East Africa again (March-August 1996)

Ethiopian Airlines took me to Nairobi in comfort but charged me US$93 to carry my bicycle. Reaching Nairobi, I passed a small personal milestone. I had made it all the way around the world. At the airport I loaded my bags on my bike and rode into town. The cool fresh air was an immediate relief and I was very happy to be back somewhere familiar. In the past I had stayed at the New Kenya Lodge in Nairobi but this time I opted for the Hotel Iqbal, which had more space for a bicycle. It was also cleaner but in general I preferred the New Kenya, which had a more interesting crowd of people.

As this was my second visit to Nairobi, I had only a few things I wanted to do there: celebrate my thirtieth birthday, collect mail, buy maps, perhaps find a cycling partner, then head off. This still took me three weeks. I spent two just relaxing, reading cheap books, going to the movies, talking to old and new friends. I found my maps and collected my mail and sent even more mail. Then I got a cold or flu or some similar thing one night, and after it had an attack of giardia and that cost me another five days. In that time I met a couple more cyclists, Andrew and Rachel, and we agreed to start off together.

How I celebrated my thirtieth birthday

I recruited a couple Frieslanders, who I’ll call Peter and Jan, from the New Kenya. We headed out to the Carnivore, a restaurant/disco which serves up all the meat you can eat for about $15-20 US and is a favourite of mine. That night we had the usual things plus Ostrich, Zebra, Hartebeest and Crocodile, the perfect mix of game meat. Then we went to the disco. At dinner Peter and Jan had told me they’d just arrived in Africa. I should have expected trouble at that point, but didn’t. Within half an hour each had attached himself to a Somali woman met in the bar, and both were in love. As they got more drunk they fell more in love. They had a spare woman also but I don’t pick up women in bars so I wasn’t interested in her and, perhaps because of that, she wasn’t interested in me. Of the three, Peter’s woman, who I’ll call Mariam, was the only genuine socializer; the other two, who I’ll call Hasina and Hodan, were notorious nasty whores. We met some expat businessmen there also and headed off with them to another bar. At some point we three "old-timers" realized the two new guys might not know that two of the three women with them were prostitutes or that prostitutes in Nairobi have an estimated eighty percent HIV infection rate. We told them. They were unhappy.

Peter got nowhere so dumped Mariam in favour of a whore. Eventually he tried to borrow a condom. When we repeated our warning that he was taking a big chance even with one, he got up and left with his girl and without a rubber. Jan stayed on, getting quieter and quieter as he grew tired of watching his whore “date” come on to other men who might have more money, until finally he left alone. I stayed until closing time at about 4:30 AM. Mariam and I agreed to share a cab back to town. As we were telling the driver where to go, she saw Hasina and Hodan coming and told the taxi driver to leave immediately.

Unfortunately, they reached the cab before we could leave and climbed inside, drinks in hand. We started to argue about how to split the fare: Hasina and Hodan didn’t want to pay anything and didn’t make any progress towards this goal by batting their pretty eyelids at me. The arguing continued for about fifteen minutes, getting more heated. The driver took away their drinks and threw them out the window. Finally I gave up, agreed to pay, and we almost left. Then at the last minute a young Indian man climbed inside waving money and shouting “take me to the New Florida Disco.” Since he had money this was fine with me but when I tried to collect his share from him he shouted “No, I’m going to pay him, not you.” I pointed out that we, the two paying passengers, had already pooled our money. He replied “No, I know Africa.” I told him to “pay up or get out of my cab.” He ignored me and tried to argue with the driver, who eventually kicked him out. Then the Indian turned to warn me I had better “watch my step here.” I turned and told him if he wanted to make threats he had better make sure he was big enough to carry them out. He didn’t care for that so came around to knock on my window. Just then I told the driver to leave.

The whores now hated me. Probably they had hated me before but now they had an excuse. They started shrieking that I couldn’t possibly be Canadian because I was such a rude cheapskate, I must be Dutch. Mariam defended me and their argument got ever louder and louder in wailing Somali until finally we reached the disco they wanted. Hodan got out and opened the back door, but Hasina wasn’t ready to leave yet. Instead she leaned across Mariam and grabbed my shirt, trying bodily to tear the sleeve off while shouting curses in my face. I turned and slapped her so hard I grazed Mariam as well. Then Hasina grabbed my glasses to try to break them, but I had been forewarned by the expats to expect this manoeuvre, and a wrestling match resulted which she eventually lost when Hodan dragged her away by the legs.

We carried on to drop off Mariam, with her bubbling apologies for all the trouble. I should have apologized myself for that disgraceful if amusing scene but it was six a.m. by then and I was far too tired to be polite. After she left the taxi driver commented “those Somalis, they are dangerous.” Many Africans hate them, and if that performance was typical it’s not hard to guess why.

Finally I got to my dormitory room and walked in. It was pitch black so I tripped over the unexpected Japanese tourist sleeping on the floor, then bumped into another one sleeping next to him. After muttered apologies I sat down on an unexpected pair of feet on the edge of my bed, which promptly moved as their owner, a young Japanese girl, jumped up and ran off to her own room, muttering “Oh solly solly.” Finally I got to sleep.

On the road again

In Morocco I had cycled everywhere. In West Africa I had cycled less than half of my total distance. On the east side of the continent I determined to get in more cycling time. We started with a short ride to Limuru, in the hills outside Nairobi. It was tough going for Rachel and Andrew, just beginning their tour, but we made it. Next day we carried on all the way to Lake Naivasha, a stretch of roughly eighty kilometres following a ridge line first, and then wandering over the floor of a hot and dry valley. This was a fairly rough ride, but we elected to do it all in one day anyway, as there were few places to stay on the way. We didn’t make it before dark and had to walk the last section of potholed road in the rain. Next day we made it easily to Fisherman’s Camp on the south side of the lake, where we stayed a few days.

Nearby was Hell’s Gate Park, one of the few in Kenya where cyclists were allowed. It had a rewarding variety of game and I recommend it highly. I particularly liked the Rock Hyraxes, which live in cliffs. These are the size of marmots but zoologists claim they are closely related to elephants. They are not very shy and will pose nicely on rocks while you get your money’s worth out of your zoom lens. It was also a particularly enjoyable feeling to buzz along on my cycle and have herds of zebra thunder across the road in front of me as they saw me coming. Although zebra are supposed to be just a variation of horse, they make strange coughing sounds instead of the neigh or whinny sound I was familiar with, so I had little advance warning of where they were.

Lake Naivasha itself had birds and hippos and other animals. The hippos had been a big problem at the campsite in the past, but the campsite manager had solved this by digging a big trench between his business and the lake. I would have preferred the problem, I think. Joy Adamson’s farm was nearby and there were backroads and bush trails to ride on. There was too much to see, in fact. It would have been a good place to base myself and make short trips. My basic purpose, however, was still to “survey” Africa so I pushed on yet again.

Andrew and Rachel and I split up at this point, with them leaving a day before me. The road onwards followed the west side of the lake closely, passing through a few small villages, then split, one branch heading for the main highway and another wandering up and over a high ridge. I took the high road. At the top of the hill the dirt track changed to an inexplicable 50 m of blacktop highway. On the other side of the hill, I missed the turn I wanted to take to Nakuru. It was probably just as well because within half an hour it started to rain and the road turned to mud and when I finished the short distance to the main highway my wheels and brakes and frame were coated with centimetres of thick sticky mud. I really didn’t want to cycle on this “highway of death”, the A104 into Nakuru, but it was a more pleasant ride knowing the alternative was impossible.

In Nakuru I met Andrew and Rachel again and we looked around town. I stayed a few days, making a dash by bus back into Nairobi one long day to pick up mail. When I left, I timed my exit so I would ride the route of the Kenya Safari Rally just as it went past. This brought me a lot of good photos but it also caused me large crowd problems as hundreds of young children decided I was more interesting than the rallyists and their cars. I escaped and climbed up and up and up and up to Kericho, passing green hillsides with tea and coffee plantations, then breezed down and down and down the next day, all the way to Kisumu on Lake Victoria.

Kisumu was a largish, slow-paced city. It had a pleasant campsite on the lake, with reeds covering the shoreline and the occasional distant hippo to see. Leaving town I rode up and up into the hills again, climbing to Kakamega and passing the equator on the way. This highway was too busy for comfort and I didn’t appreciate it at all. Kenyan roads were generally dangerous and there more than most places I tried to stay on back roads. Kakamega to Kitale, on the other hand, went easily and pleasantly. In Kitale I met Andrew and Rachel again. They had gone by way of Lake Baringo. After a couple weeks on the road, they were more fit at that point and we had fewer pacing problems. We all wanted to continue around the north side of Mt. Elgon but it rained almost daily and we had heard the mud on the road could be very bad, so instead we took the south road, around to Mbale in Uganda in two days.

Somewhere on this road I stopped under a tree to rest and a large bearded man came up to me. His name was Johnstone and he liked to preach, and he thundered the bible at me for ten minutes while I waited for Rachel and Andrew to catch up. After his sermon he gave me twenty shillings and told me to go buy myself a Coke.

Near the Ugandan border, “death highway” 104 was actually quite quiet. At the border itself a lot of trucks had accumulated, including many vehicles from UNAMIR, the UN mission to Rwanda, which was just leaving then. On the Ugandan side the road was also quiet and pleasant until it joined the road from Kampala to Mbale, at which point it became busy and dangerous. Coming from Kenya Mbale (and by extension Uganda) seemed broken and run-down, with semi-functioning power and water and little to buy in shops and restaurants. Its setting in hill country was dramatic, but Uganda’s landscape seemed more imposing than its architecture.

Near Mbale we saw Sipi Falls, a moderate flow over a projecting cliff on the side of Mount Elgon. We reached the place in a day trip out by public mini-van. On the way back our van broke down near a field of sugar cane and while we waited for repairs, a couple people raided the field and presented us with sticks to chew and suck on. The raw sugar cane juice was very good and thoroughly refreshing, although probably not good for our teeth.

I left Andrew and Rachel again, riding off on my own down the direct and less busy dirt road towards Kampala. This was tough going, due to a rough road and hot weather, so I had to stop in Iganga that night. This small road town somehow managed to support an expensive night spot and a reasonable hotel, possibly patronized by aid workers based there. In two more nights I made Jinja and Kampala, stopping to see one of the sources of the Nile on the way. My first impressions of Uganda held true: its cities looked much like those in Kenya in some ways, except perhaps that they looked both to have been better built and to have degraded more.

At Kampala I settled in at the Backpacker’s Hostel just outside of town. As in Nairobi, in Kampala I mainly stopped for business. However, since my last trip to Africa in 1994 Kampala had apparently become the centre of the African backpacker’s universe, rather than Nairobi. At the campsite I met almost all of the people I had earlier seen in Accra, on the other side of the continent. They had crossed the Congo and were continuing on their way south.

I also met many people on their way to see gorillas, heading into one of the most politically unstable areas of the world. One day a group of Ugandan rebels attacked the town of Kisoro, coming across the border from Congo in the centre of gorilla country. Nobody seemed sure who the rebels were but the Peace Corps and other foreign agencies pulled all their staff out of the area. I met a woman who was in Kisoro at the time and she commented that the locals had all worried for her safety, particularly fearing she might be kidnapped. The aim of the raid was apparently the town armoury, and the rebels succeeded, so they were armed and still free.

Despite this, tourists kept tramping off to see the gorillas, only a couple days after the attacks. When I asked them if they thought this was wise I got various unreasoned responses such as “well, you have to take some risks” and “they think it was just a one-off attack.” You must take some risks, true, but this doesn’t mean taking stupid risks or heading deliberately to trouble areas. It seemed unlikely to me that it was a one-off attack; surely the rebels had wanted weapons for a reason. People with this objection seemed not to know who “they” were that had said this, and it was wrong, anyway: the same group of rebels later attacked farther north, again across the border. All of these people seemed completely blind to these risks, in the same way tourists in West Africa had seemed blind to the evident dangers of casual sex and recreational drug use. During the time covered in this story, I counted about twelve backpackers who had got themselves killed by ignoring dangers they shouldn’t have. When I or others suggest to these people that they asking for trouble, they ignored us as well. They’d avoided one pitfall by realizing that foreign countries aren’t always dangerous, but then they apparently fell into the twin pit of thinking they are never dangerous. A lot of misinformation seemed to combine with an unhealthy tendency to trust word-of-mouth advice and make this dangerous situation.

Visas took me one week in Kampala, sightseeing another, and then I found an interesting book called “The Scramble for Africa” and that took me a week to read. While I was waiting people came and went, including a group of three pink buses full of drunken Swedish tourists, called “The Pink Caravan.” Overland trucks also came and went, and aid workers passed through and job-hunters. Rachel and Andrew returned from the west. They had broken a few spokes and run low on money, and given up on venturing further into Africa, so were now heading back to the coast. I met many cyclists along the way in Africa and, one way or another, most failed due to a lack of preparation.

Another delay came during the Presidential Elections. This was mainly a contest between the current president Museveni and an old boy from the Obote days named Ssemogerere. Foreigners were solidly behind Museveni. Ssemogerere’s comments, or at least those printed in public, suggested electing him would be a national disaster on a par with electing Idi Amin. We weren’t sure how Ugandans felt, though, so many foreigners found excuses to leave before elections and others had escape plans ready. In the event, Museveni won a large victory with only the north voting solidly for Ssemogerere, and most people I met were generally relieved.

When I was about ready to move again, I couldn’t because I had developed some strange medical problem with weakness and headaches. I went to the doctor, who found an amoebic cyst in my blood and strange marks on my back. He didn’t know what to think so prescribed a course of Fasigyn for me as he was sure it must be some sort of parasite. Probably he was right because the drug did the trick. By that time I had been there for four weeks.

Towards the end of the drug treatment came a dog problem. Kampala had many wild and semi-wild dogs, and some of them liked to invade the campsite at night and run wild causing trouble. The owner tolerated them, or slept too soundly to catch them, until one night they went wilder than usual, smashing furniture and killing his two newly-acquired kittens. I suggested shooting them and he shot down my stupid idea, pointing out we were in city limits. Somehow I had never thought of these laws as mattering there. The night of the dog attack somebody must have agreed with me as we heard shooting and squeals from a nearby house. The owner called the city council to solve the dog problem, and they laid poison bait around the campsite. The next morning seven dead dogs lay there, including the cat-killers. The day after, three or four more dead dogs also lay there. This wasn’t planned. Some bait had been scattered around the property, apparently. The next day another dog died, but this one was a nice dog who had never caused trouble so the owner was unhappy. He was even more unhappy when some disgruntled neighbour poisoned his own dog the day after that.

About the time of the dog battle another cyclist rode in. He and I traded stories. We were both going south, he on a slightly different route than I was. We agreed that Uganda had the worst and most dangerous drivers we had ever seen, even including Kenya. This man left by ferry for Mwanza and the next day we heard a Lake Victoria ferry had sunk with an estimated five hundred dead. Luckily for him, the sunken boat wasn’t the one he was on but another one coming from Bukoba. The boat had capsized during the night but many people apparently survived till the next day when authorities drilled a hole in the bottom/top to get them out, releasing the air bubble below decks and causing it to sink instantly.

Finally I left Kampala, riding to Mityana and Mubende on the road to Fort Portal. The road that far was great, but after Mubende it changed to dirt. I had pulled a muscle in my leg on the way to Mityana and found the last half of the road very tough going so hitched a ride with some Serbian highway engineers, who were busy paving the dirt section, into Fort Portal.

In Fort Portal you see some of Africa’s most dramatic and impressive scenery. At least, you do if clouds don’t surround it but the clouds were thick when I arrived, and it rained almost every day I spent in western Uganda. I rode into Kibale Forest, which was also very nice, cool with open treescapes in all directions, then stayed a couple days to watch wildlife. I saw many monkeys but no chimpanzees and took a most interesting bush path over the hills to rejoin the main highway at Kasese, where I stopped for the night.

From Kasese I rode into Queen Elizabeth Park, crossing the equator again. In the park I rode past lines of baboons watching me, around herds of buffalo and antelope. The road followed a valley bottom, between steep hills at the base of the Ruwenzoris. At Kazinga Channel I stopped for the night and stayed in a bedbug-infested local hotel rather than pay the huge amount extra to get into the “official” part of the park for the night.

There I had to make another decision: keep to the main road or take a more direct dirt road south? I was heading for Kisoro. The attack was weeks past by then and the alert over. Park authorities told me the dirt road was fine, not to worry about the lions, I should find it easy going *unless* it got wet. UN vehicles piling up there warned me about trouble in the refugee camps in Congo, a precursor to the revolution which overthrew Mobutu, but since I wasn’t going that far I didn’t care. Lions I did care about but I thought I could safely discount the truck driver who swore he saw tigers. Anyway, the next morning it was raining and the dirt road turned to mud so I didn’t need to decide.

Continuing on the main road I rode around in a big loop over hills and ridges, past tea and coffee plantations to Bushenyi. That was enough hill country for me. I dropped my plans for Kisoro and carried on to Mbarara, then from there rode on back roads to Rakai, where aid workers were astonished to see me, and finally on bush paths to the border with Tanzania. This produced a fun if mean set of encounters with village children who ran away screaming in terror at the sight of my horrible white face and strange spaceman-like cycling gear.

At the border I had a disagreement of opinion with an Immigration official about whether I had overstayed or not, confusion caused by a visa extension I obtained before my first visa ran out. He heckled and chastised and browbeat me, then let me grovel and admit my terrible mistake before asking for a bribe. I played along with all this and finally escaped without paying him anything, into Tanzania.

My impressions of Uganda were mixed overall. The scenery and sights were as impressive as anywhere in Africa I’d been, and in the cities I enjoyed myself very much and the people were friendly. In the countryside, though, I found many people treated me like some sort of strange animal, and often thought they would rather have poked me with a stick than say hello. The roads were filled with crazy dangerous drivers who really didn’t seem to care if they killed me or anyone else. In general the people seemed dehumanized, which shouldn’t be surprising given their recent history and the immense devastation of years of civil war. When I met people who seemed exceptions to this they almost always turned out to be from other countries. In no other country have I got these impressions, and I find while other tourists don’t generally share my opinions, other cyclists I have met do. When people tell you Ugandans are beautiful and super-friendly, reply “If they’re so friendly why have they spent the last forty years killing each other?” I do recommend visiting but in Uganda more than elsewhere one will learn a lot by getting off the tourist track.

Uganda was also a good showcase of aid agency work and all its worst features. Nobody with eyes could miss the large population of fat men in three piece suits driving their shiny white jeeps. Sometimes they used their vehicles to move house, sometimes they used them to run me off the road, but rarely did I see them being used for any good purpose.

I hadn’t expected to like Tanzania, because of the hassles I had had getting a visa and because of the tales of bureaucracy and tourist annoyance I had heard, but my first sight of it encouraged me. The people I met were friendly and didn’t hassle me as in Uganda. The road from the border was bad at first and got worse but I managed and as I managed I grew to like the place more and more.

The western side of Lake Victoria was hill country, and I found myself riding up and down gentle slopes all the way from the border into Bukoba. This was a quiet run-down town with a couple good hotels and a campground, founded a hundred years earlier by the eccentric German/British leader Emin Pasha. The dirt streets reminded me of an old western American frontier town. Indoors they kept up to date more, with Michael Jackson videos playing in the bar and well-stocked pharmacies. Food didn’t abound, however, and the few restaurants tended to serve a couple variations on fish.

Moving on from Bukoba I had yet another route problem. I had wanted to cycle to Lake Tanganyika and then take the ferry to Zambia. However, since the ferry on Lake Victoria had sunk a few weeks earlier, almost everyone going south had decided to take the land route and bandits had taken to raiding the road daily. Overland trucks put their passengers on boats and then drove through taking no valuables with them. I took the ferry. It didn’t sink and I quite enjoyed the ride.

I liked Mwanza, as I had liked Bukoba. The hills rolled a bit less there and the country was generally a bit more bleak and flat. The town sat among dry rocky hills with bits of scrub and thorn bush. Although pleasant enough, it didn’t tempt me for more than a couple days. Next I planned to ride south in more or less a straight line through Tabora to Mbeya. That road started out very bad, then slightly better, then developed pavement, then grew worse again. The wind blew in my face all the way. After 80-odd km I hitched a ride with a jeep I saw stopped at an intersection.

The driver, a Namibian, worked for Anglo-American at the nearby Mwadoi diamond mine. He invited me to come and stay for the night, and there they plied me with free food and drinks and hot water. The Mwadoi diamond mine had been started by a Canadian prospector around the time of colonization, then had prospered for a while and finally run out of business. In its heyday it was apparently a large self-supporting company town with happy families and community life. By the nineties it was almost deserted, but DeBeers and Anglo-American had made a deal with the Tanzanian government to re-open it and mine the tailings. They had a group of foreign workers there running things with some local help. Some of them told me a story about a plane which had landed on their runway twenty-five years ago. It had needed a spare part, which they had sent for, but the part never came and the plane was still sitting on the runway. Maintenance didn’t seem to be Tanzania’s strong point: the ferry capsizing on Lake Victoria was also eventually ascribed to poor maintenance.

From the mine I cycled south to Nzega and the next day on towards Tabora. The road grew worse and worse, with deep ruts and thick sand and gravel through gently rolling countryside carpeted with thick brush. My progress slowed until I faced a night in the bush. That particular section of bush didn’t look inviting so instead I hitched a ride on a truck into Tabora. This sits pretty much in the middle of nowhere. Tabora is a near-ancient crossroads town, which for hundreds of years was a base for Arab slavers in east Africa. It is also a famous stop on the way into unknown places. Burton and Speke had passed through while searching for the source of the Nile. Stanley had left Lingstone there while he went to get further supplies, and Livingstone had died in Tabora. I liked the place very much; It had an “end of the world” feeling rather like Khartoum. The area around town featured more open space than the brushland I had passed through. The sun shone brightly and the climate was cool and dry. It also had a good hotel and restaurant. Since Uganda I had developed a habit of staying in the best hotel in these small towns, which rarely cost me more than $4 US per night. Tabora’s railway hotel was a sprawling whitewashed colonial wonder with beautiful guest rooms and a huge dining and banquet area.

People in Tabora told me horror stories about the road south, which apparently had both Tsetse flies and lions. I’d been making quick progress on my route south and didn’t feel time pressure, so I decided to try cycling it anyway, because it was relatively short and I felt I could keep up a faster pace. The first day out I made it to Sikonge, where a Danish missionary couple put me up for the night. The day after I started out towards Rungwa. Early in the day, a truck passed me and I seized the chance to ride. The road in that area was much easier than that in northern Tanzania, but not too interesting, with uniform brown scrub the only view in most directions. This bit of hitch-hiking was wise. We rode through forest fires and by wild animals and through clouds of Tsetse flies, over incredible potholes for four painful hours until finally the truck dropped me off when they turned off the road.

According to the map, Rungwa looked pretty close to my drop off point, so I cycled ahead. There were still a couple hours of daylight left. The Tsetse flies found me quickly and feasted every time I stopped. Every few hundred metres I saw lion tracks on the road. As it got near dark this started to worry me; I was sure that lions, like many animals, were probably most active at sunrise and sunset and I didn’t want to get eaten. As it got darker it worried me more and more but I thought I heard voices from down the road so I decided to push on anyway, rather than stay in a small fleabitten village, and it turned out I had guessed right: just at dusk I arrived in Rungwa.

Rungwa is a crossroads town like Tabora, but lacked its charm, facilities, food and history. I camped next to their football pitch that night, then left that miserable place the next day. Going south the flies were far worse than they had been the day before. For eight hours they chased me. If I stopped they settled on me, even in the few seconds it took to drink a sip of water. They liked to bite my ankles and rump, and especially my shoulders. They managed to reach these even though I wore my rain coat for protection. They just bit me right through it. Partway through the day I saw some yellow baboons but couldn’t stop to look at them because the flies would have eaten me entirely. Finally I ended the day at Ilungu, a little village even more miserable than Rungwa.

Ilungu had a bus stop and an English-speaking buyer travelling through told me I could take the bus that night. I had had enough of Tsetse flies so did as he suggested. The bus stopped at Makongolosi, well short of Mbeya but good enough for me. The pleasant little bus stop town had a few good places to eat and get cold drinks, and lots of traffic passed through. A local policeman was quite interested in me and my trip through the bush. Over breakfast he told me there were no more Tsetse flies going south, so I cycled on again. The scenery here was a big improvement over the big stretch of bush I had just crossed but it was uphill and I was very tired. I scored a last ride to the top of a hill overlooking Mbeya. This was Tanzania’s highest point reachable by road. Then I had a nice long and satisfying coast down the hill into Mbeya.

Despite flies and lions I had enjoyed my trip through the bush. Everywhere I went kids said “Shikamoo, Mzee”, a respectful greeting for one’s elders. It was a shock to realize I was an elder, but at age 30 I was older than 80 percent of Tanzania’s population. Anyway, when I arrived in Mbeya the greeting changed to “Muzungu give me money” so I quickly stopped thinking about it. The bad impressions I’d had of Tanzania before going there were confirmed somewhat in Mbeya, which I guess was back on the tourist track. The small villages I’d passed through on the way there probably saw only a handful of white faces every year.

I rested a day in Mbeya then started for Malawi. The road was paved and easy there, and I pushed up and up through the hills all the way to Tukuya, where I stopped for the night. The dry and boring bush country I’d passed through had disappeared now, replaced by wonderfully scenic high and forested hills. The next day came the greatest downhill ride of my entire trip, sixty kilometres all the way to Lake Malawi with hardly a touch on the pedals.

At the bottom I crossed the border with minimal nuisance from the corrupt Malawian officials; they made a half-hearted attempt to squeeze me for a bribe, trying to find some bit of paperwork that they could pretend was done wrong. They didn’t get anywhere and soon gave up. Then I set off across the few remaining flat kilometres and ground almost to a halt. I could not muster the energy to do much more than walk, even though the cycling was supremely easy. At my slow pace I still made it into Karonga, which with its convenience store and modern pharmacy struck me with a sense of being back in civilization. Settled in a hotel, I got down to work solving this latest medical trouble. On the road I had received an estimated 100-120 Tsetse fly bites and I was naturally worried about sleeping sickness, but the symptoms didn’t fit. After a day or two flatulence and diarrhoea hit me and I realized it was giardia again. It took another couple days to cure that.

Various people had warned me that the next bit of road, to Livingstonia, was horrible with potholes but none of these people were cyclists so I ignored their opinions. The road was badly potholed indeed and driving on it must have been a nightmare but on my cycle it hardly slowed me down. It wound close to the lakeside, up and down over small hills and through a few tiny villages. What potholes there were diminished about halfway through the day. While cycling, a strange feeling grew that I only gradually identified. It seemed strange that I had cycled all day and nobody had run me off the road or passed on a blind hill or curve, that people drove on the correct side of the road by and large, in short that people drove like civilized humans. In Uganda I had speculated that one could help conservation efforts and road safety campaigns at the same time by teaching the gorillas and chimpanzees to drive buses, but in Malawi such irreverent thoughts never tempted me.

Finally I reached the climb to Livingstonia, up some twenty switchbacks to a plateau, on a dirt road. Numerous backpackers waited at the bottom for a lift but I headed up by myself. On the way up a local boy attached himself to me, saying he had better walk with me as there were robbers on that road. I figured he was just after a tip, particularly since he kept telling me how he was low on money, but let him come along. Then at the top I was surprised when he simply said good-bye and left. Was he right? Were there bandits there, too?

Yes, he was right. People at the Stone House, the local missionary guesthouse, warned me that there were a lot of thieves around. To reinforce the point, the next morning a couple walking down the road were stripped of everything they owned at knife-point. Everywhere I went in Malawi, the crime rate had soared since the old dictator Banda was deposed. Daylight robbery was common in all the tourist centres I visited. Later on, in another town, I met a couple girls who had been attacked by a group of men with machetes. When they shouted for help the police appeared quickly and shot one of the bandits. They refused to take him to hospital until he led them to the others, and in the end the thieves were caught and sentenced to fourteen years of hard labour.

Bandits were hardly a new problem for me, so this didn’t spoil my stay at Livingstonia. I walked, visiting Manchewe Falls and simply admiring the view while I used up my remaining fuel and food (I expected little camping on the road ahead). I shared my room with an Australian named Greg who I had first met two years earlier in the Sudan. We were both heading across Africa when we first met and were both still heading south when we met again there. In the meantime I had gone back to Hong Kong to work while he had gone to work in Rwanda. It was a stunning coincidence, but I managed to double it a day or two later when a couple people rode up from the bottom of the hill and I recognized one as a backpacker I knew from Hong Kong. Other people came and went but no meeting was as interesting as those. Finally I left when a French cyclist named Gilles appeared and we teamed up for the ride south.

Rather than go down the twenty bends again we took a back road which went by Nyika Plateau. I enjoyed this dirt track but Gilles much preferred tarmac. This reflected our different cycling styles; he set a stiff and steady pace where I took my time and looked around. So, the dirt roads hardly changed my routine at all and I sailed along while he lagged. When we hit tarmac the situation changed completely. There he raced ahead while I dragged, not used to the faster pace.

In Rumphi we met the couple who had been robbed, staying there for the trial of their bandits. That night they sat in a local restaurant playing with their recently-recovered palmtop computer and splendidly demonstrating the stupidity which had made them easy targets for robbery in the first place. I noticed the way they flaunted their valuables. Gilles was shocked and disgusted at the careless trust the woman showed when she came over and ate the salad he had declined to touch.

Rumphi to Nkhata Bay went smoothly. We arrived at sunset again, stopping for a huge luxurious lunch on the way. The campsite there was a favourite with overland trucks. It offered diving and a bit of hiking, with accomodation in tents or bamboo and thatch huts. It was pleasant but the party atmosphere didn’t appeal to us much. Gilles left after a day. I stayed a couple, studying maps. The road onward looked to be the same sort of gentle, moderately interesting country. Thinking about it, I grew bored and eventually I decided I simply didn’t want to do it.

That snap decision was practically the end of my cycling in Africa. From there I took the bus south to Salima, made a cycling side trip to the beach, then rode a bus on again to Blantyre. The scenery was pleasant enough but boring, as expected. It improved near Blantyre, with some rocky hills, but by then I was ready to leave. At that point I had been cycling in Africa for ten months, and it had become a routine; nothing seemed new any more. I took one last bus ride through Tete, Mozambique and on to Harare.

While I was waiting for one of the buses on this leg, a small boy came up to me and told me he was selling mice. “What?” I asked. “Mice,” he replied, and showed me his shopping bag full of dead and apparently rotting mice. I told him I had already had lunch and he left. I later saw a lot more of these mice, in piles and bags and sometimes on skewers. I asked in Harare what people did with them and the seller told me they ate them. Had I been more alert, I would have offered to buy some for him to eat, but I didn’t think of it in time.

In my first ten minutes in Harare a group of men ran off with my handlebar bag, containing my camera gear, binoculars and, particular bad luck, notebooks. Despite this unfriendly greeting, I settled in at the local backpacker’s hostel. Harare surprised me; it was modern and parts of it could have been transplanted from Canada, except for the crime problems. In Malawi I’d still been planning to ride on from Zimbabwe to South Africa, but with boredom and crime hassles I soon lost interest in that. Also, I had always had in mind going to India and Pakistan after Africa and early autumn was the best time of year to visit. So, I postponed my plans to ride on to Capetown and set my sights on India.

Wanting to go to India and going to India were two different things. First I had to get a visa, but the High Commission couldn’t give me one because I wasn’t a Zimbabwe resident. They could FAX my country of residence, which I unwisely listed as Hong Kong, and they did so but no answer ever came. For a week I didn’t mind; while shopping to replace my stolen camera I had found some guy trying to sell my stolen camera, and the resulting police work took a fair bit of my time. (I eventually recovered about half my belongings, counting by value). During the second week the delay started to drag but by then I was busy with mail and shopping for things to sell. While I did this two more guys tried to pick my pocket, I saw a few sprinting bag snatchers, and I began to wonder if Harare was Shona for “city of thieves.” By the third week I had given up on my Indian visa, so I retrieved my passport and applied for a Pakistan visa instead, which proved much easier to get. A flight out was easy to arrange also, with Egyptian Airlines. That required me to get an Egyptian visa, which was easiest of all to get. I showed up at the embassy Friday afternoon and they told me a visa would take days. When I protested I had to fly soon, they changed their minds and just gave me one the same afternoon.

Before leaving I wanted to see Victoria Falls, at least, but never did manage it. Just as I finished my paperwork the school holidays started and every available spot on every plane and train was booked solid. My visa time didn’t allow me to postpone my flight so I had to leave without seeing anything in Zimbabwe at all.

© 1997-2004 Stephen Bougerolle - all rights reserved