Monday 4 February: Day 21
While I was in the tent cooking last night, Gareth noticed a wall of black cloud like a massive wave bearing down on us; it filled half the sky and blotted out the stars. In front, like foam, raced a line of white cloud. It was an awe-inspiring sight and, really, just a little frightening! We felt very vulnerable perched on the edge of our grassy plain. Realising that it would be upon us in moments, we quickly got everything under cover and battened down the hatches as best we could.
With a series of gusty flurries it was upon us. The heavens opened with a roar but, thanks to the siliconed seams, our tent remained completely dry. In fact it was rather cozy, rice bubbling away, tomato, onion and greens cut up and frying and the thunderous roar of the rain outside. We soon realised why there was no one living on this lovely flat stretch of green grass it was a swamp and, as the rain poured down, we could feel water rising under the tent; it was almost as if we were floating on a sheet of shallow water!
But soon it was past, the night calmed and we slept cosy in our cocoon of a tent. And then today dawned dry and overcast - another delightfully cool day to ride in. We set off across the grassy plain but soon found the bikes bogging down in a swamp of black mud. Much revving and paddling with both legs got us through!
The going was slow along rough sandy roads. After an hour we had covered a mere 23ks. Then we came upon an upright barrier in the road. I passed through and was about to ride on when Gareth shouted. I stopped, puzzled.
"We've been here before!" he said and in an instant my world turned 180 degrees. A group of smiling policemen confirmed it - we were heading back the way we had come yesterday, back to the Nyika Plateau! Now how this happened is a complete mystery to me. After our night on the plain we turned onto the road in the correct direction; we had come to no fork or cross road and yet, after an hour of hard travel, we - well!
A good laugh, turn round and back, this time with directions to a short cut which we found without difficulty - a 60kph narrow track of firm sand. At a junction we stopped for a short break and a direction update. On the side of the road was a small shop which sold Fanta, Fanta and Fanta. In fact on her bare shelves, the shopkeeper had exactly 5 bottles of Fanta. We reduced her entire stock by two fifths!
Outside I tickled a bare-bummed toddler's head and she screamed the village down! Gareth said my looks scared her!
It took us until 12.30 to reach Karonga. Four hours to ride 130ks. We were very tired and very dirty but we had seen something special of Malawi over the past three days, a rural countryside not usually seen. In fact, we didn't see another at all 'outsider' during those three days.
"What have you got to eat?" I asked the owner of a high street restaurant..
"Rice!" the man said, then as an afterthought, added, "with fish."
We ordered two and I went next door to get Cokes. A youth with dark glasses sat on the counter; he offered me dagga in a conspiratorial whisper. Just then the heavens opened. Rain bucketed down while we ate our fish - the whole thing on a plate, head with teeth, tail and fins, but delicious.
While we were picking the bones, an American man and three girl hitch-hikers crowded in for shelter. The man was clean, the girls travel-stained like us. "Where you headed?" he asked.
"Wales," I replied, at last looking and feeling the part. No feelings of fraud now. We are seasoned travellers and smell the part too!
"You can't," he said dismissively. "Borders blocked,'' effacing our trip with four throw away words.
I didn't argue; I was too tired and he was too clean; only my resolve was strengthened to complete the trip regardless and prove him wrong.
The Tanzanian border post is made up of a collection of tatty buildings, leaning a little to one side as if tired, made of unpainted slats of wood nailed to frames. Inside, like most border crossings encountered so far, officials yawned and stamped forms, moved us from table to table, office to dusty office, where we fill in the same things on similar looking forms.
Where have you come from? - make up any town.
Where are you going? - say the name of the next large town.
Address? - none. "Put home address," an official says. I write Ixopo.
Stamp stamp thank you, have a nice journey.
The office for the 3rd parties was a metal shipping container without holes for windows, but no one was there. "Don't worry,'' an official said, "buy one at the next town."
"But what if the police stop me?" I ask.
"No, they won't. They don't stop anyone."
Changing money on the black market is illegal, but if you lack local currency, the border officials send you to one of the touts who stand about with fistfuls of money and an amazing ability with mental arithmetic.
We are in Tanzania. We have set our watches one hour ahead.
It is interesting that, although the borders of two countries juxtapose, there are distinctive and perceptible differences within metres of crossing the border. I noticed was a woman riding a bicycle, then another and another. Bicycle riding for women seems to be socially unacceptable in Malawi; not so Tanzania. Here the trees seem bigger, the undergrowth thicker; the thatch on houses is no longer quaint but rather tatty, flung on willy nilly; more corrugated iron roofs but mostly a dark reddy-brown and streaked with rust; many of the houses look like slum dwellings; brightly coloured sarongs worn by the women and toga-like garments over one shoulder worn by some men - regal and dignified. Toilets are provided with a tin of water instead of paper; the bricks used to build houses are bigger; spoken English is poor. Massive Scania buses with slogans like "Born to suffer", "City Pride" and "Don King, Las Vegas" ply the roads with passengers hanging off the sides and even sitting on the roof. Whenever they stop, sellers converge by the hundred and cluster around the windows holding up their wares in flat baskets. Tall palms and banana trees nod and rustle along the roadside. And, amongst all this, there is a feeling of poverty about the land. Nothing I can quite put my finger on, but it is there.
On to a rutted tar road (for some strange reason it has been the practise to repair potholes in the road with red sand. This might be convenient and cheap, but after a heavy downpour all you have is a soup of red mud which disguises all the potholes and the whole job has to be redone!) and on to the small sprawling town of Kayela, off the Dar es Salaam road.
Directed by a friendly shopkeeper to this hotel, bikes unloaded and pushed into a storeroom for safe keeping, stripped off for a long overdue shower and clothes wash. I trimmed my beard, then out for a walk around this fascinating little town of wide dirt roads lined with tiny shops and street vendors. The streets bustle with humanity, bicycles, goats and the odd cow.
The main item for sale on the side of the road seems to be bananas - from small ones the size of one's thumb to massive green ones about 600mm long (for cooking, we are told). Young boys walk about with flat baskets of boiled eggs and rough salt wrapped in newspaper. Because bicycles are the main source of transport (other than the humble foot) every street has at least four bicycle-repair shops. We watched a man straightening a bent rim using his finger as a run-out gauge. The bicycles are robustly built and all have been adapted to carry the heavy loads they place on them. Extended stubs from the front axle support metal struts to the base of the handlebars to strengthen the front end; flat iron and even reinforcing rod carriers are attached to the back. Many frames have cracked and been re-welded. A one-eyed roadside tailor sewed up my ripped jeans and apologetically charged me R2 "because of the patch".
A local restaurant offered a menu which boasted 20 items; but each one we asked about wasn't available. "Well, you tell us what you've got and then we'll decide." I said.
"Beef and rice -"
We decided on the beef and rice.
The cow they got the hunks of meat off for our beef was obviously too old, thin and sick to get out of the way of the bus that hit it a week ago, but it was an interesting meal served with a large bowl of rice, a bowl of spicy gravy, a bowl of cooked spinach and a plate with tomato and onion and a banana on the side.
As we walked back to the 'hotel' after eight, the town was still humming; bicycles with and without lights roared about the streets, bells ringing - every young man on his sports model cruising the sidewalks, out to impress the girls. The atmosphere is so vibrant and so foreign I felt the need to pause and open my senses to drink it in. The mood is unthreatening and often as we walk men call out: "Hello brother" with no trace of irony.
Later I walked back out into the street, alone, needing to absorb more of the mood of this small rickety town. The tiny shops were still open; street vendors sat in the darkness behind their wares or curled up in corners to sleep. I was invited into a 'restaurant' by a young man who sat with his friends on chairs on the pavement. The establishment - it was the young man's - measured about three by four metres; inside were two benches and a table. The doorway was partly shielded from the street by a torn curtain knotted half way; the rest of the frontage open to the street. In one corner, an upturned truck hub with glowing coals, an inverted half 44gal drum with pipe chimney the smoke extractor. On the table, peeled potatoes in a plastic bowl, 5 eggs and a gallon tin of old oil. I suppose eggs and chips was on his menu. Mosquito gauze separated the 'restaurant' from the opposition next door and I listened to the busy talk just audible above loud kwela music from a radio. I asked for a Coke and sat down. He fetched it from across the road. In Malawi and Zambia, the tops of cool drinks are half lifted and left on for you to remove with your fingers. In Tanzania the cool drink is presented with the lid still attached and then opened in front of you - still leaving the lid on - like offering a bottle of wine for inspection before de corking it. I sipped my Coke while the noises of Africa floated past me and I thanked God for his wonderful blessings.
Tuesday 5 February: Day 22
Three weeks on the road! 25.1% of the trip complete!
In preparing for this trip, I read a book called “Smith and Son”. Published quite a while ago, it is the personal record of a trans-Africa trip just like this one. In the 1940's, Mr Smith as a young man rode a Triumph Cub from Cape Town to Cairo. Years passed. He married and had a son. The original bike he had kept in the shed, perhaps waiting for another trip, a sharing of his adventure, recapturing the dream. When the boy had become a young man - 21 in fact - he proposed that they re-do the trip, this time from England to Cape Town, following his original route. The young man agreed, another Triumph Cub was bought and prepared and off they set.
The tragedy, of course, of attempting to recreate a personal adventure is that it is never the same. It is impossible to expect someone else to relive one's own dreams or memories; it always ends with the taste of ashes in the mouth. And so it was with 'Smith and Son'. It was clear from the start that the young man was not particularly interested, nor was he the adventurous type. At every opportunity throughout the trip he was angling to get the bikes loaded onto a boat, a truck or a train and, at every large town, would rush off to phone or post a letter to his fiancé.
When the trip was finally over, the bike was sold. Reading between the lines, (although he never said it in so many words) Mr Smith was a very saddened man.
With this in mind, from the outset, I tried never to foist the trip on Gareth. I offered it, he accepted with his usual maddening equanimity and that was that. We planned it in a low-key way together, worked together on preparing the bikes. Gareth showed little overt enthusiasm for the trip (which made me sad) but that is his way. He really doesn't show enthusiasm for anything, which is not to say that he is not enthusiastic - just frustratingly reserved.
Now that the trip is a quarter of the way through, I am proud that he has never shown a moment of weakness, of negative spirit; never a complaint. We ride through blinding rain all day long and he doesn't suggest we stop or seek shelter or look for a hotel or give up. We eat or we don't eat - whatever. We sleep on the ground or in a bed, wear wet clothes or dry - it is no matter. And yesterday, looking at the map, he said to me, "These countries in West Africa, what are they like?"
"Why?" I answered non-committal.
"I'd like to see them," he said and my heart was glad.
Glynis and I tried to retrace the bicycle trip my father, brother and I did from Durban to Beira in our disreputable Austin A40. That in itself was an adventure, but we couldn't capture the bicycle dream. That was of another time, resting in my memory and my brother's and father's. It can exist nowhere else. But OUR trip - Glynis and mine - became ours and new memories were created, very special ones.
In this trip with Gareth, I am not trying to repeat what my father did with me. It's a trip, an adventure, all of its own and if it creates in Gareth's psyche memories that will last all his life, if the time between us has been special, then it will have been worth while.
This morning, enquiring after a bank, an old man, thin and grey, gestured for me to come, wheeled his bike out of a store room and pointed to the carrier. Having observed the locals fairly closely, I placed my life in his hands and hopped on side-saddle. Off we went, this thin legs pedalling, tendons on his neck like wires! I sat remarkably firmly and not for a moment did I feel insecure. Bell ringing frantically, we raced between pedestrians, other cyclists and the odd car, then along a narrow path through dark green mango trees and there was the bank!
With half an hour to wait I ambled down a narrow lane shaded on both sides with tall dark-leaved trees, the ground littered with old mango pips and the husks of coconuts. In the yards of houses women were sweeping the ground clean of leaves using palm frond brooms; children played on verandahs and pigs grunted from inside their crudely-constructed pens. Hens scratched and pecked contentedly, as always in Africa. Off to one side I noticed a crudely built church. It was open so I went into its musty dark interior - like the bat cave in Malawi - seeing the rat droppings on the floor, a yellow dog asleep in a corner. He looked at me disdainfully and walked out. But it was a USED church. A blue-painted cross stood against one wall; the pews were smooth and crooked with use, and withered flowers stood on the altar. I paused, listening to the silence, and reflecting that, even in this small village in Tanzania, as in so many places throughout Africa and the world, using many tongues and styles, people were worshipping God. For a precious moment in that musty building, I felt a special kinship of faith and belief.
The bank was typical of Africa. I was the only customer, at least eight employees stood and lolled about behind the counter doing little or nothing (one ate a late breakfast behind a jutting wall) yet it still took 20 minutes to exchange three traveller's cheques.
Walking back to town, I thought about breakfast. As if to order, along came a young man with a flat basket of eggs. I bought two - they were newly boiled and still hot - and he poured rough-grained salt into a torn-off strip of newspaper. A little further along, another young man sat over a pile of chapattis - thick, flat pancake things of flour and water. I bought two and Gareth and I breakfasted on boiled eggs and chapattis and syrup.
The road inland rose steeply to a plateau of 2700m, the bikes labouring a little and getting quite hot. We passed tea plantations looking rather scrappy and banana plantations watered by fast flowing canals. The Chinese influence was visible in the Tanzam railway which followed the road, Chinese trucks and a mine sponsored by China.
At Mbeya, the owner of a motor cycle repair shop waved us over as we rode past. We pulled over and chatted. He sent a little boy off to get cool drinks while we looked the place over. In Africa it seems that nothing is thrown away; most parts are second hand. A worn sprocket had been re-filed into shape - new teeth, just lower gearing; a man labouriously rewired a stator using wire from one that had burned-out. In first-world countries the whole thing would have been thrown out and replaced with a new one or, if there wasn't a new one, a disappointed shake of the head. In Africa, ''n Boer maak a plan' and what ingenuity, what innate/learned (from desperation/necessity?) engineering ability!
On the off-chance we asked if he had an 'O'-ring link. He rummaged in his spares and - ta-da! - there it was! He noticed my broken indicator glass and muttered to his assistant. A moment later, 2nd hand lens and phillips screw driver and it was on. "A gift for you,'' he said, smiling.
After 250ks and a dark threatening storm ahead, we stopped at a small village whose name I cannot find. "What's it called?" I ask.
"Cald? Cold? Ah, beer? Soda?"
To escape the rain, we stop at a Guest House (Malawi has 'Rest Houses') called the White House, are shown two neat and clean single rooms by a young man who speaks fleeting words of English, but with appropriate gestures we make do. R6,00 each for the night. My room has a bed with a red and white sheet, pillow and mosquito net suspended from the roof; hurricane lantern for light, bedside table, curtain across the window, towel on a nail in the door and even a pair of slops under the bed for the shower (I have one green and one red slop; Gareth two blue!)
Outside, on the side of the road, a man strips the brakes and master cylinder of a Land Rover. We pause to watch. Gareth draws my attention to how much of the bits and pieces inside the engine are held together with wire.
We unpacked and visited the stalls across the road, buying 10 mangoes, 2 eggs, 1 paw paw, 2 Cokes, 1 lemon, 2 rolls of toilet paper (all for about R8,00) and organised supper at the local 'restaurant'.
"What's to eat?"
"Rice!"
"Rice!?"
"Yes, and meat."
"How much?"
"400 shillings." - that is R2.70 per head.
Wednesday 6 February: Day 23
A day of extremes and contrasts. We breakfasted on a perfect paw paw with lemon juice and sugar, followed by the perfect boiled egg and toast and honey. It is interesting how a diet lacking piquancy makes the most ordinary fare in the civilized world a feast to the palate in outer Africa! - like a warm cup of soup after cold, a dry tent after riding for hours in the rain, a soft bed after sleeping on the ground, a friendly smile, someone to talk to.
The day began very cold. Even though we had descended the western plateau, we were still very high as we realised later. The land was flat, the road straight and boring. I wanted something to photograph, but there was nothing that caught the eye - just a dull landscape with neglected unpicturesque houses, scrubby trees (gone were the tall trees and palms just inside the border) and patches of mealies grubbed out of the ground. Of note, though, has been the cleanness of Africa north of South Africa. One hardly ever sees a rubbish bin and yet there is no rubbish cluttering the streets, plastic packets trapped in puddles and fences and bushes like ugly flowers. And the reason is three-fold: firstly, packets are not supplied with purchases - you have to buy them, and the ae expensive; secondly, all drinks - soda and beer - are served in bottles not cans, and thirdly, the people are simply too poor to generate waste other than the organic kind - excrement and pips and skins and bones, and these soon blend into the landscape.
On the road men pedalled bicycles heavily loaded with 110 litres on the rear carriers of their bikes filled with bamboo wine, siphon tube attached! This was usually carried in one 60-litre plastic container, two 20-litre containers and two of 5 litres!
Lunch of hamburger and chips and Lucy's cafe, Iringa, full menu and functioning. It was run by an Indian...
We wasted an hour looking at a stone age site, 60 000 years old and supposed (according to the pamphlet, a tatty scrap of paper presented to us by the 'guide', an old man with one opaque eye and long yellow teeth) to be one of the best in the world. But what a pitiful display! In a shack latched with a hasp and staple pulling from the wood, little piles of rock labelled 'flakes', 'hammer stone', 'scraper', 'axe' etc. And most looked as if they had been randomly collected and piled there - like tomatoes on the side of the road. There were some that looked authentic and we stumbled across many more on the ground, but any fool could see that most of the pile of 'flakes' weren't flakes at all, ditto the 'hammer stone', 'ditto the 'scrapers'. Run by the Dept of Education and Antiquities of Tanzania - a sad comment.
Suddenly the road began to descend. It entered a steep valley of natural bush and we must have dropped another 1500m and, as we dropped, the temperature rose. At the bottom is was like riding in an oven or over the updraft of a fire. It was the hottest we have experienced on the trip, a frightening heat. Fortunately clouds were massing ahead and we raced towards them, relishing the gusts of cold wind and then the spatter of rain on our bodies as we reached the cloud. We didn't stop, didn't put on our rain gear, just rode in the rain and loved every minute of it!
The land changed quickly to acacia thorn veld and, after about 5ks, into baobab country. We were riding parallel to a high range of mountains and the ragged landscape had become beautiful, the mountains lending the land a dignity that, sadly, the people couldn't.
Just beating the rain, we entered the little village of Mbuyuni, a squalid place, dirty and run down. We had done our mileage for the day and were tired and hot so we stopped at the Mbuyuni Guest House as the heavens opened.
Never before have I slept in a khaya. Tonight I will. The room is about as basic as one can get and lacks the cleanness and charm of our first Guest House in Malawi. This is a squalid dump. The doorways are low, up to my nose, so we walk about hunched. Through the metal bars on my window I can see into what looks like the local bar. The ceiling is stained, the dirty walls were once painted a dirty green (or is it blue?) and my bed has lost a plank where my hip goes. The shower smells of crap from the toilet, and said toilet, the usual hole in a concrete floor, is an egregious place, hung with spider webs from a rusty corrugated iron roof.
The preferred method of voiding the bowel, in Africa, is to squat over a hole in the floor. In fact, even if a toilet seat is provided, the usual method is to squat with the feet on the bowl (with predictable results!) For me, with my gammy knees, this is something of a burden. Oh, the joy of sitting in comfort on a toilet seat moulded to fit the bum! And each 'toilet' is provided with a tin of water and no toilet paper. I suppose one washes one's bum with the water afterwards (and then, I assume one washes one's hands). But there is no soap! No running water! And HOW does one wash one's bum? - there is no towel and, even if it were provided, I wouldn't use it!
I take my own personal roll of toilet paper, thank you!
It is getting dark now. Soon they will bring the hurricane lamp and, in its flickering glow, the room will soften and shadows play on the walls and mask the smudges. I will wash in water that looks like weak tea, and we will eat our soup and toast and be happy...
Thursday 7 February: Day 24
At six I couldn't stand it any longer. I got up, pulled on my sandals, and walked out into the pale light of dawn. The cacophony from the bar just opposite my room was still going on as it had, quite literally and without pause, all night. I had slept very little, if at all. Despite masticated toilet paper rammed down my ear holes, the repetitive beat drummed into my head as loud as if the band was playing inside the room. Shirtless, I had tossed on my hot bed and waited for the dawn.
Outside a few paraffin smudge pots were still burning, illuminating the sad little piles of tomatoes and onions, the fly-blown cooked fish, the stringy lumps of meat arranged on little stalls along the road for sale. I walked closer and something stirred. Huddled over behind the pitiful stalls were young boys, asleep. In the bar, a man was slumped over a table, yet the music blared on. And for a moment in that pale dawn I felt a touch of pity for these people who, through necessity, are forced to man their rickety stalls all day and all night, leave the radio blaring to entice a late-night truck driver in for a drink.
The bush all about was silent as were the overhanging mountains and, before the street came alive, it was strangely beautiful.
I woke Gareth and we tried to prepare breakfast in his room. I found myself walking about with my lip curled as one does when one's senses are assailed by an unpleasant odour. And suddenly I was tired of the dirty walls, the grit under my feet, the rosettes of water-stains on the ceiling, the constant ducking through too-low doorways, the raw noise that assailed my ears, the greyish soup of water to bath, drink and wash dishes in, to sluice ones shit down a fetid hole, the unnatural squatting to void one's bowel, the shutters that didn't close, the mean passage outside my room which doubled as a drain, spider webs on the roof, rusted corrugated iron, blobs of fly-encrusted meat, the stench of fish and smudge pots and blank faces staring.
We discovered that yesterday, when we were looking at that poor excuse of an antiquities exhibition a youth (who had offered himself as guard) had gone through our things and stolen the torch, my Swiss army knife, dark glasses, my invaluable old light metre, binoculars and various other things. Bastards! I muttered, wanting to get away. Bastards!
And I realised that the tatty rural villages and flashes of the lives lived by the people might be quaint and picturesque when observed from the outside; but when one is INSIDE, feeling the dirt and smelling the smells, battered by the constant noise and brushed by their bodies and stares, it is not quite so attractive. We were inside and we yearned, just for a while, to be outside. To sit at a clean table and eat a bowl of cereal with fresh cold milk! To drink a cup of strong coffee, sit on a toilet, bath in a hot bath!
While loading the bikes, a man asked how I was and I poured out my disgust at the dirty walls and toilet and shower and the noise. It made me feel small and mean but, at the same time, somehow purged.
Gareth glanced at me and said he wished he had a brick. He was referring to the noise still emanating from the bar. I must admit in the early hours I wondered whether I could sneak in and smash the thing but realised that my white skin would make me particularly noticeable and the reaction of the locals somewhat unpredictable. It was the second time in two days that Gareth had mentioned a brick. The first was after yet another bus had quite openly overtaken another in front of us and pushed us off the road. Gareth wanted to carry a half brick and lob it at the wind screen in passing!
Once we were on the road, though, I felt clean again. The bikes were going well and the first 100ks ticked by. The hot flat countryside had changed to mountains covered with green bushveld. Gareth was ahead of me travelling up a long incline between two mountains when I noticed puffs of grey smoke coming from his exhaust. It happened about four times and then, with a loud bang and a flaming backfire, Gareth came to a standstill. I was positive his engine had blown and had visions of the trip ending then and there.
Gareth, however, in his stoical way, simply got down to the job of sorting out the problem. No damns! No wails; seemingly no emotion at all - just, "Let's sort the problem out."
"Please, Lord!" I whispered to myself. “Please, Lord -!”
Unload. Take out tools. Remove plug - electrode joined with carbon. Clean plug and replace. Kick. No compression. (What? - hole through a piston? Snapped rings? Riding valves?) Remove seat, tank and tappet covers. Tappet gaps OK. Now what? Try to start bike. It started! Check compression - OK. Must have been a piece of carbon causing a valve to ride. Replace bits of bike strewn across the road, repack and off - reprieved!
A very hot day again, like riding in an oven. Gareth pulled a strip of skin off his upper arm that looked as if boiling water had been poured on it. We rode through the Mikumi National Park - the pure bushveld without people was somehow clean and refreshing to the soul. A herd of elephant walked slowly away from the road...
The land became scrappy again, hot and dry and ugly, as if the soil was thin and poor. The effects of slash and burn farming were only too evident and the red soil was showing through.
At last, with the coast nearing, the air became cooler and there were some palms. We stopped 40ks short of Dar es Salaam, tired and hot and dirty. Booked into a better hotel - still shabby, though, like most of Tanzania, I'm afraid. The glorious cold shower in itself, however, was worth the price of the room!
Friday 8 February: Day 25
We are at Tanga on the NE coast of Tanzania, having ridden the last hour and a half in pitch darkness - Gareth with no lights at all and me with a dim, yellow headlight which did more to emphasise the darkness than provide illumination. We are physically and mentally exhausted, Having ridden today for thirteen and a half hours and covered 470ks, our longest distance.
In retrospect, was it wise? Probably not, but it is done and we are here.
The morning was decidedly unpleasant, heading into the suburbs of Dar es Salaam, dirty, sprawling, ugly and pinched, traffic jams and hooting cars, stares from the passengers of buses who looked down on us with undisguised interest. Dar is large and spread out, with 2.2 million inhabitants, mostly poor, most involved in some small business housed in a shack on the side of every road. We followed the main route through the city, trying to reach the harbour. I had hoped it would be beautiful, palm-fringed, dhows and rusty coasters moored in still blue waters. Reality, however, was somewhat different: the smell of low-tide assailed us long before we reached the harbour. No dhows, few ships and vast expanses of low-tide mud and the filth that is usually associated with harbours. I changed money, posted a letter to Glyn and we headed north, following the coast, eager to escape the noise and confusion of the city.
Gareth saw a motorcycle shop so we stopped, still needing a master-link - the one we got at Mbeya was too thick in the lug but could, in an emergency, probably be filed and sanded to size.
The owner, a sly-looking man with his eye on a quick buck, had a link which fitted. It was on a wreck of a bike which he said belonged to him. Thinking that our desperation would make him a good profit he insisted on R75 for the second-hand part. I laughed in his face.
At that moment a young man who worked in the trade came in and he took me under his wing. While Gareth waited with the bikes, this young man flagged down a taxi and we roared off into the sprawling hodge-podge-podge of shack businesses and began what turned into an hour of fascinating revelation. Amongst a labyrinth of dirty paths and roads, existed thousands of small businesses, many repairing cars and motor bikes, these masterpieces of 20th century technology with their entrails in the dust and shirtless men squatting before them making repairs. And clearly, in their unsophisticated fashion, the repairs must be effective or the businesses would fail. But I wouldn't like one of these dust mechanics to dip his dirty fingers into my engine!
We tried one motor bike junk yard after another, passed heaps of parts, rusting and unsorted. But the owners knew exactly where everything was. They'd dig down into the mound and emerge with a part, try it: wrong size.
Eventually, however, we located one - rather worn, but it fitted. Paid S2000 (R14), flagged down a bus back to Gareth, paid the helper for his trouble and we were off again, following the worst road yet on our trip. It was one of those roads that had once been tar but neglected until the potholes joined to turn it into a dirt road with hard lumps of tar and foundation sticking through. A bike and soul-breaker of a road, dirty and mean and dusty.
At last, after 70ks of this, we reached Bagamoyo, a fascinating old town on the coast with remnants of Arab, German, British and Dutch architecture and influence in its rotting buildings. The day was windy, and beached dhows fluttered their sails along a gently shelving coast. Fishermen waded out onto the sand with bundles of fish strung through the gills with strips of palm frond. A young man tried to sell us coins which he'd picked up in the area, old Dutch, German and early Tanganika coins which dated back to the beginning of the century - a fascinating history of the area.
Enquiring locally, we learned that the road along the coast - another 200ks of it - was just as bad so we abandoned it and decided to follow a track north which joined up with the main road. 42ks we were assured. It turned out to be 64, but what an experience! Very similar to the small bush roads in the Central Kalahari, firm sand alternating with soft, deep depressions, dry now, but judging by the radiating tracks into the bush to circumnavigate them, water-filled when wet. We crossed a river on a pontoon along with about 20 bicycles and 30 pedestrians, pulled labouriously hand over hand across by ten men who were not particularly concerned by the passing of time. The pontoon grounded on both sides, leaving a two-metre gap of open water between it and the bank; this made the route on and off with the heavily laden bikes something of an adventure!
The soft bits were, again, exhilarating and, Glory Be! Gareth came off twice! For some reason he struggled in the soft today - perhaps because he was carrying an extra 10 litres of water which he hadn't been carrying before, or maybe because I had empty Jerry cans and had retied my load to lower my centre of gravity. Needless to say I thoroughly enjoyed seeing him flailing about and slewing from side to side, legs out, flinging up rooster-tails of sand when he got stuck and helping to drag him out of the bush where he had wedged himself against a bank!
We were tired and hot by the time we made it to the tar road. Low on petrol and with not enough to reach the next town, reluctantly we turned back and rode 37ks to fill up. By now it was 4.30. 250ks to Tanga - three and a half hours of hard riding. I suggested stopping at one of the towns along the way, but Gareth felt we could make it. Maybe frustration at not making distance north, I don't know, but I agreed. Although I knew it was unwise, I felt it important to support his initiative.
We rode hard and fast, racing the setting sun. Our bodies were aching, especially our bums, but we rode standing or crouched down behind the handle bars to change position. It was exhilarating stuff, pushing the bikes over good roads, keeping one eye on the slow revolution of the milometer while the other watched the steady setting of the sun, and all the while knowing we weren't going to make it.
It was sad to see, as we rode, the devastation the locals have caused to the land by a systematic process of slash and burn and the destruction of local hardwood trees to make charcoal. The lush bush veld we passed through yesterday in the Mikumi National Park has gone; in its place raw earth and stumps and the smoke of fires rising into the sky.
But racing along with the sun setting over our shoulders, the land took on a softness that it does in Africa at dusk, when the air cools and smells of warm earth and cooking fires and the dung of cows hangs in the air. The dust and smoke in the atmosphere became tinged a soft pink as the sun went down and everything was beautiful. I thought sadly of evening coffee and sherry in the bottom of an enamel mug and the crackle of a fire in the Botswana bush, the good times Glyn and I and the kids have shared. Sometimes it is lonely riding within the vacuum of one's helmet on the bike...
But darkness was coming fast and we pushed on, stopping only after one hundred and then two hundred kilometres to quickly check the bikes. As it got darker, Gareth switched on his lights and I was consoled by that. I tried mine and was surprised to see a weak yellow glow. We stopped to don jackets against the evening cold and to remove sleeping bags in front of the lights when Gareth told me that his lights had packed up. With my bike now showing the only light, I led with Gareth keeping close to my right shoulder, only slipping back when an occasional truck passed. Darkness descended and, eventually, we were forced to slow. 70ks short of Tanga. We drove slowly now, feeling our way through an increasing number of small villages as we neared the coast. It was very dark and my headlight really only served to illuminate us rather than throw light onto the road. Passing shapes of people loomed out of the night like ghosts, and once I nearly hit a white-robed man walking in the road. Lights and fires on the sides of the road seemed so cosy in passing, smells of cooking food. Many times I nearly decided to stop at a village and look for shelter or even stop and put up the tent on the side of the road, but Tanga seemed so close that each time we decided to press on.
Exhausted, we finally made it by 9.30, asked directions in pantomime and were led to a wonderfully clean guest house with two beds and a ceiling fan, mosquito netting over the window, flush loo, shower. The owner, who speaks no English, gave us two cakes of scented hotel soap still wrapped, and that was luxury!
Saturday 9 February: Day 26
A rest day. We stayed in bed until 9, toast and coffee for breakfast and then a leisurely walk into town to enquire about a ferry to Pemba Isalnd. Back in tourist land, the only ferry will cost R300 one way for both of us. We walked along the beach, explored wrecked boats and rusting hulks of barges, watched boats being repaired with an adz, logs shaped into planks to fit missing pieces of the large dugout outrigger canoes. The tide was out and the mud abounded in crabs and mud-skippers.
Lunch of mango, orange, banana, peach and pineapple bought from the local market - delicious in the heat! Then a glorious siesta and, at four, a 20k drive out of town to visit some old ruins of a mosque. It wasn't up to much, but what was quite beautiful was a small fishing village we discovered by following a path through the bush. The tide was full and blue water lapped against a shore lined with palms; moored just off the shore, outriggers nodded against the swell, the water having flooded creeks of mangroves, making little dark blue inlets and islands. It was so 'tropical-islandish' and so delightfully foreign that we stood and absorbed the scene for some 20 minutes.
Fascinating the moods of the coast - tide out, exposing the mud and smells of the shore and it is ugly; tide in and the boats nod and rock on blue water - and it is beautiful!
Tuesday 12 February: Day 29
Home seems very far from me this evening and aloneness presses heavily upon me. Part of it, I think, is because we have made no northward progress for a few days, but mostly it is because this evening Glyn and Jem will be in our new home in Wales. They will be sitting on familiar chairs and sleeping on familiar beds while we lie on hard beds in a bare anonymous room, sunburned and tired. From the ceiling above, the clank and rattle of a fan stirring warm air about us.
The distance between us is still so vast: thirteen thousand seven hundred and fifty kilometres, in fact, and the worst still ahead. But I feel strongly confident that we will make it; Nairobi should be reached in 3-4 days and then the big decision. But whatever route, I know we will make it.
We have spent the last 3 days on the island of Pemba off the Tanzanian coast. For some perverse reason, a fellow traveller in Malawi recommended we go there instead of Zanzibar so we did. And what a disappointment it was! The ferry across was six times more expensive than the guide book said it would be, but we needed a break and were looking forward to it so we went, hoping for tropical island beaches, clear water, uncrowded streets with stone buildings of Moorish architecture and veiled Muslim women walking by on silent feet and with averted eyes. We took our tent hoping to be able to camp along the beach somewhere like castaways!
What we got was a dirty scrappy little island about 100 X 20ks, poor and mean with no camping allowed, no beaches, the small harbour tucked in an inlet of mangrove swamps. We HAD to stay at the government hotel, an expensive dump of a place. There was no water from the taps and one light out of four worked and the electricity went off at midnight so the fan didn't work. Africa seems inexorably to follow Newton's 3rd law of thermodynamics - everything is moving from a more complex to a more simple state. Fixtures are installed but never repaired: the ballast of a neon light fails, wires are taken from it to a bare bulb. The bulb fails, a lamp is produced; the lamp breaks, a candle is brought; the candles run out, a smudge pot is made from a Coke can; the paraffin runs out and you sit in the dark. There is no water in the pipes so you wash standing up in the bath with the water in a bucket. And whenever one asks about the lights or the water or the fan, one is looked at with a vague sense of amusement: do you REALLY expect ALL the lights to be working? Can't you read with the one?
But on the other hand we again experienced that other side of Africa, a special, precious part which I will never forget: people walking up to us in the street, "Hello, my friend! How are you? You are welcome here -" When swimming yesterday at an isolated coral beach, a group of very poor men who had been spear fishing called us over. They gestured to a pot of rice, smoke blackened, that they had for their lunch. I dug out a small stale loaf - the only food we could get - and we sat together on the sand, communicating with smiles and gestures, and ate rice from the pot with our fingers, balling it into wads and popping it into our mouths and gnawing at the stale bread. That's all they had and they shared it with us, and I felt strangely honoured and touched.
And then the young lad a few days before who sold me samosas for lunch outside a garage. I dropped one in the sand and, as soon as I had picked it up he gently removed it from my hand, and with a shy smile placed a clean one in the newspaper. This is the precious side of Africa and, almost without exception, it has been our experience. And a Moslem woman, African, with soft gentle features and pale satin-textured skin, breast-fed her baby on the crowded bus, her head and neck swathed in yellow cloth which draped over her breast demurely. She looked like a Madonna and the pale undersides of her feet were tattooed with black curving patterns like the markings on a Samoan warrior's chest...
Today we managed to get a cheap trip back to Tanga and the mainland on a fishing boat whose engine only broke down once, leaving us bobbing and rocking on dark blue flying-fish water with no land in sight. I got rather seasick, dipping and plunging on the foredeck just aft of the anchor, and the sun burned us both quite badly so it was good to get back to the hotel for a cold shower and a lie down. And it was then, especially, that the loneliness came upon me.
Kenya tomorrow, heading north again...
Wednesday 13 February: Day 30
We left Tanzania after a pleasant ride of 70ks along a palm-fringed dirt road. At the border, however, Gareth noticed that my rear tyre was soft. We pumped it and passed through the border stopping about a kilometre further on at a roadside bicycle tyre repair 'shop' under some trees. Then began about two hours of dirt and frustration. Sitting in the sand, the sun beating down on us and about 25 spectators crowded around so that every movement required a body or a limb to be pushed aside, we unpacked, removed the chain and rear wheel then attempted to get the tyre off the rim - which is almost impossible. (I think they design them to drive motor cyclists to the edge of distraction, sitting in the sand under the burning sun in strange far-off places watched by a hundred staring faces offering inane suggestions! I think they do it on purpose to try to get normally clean-mouthed adults to swear most foully!)
We eventually got the tyre off, found the offending nail, removed it and repaired the tube, which had also been cut half through by the rim. The next task was to get the tyre back without putting another hole in the tube. We failed. I have only repaired a motor cycle puncture twice and both times I re-punctured the tube when trying to replace the tyre on the rim. Most riders do it. Most SANE riders take the wheel to the nearest Supa Quik and pay the R20 - it's great value for money! “Please fix the puncture -” one says, and an hour later it's done!
Well, despite vigorous pumping, the tyre was flat again. Remove it, patch the three new holes we had put in (5 patches now) and do the whole job again (more carefully this time). It seemed to hold.
Through the Kenyan border and a pleasant 100ks to Mombassa where we quickly found the Cosy Guest House. Filthy from our two-hour squat in the sand, we had a glorious cold shower and washed our clothes. A quick trip (meandering and lost taking one-way streets the wrong way and dodging pedestrians) through the Old Town to visit Fort Jesus, a massive fort built in 1805 by the Portuguese and later taken by the Sultan of Oman. It overlooks the narrow seaway leading to the port of Mombassa and is massive and beautiful.
And then my tyre went flat again. What on earth are we going to do in the middle of the Sahara, dammit?!