West Berkshire grandma pens first book about 20,000km road trip

In 1970, newlyweds Ross and Sara Dunn set off, with a self-confessed naivety and a lack of preparation, on an epic drive from Edinburgh to Zambia in a standard saloon car.
Fast forward 42 years and Mrs Dunn of Hamstead Marshall, who now has three children and eight grandchildren with Ross, has recorded the extraordinary journey in her first book called Appointment in Zambia.
“Three years ago I started to put together all the information we had from our log book of the journey; from letters home and notes Ross had made for a presentation,” the East Woodhay Silver Band member said.
“It was something I had been meaning to do for some time and was initially to be for our family.
“I really enjoyed the process, and a few months afterwards I joined a writers group. Just over a year after that the first draft was complete and it had turned into a book.
“There followed a few more drafts, and now nearly 42 years after we set off in our innocence across Africa, it is in print.”
Mrs Dunn was just 21-year-old at the time she and her husband, then aged 23, set off from the Scottish capital in 1970.
The couple had a brand new golden sand coloured Hillman Hunter, in which they covered a distance of 20 000 kilometres during the trip.
“We slept in that car,” Mrs Dunn said. “We coped with illness and looked up the barrel of rifles from the wrong end.
“We did the whole trip on a shoestring. Apart from the car their only technology was a compass.”
Appointment in Zambia, published by Troubador, chronicles a number of Mr and Mrs Dunn’s experiences, including digging themselves out of the Sahara Desert with Tupperware boxes and travelling the Congo River on a raft cobbled together with old canoes.
For more information about the book, or to buy a copy, visit www.troubador.co.uk
Sara and Ross Dunn are pictured top right at a book signing at Waterstones, Northbrook Street, Newbury, and below the couple in Nigeria in 1970.