Two blokes on motorbikes, two 4X4's, an on-board medic, a film crew, and a 'mission control' back in Blighty handling all the paperwork etc. Very cosy. Worse still its taking them nearly two months to get from JOG to Cape Town! What's that all about, call that progress.I recall back in early nineties being involved in a failed attempt (not our fault, just something to do with a war in the area) to drive a Herald, and a Morris 1800 to Cape Town. Just two cars, no service crew, medical back-up, mobile phones (or Satellite phones!), and no minders to get us across any borders. We got as far as the Western Sahara (pictured above), which is right in the middle of the west side of Africa before our progress was halted. We waited a full week in some god forsaken hole called Dakhla for a UN guarded convoy to take us through one of the Worlds longest running disputed areas. It had only taken us just over a week to get to this place from the UK, and we were fairly confident that if we had got across that border the whole trip could have been done and dusted in under three weeks. As it happens we turned around and headed home. After dropping John Kipping off at Casablanca airport on the way back I drove the whole way back to Blighty including the two ferry crossings in three days of virtually none stop driving.
Ewan, and Charlie need to invest in some faster motorbikes!
I suppose they could argue that the support team is there to support itself - without the camera and sound crew, the director et al there'd be no telly programme. In other words, Charlie and Ewan *could* do the trip alone but we'd not see it, unless they'd like to shoot their own shakey-cam footage ;)
ReplyDeleteMust be nice to have a team of fixers though, and to a point I agree: we might be about more sympathetic about Ewan's whining if he and Charlie were 'roughing' it.