Guy Deacon's Parkinson’s Journey - Stuck in Gabon

I had promised to take this as a second week of holiday to relax and recharge - but then Guy Deacon got in touch. The retired Army officer driving from Freetown in Sierra Leone to Cape Town in South Africa to raise awareness of Parkinson’s wanted to give me his latest update.

I fired up Zoom and at 7 am found the indomitable colonel sitting by the sea, framed by palm trees, in Libreville, the capital of Gabon. He’s come 2,000km, around 1400 miles, since we last had an update from Lagos in Nigeria. Then, a series of mechanical disasters had left him depressed and apparently close to giving up.

This time his report on the state of his VW van was if anything even worse, but his mood seemed lighter. Yet another clutch had gone, with the van having to be towed across the Nigerian border into Cameroon, followed by a long wait for a new part to be flown in from the UK. Then the biggest disaster so far as Guy was driving through the south of Cameroon where some stretches of road are very good, some very bad: "I was going down a very good bit - 150 kilometres of good road. And then right in the middle of it there were two socking great potholes around the corner>” He swears blind that he was going no faster than 35 mph, but when he hit those potholes he did serious damage to one of the VW’s suspension shock absorbers.

Guy’s VW van in better days

He’d managed to get the van limping to a garage, where the mechanic promised it would only take a couple of hours to fix, and the VW would then be delivered across the border to Libreville. When we spoke a week had passed, the vehicle was still 150km away with the mechanic and the former army officer’s frustrations with the fate life had dealt him were obvious:

“The simple message is you must never rely upon anybody to do anything for you ever, ever, ever, ever. Because they don't do what you want them to do. And they don't do it quite the way you expect. But of course when you’ve got Parkinson’s you're entirely reliant on other people because you simply can't do things yourself. So it's an impossible position. You haven't got the presence and the authority to tell people to stop doing one thing and do it a different way.”

Still, having finally got through on the phone to the mechanic a few hours earlier, it seemed a Zen-like calm was now descending on Colonel Deacon. He seemed strangely confident that his accident-prone vehicle would soon be back in action, though repeated is advice to travellers to get a Toyota in Africa not a VW.

Spreading the word in Cameroon

But what really cheered him was that his mission to spread the word about Parkinson’s was going very well, with lots of appearances on local media outlets: “Cameroon has had a good year bending about Parkinson's over the last 10 days. So the word is getting out. And the great news is it does make a difference, we are starting conversations. People are talking about it.”

We also talked about our own experiences with Parkinson’s, the mystery of medication and how difficult it is to know whether it is working, the frustrations of trying to extract pills from childproof packaging with clumsy figures. Guy is pretty sure his condition is getting worse - “there are things I simply can't do that I could do two years ago” - but is determined just to get on with the drive.

Once the van is fixed his plan is to meet his son and drive to Brazzaville in the Congo and then on through Angola to Zambia where his daughter will be in September. “Our chances of being there on time are almost zero at the moment,” he says with a chuckle.

Guy has another 5,000km - around 3,000 miles - to go before he reaches his destination. His advice to anyone else thinking of undertaking a similar mission? “Don’t bother doing it, it’s too bloody difficult!”

But don’t bet against him driving into Cape Town in a battered old VW held together with string and whatever happens Colonel Deacon has already fulfilled his mission - to shine a light on the world’s fastest growing neurological condition.