Just as with Long Way Round, it had taken a while to get into the groove of travelling. These bike trips are so different from the rest of our lives that it’s bound to take a little time. Post-Addis though, everything had fallen into place, we were bouncing off each other, having a laugh and really enjoying the trip. Ewan was riding off-road really well and we were both less tired. It occurred to me that when we’re not riding round the world our lives are so busy that we don’t see as much of each other as we’d like. Two blokes together twenty-four seven for the best part of three months; it’s bound to take some time.
We were having the time of our lives now, aware of just how lucky we were. We were determined not to take anything for granted.
We camped close to the road, and got our heads down early. The following morning we were off at dawn. We stopped in a little town for lunch at a small cafe with circular tables built round poles that held up the thatched roof. The raw meat was in a locker that didn’t look refrigerated but we’d learned to eat where the locals eat and most of the army seemed to be here. Not just the regular soldiers, but the captains, the officers; they were hunched over tables devouring chicken and pretty quickly we were following suit.
Ewan took a phone call; Eve in Malawi. He was like a dog with two tails. ‘She’s here, Charley, flew overnight from London to Jo’burg and she’s in Malawi now.’ His grin couldn’t have got any wider.
He did stop, though, and pretty quickly. We left the cafe and were not quite out of town when he pulled up sharply, jumped off the bike and hauled his jacket off.
‘What’s up?’ I asked.
‘Fucking bee flew up my sleeve and stung me.’
I could see it, three angry looking bumps already rising on his forearm.
‘I felt it fly up my sleeve,’ he said. ‘I tried to wriggle it out but the bastard stung me.’
‘They seem to like you, the bees, don’t they? The last time, remember?’
‘Yeah, that was in my helmet. Rather up my sleeve than in my helmet, Charley.’
EWAN: As if bees weren’t bad enough, that night our tents were surrounded by ants, really nasty looking ones with massive pincers. My arm was swelling nicely; three great lumps that were gradually coming together.
The following day the riding was much tougher – it seemed clear now that yesterday we had been on the good dirt. Now we were in sand – and I mean really deep sand. Then with no warning the sand would be gravel, then rock; really bumpy stuff, and you had no time to get used to it before it changed again. One minute we were up on the pegs, elbows out and easing our way through the technical stuff and the next the back end was squirrelling all over the place.
Claudio went down, I went down…even Charley went down. I was getting tired again. I’d enjoyed the dirt yesterday but this was purgatory; really deep troughs and there was no way you could stand on the pegs, you just had to squat in the saddle, try and steer whilst paddling away at the ground with your feet. The front wheel would be bucking, the rear wheel snatching and losing traction in equal measure and all the while my wife, whom I hadn’t seen in weeks, was winging her way to the Malawi border. Mustn’t think about that, mustn’t think about Eve, concentrate, McGregor!
Crossing a bridge with a piece of scaffold pole as a rail, we paused to watch a group of hippos wallowing; they lay under the water with just their backs showing and every now and then one would lift his head, expose his tusks and grunt at us.
‘What do they call a group of hippos, Charley?’ I wondered. ‘A herd, a flock, a gaggle maybe?’
He shrugged. ‘Their backs look like rafts on the water, don’t they?’
‘A raft then,’ I said. ‘That’s what this is. A raft of hippos, Charley.’
We rode on, the road no better. I suggested we stop for lunch. We ate cold boil-in-the-bag which actually tasted better than it does hot. We had a kip and rode on and after twelve hours of sand, rock and dirt we came to the camp. We were due a day off the bikes and in any case we were in a national park and it would be mad to rush through without checking out the wildlife. Before we got to the camp, however, we hit the gnarliest piece of road we’d come across yet: a final two kilometres that felt like eighteen, a real kick in the balls just when you needed it least. It was a rutted road and I mean rutted; troughs that were so deep they could’ve drawn water and there was nowhere for the bikes to go but through them. They were dry and grassy, slippery and bumpy, bordered by thirsty grass and acacia trees. If we thought we were paddling before, we were paddling now and by the time we finally got to the camp my legs felt as though someone had taken a piece of two-by-four and beaten them.
It was worth it, though, that ride. We pulled up as the sun was sinking and it really is that huge fireball you see in the movies. The savannah stretched out endless before us. A herd of elephants wandered towards the stream we could see cutting the plain like a sliver of silver. Peter told us that was the Katuma River; all there was until the rains came, at which time most of this grassland would become swamp. Taking our helmets off we sat side by side in total silence. The camp itself was fantastic; old school colonial with big tents, our own bathrooms where water-filled barrels created showers with strings to turn the water on and off. We had wooden beds with white linen and real pillows – oh, was I looking forward to hitting the hay tonight.
In the morning my forearm was one massive bruise, puffed up like Popeye’s, the three stings finally coming together. It itched more than hurt, though, and I knew it would go down again in a couple of days.
We took off in search of wildlife, the pair of us sitting in the back of an open jeep. The Katavi National Park is part of the Serengeti and, unlike other parks, if we did see wildlife we were allowed to leave the jeep and walk. There were lions here and leopards, cheetahs, but we didn’t see any. We did see elephants and zebras, gigantic herds of Cape buffalo, and we saw…the sausage tree.
We were trundling along close to some trees I’d not seen before and I noticed weird grey things hanging off the branches. Our guide told us it was a sausage tree; Charley said the sausages looked more like haggis. We bowed to our guide’s superior knowledge, of course, when he told us the sausages were actually a form of fruit. Not juicy so much as dense and heavy, and when one fell you didn’t want to be underneath. In the dry season elephants ate them, baboons too, and there were none lying around so hyenas (that eat anything) had been cleaning up the scraps.
We came across a great herd of zebras, masses of them gathered at the river. With the land parched into plates of mud all the animals congregated more tightly together. As we watched we realised that even in the herd we could pick out separate family units: one stallion to seven or eight females and their combined young. Apparently once the stallion has his harem sorted they remain together for life. There is no serious inbreeding because when his daughters get to about two they come into heat for the first time, stand in this really sexy zebra way and drive the other stallions wild with desire. It gets so bad that Dad has to rush around trying to beat them off. In the end, though, the number of young males outweigh the father’s energy and the young females are driven off to join other families. The young studs, the sons, just drift away naturally when they are about eighteen months old. They join bachelor bands and run together until they are strong enough to pick up some wives of their own.
CHARLEY: Ewan spotted a foal through his binoculars. I know, a nightmare, isn’t it, what with donkeys in Ethiopia and baby rhinos in Kenya…give him a chance and he’d be setting up his own game reserve in his back garden when we get home. I have to admit it was cute, though. We weren’t close enough for a kidnap, thank God; and back in the truck we went in search of elephants.
The next day Ewan was up at some ungodly hour, packing his bike wearing a head torch. It wasn’t light but it was less than forty-eight hours until he would see his beloved wife. Not so much the dog with two tails now as a cat on a hot tin roof.
We were away at dawn but before we’d properly left the
camp I was down the road without my bike. We were riding the shitty track, the two clicks we mentioned before, staying to the side and trying to avoid the sand. I saw the tree stump. I watched the tree stump. Don’t hit the stump, Charley, you can’t hit the stump. I hit the stump, stove in my pannier and landed face down in the dirt.
There was nothing broken, though, just another dent in the bike and it would survive.
Thankfully we left the really bad road behind and by early afternoon we were on hard dirt and doing seventy miles an hour. Ewan was on a mission now; we knew that Eve was already at the border and he couldn’t wait to get there. We crested a hill and up ahead saw two motorbikes and three girls by the side of the road. They were just standing there as if they were waiting for us and it seemed so out of place that we pulled over.
‘Hi,’ we said. ‘Are you girls OK?’
They were fine: they lived here. They introduced themselves as Brooke, Casey and Shelby. They were American, and part of a missionary group. Brooke was a youth worker and the other two girls were sisters, and were about to go to bible school. They asked us home for a soda.
I could see Ewan umming and aahhing and I knew what he was thinking; got to get on, got to get on because Eve was already at the border. The reality was, of course, that no matter what we did today we’d not be there until tomorrow anyway, so we followed the girls a couple of miles to their home.
They lived in a white stone house close to a village and a primary school. Through the trees we could make out another series of buildings – a college for Tanzanian pastors. Casey and Shelby’s mother came out to meet us. Their dad we’d passed earlier apparently, on his way back to the city with a man he’d brought out to castrate their dogs. One of them, a Doberman cross called Harrison, looked particularly sorry for himself. The girl’s mother asked us how long we’d been on the road.
‘You’re making good time,’ she said when we told her. ‘We had a couple of cyclists here last October who’d been on the road eight years.’
‘A Swiss couple?’ I said.
‘One was Swiss yes, the other German. Kurt and Dorothy. Do you know them?’
‘We met in the Sudan,’ Ewan told her. ‘They were on their way home to look after her parents, though it was going to take them another six months or so.’
The girls’ mother told us that the couple we’d met at that cafe had spent a week with them here in Tanzania while Kurt recovered from a bout of malaria. Kurt, Dorothy: if you’re reading this, it’s a small world, isn’t it? Even on a bicycle.
The family was looking after a little lad called Stephen, an orphan from the city. Shelby’s mother told us that in Tanzania if a child’s mother dies kids are referred to as orphans regardless of whether the father is still around. In Stephen’s case, his mother was dead and his father had remarried. The problem was he worked away a lot and when he did Stephen’s stepmother wouldn’t feed him. Apparently that wasn’t uncommon. The little boy had spent some time with his grandmother but she ran the local distillery and liked to give him the odd nip now and again. This family had come across him badly malnourished in an orphanage.
‘Food and love,’ the girls’ mother told us. ‘That’s all these kids need. Food and love.’
That night we camped in a little orchard and ate more boil-in-the-bag. I was a lot better since Kenya because Claire had given us a stash of her homemade chilli sauce. It was so good we considered selling it – you know, a picture of Ewan and me on the label like Newman’s Own, but then of course we remembered the recipe was Claire’s of course…
EWAN: I couldn’t wait to get to bed, sleep and wake up in the morning. Now I knew Eve was so close I was just dying to get to her. I was up at the crack of dawn, we were on the road by seven and it was four hours to the border. We left the last of the dirt behind and hit tarmac and now I could really put the hammer down. We kept the speed down in towns, of course, rolling past people waving, rectangular brick houses with the ubiquitous tin roofs. We stopped for petrol at a proper station – all forecourt and lights and electronics. Charley said it was so nice to have a pump nozzle that fitted the tank and that the pump read ‘petrol’ and not ‘diesel’. I didn’t care. I just wanted to get going.
‘What about an early lunch?’ he said with a grin. ‘I’m pretty hungry, Ewan. There’s bound to be a cafe around here, a nice restaurant, maybe. Or a hotel even. We could get washed, peruse the menu for a while, have a siesta afterwards.’
Yeah, right. See you, Charley, it was nice riding with you.
We were off again and at last the hours were ticking into minutes. Finally, my heart hammering away in my chest, there was the border. Another dirt road cutting through a gully with green hills rising in the distance – somewhere over there was my wife and I was so impatient to see her I cannot tell you. Charley fetched the paperwork and I filled in my name, address, my nationality and occupation. Then I came to the box for destination.
I gazed beyond the barrier, the yellow hut, beyond, the people wandering around in football shirts. I was here to meet Eve, to see some country and ride on together – now the three of us.
Destination: ‘transit’, I wrote, and started the engine.
24
Lilongwe Down
CHARLEY: ‘All by myself…’ That’ll be me, then. Charley: remember me? I’m the one riding with Ewan down through Africa. Charley Boorman, Long Way Down, remember?
Just kidding.
I’d never seen Ewan quite so excited. As soon as the last of the paperwork was completed he raced across the border to where Eve was waiting. I could understand how it felt; if it had been Ollie waiting for me I’d have been jumping the fence. I made my way through and there was Eve. Ewan pulled up, leapt off the bike and she was in his arms. She looked terrific in her LWD hat and yellow singlet. He just held her and held her. In the end I had to look away. I mean, there was lots of kissing and hugging, lots of you know…Steady, Charley, best to leave it at that.
It was great to see her and a relief she’d made it safe and sound. Rick, the last of our fixers, had freighted her bike all the way from South Africa. He was driving a Nissan pickup that had been decked out with stickers like our trucks so it would be a unified front when we crossed the finish line in Cape Town.
Talking of stickers, Eve’s bike was naked. Ewan quickly pasted a Long Way Down sticker onto the bike while I gave Eve a squeeze.
‘How are you?’ I asked her.
‘I just can’t believe it,’ she said. ‘I can’t believe I’m here.’
She was, though, and I could see Ewan was delighted. A little while later she was kitted out in a rally suit and crash helmet and was ready to go. She climbed on her bike, very nervous but determined to ride. She told us afterwards that the difference between being on the bike and in the car was amazing; the atmosphere was so different. She loved how much closer she felt to everything: the people, the landscape, all the different sights and smells of the country.
Ewan rode up alongside. ‘OK, Eve?’ he called.
‘I’m so nervous,’ she said. ‘I don’t know if I can make it.’
‘You’ll be fine. Charley will go ahead and you follow him. I’ll be right behind you.’
I swivelled round in the saddle. ‘Now listen, Eve,’ I said, ‘no wheelies, all right?’
‘Yeah,’ Ewan echoed. ‘Keep the front wheel on the ground.’
We set off at a gentle pace and I checked my mirrors to make sure Eve was all right. She was doing fine; she seemed relaxed and was riding smoothly. I watched her easing into the bends and getting a feel for the bike. I really admired her; it’s gutsy what she was doing, not easy being dropped into Africa when you’re inexperienced and getting on a bike with your husband and his mate who’ve been riding every day for months. Eve was looking good, though, and I was more worried about Ewan – he wasn’t used to seeing his wife riding and I figured he’d probably be more nervous about it than she was.
EWAN: I probably was, once I’d got over th
e initial excitement, anyway. I still couldn’t quite believe Eve was here. I cast my mind back to that Sunday when she first said she wanted to go – remembering the delight, and then the subsequent worry. I recalled the arguments we’d had, the discussions with Charley, and yet here she was in front of me riding a 650 through Malawi. I was singing I was so happy. Don’t you just love it when a plan comes together?
It had taken an hour longer than we had hoped to reach the border, and then the crossing itself had taken quite a while, as usual. In winter (July is winter in this part of the world) it gets dark around five-thirty and the afternoon was already waning. Peeling off the highway we hit dirt road, heading for a remote lodge at the northern end of the lake. I was conscious of Eve: she’d been riding in London but only had half a day’s off-road experience in her life, and that had been on bikes that were too big for her. The dirt wasn’t too bad to begin with, though, and she was cutting along beautifully. Then she dropped her bike right in front of me. My heart was in my mouth, my wife on the deck in Africa. I’d never seen her fall off before. But she got to her feet immediately, picked the bike up and was back in the saddle again.
I yelled out to see if she was OK. She was fine, she said, determined to carry on. Knowing Eve her pride was probably more bruised than anything. Back in the saddle she walked the bike forward, paddling with her feet and trying to make it through the sand. Then she was down again and I had visions of myself back in that town in Sudan.
This was a tricky section of road, much trickier than it had first looked. The soft stuff just crept up on you – it would be firm under the wheels one moment then loose as shit the next. We suggested to Eve that she ride in the truck for this last section, and David jumped on the bike. He was wearing a T-shirt with no helmet or gloves: he dropped the bike, grazed his elbow and got back on. We got a little further and he dropped it again. I could see his elbow was bleeding and now he’d hurt his hand.
Long Way Down Page 27