2wheels2africa

It was a bit surreal to be celebrating the Scottish national day of Burn’s night in Africa, but celebrate it we did, with real authentic Scots men and even a few tunes on the old bagpipes! The only thing that wasn’t authentic was the lack of haggis, but I guess we can be excused that seeing as we were in Cameroon!

Here is Robbie our 100% authentic Scotsman playing Highland Castle on the bag pipes with the enraptured audience, some I’m sure had never even seen the strange white man instrument before!

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And before you all start complaining that Burn’s Night was ages ago (the 25th of January to be exact), yes it was and we got the date right… it’s just that our blog posts sometimes lag behind due to laziness or even business!

One of the guy’s here has a car which had an accident which twisted the chassis of his car and the problem was causing all sorts of issues, from excessive tyre wear, to destroying the ball joints and even wearing out the steering box so we needed to go and get it sorted out.

Usually if you had a car that was as badly damaged as this at home the insurance company would have written off the car and given you the cash, as it would be too expensive to repair… however not in Africa where anything is possible with the most rudimentary of tools.

Chassis out of alignment… no problem, just lift the engine and the body off the chassis, make a few cuts here and there, weld it all together in the correct position and you are done! It was three days work for the guy and he had about 10 of his guys working, including his own mechanic and electrical guy and it cost about 400 pounds sterling, including all labour and parts!

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The steering box was completely gone, but the mechanic was able to take it apart, find a replacement for the broken part from another Toyota steering box and put it all back together as good as new!

The guy at the body shop was quite amazing and specialises in taking accident damaged cars from the US and Europe and fixing them so well you can’t even tell they have had an accident! Even looking under the bonnet of one of his Toyota’s that he had fixed you couldn’t tell that the thing had been completely crumpled.

All of this achieved with a small area of dirt, a corrugated iron lean-to, a few basic tools and a lot of willing strong assistants. True innovation does come from Africa, just a different kind, how to do more with less, perhaps we can learn a little from Africa during our own economic downturn and be a little less wasteful?

There has been a bit of silence around the blog recently, however that doesn’t mean that we haven’t been busy or even that we have just been sunning ourselves on a beach somewhere in Africa! In fact we have been doing a little of both.

Right now the bikes are still in Cameroon taking a bit of a rest while we work on some other projects that have come across our path. In true 2wheels2africa style we have embraced the opportunities that have come our way and as things materialise we will be blogging further, we just don’t want to let the cat out of the bag yet!

Our dynamic duo has been split up temporarily as Keith has gone back to the UK for a couple weeks to sort out all of his stuff in storage in London. Here is a picture from him today, still flying the flag for KTM in the back window of his rental car.

Snow is quite a change from Africa and it was a shock for Keith to find he needed a whole new wardrobe to handle the cold! It was a 30 degree Celsius plus difference from boarding the plane in Africa to touching down in London!

Keith flying the KTM Flag even in a car!