West African Wander

I just realized I do not have a single post in the fifth category in this blog, the title of which I have also given to this post.     The ultimate objective in this whole project is to use the seventeen year old Land Rover Defender we are restoring and outfitting for a sojourn into some of the countries that neighbor Ghana where we live now.   The original idea was to perhaps go as far as Morocco, but we have decided that would take more time that we have, and it wold present some very difficult challenges with respect to what to do next with the vehicle.   When I first articulated the project there was a category of “disposal” which was meant to cover what exactly we would do with the Landy once we had done our trip.   After weighing all the options over  the course of the past few months we have now decided:

1. we will not sell it in Morocco, which was option A.  The rationale behind that option, and a variant of it of selling it in Spain or another European country, was to tax situation could get very tricky;
2. we will not sell it in Ghana,  I am not sure we would get the money out of it, and we are rather keen on keeping it;
3. we will not ship it back to Canada.  The would be the easiest and perhaps the most economical thing to do,  the Canadians who sent there Defenders back to Canada did so on in confidence that they would be a good market for them.  Unfortunately,  Canada is not the most sensible place to own a 17 year old diesel vehicle designed for the tropics.
4. What we are now thinking of doing is to ship it to South Africa as a jumping off point for a tour of East Africa to discover a whole bunch of places we have not seen yet.

But before we do any of that we are going to discover some pieces of West Africa that we have not gotten to.  Once the vehicle is mechanically ready and outfitted driving it to Mali is something we would very much like to do.  I have a great deal of accumulated leave and we are hoping to be able to take six weeks in June and July for this.