Hiya Dennis.......privelidge my arse, it was great fun meeting up with you as we went along......get that bloody cough sorted out though mate before you go much further.....they shoot horses for less than that in several countries
PS stash a few Eucalyptus branches in your panniers on the way
Thanks to everyone else for the comments......we have discovered though that what we've done may well only be the start of things......getting a 20 yr old landy across the desert was a huge crac, pulling the people and belongings out of hundreds of miles of sand and rock was fun too, but what we found in the Gambia has made all three of us look at things differently....
Don't be the slightest bit surprised to find us trying to raise a posse to fly out there and spend a week in the bush mending incubators, wiring, installing solar heating, digging rubble out and driving small bleeding children a hundred miles out of the bush to the clinic....
One of the things I'll certainly be trying to do is fulfill a promise that the three of us will try and carry on supporting the people we met and donated the landy....YOUR landy, to.
Giving a superb vehicle like that to anyone is nice- but we looked at several clinics, talked to lots of people, including the Gambian minister for health, and turned them all down because we didn't feel that the landy would be either utilised properly, or maintained properly.....we had literally hours of talks and heated discussions before we all agreed on the best place for Boris.....and it still feels good knowing where he's gone to.
There was no way that we were going to leave it in the wrong place, or somewhere that it would soon become spare parts or a hulk to be stripped and sold off, but they will still need support to run her effectively- and we've promised that support.
Graham got some good contacts with people like Bearmach and Swansea 4x4 when we were prepping the vehicle, and we'll be talking to them more to try and extend the generous support they initially gave us.
We'll get the photos and links up here soon so that you can see what we're on about, and I'm going to copy this into a new thread too, because it's really important to us.
Like I said at the beginning, this was a huge crac, a big adventure, but what we came away with was not only the sense of achievement in a job well done, a mission accomplished but also a humbling experience that made us all feel rather small and our problems insignificant.
Oh yeah, and don't forget the two chimps that UKGSer has adopted