Simunye! We are One.
Chapter 1, From Ancient Stones to African Shores
Oh that’s it then.
Redundancy.
Do not pass go, do not collect your personal items from your desk.
Do not speak to any staff member, just get in your car and vacate the premises.
I'd been fired under less hostile circumstances than this redundancy!
I wasn't surprised, I was approaching the 2 year point, at which I would have been entitled to better pay and conditions.
You also need to have an actual reason and to have followed a due process to make someone redundant when an employee has 2 years or more service. I’d also seen the personal files of my predecessors. There was a pattern.
Oddly, I wasn't upset, annoyed, worried or anxious about the future either.
If anything I was weirdly ecstatic!
I immediately felt a weight lift off me, the cold March morning air tasted cleaner. The world seemed a brighter place.
Literally.
In the years leading up to me setting off on Gobekli Tepe to Cape Town, I experienced a series of, what would commonly be known as, paranormal events that made it very clear to me that the world we called home, is not as it seems.
Things are not the way we are told they are.
I’m telling you this because I hope it helps you to understand my frame of mind on that fateful day in March 2023. Beware the Ides of bloody March indeed!
I saw being made redundant as a good thing.
By the time I had arrived back at my Plymouth flat, I had decided to follow my childhood dream of being a journalist and author.
I had no experience to speak of, no contacts, no savings and not a concern in the world.
This was, if you like, Divine intervention although in my reality that involves understanding that we don't live in the Universe. We are part of the Universe.
As we learn to do better maths and expand our understanding of quantum physics, more and more mainstream scientists are exploring the idea that we are each comprised of billions of minute black holes and that rather than being our physical body, our bodies are in fact mere, miraculous, representations of our consciousness. That our true self is as much a part of the Universe as the Universe is part of us.
Our soul, if you like, exists within the divine consciousness in the same way as a thought exists within our mind. Unlike our thoughts though, the Great Geometrician of the universe has given his or hers, sentience.
As much of a U in verse as a Universe.
Basically this was the Universe’s way of offering me a helping hand, a little voice in the back of my mind.
One of the things I’ve finally realised is that when you show yourself compassion and actually listen to the Universe, He or She, It seems disrespectful, is designed to work with you.
2 years later as an internationally published journalist with Simunye! Only 2 or 3 months away from being published, I'm grateful that I listened that day.
I also realised that morning that I was done with being a miniscule and unvalued cog in some corporate machine.
Just as an aside, any business that has a policy of phoning sick employees every day to grind them down and guilt trip them into coming back to work, doesn't give a monkey’s arse about their employees.
I should point out that the people at my ex-employer were lovely and I harbour no ill will toward them whatsoever. It's the system that's wrong.
It's not broken. It works exactly as it was designed to.
The system is wrong.
My awakening also showed me that fear is a powerful but entirely pointless emotion and is actually, the root cause of the danger.
Plato referred to it as the Ether, Einstein called it “spooky action at a distance”, and almost all early belief systems and religions recognised its intelligent, divine nature.
Two out of the last three Nobel laureates for Physics also referred to it in one way or another in their research papers and, thanks to a lecture given by another Nobel prize winning mainstream physicist, Frank Melchik, where he described humans as children of the ether, Plate was right! The ether is back baby!
Let’s see how long it takes for school curricula to be corrected.
Most of all being made redundant showed me that life is for living today! Not tomorrow, not next week, not when I’m an eighty year old man. Today.
When I opened the garden door to my Plymouth basement flat. I knew that from that moment on, I was going to live my life on my terms.
The first thing I did, after making a cup of coffee, was google becoming a freelance journalist and Gobekli Tepe. I had another idea brewing in the back of my mind.
What if I went to visit some of the ancient, megalithic sites that I was so enthralled with?
Gobekli Tepe had become the talk of the ancient civilisation world and even mainstream archaeologists now accepted the dating of the site at around 9000 years BC. I brought it up on Google maps and quickly realised that the area contained many of the world's ancient megalithic sites. From Egypt with its Pyramids and mysterious tombs, Jordan and the breathtaking ruins of Wadi Musa (Petra), Lebanon and the enigmatic site of Baalbek to the many Pyramids of Sudan and the Syrian site of Krak de Chevaliers.
Incidentally, there are more pyramids in Sudan than there are in Egypt.
By now the idea of visiting Gobekli Tepe and its ‘sister’ site Karahan Tepe had expanded into a bit of a walk.
Not just any walk, a walk from Gobekli Tepe to Cape Town, taking in as many of the world's mysterious, ancient wonders as possible.
I am not an elite athlete.
I am not any kind of athlete.
It was spring 2023 and I had work to do!
Over the next few weeks I worked on a route that would take me from Sanliurfa in Turkey, south through Syria, Lebanon, Egypt, Jordan and Sudan before entering Eritrea and undertaking the African leg which was still to be finalised.
Although the horrific situation in Gaza had not yet fully developed, when I looked at the UK government's travel advice website, virtually every country I planned to visit had an urgent advisory against going there!
Even the area of Turkey that I was going to start in was listed as red! Do not travel. I realised that this was due to its proximity to Syria but the list went on. Of all the countries on my early agenda, the following were, according to the UK government, at least in certain areas, too dangerous to visit;
Sanliurfa area of Turkey
Syria
Lebanon
Egypt
Jordan
Sudan
Eritrea
Ethiopia
Kenya
ZImbabwe
Zambia
Tanzania
Yeman
Parts of South Africa
As I had been following a couple of fellow travellers on social media I knew that Ethiopia and Eritrea had reached a ceasefire and had reopened their mutual border. Egypt had a long history of tourism and I’d been in contact with people travelling in many of the Southern African states. Indeed at this point, even the Eastern path through Sudan, via Port Sudan looked doable.
Scouse African life hack No.1 - ignore what the government says.
Approximately two weeks later I had identified my first route, realised that I would need to utilise my modest pension and had begun spending hours watching youtube videos about tents, water purification kits, backpacks and sleeping bags.
Then the world caught fire.
Actually it didnt catch fire.
It was set on fire.
I'm not going to discuss the rights and wrongs of the situation in Gaza. Everyone will have their own opinion. Suffice it to say that across the Middle East and Africa, conflicts were breaking out almost daily and my planned route was becoming a list of the world's hot spots. Each day the news brought us stories of ‘evil men who wanted to take over the world’, and of course, how we needed to bomb them.
At the time, this involved a lot of bombing.
Scouse African life hack No.2 - don't watch the news.
I made the decision to focus on my kit. Wherever I eventually went, those requirements would stay the same. The post covid trend of every man and his dog raising money for a charity gave me the idea of getting the NHS mental health team at MIND on board. visited the local Plymouth wellbeing hub and started making friends. The initial conversations were positive and the on site team were adamant that they would like to get involved.
The site manager was excited and we started discussing how we could involve the local community.
I’d wanted to partner with MIND because my own academic and professional backgrounds were psychology and mental / emotional wellbeing at work. This seemed like a good way to give something back to a charity that had given me extensive training in mental and emotional well being at work issues. I was now qualified as being ‘train the trainer’ proficient and had worked with numerous local businesses as a mental health professional.
Finally getting to use my BSc in psychology!
The day I spoke to the charity's trustees, everything changed. Whilst they loved the idea, the countries I was planning to visit were, in their words, too dangerous’, too political and they wondered “did I have a death wish?”
The potential for bad press should I go missing was too much of a risk for them to take.
There would be no MIND involvement in my journey from Ancient Stones to African shores.
As I no longer had a UK charity on board, I stopped fund raising, offered the small number of donors a refund and set about finding other ways to publicise my adventure. I would turn 55 in January of 2024 so would have access to my private, work related pension to cover what I expected to be limited travel expenses.
.
Also, I had contacted The Nelson Mandela Foundation in Johannesburg and they were keen for me to keep in touch and had shared my social media post explaining the trip.
I'd just have to make sure that this book, Simunye! sells well!
Around the same time the people I had been speaking to at the BBC and ITV both bailed on me. It seemed they too were unwilling to risk being associated with, as the BBC correspondent for Devon described it, a potential PR disaster!
They suggested I travel with a support team, a’la, The Hardest Geezer. This suggestion was a non-starter for me. Apart from the appeal of solitude, there was no way I could fund a support team!
Scouse African life hack No.3 - it’s your journey, make it what YOU want it to be.
The planning was going well, not only was my pile of kit and equipment getting bigger, I'd registered as a self employed journalist / author and I was making progress with my detailed itinerary and route plan.
Using google maps and various travel websites I was making a spreadsheet that showed where I would be on each day of the journey. I was most concerned about access to drinking water so this part of the planning was paramount. I spent weeks investigating the towns and villages I would come across, checking whether they had access to clean water, would food be available, was camping allowed in the area? What supplies would I need to carry between each waypoint?
Could I carry 25kg of water along with all my survival gear?
One of the issues I envisaged was legally crossing land borders, I needed to make sure that the border crossings I had identified were all open as normal. Things looked positive,even the border posts between Turkey and Syria and Sudan and Egypt were showing on the UN’s website as being open.
Then October the 7th Happened.
Then riots started in Kenya.
Then the RSF started making gains against the Sudanese armed forces, extending the conflict into the East of the country.
Then the IDF started bombing Lebanon.
Then the war with the Houthis in Yemen spread to the red sea.
Then I needed a hernia operation..
The departure date was going to be pushed back!
It takes longer to recover from a hernia op than I expected.
The entire middle east was on the brink of war.
It was about now that I started getting messages from friends asking, telling and even begging me to shelve my plans to travel from Gobekli Tepe to Cape Town.
Realising that I was still not match fit I set off to South Africa for some altitude training. The HIghveld has an elevation of 1500 - 2100 meters above sea level. While I was there I planned to test some of my critical kit, take in the stunning scenery and wildlife and catch up with some good friends.
I saw plenty of beautiful scenery and wildlife, had a wonderful time visiting two of my best friends, got some good advice on how to run a social media campaign and was reminded by the highveld that any form of exercise is far more exhausting at altitude!
That's OK I told myself, Turkey will be a good training ground for the mountains of Jordan!
It was in a zoom meeting with one of my good friends and a social media expert that the line, Ancient Stones to African Shores was first mentioned. According to my good friend Clint Bryce, Chat GBT was the real brains behind the line but I’m crediting him with coming up with the idea of even involving AI. It’s not something I would have considered, I was still taking great pride in my spreadsheet that now not only listed each town I planned on visiting but also had cumulative distance travelled and total days spent travelling columns and showed me that, as long as I wasn't kidnapped, arrested, eaten by lions or abducted by NHI, the journey was going to take about 15 months, taking in a maximum of 17 countries.
When I returned to the UK in April of 2024 I was becoming impatient. The UK was cold, people seemed to be getting increasingly intolerant of each other and the more I researched my route the more ancient sites I was learning about. So, I convinced myself that my physical preparedness wasn't so important, and besides, I still had Turkey to use as my training ground for the rest of the trip!
My basic Arabic lessons were progressing, I was almost at basic level. My body was in fairly decent condition, recovering hernia excepted. My tent had stood up well to a few nights on Dartmoor and I’d figured out a way to pack my 58 litre Osprey backpack with most of the kit I considered essential to my survival. Admittedly I had been forced into reconsidering my list of essential items more than once as I tried numerous ways of packing everything. (And carrying it!)
I’d given away most of my belongings, apart from some items of sentimental value and my favourite T-Shirts. These were put into a holdall and left with my son for safekeeping!
I was confident that I had put my affairs in order in the UK, I had managed to get travel insurance for the few of the countries I would be visiting that were actually included in insurance companies worldwide destinations list and with the purchase of a Garmin geolocator and satellite communications device, I was fairly confident that should it become necessary, someone would eventually be able to locate my body should the desert, wildlife or a militant group or any other as yet unimagined peril, decide that I was not welcome!.
To be one hundred percent honest, I had absolutely no doubt that, sometime in mid 2025 I would arrive safely at the Brass Bell in Kalk bay, Cape Town.
Leaner, hairier and smellier!
It's not that I consider myself brave or superhuman. Far from it, I was however, confident that I would be able to find common ground with whomever I ran into and mitigate the risks I encountered.
Afterall. Simunye! We are One!
And lions don't eat humans out of choice, apparently we taste bad!
Nor do I mean to disparage the appalling conditions that people find themselves in,without choice, every day, all around the world. By undertaking Gobekli Tepe to Cape Town I was checking out of society. The only person I was going to be responsible for was me and the only person responsible for me, would be me.
