Recommended Reading: Appointment in Zambia

Appointment in Zambia is a gripping travelogue about a young couple moving from Scotland to Zambia to take a job. When the ship scheduled to move their brand new Hillman Hunter car was delayed, the impatient duo decided to drive. They had no overland experience and set out across the Sahara in without sand ladders or even a shovel. The year was 1970.

The story turned out much like you might imagine. But with a tremendous amount of grit and inexhaustible help from strangers, Ross and Sara Dunn actually reached their destination. This is their story:

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Countries you can’t drive across now

Appointment in Zambia is hard to put down. Much of the book is like watching a train wreck, yet you can’t help but develop a deep respect for Ross and Sara and what they accomplished in the end.

Being 1970, the couple had little information about their route. What they knew beforehand was gleaned from The Automobile Association (AA) in Edinburgh and London (where the officers said the two would not get through to Zambia). They also had an AA guidebook with them.

It seems they attempted to take a direct route, in a way that is impossible today because of closed borders and conflict zones.

These are the countries they travelled overland:

Scotland-England-France-Spain-Morocco-Algeria-Niger-Nigeria-Cameroon-Central African Republic-Democratic Republic of the Congo-Uganda-Kenya-Tanzania-Zambia

Even so, they threaded the needle between conflicts. The Biafran War in Lagos had ended mere months earlier, so they drove through a recent war zone with all its bullet holes and displaced people.

The book holds dual interest: revealing north and central Africa as it was nearly 60 years ago, and also giving insight into countries even accomplished international overlanders will never see.

Not playing tourist

This travelogue is interesting because Ross and Sara were not sight-seeing or on expedition. They treated the whole thing like a big road trip, but with tight parameters. At 21 and 23 years old, they had to borrow money from their parents to afford the journey. Their daily budget was miniscule and rigid, which impacted their experience greatly.

They subsisted on some mixture of bananas, tomatoes, bread, canned meat when they could find it, and eventually fruit when they arrived in the tropics. They slept in the front seats of the car, except for a small handful of nights they were hosted by people they met or sprang for a hotel so they could take showers. When they arrived in Zambia, they had lost so much weight and were so physically impacted that friends did not recognize them.

The journey from Scotland to Zambia, over 20,000 kilometers (12,000 miles), was accomplished in a mere eight weeks.

The overland rig: Hillman Hunter

And what about the rugged overland vehicle for this cross-continent, cross-Sahara adventure? It was a brand new Hillman Hunter, what was termed a standard saloon car.

The car started falling apart almost immediately, even before the Dunns had left Europe. Through the Sahara, where they were constantly stuck in sand, the car nearly rattled to pieces around them. They used two Tupperware containers to dig themselves out.

In Lagos, still part of Nigeria in 1970, Ross and Sara went looking for a mechanic. These were their issues at that time:

• The bonnet was still tied to the roof.
• The battery rested between [Sara’s] feet by the passenger seat.
• There was no paint on the lower eighteen inches of the car body as it had been stripped off by sand.
• The black plastic of the dash-board had turned grey for the same reason.
• The bump stops glued back into place in the Sahara had subsequently fallen off completely.
• Two holes large enough to put an arm through were now in the body of the car above the rear axle. They had been made by incessant hammering across the piste corrugations and pelting by stones.
• There was a dent in the steering linkage about the size of a tennis ball which had been caused by a stone hidden in the sand.
• The rear registration plate had been ripped off.
• The rear shock-absorbers were shot.
• The gear-box was still leaking oil as it had done since Morocco.

But by some miracle, the car did make it to Zambia.

Many more adventures

Appointment in Zambia brims with one adventure after another, like when a makeshift raft was created to get the car across a wide and fast-flowing river. I don’t want to spoil the story for you.

I hope you’ll get your own copy of this overland travel book and enjoy it for yourself. Even though the events took place in 1970, the book was just published in 2019 and very few people seem to know about it.

I tried to get in touch with author Sara Dunn, but I wasn’t successful. If anyone knows her, then please let me know!

-B