Johannesburg – From fleeing Mali in the middle of a coup d’état to inhaling the breathtaking horizons of the Mountains of the Moon in Uganda, two young South Africans – Scott Mallen and Dave McAlpine – experienced a journey of a lifetime for charity which took them 10 months to complete, using only public transport from Casablanca all the way to Johannesburg.
And even now, four years later, it remains an expedition suited to anyone with a penchant for travelling.
“I would definitely recommend it to anyone. A lot of people couldn’t do it, but not for the reasons they’d expect,” said Mallen of his 26,607 kilometre journey in an interview with African News Agency (ANA) recently.
“People would sooner crack because of the relentless uncomfortable public transport, you hardly sleep. You camp in crappy places, there’s noise all the time. What Dave and I always said, the 80 percent of the terrible times were always trumped by the 20 percent of highs entailed in the natural splendour of our mother Africa.”
The pair used 16 different kinds of transport including train, bus, minibus, truck, scooter, car, donkey, horse, cattle, camel, pirogue, ferry, dhow, speedboat and steamboats. As for why they chose public transport, Mallen said it was for the thrill of the journey.
“Why public transport? For an adventure. Even though we don’t use it here, it was an opportunity to get to know what each country was really like on the ground rather than flying in and getting a 4×4 and cruising with air conditioning to the places you want to see.
“I won’t deny that a lot of it was because it was the cheapest option, much cheaper than if we had tried to take a vehicle. The riskiest aspect of our trip was the public transport, and that probably won’t change soon.”
The word epic is often thrown around rather loosely these days, but to describe this undertaking as anything less would be understating the journey which took Mallen, an English teacher, and McAlpine, a medical doctor, the best part of 2012 to finish.
Both Mallen and McAlpine, friends since attending St Johns College, now aged 31, look back on that memorable trip which started out in Casablanca in Morocco in January and ended in October back in Johannesburg with true nostalgia.
McAlpine had just finished studying medicine in 2011 when he and Mallen decided the time was right to undertake what would become an unforgettable period in their lives.
“The overall yearning of the trip was to go from North to South, but in a less conventional way than what you often hear from Cape to Cairo,” said Mallen.
And while most of the initial part of their trip went according to plan, it would be three months into the journey when on March 22, the military attempted to overthrow the Mali government, Mallen and McAlpine had their first real scare.
“The scariest part without a doubt was in Mali. We knew there was some upheaval and potential rebellion in the north east of the country with a growing Al Qaeda presence there, and weakening government forces across the country. We probably pushed it a bit by going into the red zones as the American and English governments would call them. Two days before we were due to leave, the 2012 coup d’état happened.
“What it did mean for us was that the borders would be sealed on the outskirts of the country. The scariest moment by far were those two days where we had to hightail it out of Mali to get to Burkino Faso.
“We ended up in all sorts of transport that broke down, amid increasing reports that the public broadcaster had been taken over and the President deposed and all sorts of other conflicting reports. We actually had to get on an ox wagon for the last 30 kilometres before the border.
“When we got to the border, all the flags were at half-mast, which again signals a country that is no longer under governmental rule. We were lucky, we were probably some of the last people that were able to get out for a period of six weeks until the curfew on the borders were lifted.”
When pressed for highlights of his trip, Mallen was reluctant to single out just one because it would always be difficult to reduce such an undertaking to a single defining moment.
“Summitting the Rwenzori mountain range, also known as the Mountains of the Moon in Uganda, was magical. It straddles the borders of Rwanda, Uganda and the DRC. Largely because it’s the most incredible place I’ve ever seen. From the rainforests in the beginning to the shelves of ice and frozen plateaus you get in the middle of Equatorial Africa. That was a stunning moment. To summit the peak at just under 5 000 metres was something I’ll never forget.”
The most touching personal encounter came in a rural village in Senegal.
“We were on the Senegal river between Mauritania and Senegal which was very, very remote. We were canoeing down it in a flat-bottomed canoe which was not really meant to go down 100 kilometres, and we would stop occasionally.
“We were in desperate need of cooking utensils and the village we chanced upon was completely poverty-stricken, living off the few crops they could grow close to the river banks.
“We went in, and in our broken French we said we needed cooking utensils and this lovely woman gave us a pot which we said we would use that night, and return it. But through our broken French and some of the locals who could speak a bit of broken English it became clear this woman was giving us that pot as a gift. This being in a house where it was clear she needed the pot far more than us.”
While it was a massive personal experience for Mallen and McAlpine, their quest was also charity-driven as they raised money for the Key School for Autism in Johannesburg.
“There’s so much you can do for Africa, if you want to. There are so many charities you could throw money at. To get to grips with someone who has Autism in a community where it’s misunderstood, the patient suffers on so many levels as they are demonised and raised as different. You’re basically doomed, sentenced to a life of being ‘othered’ if you should have some mental illness. We set up a fund based on reaching our destinations and other such things and we managed to raise R60 000 for the Key School for Autism.
“It was something, but by no means anywhere near enough. It just made sense to do this trip for more than just ourselves.”
African News Agency