My brother, Robbie, phoned me the other day, and I told him about the proposed trip. He is super fit – goes out jogging every day – and seemed quite envious. He told me he had done a couple of very long rally drives, and had a couple of tips to give me as a result of that. I struggle a bit with the comparison, but hey! The tips were:
1. That I should buy cheap knickers and chuck a pair on the fire every night, to avoid having to carry dirty washing home and
2. Take a paper back – not hard back – book to read, and each evening I should tear out the pages I have read and put them on the fire too, to avoid unnecessary weight.
Quite why a few pages and some dirty knickers would be a problem when you were driving a car escapes me, though I can see the relevance up a mountain. However, everyone says you should give what you don’t need to the porters, as the Tanzanian locals have nothing and appreciate whatever you don’t need. But could I bear to give anyone dirty knickers? If I tried to put them in the fire, would I suffer public embarrassment, if someone tried to snatch them off for reuse? And tearing pages out every night might be an idea, but they could be passed to someone else to read the next night and so on. If you were both reading the same book, it would be something to talk about – in fact there could be a whole stream of people a couple of pages behind each other.