Ari Vatanen, Rally Legend
“Africa, Africa, Africa, Africa, Africa, Africa – there is no other place for me,” is how Ari Vatanen replies when asked where his Favourite Detour would take him.
“Life is about the journey.”
So not the French Alps in a Porsche 911 GT3, say? “Nooo,” comes the reply, “A nice car for sure, but no good for Africa. I will even have to leave my beloved BMW X5 at home for this one. I will need a US-style motorhome – a four-wheel-drive one with good suspension – so I can take the whole family with me.”
At first, it sounds an odd choice considering Ari’s CV: He won the 1981 World Rally Championship in a much-battered, many-times-rolled Rothmans Ford Escort Mk II. He beat the all-wheel-drive Audi quattros to victory on the 1983 Safari Rally in an ageing rear-wheel-drive Opel Ascona. He sliced eight minutes off the mighty Walter Röhrl to win the 1985 Monte Carlo Rally in his Group B Peugeot 205 T16, only to oh-so-nearly die after rolling the same car nose over tail at 120mph in Argentina a few months later. Then he came back from his severe physical injuries and deep mental trauma to win the 1987 Paris Dakar Rally, travelling more than 7,000 miles across the continent of Africa in the process. He went on to master the dunes, the wadis and the rock fields to win the event three more times.
At the end of the day, Ari doesn't have a great deal to prove behind the wheel. So, off to the African bush, in a motorhome, with wife Rita and the grown-up kids, it is.
“My deepest love is for Kenya, where I went for the first time in 1977 to do the East African Safari Rally in the No 14 Ford Escort,” Ari tells us. Sadly, axle problems and poor weather conditions, with eight inches of rain falling in four days, prevented him from getting to the end that year. Many cars came to a halt, completely clogged with mud on the wettest Safari Rally ever, with only 12 of the 58 crews who started making the finish. Canny co-drivers had packed their old rugby boots, which proved the best footwear for pushing cars out when they got stuck in the mud.
"I would love to retrace the route of the old-style Safari Rally. They were just incredible events; almost 4,000 miles long sometimes and the whole thing was on open roads, all driven on notes from the co-driver," recalls Ari. "When you did the Safari Rally, it was like doing three or four normal rallies in a row. But that might not make for a nice relaxing family driving holiday, of course."
Ari would start his adventure in a boat, not a motorhome. ”Because you cannot come to Kenya and not take a cruise on Lake Victoria, you know. From there, I would drive south-east through the Masai Mara National Park to stay at the Governor’s Camp, which is in a shaded forest by the Mara River banks. You sleep in a luxury tent and enjoy the Kenyan hospitality and help keep the economy going when you are there.”
Masai Mara Photo Harshil Gudka / Unsplash
With the family refreshed and the RV fuelled, Ari’s next destination is a nine-hour drive north to the Mount Kenya Safari Club, a venue he has fond memories of visiting may years ago with the Rita when the children were little. "It was down a long gravel road, but maybe it is tarmac now. Anyway, they do things properly there. The children don’t eat with their parents, they eat with other children. And you have to dress properly for dinner, with the tie and everything.”
The next stop is the Norfolk Hotel in Nairobi, Kenya's capital, and then it's a two-day drive south-east through the Tsavo National Park to Mombasa and the coast. But Ari's journey isn't over yet. "Where I would really like to go to is a little island north of Mombasa called Lamu. My old Peugeot rally boss Jaen Todt used to go there. It is a UNESCO World Heritage site in the Indian Ocean. I have never been there before."
Sadly, the current security situation means making the trip by road to Lamu is too dangerous, so it would be time to park the mud-covered RV and take an aeroplane to reach the final destination.
Once back home on his farm in the south of France, Ari’s African Detour would be hoarded carefully up in his memory banks to savour over the decades to come: "Life is about the journey, and I just love taking trips with my family. Years afterwards, we will find ourselves saying: ‘Remember when we were there. And you did this, and that happened?’ That is what life is all about.”
Words Angus Frazer