“All I wanted to do was get back to Africa. We had not left it, yet, but when I would wake in the night I would lie, listening, homesick for it already.”
Ernest Hemingway – The Green Hills of Africa
Bill Ball who presents Journeys in Africa quotes Hemingway at the beginning of each episode. I was truly fascinated by the same echo in my mind. And as I lifted off the continent in 2017, I was sure that I would be back again and again and again..
As Daryn often says ‘TIA’ (translated as This Is Africa). Who is Daryn you may ask? A man who made this pilgrimage possible along with Sailesh and Sonu, my friends in Mumbai, who first heard of Put Foot from Ishita and dared to share it with me. Daryn Hillhouse is the inspiration behind that epic journey across a continent billed as the greatest social rally on earth. Along with his team that he calls HQ. And indeed it is. Now in its eighth year, this annual event brings together old and young, the reckless and the cautious, the fast and the steady stranger together as a family over three weeks of intensive travel over a landmass that has beckoned thousands over the millennia to its shores and its bounty.
That is how we, an even more unlikely crew of five making up Team cocoNUTs and Team Dagaboys, landed at Capetown on 15th June 2018. Set for the Put Foot Rally 2018 at the start line in Ou Skip Campsite on 17th June. This is my modest attempt at describing an amazing creation , the enduring images and a collage of peoples as they race across six countries over 9000 kilometres from the icy Atlantic coast in South Africa to the warm waters of the Indian Ocean in Mozambique.
iPIi 