down.  I restarted the engine, selected low first, locked all the differentials, and gave her all she had left!  The huge wheels span, found purchase, ripped the bulbar off the face of the rock and climbed up.  The fuel tank guard crashed into the rock at the back, and with a grinding of metal against rock, blue smoke off the tyres, she was out!  Mike’s face was a picture, but we didn’t have time to congratulate ourselves, we were off.  

The access road into Pies was in sight, when the engine died.  I tried and tried to restart it, but it just wouldn’t go.  I couldn’t believe it, so close and yet so far.  “Just get it to the road, somehow!” said Cor, and as I frantically pumped the accelerator whilst holding my thumb on the starter, one of the eight cylinders began to rhythmically fire.  A second fired, and once the third joined in I thought “That’ll do” and let the clutch out, back in low first.  She crawled forward, at less than walking pace, with a cylinder joining in the chorus every hundred yards or so.  We made it to the road, and turned left in towards pies, by this time with all eight cylinders firing.  As we picked up speed, our spirits rose, and we came flying around a blind bend to reveal a steep drop in the road.  It was at this point that I remembered the lack of brakes.  I flicked the gear lever from 5th to third, and we managed to slow down just enough to stay on the road.  We careered into Pies, with everyone cheering and shouting; and I took the car round in circles until I had bled off enough speed to stop.  They must have thought we were doing victory laps!

The End

Our support team was there to meet us, and we had a celebratory beer – we had finished with 5 minutes to spare, after having battled through the bush for ten hours!  Pies were delighted to get a car back to their control as we were the only team who made it back having started from there. I asked our fundi to see if he could figure out what was wrong with the engine, and he pointed out that the fuel filter under the bonnet was completely dry.  I then found that the switch to the fuel pumps was off – it must have been flicked down when we crashed into the lugga!  I couldn’t believe it, all that stress could have been removed with the simple flick of a switch!  We had driven the last 15 minutes with no fuel pumps at all.  

We also found that we had lost our tool box and tool roll, which was a disaster as they contained almost all the tools that I had been collecting over the last 20 years!  Cor and Mike volunteered to go back to the lugga to retrieve the tools, and as they headed back down the access road they saw Bernard, Richard and Dirk carrying the tool box and tool roll down the road!  They had decided to follow the trail of brake fluid we had kindly left for them through the bush, rather than head directly to Pies, reasoning that if we broke down they would find us.  Back at Pies there was much derision and banter from the abandoned runners, but in reality everyone was delighted with the result and we celebrated with numerous pies washed down with cold Tusker.

The Results

The next morning the results were announced, and we learned that we had come 5th in the event.  We had also raised the third highest amount of money, which put us second in the prestigious Victor Ludorum award – a combination of the charge and the fund raise.  Last year we came sixth, so we reasoned that we should win the event in another four years....   The hour that we lost in the gauntlet may not have affected our placing either, because had we had the extra time, we would have taken on the section from Brookhouse to Satao and been caught in another horrendous jam, which may have meant we would not have finished at all.  A great charge, enjoyed by all!  Now to repair the roof, sort out the engine miss and overheating problems, strip the gearbox (synchromesh problems in second) and sort out that dislocating steering – better get cracking then, only 12 months to go!

Ben Woodhams

 

This article is reproduced with kind permission from LANDROVER ENTHUSIAST UK where it features in their November 2009 issue