PSM Signing out…

That’s right folks, the last update. This is where the story ends.

After 24 days of driving from Tipperary I’d been in Bamako in Mali with my co-driver for a few days and he’d been pretty ill. On evaluation of things the time it would take for him to recover (I’m still not fantastically well myself) we weren’t going to have it in us to make the final stint. Having gone so far and suffered/experienced (equal measures) so much we called it a day in Bamako and got on a plane at around 3.30am today. I’ve not been home long and obviously photos and so on will follow. It’s a bugger that we didn’t make it but the Micra never let us down and it was really a health problem and the fact that driving to and through Africa is really fucking hard work. We did a cracking job getting as far as we did and doing as much as we did. Not all the way but damned near enough. By yesterday morning we had both agreed that Timbuktu would take more than it would give and what we needed was to just get out.

Thank you all for your words of encouragement and support, I’ll be typing up my journal over the next week or so and getting the photos up and doing my best to satisfy any desires people have to know what exactly went on… I’ve written a lot!

We managed 4821 miles through 8 countries and one principality in 21 days on the road. No mean feat in a car 20 years old. The only real casualty to the car was losing the exhaust on the stretch into Bamako. I like to call it the “sports conversion”. I managed to sell the car in the city, and hopefully the Mali tax men will never find me cause I sure as fuck didn’t do the paperwork right but I’m home now and that’s what matters. I may not have swapped my co-driver for camels and/or a life of luxury in a remote spot of the world but we had one hell of an adventure.

Hopefully catch up with you all soon,
Dave