Driving in Africa is not like taking your car to France. You need a "carnet de passage" - essentially a bond in insurance form to the value of the vehicle (which would be forfeit if the vehicle is not brought back to its country of origin).

The document in the photo is the log book for Tim's Landrover - which is needed to get a "carnet de passage".

The Kenyan AA issue carnets and the process is pretty straightforward, but the process for getting a logbook from the government is not!

Tim originally applied for his log book before Christmas 2012 and it was only after continuous chasing and payments to "agents" that Tim finally got the document yesterday - but with a sting in the tail - the vehicle can't be taken out of the country for 14 days.

This further delay would reduce the time for our proposed drive down to Zambia significantly and increase the probability of getting caught in the rainy season. However, we have no faith that "the system" will actually deliver any more - there is no guarantee that having waited 14 days there would not be some other issue with the documents, or that having got to the border the documents would be acceptable - so we have decided to bin the big drive down to Zambia and leave that for another day.