It was a bit surreal to be celebrating the Scottish national day of Burn’s night in Africa, but celebrate it we did, with real authentic Scots men and even a few tunes on the old bagpipes! The only thing that wasn’t authentic was the lack of haggis, but I guess we can be excused that seeing as we were in Cameroon!

Here is Robbie our 100% authentic Scotsman playing Highland Castle on the bag pipes with the enraptured audience, some I’m sure had never even seen the strange white man instrument before!

And before you all start complaining that Burn’s Night was ages ago (the 25th of January to be exact), yes it was and we got the date right… it’s just that our blog posts sometimes lag behind due to laziness or even business!

One of the guy’s here has a car which had an accident which twisted the chassis of his car and the problem was causing all sorts of issues, from excessive tyre wear, to destroying the ball joints and even wearing out the steering box so we needed to go and get it sorted out.

Usually if you had a car that was as badly damaged as this at home the insurance company would have written off the car and given you the cash, as it would be too expensive to repair… however not in Africa where anything is possible with the most rudimentary of tools.

Chassis out of alignment… no problem, just lift the engine and the body off the chassis, make a few cuts here and there, weld it all together in the correct position and you are done! It was three days work for the guy and he had about 10 of his guys working, including his own mechanic and electrical guy and it cost about 400 pounds sterling, including all labour and parts!

The steering box was completely gone, but the mechanic was able to take it apart, find a replacement for the broken part from another Toyota steering box and put it all back together as good as new!

The guy at the body shop was quite amazing and specialises in taking accident damaged cars from the US and Europe and fixing them so well you can’t even tell they have had an accident! Even looking under the bonnet of one of his Toyota’s that he had fixed you couldn’t tell that the thing had been completely crumpled.

All of this achieved with a small area of dirt, a corrugated iron lean-to, a few basic tools and a lot of willing strong assistants. True innovation does come from Africa, just a different kind, how to do more with less, perhaps we can learn a little from Africa during our own economic downturn and be a little less wasteful?

There has been a bit of silence around the blog recently, however that doesn’t mean that we haven’t been busy or even that we have just been sunning ourselves on a beach somewhere in Africa! In fact we have been doing a little of both.

Right now the bikes are still in Cameroon taking a bit of a rest while we work on some other projects that have come across our path. In true 2wheels2africa style we have embraced the opportunities that have come our way and as things materialise we will be blogging further, we just don’t want to let the cat out of the bag yet!

Our dynamic duo has been split up temporarily as Keith has gone back to the UK for a couple weeks to sort out all of his stuff in storage in London. Here is a picture from him today, still flying the flag for KTM in the back window of his rental car.

Snow is quite a change from Africa and it was a shock for Keith to find he needed a whole new wardrobe to handle the cold! It was a 30 degree Celsius plus difference from boarding the plane in Africa to touching down in London!

Keith flying the KTM Flag even in a car!

This day last year saw the grand departure from a very wet, cold and blustery London. It was a great day to leave as the memory left an indelible impression on both of us. As we rode out through the streets of London I can vividly remember thinking ‘thank god I’m leaving this s%$t behind’. The idea was to hit Cape Town by late April and having only made it as far as Ghana by then it was clear that the plans had changed.  We then pushed back the idea of Cape Town to 5 months or maybe 6 and then in Nigeria in a moment of clarity we were struck, as if by lightening, that no plan was the best plan.

Currently we’re in Limbe, Cameroon. There was a plan to make Cape Town by February but it only took 3 days before we remembered the great discovery made in Nigeria. We celebrated Christmas, New years and even Jeremy’s birthday here. What a strange but fantastic moment Christmas day was. Sitting at the bird watchers club poised on the balcony with the waves crashing on the rocks 20 meters below us. It was 30 degrees Celsius, the sun was shining and the skies were blue. There was even a fine breeze coming off the ocean to keep us fresh and cooled. What a great setting in which to enjoy the next treat. A gourmet 6 course meal which comprised of none of the traditional turkey, ham or stuffing. Instead there was salmon, foie grasand duck. It was fantastic and we hardly even noticed it was Christmas, at least in the sense that the shops weren’t crowded, it wasn’t full of commercial messages of buy buy buy and fake piped music full of Christmas cheer, and where the real point of the celebration was totally ignored!

As we look forward to the road ahead it brings us many questions as to what to do, but I’m sure we’ll find our way in our own time. We are certainly keen not to miss out on all the wonderful people who have touched our lives with their incredible generosity during this past year, those who have opened up their lives and their homes, fed and watered us and given us their friends details along the way or just jumped on the back of the bike to show us how to get to a place when we merely asked for directions! This is I guess the true spirit of Christmas and really shows mankind on it’s best day, something that happens a lot more than the news would have us believe!