Guy Deacon's African Journey - end in sight
Ping! Another email from Guy Deacon arrives in the early hours. The indomitable retired soldier driving across Africa to raise awareness of Parkinson’s wants to give me another update on his progress. At least I think that’s what he’s saying - his message is somewhat confusing:
“I’ve now left overnight which was brilliant and into the video into Namibia I’m going to see the campsite which is part of the lodge..”
A few hours later he explains: “That is late night dictation for you! But I am in a good resort with a good backdrop for a change and lots of good things to say about Angola.” I sympathise - Guy, like me, often finds it easier to use voice to text technology rather than to type. But sometimes the results can be a bit wayward - “Angola” becomes “overnight”.
When we each fire up the Zoom video app, I find he is indeed in a place with a good backdrop, a national park in Namibia, and once again he is very upbeat. The reason - against all expectations, he has fallen in love with Angola, which he left a couple of days ago: “Everybody said it would be expensive, dangerous, difficult, and not worth going to. My experience was completely the opposite. It has been the best country we've been to so far.” Everybody was welcoming he says, even the police at the border crossing. He waxes lyrical about the quality of the Chinese-built roads which are mostly empty - tourism has yet to take off in a country that is still recovering from the civil war that ended 20 years ago, but Guy says now is the time to visit.
His mission of course is not to promote tourism but to raise awareness of Parkinson’s. That was not easy in Angola, where the main language but he did do a 45 minute interview with the main English language radio station. He says the interviewer was gripped by what he had to say:
“Like everywhere, people are very unfamiliar with Parkinson's in Africa, unless they have it themselves or they know somebody in their immediate family with it. And this particular chap was completely taken by the story of what we're trying to do, the details about Parkinson's, the bad things about Parkinson's - there's not many good things, of course - and was kind of moved to tears.”
What is striking to me as Colonel Deacon’s long drive to Cape Town enters its final stages is how he’s learned to cope with his symptoms, be realistic about what he can and cannot do, and become a lot more zen about the inevitable aggravation of crossing borders and dealing with his temperamental VW van - though making friends with the local VW franchise in Angola obviously helped.
Like all Parkies, he is somewhat obsessed with his drugs routine, which seems to involve taking more and more Levdopa, the classic Parkinson’s medication. From the sound of it the drugs are getting less effective, wearing off a couple of hours after each dose:
“I tend to have two good hours when everything is absolutely fine. Then I start to drift a bit. And then if I don't do anything when I start drifting, I can be completely beyond it and incapable of anything. And I just lie on the floor and wait for it to pass.”
Lying on the floor and letting it pass seems to sum up the new level of calm he has acquired as the epic trip has progressed. But he says he has been sustained by the kindness of people faced with his Parkinson’s:
“It opens doors because people just bend over to help and they couldn't be more helpful when they hear that I've got this problem. They have me in, they feed me, they look after the vehicle for me, they do everything - it's very humbling.”
The journey which began in Sierra Leone in April (if you don’t count the London to Sierra Leone leg in 2020 when Covid forced Guy to head home) is nearing completion. Colonel Deacon says if he wanted to he could drive the final 1200 miles to Cape Town down excellent roads in Namibia and South Africa in around three days.
But he wants to take it easy and do some sightseeing along the way: “I want to go to Rorke's Drift and I want to go to Isandlwana . And I want to see see Spion Kop and all those extraordinary places which are ingrained in our history.”
He says he should be home well in time for Christmas though there’s a note of caution - “wheels do fall off wagons!” Still, my hope is that our next update from Colonel Guy can take place with Table Mountain as a backdrop and we can congratulate him on a job well done.