To put this all into context I will need to tell you a little more about us. At the time of our decision Cath was 26 and I was 29. We were both very much city dwellers, with little or no camping experience other then a few sporadic forced school outings and one very gentle paddle down the Orange River whilst at Varsity in the Cape a number of years before.

Furthermore our free time was not spent in the great outdoors and certainly did not involve anything that resembled physical exertion or extreme sports. The first time I had ever driven a 4x4 was when we went to collect the car one rainy summer’s evening and out of our friends and acquaintances, we probably would have been voted the two people least likely to venture out into nature.

We liked the city life – enjoying good food, great wine, soft beds and hair-dryers. Being dirty, tracking mud in our house or having my hair rumpled was just not on the cards. Bugs, flying insects and other creepy crawlies when always dealt with swiftly and without compassion – usually with me on the other end of a five foot pole and armed with a can of Doom just to be on the safe side. Added to this, our combined knowledge of the internal mechanics of a motor vehicle was simply non-existent.

In short we were not outdoors people in any way, shape or form.

However, when confronted by my uncle one Saturday afternoon and asked why on earth we'd chosen Africa as our destination because we were not well suited to it (putting it mildly) I replied, "because it's hard and out of our comfort zone and nobody really believes we'll be able to do it".

And so it was that in August 2006, about a year since our drunken decision we had set off on our Grand African Adventure.