Fran Sandham: Sand man

Flemmich Webb meets intrepid south Londoner Fran Sandham, the first person ever to trek solo and on foot from the Skeleton Coast to the Indian Ocean at Zanzibar

Above: Gipsy Hill resident and Saharan explorer Fran Sandham

For someone who has walked 3,000 miles across Africa carrying an 80lb backpack, Fran Sandham is a surprisingly slight man. We meet in a pub, where he orders an orange juice. "I’m on the wagon," he explains. "I’m a couple of months into a raw food diet." It’s not what I was expecting. Even though his epic journey was 10 years ago, the book about his travels, Traversa, is peppered with references to eating junk food and drinking generous amounts of the local firewater. But then Fran seems to relish challenging people’s expectations. After years of being rejected by publishers, the hardback came out last year and was serialised in The Sunday Times, and the paperback comes out this summer. "I think publishers have this idea of what travel writing is or should be about," he says. "They are expecting these descriptions of the soul of modern Africa and the wonderful landscape. Traversa is so different. It’s not conventional travel writing at all."
It certainly isn’t. The trip was conceived one New Year’s Eve in south London. "I was at a really dreadful party in Colliers Wood, thinking about the year ahead and it just seemed so predictable," he says. "So I made a resolution to walk across Africa by myself." But whereas most people would wake up with a hangover and dismiss the idea as a drunken whim, Fran, living in Morden at the time, scrimped and saved working at a bookshop to raise the £3,000 he needed for the trip. A year later, he was standing on the Skeleton Coast watching as his drinking buddy of the past few days drove off across the desert, leaving him alone with his absurdly heavy rucksack. What followed next was eight months of walking, sleeping in ditches and numerous adventures across Africa, including a futile attempt to train a donkey to carry his pack.

Fran grew up in the Wirral, Liverpool and first became interested in adventure when recuperating from a leg injury he had when he was six years old. "I was given a copy of a Tarzan comic and was absolutely hooked. It was so different to where I was and seemed like the ultimate escape," he recalls.

After studying English literature at Salford University, he moved to Morden. During this time he began to develop a reputation as a walker. Not in the sense of a Sunday stroll around Hyde Park, more like long staggers back across London from late-night parties. Soon, to save money for his trip, he was walking everywhere.

But now he works as a freelance book editor from home – a shared flat in Gipsy Hill – he has less and less time to indulge in his passion. "A few weeks ago I thought: ‘I don’t really walk anywhere now, I’ll walk to Bromley and back’. By the time I got back I was so exhausted I was nearly crying. I walked all the way across Africa and now I can’t even walk 10 miles." He has been trying to get out more recently, and often walks to Dulwich Woods, "one of the nicest woodlands in London".

Fran loves the capital (he had a stint in Brighton recently but didn’t feel at home there). "I can’t imagine living anywhere else in England other than London," he says. "Virtually all my adult life has been spent here. All my experiences and history are here."

It almost sounds like he’s settled here but one gets the sense that he is still restless. He describes his love of the view from Gipsy Hill, as if that peek out of the city towards the horizon sets his imagination free. He hasn’t been abroad for three years but has plans to go away for three months at the beginning of next year, once the promotional work for the book calms down, to write an historical volume about Victorian travellers in Tibet.

"I’ll probably go to Thailand to work on the book. I feel at home there, and love the people and the food. I’m not a beach person, so I’ll spend most of my time in Bangkok in an apartment watching too much cable TV. It’s one of my favourite cities even though it’s really polluted and busy."

Fran says he is single, so does his doggedness and determination make it hard for him to form relationships with people? "I find it easy to let people into my life but with other creative people there can be a clash, and they are the ones I am drawn to," he says. If there is any degree of artistic ambition, egos can get in the way and that can cause friction."

In some ways, the trip across Africa didn’t help: "I changed but not necessarily for the better. On the positive side I became more self-reliant, but I also became less patient when I got back because I was so used to being my own boss. I had little money but the freedom to go where I wanted. It was a real privilege."

Throughout the interview, when he thinks he might be coming across as taking himself too seriously, Fran does a good line in self-deprecation. But the twinkle in his eye and the self-mocking tone he occasionally adopts doesn’t hide that fact that deep down he’s a pretty tough character.

"If you approach something with enough determination, you can see it through," he says. "Getting the book done and the sorting out the publicity has taken far more effort than the trip itself. But if I hadn’t walked across Africa I don’t think I would have been able to apply the determination needed to get Traversa published."

And with that he walked off… but only as far as the bus stop.

www.traversa.co.uk