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This is the story of the year that Tegan Philips and her family left their suburban home in Cape Town, South Africa, to cycle 11,000km through Africa, accompanied by her pet pot plant, Speckles, and the spirit of Eckhart Tolle. And of how, during that year, she learned how to take her Brain less seriously.

It's about the big things that happened - like the elephant stampede and the train that fell over and the drug-fuelled machete attack - and the people they met along the way. But it's also about how they discovered diversity and complexity in a place of homogenous stereotypes; familiarity in situations where they'd expected fundamental difference; and trust that they could handle whatever came their way.

Ultimately this is a story about the realisation that Grand Adventure is mostly the same as regular life but with more scorpions, less wifi and the same amount of dysfunctional mental activity.