Overlanding

I originally came up with the idea of buying a car in Kenya because I thought it would be an easy way of travelling around and I figured it would be cheaper than renting a car. It was only after this idea, when I started digging into the subject, that I found out there was a name for the act of travelling around in cars: overlanding. A term I had never heard of in my life, even though I consider myself an experienced traveller. It's quite strange that I never met overlanders or even had considered this way of travelling before. I was surprised to find out about this whole unknown world that has been there since forever and I had managed to miss it.

Apparently overlanding is mostly done in Africa, but people basically do it everywhere. Like with most subjects, the more you read about it, the more you realize how little you know and how much there is yet to learn.

Anyways, we never really back out of a good challenge, plus, we wanted an adventure, so throwing ourselves into the world of overlanding was just about the thing we wanted. With everything that I know now, after only five weeks of travelling, I realize we made a huge amount of mistakes we could maybe have avoided if we would have investigated more, read more, knew more.

It's just that we didn't, for many reasons. Also, some things just have to happen to you in order for you to learn. If you investigate well, you can read about all the disadvantages of buying a Kenyan car, you can probably read about the amount of shitty mechanics you will find in Africa and you will most likely be able to find out about the fact that cars in Kenya are relatively expensive and relatively shitty in general. Obviously we did not find that out online - thus, we found it out the hard way.

Even if I'm quite happy to accept all the mistakes we made, I have to admit that we have been extremely unlucky with the car that we bought. Everything that could have gone wrong, went wrong. This resulted in a lot of stress, a lot of frustration and a very very painful decrease of money in our bank account.

It also resulted in a lot of lessons learned, a bit too many for my taste, but still very valuable. It also meant that instead of unwinding, relaxing and letting go of all the stress that had accumulated in the past years (something I was somehow - very naively - hoping for, even if I knew it was never gonna be that easy), I was confronted with many weak spots at once: impatience, wanting to control situations, inability to accept situations I can't really change, anger management…. and I can name another few but it would make me look even worse.

Either way, our so-called overlanding adventure, much praised by fellow overlanding lovers, started out with many hours of waiting on the side of the road and many heated discussions with mechanics. This, in my case, included screaming at people who wanted to rip us off and crying in front of my kids. It included me trying my best to see the funny side of things, it included Enrique putting his newly learned Kiswahili to use, it included me telling my kids we will most likely laugh about this in a couple of years. It included letting go of plans that could not be executed and many hours of thinking about and discussing alternatives.

So, evidently we made some very expensive mistakes but we (or mostly Enrique, really, because I was about ready to throw in the towel) decided buying a car wreck instead of a car was not gonna stop us from overlanding. So we (or I should probably say Enrique again, because my main goals at that point were trying to stay sane and keeping the kids happy) solved the car problem - which included a conversation with a mother and resulted in some sort of loan. And we kept going.

And I have to say, as long as the car does not stop or makes strange sounds or does anything suspicious, overlanding is pretty amazing. I love camping, even if the tent is too cramped, the inside of the car is in a constant state of chaos and the cooking on a one pit stove limits my cooking options a fair bit.

I love the freedom it gives you, everything you see along the road, the possibility to choose wherever you want to go at any given point. I love the camp sides (mostly). I also realized I still love the travellers´ ambience, the lightness of meeting new people, the ease with which people connect and talk. I love the randomness of it all, all the stories you hear, stories of lives you would have never even imagined exist. Learning about lives so different from your own, and yet having zero trouble at all in finding overeenkomsten.

At the same time I enjoy the slower pace of camping life, the we´ll see what and where we eat our next meal kind of attitude - even though this one is a challenge for me, it's still something I like. I like staring at the rice being cooked instead of doing twenty five other things in the meantime in order to try and save some time. I definitely don't like the amount of times that I have to tell the kids to back away from the fire if they don't want to end up in hospital, but I still have hope there will come a day where this information will stick in their lovely, very active brains.

There is a clumsiness to this camping life that I hope at some point will turn into something a bit more smooth, but at the same time it is an excellent practice to stop trying to get everything perfect. The washing up simply can't be completely clean. The cardboard boxes we use to store our food are never going to be all organized because there is so little space and so much stuff and it all gets mushy and sticky but there's no way to avoid it. There will always be sand in clothes and in the bed if you camp at the beach. You will never keep all the socks in the right place because there really isn't a ´right´ place to keep them. There will be flies around you because you live outside. There is no point in trying to get it all right, so you better give up on that utopia altogether - and really isn't this just a miniature version of real life?

I like watching the kids invent games, using random items to execute their play. At times I get enough of the zillion questions they ask, but most of the time I enjoy explaining stuff (or in many cases I have to tell them I have no clue about the answer, because really, how am I supposed to know if a sea cucumber has a mouth and if not, how he survives?)

I love the fact that we can go wherever but we have nowhere in particular to be, which means I can stop running and simply just be, even though also this one is a challenge, because if you want to you can always find something to rush towards.

What I definitely do not like is the dependance on a motorized vehicle of which I have no knowledge whatsoever, and I am constantly reminded of this lack of knowledge and the risks there are of getting stuck again, thrown into the hands of shitty mechanics - or at least the not knowing whether a mechanic is there to help you fix your car or mostly just to take your money. I don´t like the feeling of uncertainty this gives us. Our journey can proceed as long as all the parts of the car keep functioning, and the journey stops as soon as one of them decides it has had enough.

So whenever it stops or it creaks or does something funny, Enrique tells me ´it´s part of the show´ and I am reminded that this part of the show is not my thing, but hey, I decided I wanted to do this so this is what we do.

I guess that's what overlanding is about and I guess I should have known this, but I don't think I could have really imagined what it's like. Experience it to know it. So, here I am, sitting next to the motorized vehicle that I am not sure will be fixed today and if so, how well it will have been fixed. On the other hand, I am sitting here on an empty camping field, watching the sun come up, enjoying the sea breeze, feeling close to nature and less rushed than I have been in a long time (and yes I have to admit there is still this tiny rush crawling around inside of me. Still working on that). My kid is sitting next to me, drawing what he sees: a lot of trees, a sun rising above the ocean.

We don´t know if the car will be ready or at what time, and we don't know where we will sleep tonight - but this not knowing and not really being bothered because in the end it doesn't really matter where we sleep tonight is part of what makes it a blast.