Completing an overland trip today is sometimes quite stressful. Being an expedition leader with a convoy of vehicles adds additional stress. Now add 36 vehicles, majority of which are towing a caravan to your convoy and drive North from Cape Town. The logistics leading 106 people would be pretty hard work. Now do it in 1959... And that's exactly what the founder of Airstream caravan did.
In 1959, 41 vehicles & Airstream caravans plus a few support vehicles (104 people) convoyed from Cape Town to Cairo. The founder of the Airstream caravan, Wally Byam, was instrumental in expanding on the lifestyle a caravan could offer. As a result, he lead his 1959 convoy North from Cape Town in a total of 221 days. In this blog post, I link to the various YouTube video clips, and a few photos from a podcast interview.
A few interesting comments and observations from the various videos: Eldest person was a gentleman aged 85 whilst the youngest was a girl aged 6. The convoy 'quite accidentally' came across the Great Zimbabwean ruins!
Pith Helmets are a must as almost each film shot of the convoy includes one. Giant Wildebeest sound like thunder as they rumble across the plains. A good day in Ethiopia would be a total of 6miles covered due to the road conditions - It took a total of five weeks to get to Addis Ababa. A good quote form part 5 of the videos:
'The Nubian desert is a blistering inferno of vagrant sandunes exiled from the rest of world'
