Profile
Blog
Photos
Videos
After a wonderful 22 day, 4500 kilometre trip through Botswana and South Africa's remotest desert parks with Isaac & Liesel it felt quite lonely to be back in South Africa on our own.
We had left the Kalahari Transfrontier Park and driven to Upington, our Northern Cape bolthole where we visited Landrover for our regular ritual of parting with large sums of money for repairs to our Discovery 11.
News from the UK, via text on the mobile and email once we got to Upington did little to improve our mood after such a lovely trip. Our tenants, whilst generously paying the last 2 months of rent they had previously withheld, had vacated our house and left it in a considerable mess. We were also missing various items on the inventory list.
Adding to our worries was the comment from our agent that the letting market was suffering in the economic downturn. Despite reducing the rental by £100 a month our house was attracting little interest from prospective tenants.
Gradually over the last month Angela and I had reached the same conclusion, we would probably have to return to the UK to sort our house out and see for ourselves what state it was in.
We also concluded that for the sake of our nerves the Landrover Discovery would have to be sold. With 250,000 kilometres on the clock, the ten-year-old vehicle was costing over £600 per repair bill, and we had three such bills since January. Whilst lovely to drive, it was too expensive to run and not reliable enough!
So there it is. Just short of three years since we left the UK to travel in Africa, we have decided to return home. However it is not the end of our desire to travel, or the end of our Africa adventure. We will repair the house ourselves, hopefully earn some money working and if there is anything left over after paying gas & electricity bills and local and national taxes, we will be back out to South Africa early in 2010 to sell the Landrover and buy something more reliable and cheaper to run.
The return tickets are booked for 28 April, Angela's birthday, and we will land at Heathrow early on 29 April to a beautiful warm and sunny English spring day. Gordon Brown will head the list of dignitaries there to greet us and the Queen will have laid on the State Landau for a tickertape parade down the M4 motorway back to Reading.
Alternatively we could be queuing in the rain outside Terminal 5 for a coach, the cost of which will require a liberal application of smelling salts and cardiac stimulation, and we will sit in a 20 mile long traffic jam on the M4 wondering how so many people fit in to such a tiny piece of land!
Should you or anyone you know, wish to buy a very low mileage 1999 Landrover Discovery 11 V8 petrol in pristine condition which has never (well hardly ever) been off road please ask them to contact us (sales particulars will be available in Braille).
Thanks are long overdue to all of you that read these blogs, look at our photo albums and contribute to the website through the Messageboard, and those of you that put your comments through the more private avenue of email.
We have both appreciated all your contributions and support, through whatever channels, and it has meant a great deal to us over the past 36 months. We will of course keep the website going (it's free for a start!) and continue to bore you to death with blogs and photos.
We are determined not to buy a car when we go back home, I'd like to say we are trying to do our bit for the planet but you know I'd be lying, we actually can't afford to run one!
Visitors to our house are most welcome and we meant what we said to everyone we've met in Africa and North America about you being most welcome to stay; we are a short (but sadly expensive) rail trip away from London. Depending on our financial situation you may have to bring your own food and bed (we are not sure if the outgoing tenants left ours!)
Finally, for those of you that live in the UK, if you know of any jobs that pay £100 per hour cash in hand within a 5-minute walk of our house in Reading please feel free to get in contact. Any work considered providing it is reasonably legal but I absolutely refuse to wear a suit and tie (actually I haven't got one, as you may recall I burnt my last suit in May 2006!)
Goodbye for now………..
Ralph & Angela
- comments