by MP Miles
*
On the train progress had been slow. In six hours they’d covered thirty kilometres. Ralph could have walked quicker.
A guard came to inspect tickets.
“You have no visa for Tanzania?”
“No. Someone told me I could arrange it at the border.”
“The embassy for visas is in Lusaka.”
He looked through Ralph’s passport carefully, but selected pages at random and examined each as though he couldn’t read.
“I’ve come from Johannesburg,” explained Ralph. “And I’m just travelling through Dar and Mombasa to get to Nairobi.”
The guard gave him back his passport wordlessly.
The young man lying on the upright wooden bench lifted a hat off his face and sat up. He pulled a blue passport from his back pocket and gave it to the guard.
He winked at Ralph.
“Morris,” he said and held out his hand.
It looked fat and puffy, like a glove that had been blown up. It was scarred on both sides, a mess of small deep cuts where the flesh had been cut out and longer deeper rips on the palm. It resembled a road map of an inner city in relief.
“Hi, I’m Ralph.”
“Smoko,” Morris said. “Coming for a cuppa?”
Ralph followed him to a carriage where a lady sold black sweet tea in glasses.
“Where are you from?” Ralph asked him.
Morris mumbled with a mouth stuffed full of chapati.
“You’re Dutch?”
“New Zealand, mate. Not old Zeeland.”
Morris was travelling up from South Africa, on a strict timetable in between jobs. He’d ‘taken a shufti’ around Johannesburg and done a safari in Kruger National Park. Neither had impressed him.
“I’m here to go up Kili really.”
Ralph liked him immediately.
“Have you got a map?” Morris asked.
He put his empty glass on the countertop and pointed to Ralph’s.
“Skull it. We need to take a squiz at your passport as well.”
*
Morris stretched himself and threw the Baldwins’ map of central Africa on the floor between the benches.
“Mate, you’ve got two problems.”
Ralph had already prepared himself for bad news. A private conversation with the guard outside the toilet had not given him much encouragement of his entry into Tanzania without a visa. There had been much shrugging of shoulders and sucking through stained teeth.
“The bloke is wrong about the visa. I guess the United Kingdom is in the Commonwealth, right?”
“Well, yes. Of course.”
“Yeah. I thought so.”
He thumbed through the pages of Ralph’s passport.
“You don’t need a visa, then. Commonwealth countries and some neutral European ones like Ireland, and Scandinavian countries for some reason, none of them need a visa. They issue you with a ‘Visitor Pass’ at the border.”
“That’s great.”
“But your problem is these.”
He pointed to a page with something stuck on it: a visitor permit for The Republic of South Africa, ‘No Remuneration Allowed’, with a stamp – ‘Immigration. Jan Smuts Airport’.
“The Tanzanians hate the South Africans. They’ll kick you out if they see these, just because you’ve been there.”
He searched through a side pocket on his small backpack. With swollen fingers he peeled off a white adhesive label and pressed it on the page in Ralph’s passport that showed his offensive visit to the bottom of the continent. The South African stamps were hidden. On the label were eight lines of Chinese characters.
“What does it say?”
“I’ve no idea, mate. Look. It’s in Chinese.”
“Will that work?”
“Hope so.”
He held up his own passport.
“You’ve got bigger problems anyway.”
Ralph stared at him.
“You are going through to Nairobi? Yeah, I thought the same. Kilimanjaro is in Tanzania but just over the Kenyan border. It would have been much easier to fly to Nairobi and just cross over. Instead I’ve had to come up from Joburg.”
“Kili?”
Morris nodded.
“The problem you’ve got, mate, is that the Kenyan border with Tanzania is officially closed.”
Tension between Kenya and Tanzania had been high since 1977 when the East African Community collapsed, mostly due to differences in the Tanzanian socialist economic model and the Kenyan capitalist system. The EAC had been an economic union between Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda. The jointly held assets included the railways, the ships on Lake Victoria, the airlines and the Post Office. One day, Kenya had unilaterally seized all the assets. And then when Tanzania invaded Uganda to oust Idi Amin, an action almost universally applauded, they had been criticised by Kenya. It had taken several weeks for Tanzania to rout the remnants of Amin’s army as it retreated further and further north. At the end, over ten thousand Tanzanian troops remained in Uganda, trying to maintain law and order. Nyerere, President of Tanzania, maintained that his intention had been to see a civilian government elected and to withdraw his troops as soon as possible, but Kenya felt threatened and closed the border between the two.
“It’s harder crossing from Kenya to Tanzania. The other way is possible but who knows. It’s a gamble. First you must go to the Ministry of Home Affairs in Dar es Salaam. They may give you special permission. Or they may not. If they like you they’ll give you a document that you should present to the Chief of Police in Arusha, who may then issue you with another form which allows you to cross the border at Namanga, and only at Namanga. Here.”
Morris pointed it out on the map. It was nowhere near Mombasa.
*
Progress on the Tanzam had been steady during the day but as night fell the train slowed and occasionally stopped for no reason on dark straight stretches, a long way from anywhere.
Morris talked of Kilimanjaro, at 5,896 metres even higher than New Zealand’s Mount Cook. He’d never done anything that high, even though he liked tramping. When off work he’d often go over to the Southern Alps and do the Kipler. The Routeburn Track was better, with great views of the Humboldt Mountains and up the Valley of the Trolls toward Lake Wilson. It was a lot lower than Kili of course. If he went up Conical Hill from the Harris shelter he would only get to just over 1,500 metres.
“How long does that take?” Ralph asked.
“Takes me about three days. I like to take it easy, look around. There are good shelters along the way. Somebody did the whole thing in three hours.”
“You wouldn’t do Kili in three hours.”
“Mate, I tell you, I’m worried about the altitude sickness. I’m going to take the long route, maybe take nine days, do it slow, get acclimatised. The best routes let you walk high but sleep low. More climbing, as you’re up and down a wee bit, but better for you.”
Ralph wondered what Morris did for a living that gave him time off to go to Africa just to climb a mountain.
“I’m a deckhand on a deep-water freezer trawler out of Timaru,” he explained.
In January the cockies sold livestock before the grass started drying off for the summer and the beasts ran out of food. They got busy at the meatpackers at that time, knife work cutting beef and sheep and venison, so Morris worked there as well if he wasn’t at sea.
Ralph Laughed, “Cockies?”
“Farmers. They’re all a bit cocky. They can’t help it. Must be living out in the wop-wops on your own. You’re the king of your own patch of land; makes you act like you’re king of everywhere. Cocky.”
“You get a lot of time off then?”
“We work a trip of fifty or sixty days and then have two months off.”
“Sounds easy.
”
“Easy? You bust a gut, mate.”
Morris worked six hours on six off for seven or eight weeks, numbingly hard work. He got wet, smelt like a fish, and needed to have his wits about him. He lived with his head on a swivel and slept, along with three other men, in a space the size of most people’s bathrooms. He’d witnessed accidents too, people falling right across the deck in bad seas. There was a crane for lifting the metal doors that spread the net out, each door weighing five tons, and he’d seen people fall out of the crane when the ship pitched about. Luckily, he’d never seen anyone go overboard. He had help treat bad burns from the steam of the fishmeal cooker.
“So, what do you do on the boat?”
“You know, shoot and haul the nets, work winches, mend nets,” Morris replied modestly. “It helps if you’ve a mechanical aptitude.”
The nets were shot and trawling for three hours, and while they were out there was always something to fix. Wire splicing was the worst. The wire was on a drum and led to the warps that were attached to the nets, 2,500 metres on a drum so they could fish to 1,200 metres deep.
“It’s twenty-eight millimetres thick, six-strand. Twice a trip we splice a new loop into the wire. It’s a tough physical job working a huge marlin spike. And you better get it right. If you lose a net that’s a hundred and fifty thousand down the pan.”
Ralph was curious about Morris’ life, looking for guidance to help him decide what he should do with his own. He asked, thoughtfully, “What sort of boat is it?”
“Depends where you are and what fish you’re going for. Some are trawlers or long liners in the Cook Strait going for hoki. Some go down into Antarctic waters for toothfish in the summer. There are skipjack tuna boats with purse seine nets and a helicopter on board for spotting the fish; they go out in the western or central Pacific. My boat is a big boat – a factory ship. The Endeavour. We’ve got a crew of forty. She’s almost seventy metres long, nearly 2,500 tons. She’s a stern trawler with twin nets. We go out in the Southern Ocean.”
“Do you make good money?”
“Are you kidding? That’s what we do it for. First thing I do when I start a trip, I put a hundred-dollar bill on the inside of my locker and write on it in a fat pen: ‘This is why I’m here’. I left school at fifteen, wanted to be outside doing something and not stuck in a classroom. They all thought I might be a piker. I bought my own house when I was twenty-one. In cash. For working half the year.”
Looking at his own scarred hands Morris explained that the Endeavour was a factory ship and that the factory worked shifts for twenty-four hours a day, so Morris had to fish day and night as well.
“But we don’t just fish and say, ‘Hey, you tinbums down there in the factory, pull your finger out your arse and pack this stuff.’ The factory sets the pace.”
They fished to keep the factory supplied at the rate it could work. If Morris and his team got ahead of the factory then the fish would go bad before they could pack it. Fresher fish meant that more of the higher-value skinless steaks and fillets could be packed. The rest of it, the heads and the bones and the junk, were cooked up and powdered into fishmeal as they went along. The only thing they left behind them was a trail of dirty warm water in the clean cold Southern Ocean. Everything had been used.
“I tell you, mate, it stinks. The whole boat and everyone on it. We smell so bad,” Morris laughed, “but we don’t care. it’s the stink of money.”
Ralph was thinking in unexpected moments that took him by surprise of his future. “Will you do it forever, then?” he asked, wondering what was in store for him back in Dorset, back home.
“I started as a factory hand, cutting and packing fish. It’s better on deck. It’s tough, like playing a rough rugby match for six hours. The skipper, he got his deep-sea captain’s licence when he was twenty-three. Bought his own boat eventually and went after toothfish in the Ross Sea. He left school at fifteen too. Blondie – he’s the first mate on Endeavour – he said I should think about getting some tickets.”
Ralph envied Morris his active life and not for the first time thought what a great country New Zealand must be. Wild countryside with mountains for ‘tramping’ in, space to breathe, a country where you could work hard and be rewarded well for doing a physically demanding job in clean air. A country that bred men like Morris. Men that could earn their way and with quiet confidence travel about the world, taking a little bit of everything they saw back to their own quiet beautiful place.
*
In the early dawn the train stopped and didn’t move. Morris woke Ralph from a fitful sleep.
“What’s up?” said Ralph.
“We’re at a bridge in the boonies.”
“Where are we?”
“Chuck us the map, mate.”
The scale looked small but useable.
“Here. Somewhere after this station,” he looked hard at the name, “Keyaya and before the next one, this place Makasa.”
After a town called Chamdamkulu, the Tanzam crossed a river that meandered south-east before turning south-west and joining the swamps that fed Lake Bangweulu. They were about 750 kilometres from where they had got on the train at Kapiri Mposhi, not halfway to Dar es Salaam, and over 1,100 kilometres still to go. They had been on the train for twenty hours.
“What’s the problem?”
“It’s puckeroo. Munted.”
Neither sounded good. Morris translated.
“The bridge looks too dodgy to cross. We’ve stopped to look at it and shake our heads. Thankfully some local built a fire on the track to warn the driver. Want a shufti?”
The train had stopped some way short of the bridge on flat wetland and swamp, with the rail track raised on an embankment of stone and shingle. The train hissed at them like a big cat as they stepped down and joined a knowledgeable crowd inspecting the bridge. Flash floodwater had washed the riverbed away around the concrete base of a steel support and the middle of the bridge tilted drunkenly like a poorly ballasted ship.
The ticket inspector with the stained teeth provided little encouragement.
“How long?” Morris asked.
“A week. Maybe two.”
“We’ll stay here a week?” asked Ralph.
The ticket inspector looked at him as though he might be simple.
“No. We’ll go back.”
“Can I get off here?”
“If you like. But no buses on the road in Tanzania. No fuel. Better to get off at Nseluka.”
Ralph and Morris got out the maps.
“Here. Nseluka,” said Ralph.
Morris studied the map.
“Oh. I got it. You could go up to this place on the bottom of Lake Tanganyika, Mpulungu, and then around the top.”
“How far is that?”
Morris measured it off.
“Through Nendo, Senga Hill, Mbala – 170 kilometres.”
Ralph did a rough calculation and guessed it to be a four- or five-day walk.
“And then how do I go up the lake?” he asked.
“Must be loads of boats,” Morris assured him.
Morris measured again.
“It’s the same distance as from Invercargill to Nelson. This lake is as long as the South Island.”
It was the longest freshwater lake in the world and the second deepest.
“Get a boat to the top here in Bujumbura Burundi, then around Tanzania so you avoid the border problem. It’s a bit of a tiki tour but you’ll be giving your ferret a run in Nairobi before you know it.”
“What will you do?” Ralph asked him.
“I’ll go back to Lusaka and go to the airport. Get a plane if I can. Or I might give up on it and try and get to South America. Have a root around Buenos Aires. Or try to. I could go home that way around. Come back and do Kili another time.”
*
From the doorway of the train heading back the wrong way Ralph saw the ground speeding past.
Ralph looked at the ticket collector.
“I thought you said it stopped at Nseluka?”
“I said you could get off at Nseluka. I never said it stopped.”
“That’s true, mate,” said Morris unhelpfully.
“You have to jump now,” said the guard.
“But it’s going too fast.”
“Stop whinging. Come on, rattle your dags. Hurry up.”
Morris gave him a friendly push through the doorway.
Ralph flew with rucksack in hand, then tumbled forward, rolling painfully on his shoulder before ending face down looking at gravel and dust. He stood up, brushed himself down and watched the train disappear. In the door of the carriage Morris laughed.
He looked around and found he’d landed just outside the village. A few other men who’d jumped had already started walking north. From Cape Town to the Zambian Copperbelt, Ralph had been following a path well-trodden by explorers, missionaries and empire builders. His truncated trip on the Tanzam had brought him beyond the Benguela Swamp which, until the Chinese, had been an impenetrable natural barrier to the route north. Cecil Rhodes had never surveyed this far, his dream of a red line from Cape to Cairo curtailed by marshland, bog and disease. In the morning light it looked untamed, unexploited, virgin Africa. He heard a subtle faint noise from the village, answered even fainter from beyond. It was the sound of drums, African drums of villages along Ralph’s path communicating at the dawn of the day. Ralph, 5,060 kilometres from Cape Town, had finally found Africa.
*
Angel had gone to see Elanza on a Sunday, expecting her to be fractious. Instead he found her in high spirits, a cocktail of prescription medicines momentarily in the correct combination to alleviate her pain and depression.