Something mildly disturbing has been ringing in my ears the past few days. Like the uncomfortable drone of a mosquito in the dark or an annoyingly bad 80’s tune that for some reason only known to itself has popped into your head and just won’t go away, it’s niggling and gnawing painfully at my mind. It’s a an old English adage – seven ominous little words – repeating endlessly in my skull: “Start as you mean to go on”.
You can probably deduce from this that things had not started well. The idea of trying to take part in The Adventurists Africa Rally 09 began one crisp winter’s day in a bar high up somewhere on the ski slopes of the Alps. We were two friends who knew how to drive, quite liked seeing the world and had pretty flexible work commitments. Spending a few weeks on the road from London to Cameroon in aid of charity seemed an adventure not to miss. It would be a journey of 10,000 miles taking in a few different countries (no clue which at this point) and certainly several different habitats (desert, jungle and probably other stuff in-between). We agreed there and then to sign up as soon as possible and turned our formidable intellects to the most important first task in preparing for such a mega trip: deciding on a team name. The effort of crafting something with the appropriate comic genius soon proved too much and we settled on a mash-up of our two surnames (Mann and Gow) with a vaguely mechanical sounding bit tagged on the end: the “Man-go-matics” team was born. Any similarity to the names of actual tropical fruit is purely coincidental.
Energised by our achievement so far, we left the bar and returned to the slopes for an impromptu mini ski adventure that would take us across several valleys and back in one day. There I stood, half way up the first slope, peering to the distant snow-covered peaks that marked our furthest destination. The next thing I seemed to be observing was a cluster of stars, which surprised me because I was sure they hadn’t been there a second ago. And this starry scene was shrouded in a profoundly peaceful silence. Then the pain kicked in, quickly followed by the eye-piercing glare from the sun-drenched snow. And lots of muffled shouting in an assortment of languages. No doubt much of it was very colourful.
Having established that a direct hit at high speed by a rogue and very well built Dane boarder had probably caused a degree of confusion among my bones and internal organs as to what shape they should be or indeed what their actual jobs were, I was packaged off down the hill like a well wrapped saucisson.
Started with a bang!
That was the beginning of the Mangomatics’ African adventure. But it wasn’t the end of the beginning. The beginning had more to offer.
After the bang came a whimper. While it was completely understandable and on reflection not completely unexpected, it has brought the Mangomatics’ bid to take part in the Africa Rally 09 to a spluttering halt months before the start date.
The two of us had agreed back in January to try to sign-up to this year’s rally and successfully completed the online registration. We’d paid our money** in February and had a place confirmed. All we had to do now was to think about starting to plan our trip. The actual planning bit seemed like a lot of work involving finding cars, deciding on routes, getting a variety of jabs and sorting out Visas, not to mention raising cash for charity. So for now we limited our planning to deciding that we would think about it later, at some point… probably.
That’s when the whimpering text came from the “go” half of Mangomatics: “wont b able to go on rally“. Familly commitments have conspired to reduce the team to just one. Recovering from injuries, with no car, no plan, no route and now no co-driver, it could turn out to be a very short rally for me. This is when that little adage started playing with my mind: “start as you mean to go on”. . .
When faced with such adversities there is only once reasonable course of action possbile and that is the action I intend to take: blindly ignore all the problems and carry-on regardless.
So I guess I had better get proper busy…
** Just as an aside and note to the illustrious Adventurists organisers: my bank (and probably other participants’ banks) didn’t seem to like Google CheckOut which you were using to collect the initial fees. It all went though in the end, but just made trying to give you money a bit more difficult than it needed to be.
