So who are Andrew and Peter?

Peter is of an age where he should probably be old enough to know better, but is still young enough not to care and to do it anyway.

He works in IT, a career choice that causes people’s eyes to glaze over at parties and for them to turn to one side and say “So then, tell me more about your job, it sounds absolutely fascinating!” to the National Audit Office statistician sitting beside him. His English/German parentage probably accounts for his vertical altitude, his tendency to lay towels on sunloungers first thing in the morning when on holiday and his frankly ambivalent feelings towards a certain event that took place in 1966...

So why this Challenge? For some perverse reason the idea held immediate appeal when first mentioned by Andrew, a work colleague, whilst toiling over a hot VDU at the office – drive an old wreck across the Sahara? But obviously! Now with only 4 weeks to go the reality of what faces them is just starting to sink in (just like the needles involved in the multitude of dratted injections required for numerous vaccinations).

The "Didwepackeverything  and didyoupickupthepassportsandtickets and ohmygodivelefttheovenon" checklist is just a little bit longer for this trip than it would be for a couple of weeks touring in Mainland Europe...

Andrew, with his chronological advantage and the fact that all this was his idea in the first place, is very much the senior partner and the brains behind Team Desert Rats, which he conveys through his gravitas and sensible, mature no-nonsense approach. His somewhat convoluted background brings another nationality to the mix, making Team Desert Rats sound like the opening line for an old-time stereotypical joke; “There’s these blokes, right, English, German an’ Italian. An’ they go for a drive…”

Andrew lives his life by a maxim that sets forth a universal truth that has gained credence through his own long personal experience, namely that; "Growing old is mandatory, Growing up is optional".

Not unconventionally however, Andrew has also been working in IT for a number of years, but has never found it easy answering the question "So what is it that you actually do?" Actually, what he really wanted to be was a pilot like his father, but that's another story...

Born in Italy, Andrew speaks Italian fluently, French pretty well and understands Spanish. With English he struggles, but gets by. As a young lad, he lived in Libya and Nigeria, and spent holidays in Niger, Kenya and The Gambia as well as travelling to South Africa on business. Can we perhaps see a theme starting to develop here?

"Let's drive to Africa. Better still, let's take the Sahara Desert route." was the initial suggestion to Peter. Since that moment and since the moment that Peter, having gone away briefly to mull it over, came back and agreed, it has been an exciting but anxious time.

This then marked the inception of their odyssey…