STEPHEN McGOWN worked as an investment banker in Johannesburg, South Africa, before spending seven years doing similar work in London. While in London, he met his wife, Cath, who shared his desire to return to South Africa to manage his family's farming business and start a family. It was his life on a farm that had inspired Steve's passion for the outdoors and his desire for adventure: in this case, to ride his motorbike from London down Africa back to Johannesburg. But he was abducted in Timbuktu, along with a Dutch and a Swedish national, by Islamist militants of Al Qaeda and held as a hostage, due to his British passport, in many different locations in the Sahara Desert in north-west Africa for nearly six years.