Mahindra Scorpios go 35000km back down history

Published Jun 27, 2006

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Kitting up three vehicles for a 35 000km overland drive from the Himalayan foothills to Cape Town via a good chunk of western Asia would, you'd think, mean quite a quartermaster's list. Unless, that is, you're driving a Mahindra Scorpio SUV - in which case you bolt on a roof-rack, fit some heavy-duty tyres and head on out…

No, seriously. Well, OK, there were also some wooden boxes with a chirpy little image of a handyman and the words 'TOOL BOX' painted on them just to avoid any possible confusion; inside the boxes were, well, some tools that looked like they'd been bought from a local hardware store and some bits of plastic piping "just in case".

No, I didn't get to take 100 days' paid leave to join the Gondwanaland Expedition; I was being shown the remarkably undamaged and unworn Indian-built vehicles outside Cape Town's 'Pink Lady' - the Mount Nelson Hotel, final stop of the trip, by expedition leader, explorer extraordinaire and Fellow of the Royal Geographic Society Akhil Bakshi.

Bakshi had just delivered a presentation about the journey and, though not an employee of Mahindra & Mahindra, was hugely proud that the Scorpio GLX 2.6 turbodiesels had arrived in Cape Town right on schedule on Sunday (June 25) after visiting the southernmost point of Africa, Cape Agulhas, the day before - and that that box of spanners was still wrapped in its original plastic packaging.

Almost casually, he also pointed out that the Scorpios were not new: "Our budget didn't allow that," he explained. "We had to pick out some used models - they'd all done about 50 000km before we started the trip but still gave us an average fuel consumption of around 10.5 litres/100km."

Each was named after a major river in the areas they eventually crossed: Nile, Tigris and Ganga (Ganges) and Bakshi smiled wickedly from his rostrum as he reported their small convoy meeting an expedition convoy of huge Toyotas off-roaders south of Ethiopia "carrying so many parts they could have built an entire vehicle".

What, you might ask, does the ancient unified supercontinent of Gondwanaland have to do with it all? Bakshi explained that, 265-million years ago, Africa, India, Australia, South America, Antarctica and Eurasia were all way south of what is now the Alpine-Himalayan mountain chains, both of which were thrown up when this southern continent collided with what is now Russia, China and northern Europe.

"Part of our aim was to promote people-to-people contact between scientists from India and the countries of West Asia and East Africa which split from India all those millions of years ago," Bakshi explained. "It was a trip not only of exploration but also of friendship."

Historic cities

On board the Scorpios when they left the former hill station of Simla in the Himalayan to foothills en route to Mumbai were experts including a botanist, an archaeologist and an anthropologist.

From the port city of Mumbai, the vehicles were shipped to Bandar Abbas in Iran and continued driving through the historic cities of Shiraz, Persepolis, Isfahan, Tehran and Tabriz into Turkey.

From there they crossed the Anatolian Plateau and the Taurus Mountains and descended into the Syrian Desert towards the Mediterranean coast via the ancient ruins at Crac des Chevaliers and on through Jordan and the Dead Sea to Jerusalem before crossing the Suez Canal past the Gaza strip and into Egypt.

The convoy, still without mechanical problems, then followed the Nile Valley south through the Eastern Desert to the fringe of the Sudanese Nubian desert into Khartoum, the confluence of the Blue Nile and the White Nile.

Through Mozambique

Then it was up again and through the Ethiopian Highlands, the Danakil Desert and then south to the Great Rift Valley, Lake Victoria in Kenya, the Serengeti plains and the Ngorongoro Crater in Tanzania.

Lake Malawi was next (also called Lake Nyasa, Lake Nyassa or Lake Niassa after the Yao word for "lake" and officially Niassa in Mozambique) and then Mozambique, through Swaziland and into South Africa, following the Drakensberg - another mountain range created when Gondwanaland fragmented.

The drive ended at Cape Agulhas.

- For map-readers, here's the full route:

INDIA: Shimla - Chandigarh - New Delhi.

IRAN: Bandar Abbas - Shiraz - Isfahan - Tehran - Tabriz - Bazargun.

TURKEY: Gurbuluk - Van - Dayarbakir.

SYRIA: Aleppo - Damascus.

JORDAN: Amman.

ISRAEL: Dead Sea - Jerusalem - Taba.

EGYPT: Cairo - Minya - Luxor - Aswan - Abu Simbel.

SUDAN: Wadi Halfa - Abu Hamed - Atbara - Khartoum - Wadi Medani - Gedaref - Metema.

ETHIOPIA: Gondar - Bahar Dar - Lalibela - Addis Abbaba - Awasa - Moyale.

KENYA: Marsabit - Isiolo - Nairobi - Mara.

TANZANIA: Serengeti - Ngorongoro Crater - Singida - Rungwa - Chunya.

MALAWI: Karonga - Nkhata Bay - Liliongwe.

ZAMBIA: Lusaka.

ZIMBABWE: Harare.

MOZAMBIQUE: Chimoio - Inhassoro - Inhambane - Xai Xai - Maputo.

SWAZILAND: Goba - Siteki - Big Bend - Lavumisa.

SOUTH AFRICA: Ubizane - Durban - Port Elizabeth - Mossel Bay - Cape Agulhas - Cape Town.

- For more background information on the trip click here or here.

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