Announcement: Big Change of Plan

We had an emergency committee meeting at 2 o'clock this morning.

Over the last few days, since we left the coast, it's been getting very hot indeed. The daytime temperature has been in the 40s, and inside the truck it is even hotter. This means you spend a lot of the day feeling pretty damn uncomfortable. Sweat drips off you; you can feel the sun burning into you, even wearing Factor 50; you drink bottled water which is the temperature of a cup of tea; you seek shade whenever possible and drink constantly. This was not entirely unexpected, and we can cope with it. It's not ideal, but you have to make sacrifices.

The crunch point is the night-time temperature. When we went to bed last night, it was still well in the 40s in the truck, long after dark, with the door and roof vents open. It's not easy to explain what this is like to anybody who hasn't experienced it, but imagine going to bed in a sauna. As you lie down, sweat pours off you, and it does so all night; you can't escape. You lie there nearly naked and your pillow and all your bedclothes are soaking. If you lay your arm across your chest, it slides off again. You wipe your eyes and the salt stings them. For Pete's sake, I'm lying in bed at a temperature at which I have actually COOKED tuna! The lowest temperature all night was 37 degrees. In the desert, the nights are cool, so you can recover from the heat of the day. Here you just can't escape the heat at all, ever, not day or night. Add to this the fact that it's always hotter in the truck than outside, whether or not you're moving.

Now, as we head inland to Mali, it will get hotter: up to ten degrees hotter. Nicki was not relishing the thought of these daytime temperatures in the 50s, but we both agree that the night temperatures will just be intolerable, for at least three or four weeks until we get towards the coast again.

So, we've decided can't feasibly go on as planned.

We considered a number of options last night, including getting a roof tent (but it's nearly as hot outside as in), getting a big generator to run the air conditioning, staying in hotels, or shipping the truck from Dakar to Ghana. The most sensible option seems to be to cut out the eastern half of our route and instead of going through to Ghana, driving back the route we came down on, through Mauritania, Morocco and Spain. This would give us a chance to see more of these countries which we had to race through on the way (and of course Nicki didn't see anyway). The visas would be easier, and I know the terrain and the campsites.

So we're intending to carry on south through to Guinea and probably Sierra Leone, turning round when time gets short or the heat gets too much, and then come back up the Atlantic coast to Europe.

It'll be a shame to miss our sponsor child visit in Burkina, and the other countries we were looking forward to, but unless anything else comes up this seems to be the best way forward.