A night camping by the Dead Sea precluded a drive down the ancient King’s Highway and a visit to Petra. From there we took the ferry to Egypt – our gateway to Africa.

However, getting the cars into Egypt wasn’t easy. It took fourteen confusing hours at the border, lots of indecipherable paperwork, and ample baksheesh before the Porsche had its Egyptian numberplates and we could hit the road to Cairo, where we were rewarded with an unforgettable afternoon, driving among the Pyramids.

Then came the Sudan. The Nubian Desert stretched into the distance and was where the Porsche celebrated its departure from tarmac by overheating and breaking its exhaust. We bounced through the gravelly sand for three days before crossing the Nile and speeding down to Khartoum.

Following some repairs, we carried on to Ethiopia, where the deserts gave way to lushly vegetated hills. We passed Addis Ababa in a blur of potholes, and then crossed the Kenyan border, where the Porsche’s biggest challenge, loomed.

Rain had turned the three-hundred-mile dirt track across northern Kenya into a rutted quagmire, which the Porsche initially set about crossing with gusto, bouncing between the ruts as it slithered its way along the soupy surface. However, the going was extremely hard on the car, and it eventually protested, a fuel filter failure leaving us dead in the mud.

I attempted several repairs, but nothing worked, so team 4x4 produced a towrope.

The next sixty miles took forever. After succeeding on Africa’s toughest road, we found ourselves bouncing along trying to avoid obstacles, an impossible task after dark, when rocks pounded the Porsche’s vulnerable underside as it was dragged to a village.

The next day we set to work, bashing the broken exhaust back into shape, replacing severed fuel lines with pieces of hose pipe, and generally reassembling the car’s underside sufficiently to attempt to reach the next village of note. Another breakdown and an ill-advised river crossing later, and we were out of the wilds, in the verdant shadow of Mount Kenya.

We continued across the equator and headed through Tanzania. Malawi and Zambia passed routinely beneath our wheels, and then we entered Botswana, where our friends in the 4x4 tired of the smooth progress, and added some drama by smashing into the back of the fragile Porsche, caving it in rather impressively.

Despite the damage, we crossed into Namibia and entered our last desert – the Namib. Cruising along as a stirring sunset played upon the sands, we were blissfully content with our achievement, knowing that nothing could now stop us reaching Cape Town. It was about that moment that the front wheel fell off.

The Porsche’s lower wishbone had cracked, and there was no option but to bodge a repair with what we had with us. We removed the wheel, slotted the fractured ball joint back together, tensioned everything into place using ratchet straps, and then edged forward. Five miles per hour. Ten miles per hour. Fifteen miles per hour. We counted down the miles to tarmac, our confidence slowly growing. Twenty miles later, the wheel fell off again.

We repaired it and carried on toward storm clouds backlit by the sunset. Soon, the wheel was off for a third time. Another repair ensued. Pulling away, the first bolt of lightning crashed into the desert nearby. And then, shortly after midnight, the wheel came off again.

With lightning now strafing the desert, we sheltered in the vulnerable cars, awaiting either daybreak or a direct hit – whichever came first. It seemed to last a lifetime, but eventually the stormy night was over. We reattached the wheel and pushed on through a vivid morning. The wheel came off twice more in the next fifteen miles, each repair proving less resilient than the last.

The prospect of abandoning the Porsche loomed. By the eighth breakdown, only stubborn determination kept us going, but then we found some grit hidden within the ball joint socket. We cleaned it out, strapped everything together and held our breath as we pulled away. An hour later, we’d covered twenty miles. Hardly willing to believe we’d cracked it, we crawled across the desert for six hours to a beautiful sight: tarmac, all the way to Cape Town.

Seven hundred miles later, the stirring silhouette of Table Mountain appeared, and jubilantly, we rolled into the last city, emotions overflowing sixty days after we’d fired up the scrapyard engine and set off, not even daring to hope that we’d make it out of the UK.