Paved

Andy's flawed assumption that a friend's wedding reception in Spain would just be a fun weekend away from his mundane London life, leads him to bite off more than he thinks he can chew.

Thanks to the torrential autumn rain combined with too much alcohol and too many drugs, after being dragged into a taxi by Shelley, an old acquaintance, they continue this wild and debauched Saturday night bender in the wet Andalusian streets of Cádiz and end up as stowaways on a cruise ship that is heading off to the tropics. His unintended and somewhat unhinged female travelling companion then attempts to climb into a lifeboat but falls down into the ocean.

With lifejackets and bravado, Andy dives in to the rescue, but after a desperately cold night stranded in Atlantic waters off the west coast of Africa, they both unwittingly wash up, half naked, on the shores of Mauritania.

Following their rescue and subsequent arrest by the military in the name of Sharia law, Andy is subjected to a harrowing interrogation under threat of the death penalty but eventually manages to slip away from his incarceration and begins his attempt to somehow return home without money or passport. He is blessed by the sympathetic generosity of others and has the dubious fortune to reunite with Shelley, who has recently fled from a local hospital.

Now as fugitives, for whom the British Consulate has no interest in helping, the only way out of their predicament is to somehow sneak across the border into Western Sahara through a formidably barren desert laced with landmines. They fail to reach sanctuary, almost losing their lives in the process through dehydration and exhaustion, but not without enhancing their relationship into the realm of romance.

They are helped out by two German brothers they meet who are overlanding through Africa in a six-wheel-drive truck. Shelley and Andy join them in their travels, only to soon discover that all is not well onboard, and in the end, following a night of terror at the hands of the mentally unstable Gerd and the apparent but misdiagnosed death of his brother Hans, all four of them become locked up in an army barracks deep in the desert.

In the aftermath of a deadly rebel attack, they are freed once more, but in the process, Gerd is killed by a stray bullet, and Shelley is taken hostage by the militia, who quickly steal her away to trade her on the white slave trade.

Andy and Hans now have nothing else to live for except their mission to find and rescue Shelley. This takes them all the way across North Africa to Saudi Arabia, not without many a wild goose chase en route, what with Andy travelling on a dead man's passport.

Eventually, in their botched attempts to buy back Shelley from the traffickers, they are arrested yet again and forcibly put on a flight to Germany, but not without the valuable knowledge that Shelley has in fact been gifted as a new wife for a Somali warlord. So, whilst transferring aircraft in Cairo, they abandon their homeward journey and are briefly distracted by the city's wine, women and song, at which point Hans abandons ship, leaving Andy to complete his mission alone.

He soon locates Shelley in Baidoa, one of the most dangerous places in the Horn of Africa, but she would appear to be content in the household of the octogenarian warlord and actually prefers to remain in her new life of true friendship with his other three wives, happy to be free from the drudgery of London and her unfaithful ex-husband that she had left behind.

In the end, it is only Shelley's actions that save Andy from his predicament, trapped covertly in the women's quarters of the warlord's mansion, and he finally returns home with the realisation that the road to hell is, in fact, paved with good intentions.