Page 90 - QDG Year of 2022 CREST

88 1st The Queen’s Dragoon Guards
Africa for Parkinson’s Guy Deacon
Driving 12,000 miles through Africa in a VW campervan. Satnav, music and plenty of cigarettes, what could possibly go wrong?
When Colonel Guy Deacon decided to drive solo, from Sherborne to Cape Town he conveniently ignored the 101 things that any sane person might worry about, including the small fact that he was suffering from well progressed Parkin- son’s Disease.
So in November 2019 Guy set off from the Courts of Sherborne School, wending his way down through Europe, and then hopped across to Morocco. Everything was going fine, Guy was eating up the miles and exotic destina- tions - Marrakech, The Atlas Mountains, the sand dunes of the Algerian border- land, the dusts of Mauritania reaching Dakar in Senegal - the most westerly point in Africa. By February 2020 he was getting used to smoothing customs offi- cials, meeting kind people who went out of their way to help him and was building a following of journalists and
supporters of the Parkin- son’s charities he was raising money for. It was all a bit too easy.
It was the crossing from
Guinea Bissau into Guinea
(I challenge you to find that
on a map!) where things
hardened up for Guy. He
was low on his medication
(he has to take nine pills a
day), there was an ominous
leak from underneath the armour plated engine and the roads were turning into mud tracks. When he limped to the border with Sierra Leone he discovered right hand drive cars were forbidden in
As a Parkinson’s sufferer, Guy has to regularly “re-charge” by resting on a hard surface
You get into a downward spiral very quickly
the country! For most of us, hearing this would be devastating. For Guy his charm, a lot of patience and a good contact in the High Commis-
sion sorted him out.
Covid came and went,
and it was now March 2022. Guy was back in Freetown, the capital of Sierra Leone where his van had patiently been waiting for him. 6,000 miles down, 6,000 to go.
Before we continue the journey with Guy, it is impor- tant to realise that two years
for a Parkinson’s sufferer is a long time and Guy’s condition had only gone one way. This is how he described it to one of his keenest followers, BBC journalist, Rory Cellan-Jones who is a fellow sufferer:
“You get into a downward spiral very quickly. And then Parkinson’s grabs hold of you even more quickly, and you simply can’t do anything. You can’t make a sensible decision, you can’t move, you can’t turn around to talk, all the things that are dreadful become more dreadful.”
With this in mind, imagine being in the van with Guy as he tackled the next leg of his journey. Monrovia, Liberia and The Ivory Coast went well, and in these countries Guy was able to do a lot more PR for Parkinson’s Africa, appearing on TV and radio shows to explain what the disease was and how it affected people. The symptoms of slurred speech and restricted movement were not, as many people believed in Africa, the result of being possessed by the devil.
By now, Guy’s shock absorbers, not to mention those on his van were getting tired. In Ghana, Togo, Benin and Nigeria an ever growing band of supporters reached out to Guy, without whom he freely admits he would not have been able to continue.
Nigeria is wet and Cameroon even wetter. The road between the two is the most difficult road in Africa and it was here the clutch finally gave in. The van was towed across the boarder to the nearest town and Guy had reached a low point on his journey. Luckily he is a very very stubborn person. This saw him through some dark periods and by hook and by crook he was back on the road and crossing the Equator in Gabon on 19th August 2022.
Congo sounds a tough place and proved to be so. The pages in Guy’s blog are a bit hazy here, suffice to say that the roads were so rough that the van’s prop
Guy crossing the equator in Gabon on 19th August 2022