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London to Cape Town: Max Adventure!

November 12th, 2010

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Plenty of sunrises and plenty of sunsets are what three British adventure drivers recently witnessed. Up to twelve of each in a row, if my math is right.

The solar spectacles were not viewed from a lawn chair on a pristine Caribbean beach or from a lonely perch on the side of a Himalayan mountain though. They were observed through a bug-splattered windshield along a seemingly endless ribbon of highway, back road and desert track that led the crew of intrepid drivers on a 10,000-mile motoring jaunt into the record books.

When the Max Adventure team of Mac MacKenney, Chris Rawlings and Steve MacKenney horsed their grubby, 10-year-old Land Rover Discovery into the parking lot of the Automobile Association of South Africa in Cape Town on October 28, 2010, the 47-year-old record for the fastest drive between London - England and Cape Town, South Africa was finally trumped. Eric Jackson and Ken Chambers daring 1963 drive in a Ford Cortina GT became the inevitable, an historical milepost in the long-distance driving record books.

The new ‘best ever’ stands at 11 days, 14 hours and 11 minutes which is 1 day 18 hours and 37 minutes inside the Jackson / Chambers time. Lady Luck played a hand with the guts, determination and skill of Team Max Adventure and passed a coveted motoring record off to a team of rightful new owners.

I wasn’t surprised though. I’ve known Mac MacKenney for a decade, since he began toying with the idea of breaking the London to Cape Town record. Fit, affable and curious Mac possesses the tenacity, courage and logistical know-how to put together a plan to move a motor vehicle and three team members from London to Cape Town in record time.

Mac recruiting the right team of former British military colleagues who together demonstrated the stubbornness and determination required to drive day and night, keep the rig on the road and get along with each other.

Evidently, their visas were in order. The years of paperwork, letters, faxes, e-mails and face-to-face diplomatic meetings paid off at the lonely frontiers where the dreams of Max Adventure hung in limbo dependent on the mood of the border guard. Just another failed bid for the record books that got snagged by an endless list of potential hazards and delays inherent in such an endeavour.

I had done a similar run in 1984 when Ken Langley and I set a Cape to Cape Guinness Superlatives record by completing the 12,531-mile run from the bottom of Africa to the top of Norway in 28 days.

Aside from a first-rate adventure fraught with a smuggling boat, blizzards and bureaucracy, the hit of that escapade was not getting hit when shifta bandits in Kenya’s Kasuit Desert ambushed us with assault rifles. Bullets flew, metal tore, glass shattered and the good guys escaped but I couldn’t help think about that as Max Adventure headed right through the Kasuit Desert.

Part of the team’s mission was to raise money for ‘Help for Heroes’ which supports British soldiers who have been wounded in the current conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. The fact that the team looked like they were up to something noble and heroic, along with the burning determination in their bloodshot eyes, obviously cracked the moods of officials at dozens of roadside checks and at border after border. Then, with the frontier post behind, the euphoric adrenalin rush that fuels the rationalization that it’s all worth it. Yahoo!

But that is what they did day after day as they crossed Europe, the Middle East and took a ferryboat from Jeddah, Saudi Arabia across the Red Sea to Port Sudan, Sudan. Only they know how they kept up their spirits through the long drive south through the Sudan, Ethiopia, Kenya, Tanzania, Zambia, Zimbabwe and into South Africa to victory.

Half of the drive was at night so the trip will not go into the annals of a beauty travelogue but the taste of the trek will stay with the team forever. It will also fire the dreams of a long line of road trippers who will use Max Adventure’s success as a stimulant for record-setting adventures of their own.

“I can’t believe that we are actually here, it hasn’t sunk in yet,” writes Mac in his blog at http://www.maxadventure.co.uk/, after their arrival in Cape Town.

“Looking at a map of Africa makes it even more unbelievable. Did we really drive all that way in just 11 days?”

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