THRILLS IN AFRICA

Auckland Star, Volume LXX, Issue 169, 20 July 1939, Page 9

THRILLS IN AFRICA

A MOTOR EPIC.

8000 MILES ON £250.

ESCAPES IN CONGO AND

SAHARA.

(Special—By Air Mail.)

LONDON", July 1

Two policemen from Northern Rhodesia, on six months' leave, have just arrived in London after motoring SOOO miles in a 10 li.p. car. One of them spent his first week as a fever patient in a London hospital. They are Mr. Roy Eric Proust, aged 20, and Mr. Raymond Thompson, who is 29. They left Northern Rhodesia on March S, after driving up 600 mites from the Victoria Falls. "The roads, if you can call them that, were awful, and I would never try it again," Proust said this week. At Bukama, in the Congo, we ran into a. tse-tse fly belt nearly"* twentv miles wide. We were having a meal bv the roadside when we felt ourselves being bitten. We put everything into the car and left as quicklv as we could. Although neither of us had been inoculated we were fit until fever got the better of us through exhaustion. "When we recovered we had to cross the Congo River in the flood season. The terrific currents nearly washed our pontoon down stream. We had a narrow escape when we were going through a mountain range in which the 'road' is a narrow ledge carved out of tiTe mountain side. For hundreds of mik> it h:js winding hairpin bends, with a sheer drop of 1000 feet to the valley below. "We went round ou bend too fast and on the loose gravel. Our back wheel went over the edge. Luckily my companion kept his head and 'revved' the engine. "We pushed the car through a river 200 yards wide and four feet deep. Water came up to the windscreen, but

the car started at once when we got to the other side. Several times we found Ibridges had been washed away. We rebuilt them to save the trouble of making a pontoon; in three weeks we had covered 1500 miles. "At Stanleyville the back axle went —the ball-race seizing through heat drying up the oil. We cabled to England and waited for a replacement, which came out by air in a fortnight. The NigeriaVi police knew we were coming— and they gave us a royal welcome. We took two days' rest there, and then began the trip across the Sahara Desert. "We did it in 17 days. At Daura our back axle broke down again, but we were lucky to find three ball races, which fitted our car, in an old Syrian contractor's junk pile. We put one in and carried the other two as spares. "But the worst part of the Sahara crossing, and one which I would never attempt again, was over 800 miles of corrugated sand. My friend and I collapsed from exhaustion and fever in Algeria, and spent three days in bed before we were aware we had actually got to Algiers." The cost of the trip—for which Proust and Thompson saved for nearly two years—was £250 for oil, petrol, spare parts and food. <