In January 1963, when I was a few days short of my eighteenth birthday and waiting to go to university the following October, I set out overland from Cairo to Johannesburg on a zigzagging journey which I expected to last about four months. I made my way south, at first by Nile steamer and then in a succession of decrepit buses and trucks that juddered along roads at times resembling riverbeds, or sped along rust-coloured laterite tracks from which their tyres flung up clouds of choking dust. In small out-of-the-way places, a few care-worn travelers seemed always to be waiting anxiously at dusk, hoping to persuade our exhausted driver to take them on with him next day for whatever money they could afford to pay.
- From Stanley: The Impossible Life of Africa's Greatest Explorer by Tim Jeal
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