Whatshot
Adventures with Kingsley Holgate - Extreme East 1
Adventures with Kingsley Holgate - Extreme East 1
Date: 2018-07-06
'Number 7' of Africa's Extreme Geographic Points
The adventure bug has bitten again. After months of tricky stop-start negotiations, it's time to tackle the last of Africa's seven extreme geographic points. It's going to be a difficult and dangerous journey that, if we survive, will take us to Africa's most extreme easterly point at Ras Xaafun in Somalia.
I suppose we really are just a bunch of madcap dreamers and to reach Africa's most easterly point is extremely important to us - it's the 'icing on the cake' of all the crazy journeys that have taken us to every country in Africa, including all of her island states. We'd managed on other journeys to reach the other six extreme geographic points of Africa: there's Cape Agulhas - Africa's most southerly point, where the Indian and Atlantic Oceans meet at the rocky 'Cape of Needles', famous for its lighthouse built to a similar design as the ancient Pharos Lighthouse that once stood in the Egyptian port city of Alexandria. On our Land Rover journey to track the outline of Africa through 449 days and 33 countries, we'd reached the most westerly point at Pointe des Almadies on the Cap Vert Peninsula in Senegal, and the most northern point of Ras ben Sakka at Cape Blanc in Tunisia. We'd twice stood at the lowest point on the continent - Lake Assal in Djibouti, Africa's deepest point at 155 metres below sea level - andearlier adventures had taken us to the highest geographic point of Uhuru Peak on the summit of Kilimanjaro. Then in 2015, we'd discovered the geographic centre point of Africa - that unforgettable journey into the Congo rainforests that bloody well nearly killed me.
However, it's not going to be easy to reach Ras Xaafun, the remote promontory that lies 115 kilometres south of the tip of the Horn of Africa in the northern, semi-autonomous province of Puntland in Somalia. Surrounded by thousands of square kilometres of inhospitable desert and mountainous terrain and cut off from the rest of the world by conflict, it is one of the most inaccessible regions on the continent. Will keep you posted.

