I wasn’t too impressed at three o’clock in the morning when someone suggested that this journey would be a great story for my grand kids. Sitting by the side of a dark road with cars whizzing by, waiting for the car in front to change a tire while listening to the constant click of the hazard lights was pretty annoying, but it didn’t seem so newsworthy.

But it got a lot more newsworthy after that. It will indeed be one for the grandchildren. Because two hours later, at four am, we were now somewhere in the middle of a long and very muddy dirt road, where mud well over your ankles was occasionally punctuated by puddles up to your knees. We had made it through this far without getting hopelessly stuck, but the urgent question was: could we possibly make it the next ten km with the same luck? The owls that fluttered around in the tall African grass on either side looked skeptical, and even the jackal who’d been running ahead of us earlier had left to find a better road….

Welcome to the 700 km adventure between Johannesburg and Ponta do Ouro in Mozambique. Of our group of three cars, two got flat tires before morning. We had left at 2 am with the idea of being at the border when it opened at 8. Instead, at 8 o’clock we were at the repair shop, for even the third car had a wheel bent out of shape. And this was before the worst of the potholes, that gave us a very nerve-wracking couple of hours. Before the signs saying everything from “Beware: Blasting Zone Ahead,” to “Cow Crossing Next 60 km,” to, at one point, “Hippo Crossing.” It was also before we had passed by several picturesque African villages, a family of monkeys, and something called “JUNK Shopping Centre.

It was 15 hours after we had left when we finally left our very muddy cars in a field along with several land rovers and a helicopter, and crossed the border into Mozambique.