Sticky end to Kev’s African fundraiser

Instead, he was flown back with a broken leg, arriving at Heathrow after spending a week in a cockroach-ridden Mauritanian hospital, and ironically was taken straight to the hospital he’d been fundraising for.

“To ben honest I might as well have stayed at home and put all the money I spent straight into the hospital,” said former L&D pathology worker Kev, 46, who’s now well on the road to recovery after his ‘adventure’.

It had all started well enough, with Kev, of Princes Street, setting off with friends Jason Gallier and Jon Mallett on November 11 from the Oddfellows Arms in Toddington for the six-week ‘Toddington2Timbuktu’ fundraiser.

With their combined skills – Kev is a professsional bushcraft expert, Jason had the mechanical know-how, and Jon is a fluent French speaker – the trip should have been, if not a doddle, then at least do-able, and seen them home in time for Christmas.

What they couldn’t predict, though, were the calamities that would strike.

France was hitch-free, but Spain saw the trio riding through torrential rain and gale force winds. When they arrived in Morocco, getting their visas to travel around Africa saw them endure days of bureaucracy, jostling for position at the counters, in lieu of any queueing system.

Also looming large was the shooting of one tourist and the kidnapping of three others in Timbuktu.

Then Jason’s front brakes decided to stop working, which saw him and Jon stop in Dakla, in Western Sahara, to wait for three days for parts to arrive in the UK.

While they were waiting (the parts never actually arrived), the disaster that put the final nail in the coffin of the trip occurred.

Kev had decided to carry on alone, taking a cross-country route across the desert, with the intention of meeting the others in Timbuktu.

Fortunately, in Rabat they had met a Latvian couple who were travelling the same route in a 4x4, and they went with Kev, taking his extra fuel and water in their vehicle.

So when he came off his bike somewhere in the Sahara, at least help was at hand.

“I had done some training before we left, but riding on sand is something that you really can’t prepare for,” he said. “Your handlebars just go all over the place and you have no control. I took a couple of tumbles in the first 100km but I wasn’t hurt.” The following day, though, they encountered sand dunes, and Kev ended up riding in a deep rut. He caught his toe on the side of it, which twisted his leg. “I fell off and I knew straight away it was broken,” he said.

Luckily, the Latvians weren’t far behind, and one went for help while the other stayed with Kev.

“To be honest there was an element of relief that I didn’t have to ride on anymore sand,” said Kev.

Three hours later, the Latvian husband returned with help from the settlement they had passed 40km back.He was taken to another village where there was a clinic with an ambulance.

“It was the ambulance driver’s day off, though, so the mayor of the village drove me the five hours to the nearest town. They hadn’t been able to strap my leg down as the strap would have gone over the break, so every time we went over a bump in the road my leg would fly up and hit the ceiling.”

He was X-rayed in Nouadhibou, and transferred to a hospital in Nouakchott, the capital.

“They said I needed an operation but I thought, ‘I’m not having that here’,” he said. “It really made me appreciate the NHS,” he said. “I was in the emergency room at first, sharing a bed with cockroaches, then when they transferred me to a room of my own, people would just come in and look at me. They don’t see a lot of westerners so I was a curiosity.”

Meals were sporadic, and at times non-existent, as the days passed. “A kindly relative of another patient took pity on me and brought me a bowl of food one day,” said Kev. He was also befriended by a young orderly, who would even come in and visit him on his days off.

And despite the two not sharing a language, Kev managed to ask him to bring in a pen and paper so that he could make himself a pack of cards to play patience with.

With no books there wasn’t a great deal else to do as he waited to hear when he would be flown back to the UK. His insurance company wouldn’t pay for the flights or treatment (due to the nature of the trip and the Foreign Office advising against travel to Mauritania) but arranged for him to get home.

It was six days before he got a flight out of the country. “Every day you would get your hopes built up and then they would be dashed. Until I was sitting on that plane I was convinced I wouldn’t actually be on it.”

Needless to say, the whole affair didn’t make him too popular with his wife, Zoe, a former L&D midwife. “She wasn’t impressed when she realised I didn’t have any insurance cover,” said Kev. “I did feel for her because she was powerless back here.”

The ordeal hasn’t quelled his sense of adventure, however,and he says he would do the trip again, apart from the sand part.

And despite the problems, the trio have managed to raised more than £3,300.

To donate, visit www.justgiving.com/t-2-t