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By the guy who was supposed to be behind the camera
There are two types of people in this world. Those who read briefing notes, and those who nod enthusiastically at briefing notes before immediately doing the opposite. I had front-row seats to both… but more on that later.
I was brought along on the SafariProjek Tri-Nations Tourto do what I do for iShootStories: tell the story through a lens. Simple enough brief. Point camera at moving thing. Press button. Repeat until full. What followed was a masterclass in the universe’s ability to find creative new ways to prevent a man from doing his job.
Day Zero: The Briefing, or “The Part Everyone Pretends to Listen To”
We rocked up at SafariProjek HQ to a sight that genuinely rewires your brain.. a nest of purpose-built off-road Porsches. Not one. Not two. Nearly twenty. Sitting there like they owned the place, which, fair enough, they did. You don’t just stumble across this many Cayennes and 911s that have been properly sorted for the bush unless you’ve either built them yourself or you have very specific job description. SafariProjek has the former locked down.
The briefing was thorough. Professional. Safety-conscious. All the right boxes were ticked. The convoy rules were explained with the kind of patience reserved for people you already suspect won’t follow them.
“We all know convoy rules, yes?”
The room…well parking lot nodded with the collective confidence of people who have absolutely no intention of following convoy rules.
I had even gone to the effort of arranging Abrie from Garmin SA to come along and walk everyone through their brand new Garmin Overlander GPS units. The Overlander is, without exaggeration, a genuinely spectacular piece of kit. It does things a normal GPS hasn’t even dreamed of. But the thing about alpha males (and some females) in off-road vehicles is that accepting guidance from another human being on how to use a device… even when that device can, among other things, probably brew coffee and file your taxes… is treated as a personal affront. “We’ll figure it out” is the battle cry of most who will, in fact, not figure it out, at least not before making several very avoidable wrong turns.
More on that shortly. Much more.
Day One: Everyone Gets Lost Except the One Car That Gets Stuck
We headed out toward Kaapsehoop for our first stop. Now, as the designated visual storyteller, my job was to capture the fleet in full flight. What I actually captured was a lot of empty road. The convoy had scattered like pool balls on a break shot, with nearly every car inventing their own creative interpretation of the route…not “TRACKS” as they were suppose to…
Every car except one.
One solitary vehicle… the only car that had correctly followed the actual route… found itself alone on the correct road, which is apparently where mud lurks waiting for someone to prove a point. It got stuck. Spectacularly. I must just mention at this point that this ONE vehicle was the ONLY 2-wheel-drive GTS on the tour.
Jaco… the mechanic, the support vehicle driver, the human equivalent of a One-Man-Workshop… and I went to extract it. We managed. What we hadn’t anticipated was the arrival of a convoy of Cruisers while we were busy, piloted by a group of Jollie Ooms who had, by the smell of things, just concluded a spirited round of golf. They had opinions. They also had questions, the most memorable being whether we happened to have any brandy on us!
We did not…unfortunately!
They left marginally less helpful than they arrived.
Jaco: A One-Man Workshop With the Patience of a Saint
Let me tell you about Jaco.
While I was fretting about focal lengths and good light, this man was quietly making sure that all the purpose-built off-road Porsche… cars that were about to be sent through mud, rocks, mountain passes, and at least one incident that would later be described as “a scary moment” — would actually make it from one end of southern Africa and through 2 other countries. In one piece… Ish.
When parts were needed, the SafariProjek team in Pretoria didn’t send an invoice and a two-week lead time. They got themselves and four extra sets of hands to wherever we’d set up our impromptu roadside workshop. That’s the kind of backup that makes the difference between a story you tell over a braai and a story you tell to an insurance assessor.
Jaco is the kind of mechanic who makes the rest of us feel like we’ve been wasting our lives. The man is a mobile, sentient, Porsche-specific diagnostic tool with good stories and better instincts.
The Flying Cayenne, or “Air Safari Flight 33 Call sign “Beast””
A few days in, Johan made an excellent suggestion: I’d ride along with him so we could get ahead of the pack and actually photograph the cars as they came through. This was the best idea anyone had had all tour.
We found a decent spot. I got some shots. (even got a shot of a cow that rolled down the side of the mountain) They were fine. I was not fine with just “fine”.
Being a perfectionist is a character trait that sounds admirable until it gets you into a Cayenne doing 120kph on what had been, up to that point, a perfectly pleasant sandy road. Johan, bless him, had his foot appropriately planted because we needed to make up time and get ahead of the convoy. I respected the mission.
What neither of us could have reasonably foreseen was the big ditch.
Not a pothole. Not a rut. A ditch… the geological equivalent of a trapdoor… buried under the sand, invisible until the precise moment it was far too late. The Cayenne hit it at full noise and, with zero ceremony, became airborne.
For a fraction of a second, things were fine. We were flying. This was fine.
Then the Cayenne remembered it was not, in fact, an aircraft, and the laws of physics… which had been patiently waiting their turn… reasserted themselves with considerable enthusiasm. We landed nose-first with a bang that rearranged the interior decor, snapped the rearview mirror off, and introduced it to the windscreen in a way that left a lasting impression. On the windscreen. Literally.
Johan, who carries race experience the way other people carry car keys, kept those wheels dead straight, absorbed the hit with the composure of a man who has probably had worse Tuesdays, and got us stopped safely.
My heart rate, by contrast, was somewhere north of sensible for approximately the next forty minutes. New, better life decisions were made in moment that felt like a lifetime…
I did, of course, photograph the aftermath. Because that’s what I do. Some of my best work of the trip, honestly.
Sani Pass: Where the Views Are Breathtaking and So Is the Mechanical Failure
Jaco and I headed up Sani Pass early to find my spot. Near the top, we stopped and I genuinely forgot to be frustrated. Clouds below us. Mountains everywhere. The kind of view that makes you feel like the planet is showing off.
Then the cars started coming up. One by one, they crested the pass and the story started writing itself through the lens. Until one car decided that heights weren’t really it’s thing, and its water pump gave up the ghost at altitude, which is the automotive equivalent of a dramatic exit.
Now at this point, a reasonable photographer would document this from a respectful distance while making sympathetic noises and contributing nothing mechanical. I was preparing to do exactly this when a hand landed on my shoulder.
“You’ll have to do this.”
I processed that sentence in stages. The camera. The shots I still needed. The coffee table book I had been mentally designing since day one. All of it evaporating like morning mist over the Lesotho highlands.
“You have the skills,” said the voice.
And here’s the thing… it wasn’t wrong. I do have a past. Racing. Rallying. The kind of automotive history that makes mechanics look at you sideways and insurance companies look at you with concern.
I guess this is the moment my job description changed…
So I packed away the camera, climbed into a 911 with no running engine, no power steering, no brakes, and no air conditioning, and accepted that I would be spending the next 200-odd kilometres on a rope. The coffee table book would have to wait for another trip.
The Downhill Conversation I Had With Myself at the Top of a Mountain
Towing a car uphill on a rope is a task that requires coordination, communication, and a well-attached tow hook. Ours made it about as far as you’d expect before stripping its thread and parting ways with the car. Mark from DESA (a man who lives up to his own slogan aka Do Epic Shit Adventures) improvised a solution involving the bumper, a rope, and what I can only describe as creative structural optimism, and we continued upward.
Coming down the next mountain pass that he towed me up is an entirely different conversation.
At the top, I looked at that descent… a stunning piece of road, genuinely beautiful, the kind of thing that gets framed and sold in galleries… and I did a very quick risk assessment that took approximately zero point two seconds to complete.
“Unhook me. I’ll meet you at the bottom.”
Mark looked at me the way people look at someone who has just said something that is either very brave or very stupid. I have been on both sides of that look…. He unhooked me.
What followed was one of the better pieces of car control I have managed in recent memory. No real brakes worth mentioning as you would need pedal pressure that makes Verstappen nervous. Power steering that had long since clocked out. Zero aircon with a open window that let in all the UV rays turning me into a tomato. A 911, a mountain, gravity, and whatever muscle memory I had left from the rallying days. At one point Mark’s lights started flashing at me from behind (yes I had passed him coming down in my “Cool-Runnings-Bob-Sled” and I slowed down, thinking something had gone wrong. He was flashing at the kids lined up on the roadside to watch.
They got a show.
I got to the bottom. The 911 got to the bottom. My common sense, I believe is still at the top. We were both significantly more worn than when we started, but we were there, and that counts for something.
Lesotho, Clarens, and the Gravel Road That Definitely Wasn’t a Gravel Road
After dropping the car in Clarens, We crossed back over the border into Lesotho… twice in one day, because why not?… One thing is for sure… we slept well that night.
The next morning was the kind of thing you can’t photograph adequately no matter how good you are. Lesotho mountains at dawn, mist hanging in the valleys, clean air that makes Joburg feel like a memory. Oom Arnold gave us an impromptu geology and botany lesson about the mountains acting as a sponge for water… genuinely fascinating stuff that I wasn’t expecting to enjoy as much as I did.
Then Mark announced we would not be on any gravel roads today.
I want to be clear that I believe Mark believed this when he said it. The road, however, had not been briefed. We ended up on something rocky enough to qualify as an off-road stage that gradually transformed itself into a swamp… at which point yet another car had a muddy disagreement with the terrain and lost. Eventually, Mark made the executive call to turn everyone around. Back to the tar. Back to Clarens.
What I Actually Got
Here is the honest accounting: I did not get the hero shots. I did not fill memory cards with perfectly framed Porsches against dramatic backdrops. The coffee table book, in its original imagined form, does not exist.
What I got was better and worse simultaneously, which is the most honest outcome any trip can offer.
I got mud on day one. I got a brief, unscheduled PPL aviation lesson shortly after. I got a 200km wrestling match with a 911 that had decided it was done cooperating. I got border crossings I hadn’t planned, mountain sunrises I hadn’t expected, and the very specific camaraderie that only develops when a group of people collectively survive things they probably shouldn’t have attempted.
I got the story. Not the version I’d planned, but the real one… unfiltered, unscheduled, and completely impossible to manufacture.
That, ultimately, is what iShootStories is actually about.
The Garmin Overlanders, by the way, worked perfectly the whole time. For the cars that were using them properly 😉
Check out a slideshow of our trip below. Blink and you will miss something 😉
SafariProjek builds and maintains purpose-engineered off-road Porsches for expeditions and touring across and beyond Southern Africa. iShootStories documents the adventures that follow. The Garmin Overlander does not drive itself, regardless of how capable it is.