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In England Tim Baily worked for a year with the South African immigrant organization, and was in line for grooming for a senior post when he gambled with hi s future once more . He felt that he had learned enough about office management and his next step was to find out the travel trade. So he took an enormous cut in salary to figure as a tour operator. After eight months he resigned again then rebuilt his finances with six months hard labor digging out the underground tunnel for London s new Victoria Line. Then he was ready for the most important gamble of all: the acquisition of 4 second-hand Land Rovers and his return to Africa.
"My friends and relatives all thought i used to be insane," he recalls. "Only a fool, they said, would risk his career this manner . i attempted to elucidate that not all folks crave for the securities of modern-day life, which on behalf of me there was a far greater sense of fulfillment within the sort of life that i used to be planning. I believed also that there must be an excellent number or other children tired of security and routine who might feel an equivalent way, and who would be grateful and looking forward to the chance or shedding the shackles of civilization for a couple of months in Africa."
"I tried to elucidate the comradeship of a camp fire by night, the majesty of a bull elephant with ears spread able to charge, the dust-filled splendor of an African sunset, or the sounds or native music drifting across the night bush. The very uncertainty of Africa makes every moment a replacement experience. Africa, I told them, is like nowhere else on earth, and that i must see every corner of it, and help others to ascertain it, before it goes -- for sadly, it's going."
So, in November of 1968, Tim Baily launched that first Siafu expedition across Africa; 50 young men and ladies driving six Land Rovers, for 2 private vehicles had also joined his convoy. The Sudan was still a obstacle in reference to visas, then their route lay through the Algerian Sahara and therefore the Hoggar Massif, heading south through black iron-stone hills, wild red mountains, and therefore the vast yellow sands. On this pioneer trip the task of keeping their ancient vehicles running taxed all their combined mechanical skills, but Tim Baily was learning invaluable lessons in bush mechanics.
South of the Sahara this was a period or violence and upheaval. The Siafu party avoided the Biafra conflict but as they skilled northern Nigeria they found military checkpoints everywhere along the route and repeatedly the Land Rovers were stopped and searched by impolite soldiery who left the expedition members to repack. The delays were endless. On entering Chad they found more war tension. The last remnants of the French legion were fighting a little-known war against rebellious tribesmen in France's former colony and therefore the northern a part of Chad was a turmoil of raiding bandits.
Next came that dramatic crossing of the Obangui River into the Congo. the foremost recent waves of bloodshed therein unhappy land had been brought in check only a couple of months before, and at any moment it could explode again. the entire country was still nervous and trigger-happy, and therefore the expedition had cause to sweat a dozen times over the thirteen hundred miles of troop-infested mud and jungle roads before they eventually crossed safely into Uganda.
In East Africa they were eventually ready to relax, to go to the good game parks, to cruise up the Victoria Nile to the Murchison Falls, and to easily laze and swim on the Kenya coast -- activities which are still a serious feature of each Siafu safari. once they continued south they encountered an angry political atmosphere as they crossed from Libya to Rhodesia, but it had been their last moment of tension. Four and a half months after leaving London the primary Siafu Expedition drove triumphantly into the South African city or Johannesburg.
Since that original hair-raising trip there are a dozen and more successful Siafu safaris, and therefore the Siafu ant emblem painted on the white door of a Land Rover is fast becoming a well-known sight on the desert and jungle roads of Africa, the toughest continent of all of them for overland travel.
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