| Event type: | Meeting |
| Date: | 20th February 2025 |
| Time: | 2:30 pm |
| Venue: | Kenilworth Methodist Church |
| Organiser: | |
| Cost: | Entry is free to members. Non-members are welcome for a nominal charge of £1. |
Speaker: Fran Sandham
Critically acclaimed author and public speaker Fran Sandham took on the challenge of a lifetime by walking coast-to-coast across Africa, from the Atlantic on Namibia’s Skeleton Coast to the Indian Ocean near Zanzibar.
This was the first time on record anyone has crossed Africa solo entirely on foot by this route - or at least solo apart from a disastrous donkey!
He undertook this 3,500-mile journey with no backup, no support team, no sponsors, no film crew, and no strings attached.
For several hundred testimonials about his talks please visit https://www.traversa.co.uk/
Review (Post Talk)
Fran previously gave us a talk on Africa – the meeting between the explorer Dr David Livingstone and the journalist Henry Morton Stanley. His second talk is again about Africa but this time how he took on the challenge of a lifetime by walking across Africa from the Skeleton Coast in Namibia to Zanzibar.
Why Africa and why 3500 miles? At the age of six Fran was hooked on the Tarzan comics, then when he was a little older, he researched Livingstone and Stanley, so Africa was often in his thoughts. The distance from coast to coast was 3500 miles which had never been walked entirely solo with no backup, so a good challenge for Fran..
Fran recounted many of his experiences and adventures whilst walking for a year across Africa:
One of the more unexpected challenges he faced was that travelling in one direction over many days in the African sun meant that the left-hand side of Fran’s face progressively got sunburnt while the right-hand side remained the original pink! He only realised he had this problem when he looked in a mirror.one day!
Fran’s rucksack weighed about 100 lbs, quite a load to carry on your back. So, he considered building a trailer and harnessing a donkey, but the donkey named Tsondab, had other ideas and galloped away as soon as it saw the trailer. The second potential ‘horsepower’ was a very large mule called Marieke, who proved to be somewhat bad tempered and lashed out with its rear hooves at the nearest person in the vicinity. Eventually Fran decided that the best option was to stick with his own backpack.
The native people he met in the villages he found to be very friendly and liked nothing better than to be photographed. Only a few were initially truculent. One village official high jacked Fran while he was having a welcome meal in the local café. The official kept interrogating him and demanding ‘What is your job? Eventually Fran decided he would get no peace until he explained that he was essentially a jack- of- all -trades so responded to the official that he was a ‘general factotum’. At which the official jumped to attention and saluted Fran as did the rest of the villagers when they thought they had a real live general in their midst!
The West Caprivi Game Reserve through which he had to travel had a bad reputation for lions as a few people had been killed and eaten. So, the big cats were causing Fran some anxiety. He planned to traverse the reserve as quickly as possible but fell ill at the time he was in the critical area for lions. He stayed in his flimsy tent listening to the lion roars around him and expecting a lion to slice through the fabric of his tent at any moment. His only source of comfort was that more people get killed by drunken drivers in Africa than get eaten by lions! The lions eventually wandered off allowing Fran to hightail it out of the reserve safely.
His real danger was not lions or drunken drivers but malaria. Luckily, he didn’t catch this until the day after he finished his epic walk, but he recovered.
So, Fran walked 3500 miles in about a year and lost a stone in weight in the process. His book is well worth reading, it is titled ‘Traversa’. A very interesting and amusing talk.