Renowned South African humanitarian and explorer Kingsley Holgate has headed out on his fortieth Land Rover expedition across Africa and the world, taking several new Defenders from the southern tip of South Africa to the Nordkapp in Norway, ending at the ancestral home of Land Rover in Anglesey, Wales. “From Hot Cape to Cold Cape” will be a 30,000-kilometer adventure from south to north.
The “Defender Trans-Continental Expedition” will focus on several of Holgate’s most passionate causes: malaria prevention, vision testing and correction, water purification, early childhood development, and conservation. As they transit Africa, they’ll work with different focuses in different areas, before moving on to the Asian and European segment.
It’s Holgate’s second major expedition in the new L663 Defenders, after 2020’s Mzansi Edge expedition around the edge of South Africa. This will be Holgate’s first carbon-neutral expedition, too. They’ll plant 6,000 Albany Thicket indigenous trees and shrubs in the Eastern Cape of South Africa to compensate for the emissions of the three Defenders.
The team left Johannesburg at the beginning of February, with a sendoff ceremony at the Flame of Democracy in front of the South African Constitutional Court. Here, the Expedition Scroll of Peace and Goodwill was begun, with the first messages inscribed in the book; by the time they get to Anglesey, there will be thousands of messages in this book.
They then headed to the Cape Aghulas Lighthouse at the southern tip of South Africa, where the Atlantic and Indian Oceans mix. Here, the traditional Zulu calabash was filled; they’ll add more water at the mid-point in Alexandria, Egypt and at the North Cape in Norway before dumping the water into the sea at Anglesey. They will also build four Isivivanes, or Zulu stone cairns at these four places, with the last to be built on Maurice Wilks’ grave in Anglesey.
The expedition is using three Defender 110s, all similarly equipped. They have Alu-Cab roof-top tents, Australian-spec bullbars, spotlights, and uprated wheels and tires.
As of this writing, the Defender Transcontinental Expedition is in Mozambique, working with Goodbye Malaria to spray against mosquitoes and distribute mosquito nets. They have spent part of that time visiting villages they’d visited on prior expeditions, reinforcing their commitment to this cause. A few days ago, they crossed the Tropic of Capricorn in Mozambique.
The route was originally supposed to go via Ethiopia, a country Holgate has visited many times, but war has broken out there. Africa’s borders and geopolitics are always in flux, though, and now there has been an opening of the border between Sudan and South Sudan, so the expedition may be the first to cross there in thirty years, when they arrive with a military convoy. There is always some way or another to transit the continent, even if the logistics aren’t always straightforward.
The expedition should last around eight months, taking up much of 2022. We’ll share updates every now and then from along the way.
Follow along for yourself on the Kingsley Holgate Foundation's Facebook page.
Sign up and receive once every 2 weeks
Select Your Vehicle
