Highway Code

Julie has been busy reading every book under the sun about Southern Africa and scarring her self silly. The book giving her the most nightmares seems to cover and the driving standards in Southern Africa.
On the last couple of rally's we have had to tackle some very dangerous roads, but to be fair the driving standards have been reasonable and traffic very light.
Southern Africa seems a little different.
The road signs (straight out of the Southern Africa 'how to drive and survive manual' ) are a interesting, I have posted some below.
The last sign is designed especially for rally navigators :)
Some of the roads are a bit ify to you can see what i mean on The most dangerous roads in Africa website.
I have put a photo of one of them on our journey at the bottom of this page so Julie won't see it ;)



 

 

 Glad Julie is in charge of navigation :)

 Glad I'm in charge of driving :)

Getting ready for the Classic Safari Challenge or is it Survival Challenge?

David, Julie and Molly are off on another adventure.
Next Monday we fly to Cape Town, South Africa, and meet up with Molly, our 356A Porsche. It will be good to be reunited. We have only seen her for a few days since we left her in Cape Horn, South America, and the few days we did see her she got a bit over excited and dropped oil all over the drive :)
Gantspeed had a word told her to grow up and behave. Which she did. I thought it was a bit harsh to then put her in a big black box for 4 weeks and send her away. Just hope she does not throw a paddy when we meet up.
This adventure is called the Classic Safari Challenge. It is run by The Endurance Rally Association (ERA) and is approx. 8000 km over 26 days, taking in a huge amount of Southern Africa.
There are 28 competitors. These are broken down into classes with ages ranging from 1928 up to 2010. These are the car ages ( I think).
Some of the competitors we have rallied with before and we are looking forward to meeting up with them again.
We are about to start packing for the trip.
We have compiled a bit of a packing list. Clothes, shoes, anti everything sprays. Then I decided to  do a bit of research on this Internety thing to check what else we may need.
I am not terribly sure that it was such a good idea. While I was searching for 'rally drivers survival techniques' I came across an article about something called the rule of 3. It goes a bit like this,

The Rule of Threes
The rule of threes is only approximate (and can change a bit under certain particular conditions), but it will give you a good general idea of what is important. In its most basic form, which covers most circumstances, it goes like this:

1. You can survive for three hours without enough warmth.
2. You can survive for three days without water.
3. You can survive for three weeks without food.
4. Sometimes people add a few more "threes" to the list, here is an extended version
5. You can survive for three seconds without blood.
6. You can survive for three minutes without air.
7. You can survive for three months without human company.

Another rule sometimes added to the front of the list is "You can survive for three seconds without thinking", meaning that it only takes three seconds (or less) to do something dumb enough that it could kill you, if you are not thinking straight.
All very useful, but it excludes the real essentials of  lasting 30 seconds without checking your Facebook status, checking the football scores and checking to see if you have won £3000 on your
accident claim you never knew you had.
Oh yes!  and checking that you have anti charging angry animal spray.