My Mercedes Is Not for Sale: From Amsterdam to Ouagadougou - An Auto-Misadventure Across the Sahara - Softcover

Jeroen Van Bergeijk

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1857885155 ISBN 13: 9781857885156

Publisher: Nicholas Brealey Publishing Ltd, 2008

Synopsis

My Mercedes Is Not for Sale is a rollicking, witty and insightful tale of an innocent abroad which captures the high-spirited adventure of a young journalist and paints a vivid portrait of West Africa through a surprise-filled journey into its thriving car cult. It has all the wit and charm of John Mole s bestselling Its All Greek to Me! and Peter Allison s Don t Run, Whatever You Do and the philosophical underpinnings of Robert Pirsig s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance Dutch journalist Jeroen van Bergeijk came up with what seemed like a great scheme for making a quick profit: buy an old banger in Amsterdam and resell it in the Third World, where a market for clapped-out cars still thrives. His chariot of choice is a rusty 1988 Mercedes 190D with 140,000 miles on the clock; his route takes him from Holland through Morocco, across the Sahara, and into some of the least trodden parts of Africa. Van Bergeijk finds himself facing a driving challenge akin to a Dakar Road Rally but encounters obstacles never dreamed of by race-car drivers: active minefields, occasional banditry mostly by the border guards and a teenaged, chain-smoking desert guide with a fondness for Tupac lyrics. Food and water are scarce, sandstorms are frequent, and all he has to patch up his many car breakdowns thousands of miles from civilization is a bar of soap, some duct tape, and a pair of women's tights. Then there's the coup he lived through. My Mercedes Is Not for Sale captures more than the adventure it vividly portrays the impact of globalization on Africa through an adventurous and sometimes dangerous journey into its thriving car culture.

About this title

Review:

Noël Coward once said that only mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun. Journalist Jeroen van Bergeijk, whose chronicle of an auto-misadventure across the Sahara, piloting his used 190D from Amsterdam to Ouagadougou inMy Mercedes Is Not for Sale, is Dutch. You do the math. Crazy-making is also often funny-making, and van B's musings on subjects like the state of African commerce (Things in Africa come in two forms: broken or almost broken. ) inform the armchair traveler about the real on-the-road experience in ways Baedeker and Lonely Planet never could. In a place where border delays may be measured in days rather than minutes, our explorer has learned to pass his idle time wisely: not only do we hear digressions, related in some detail, about the history of the Paris to Dakar Rally and the disastrous expeditions to map out the desert in advance of a never-completed Trans-Sahara Railway, we also meet every previous owner of his humble Mercedes and travel to the factory in Bremen where it was built two decades ago. Places like Mauritania, Togo, Burkina Faso and Benin will likely never rank with France, Mexico, The Bahamas or even China as a potential vacation destination. But thanks to a crazy Dutchman who boldly went where few men ever go, entertaining us every kilometer of the way, I m dusting off the old passport and thinking . . . maybe a visit to Disneyland would be nice this summer. --Thane Tierney, BookPage magazine, July 2008

An inspiring and accessible old-school adventure story...A classic road trip tale of a Dutchman driving a clapped out Mercedes across the Sahara to West Africa to sell it at a profit. --Adventure Travel Magazine, September 2008

Synopsis:

"My Mercedes Is Not for Sale" is a rollicking, witty and insightful tale of an innocent abroad which captures the high-spirited adventure of a young journalist and paints a vivid portrait of West Africa through a surprise-filled journey into its thriving car cult. "My Mercedes is Not for Sale" has all the wit and charm of John Mole's bestselling "Its All Greek to Me!" and Peter Allison's "Don't Run, Whatever You Do" and the philosophical underpinnings of Robert Pirsig's "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance".Dutch journalist Jeroen van Bergeijk came up with what seemed like a great scheme for making a quick profit: buy an old banger in Amsterdam and resell it in the Third World, where a market for clapped-out cars still thrives. His chariot of choice is a rusty 1988 Mercedes 190D with 140,000 miles on the clock; his route takes him from Holland through Morocco, across the Sahara, and into some of the least trodden parts of Africa.

Van Bergeijk finds himself facing a driving challenge akin to a Dakar Road Rally but encounters obstacles never dreamed of by race-car drivers: active minefields, occasional banditry-mostly by the border guards - and a teenaged, chain-smoking desert guide with a fondness for Tupac lyrics.Food and water are scarce, sandstorms are frequent, and all he has to patch up his many car breakdowns thousands of miles from civilization is a bar of soap, some duct tape, and a pair of women's tights. Then there's the coup he lived through. "My Mercedes Is Not for Sale" captures more than the adventure - it vividly portrays the impact of globalization on Africa through an adventurous and sometimes dangerous journey into its thriving car culture.

About this edition

• Publisher: Nicholas Brealey Publishing Ltd
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 1857885155
• ISBN 13: 9781857885156
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 240