Two Women And A Band Of Brothers

With the expedition Landies and crew safely back in South Africa, Leisure Wheels caught up with the Greybeard of Adventure, Kingsley Holgate and his core expedition team that recently completed a tough but exciting transcontinental Land Rover journey from Cape Town to Kathmandu.

THERE’S Kingsley’s highly experienced son Ross, a veteran of countless expeditions who has adventure flowing in his veins and faces the daily challenges of being expedition leader; his wife Anna, who ably assists with the humanitarian work and juggles home base and children with expedition life and red-bearded Bruce Leslie, who coaxes his heavily-laden 130 Defender through thick and thin, helps manage logistics and has not only become an accomplished photographer, but also bangs out a great camp stew commonly known as ‘Imodium and Goat’. Sheelagh Antrobus is Kingsley’s partner and somehow, while on the move, transcribes his scribbles and ‘bush notes’ into despatches and stories and also plays a key role in the expedition community conservation work; and then there’s ‘Shova Mike’ Nixon, a crazy adventurer in his own right who’s climbed Mt Everest twice as part of the 7 Summits of the World and as a member of the Land Rover mountain bike team, is one of only three people to have completed every Cape Epic mountain bike race.

Q: Kingsley, what made you choose Kathmandu as a destination?

A: It was one of those crazy adventure concepts that started in the Explorer’s Bar at Africa House in Zululand. We were discussing what our next expedition should be, when Shova Mike, came up with the idea of ‘Africa & Beyond’: an odyssey that would take us beyond Africa’s shores. Out came the tattered National Geographic Atlas and by midnight, we’d hatched a grand plan to link Cape Town’s 600 million-year old Table Mountain to the ancient Himalayas.