This is Africa…

As I sit down to write this, the only recurring word that comes to mind, is a four letter one, beginning with the 6^th letter of the alphabet….. I thought the ride from Nata to Kasane had been our most difficult, with potholes, rain and elephants to contend with, but even though we travelled only 75kms today, it took us three hours to get to our destination in Livingstone, an hour and a half of which was spent at the border in pouring rain…

We had left our bikes at the Chobe Safari Lodge whilst we were out on the houseboat, taking only the bare essentials with us. We arrived back at the hotel at 1.00pm, repacked everything and then rode the bikes down the main road and out onto the highway again. We headed east for 8 kilometres and turned north to the Kazungula Border Post. We cleared Botswana Customs with the minimum of fuss, in blazing sunshine, and then mounted up and rode the few hundred meters to the banks of the Zambezi and the Ferry Station…

The ferry was in the process of docking, and while we watched it, a load peal of thunder sounded above us… Hardly had the noise died down, when the heaviest possible downpour enveloped us!! In moments, the ferry all but disappeared from view, even though it was probably only 50 metres away at the time… I looked over to my left where Allan was crouched with his arms folded, shaking his head and muttering into his helmet…

Even though it was raining hard, we were quickly surrounded by a group of locals, all eager to “help us through customs”…. We had been warned about this, and Allan referred all these “con-artists” to me, who he called “The leader of the Expedition”… They hurried away from him, and over to me. I watched him grinning at me for a moment before I turned to the Zambian who was shouting the loudest, and invited him and his cronies to make a sexual departure from my current position… That silenced them for a minute and they slowly drifted away from us, looking for other travellers to dupe…

Spelling was not a prerequisite for the sign-writers position…

The ferry finally docked, and two trucks drove off, causing the ferry to rock in an alarming manner. I looked over at Allan, who shouted that he had seen worse, and drove up and onto the deck before I could think of a suitable reply… I followed him up the slanting, slippery surface, rain obscuring my vision. The “ferry master” was berating Allan for parking on the wrong side, and I nearly rode over him as he dashed across the deck in an effort to get Allan to move. I heard Allan shout, “Fuck off and drive the ferry!” to the startled skipper, who had stopped in his tracks and stood in the rain gaping open-mouthed at Allan, who had dismounted, turned his back, and walked over to the railing…. “This could be interesting,” I thought, and parked as far away from Allan’s bike as I could… I had visions of his bike being pushed into the Zambezi by the annoyed skipper and his crew…

A huge truck and trailer, bound for the Congo drove up behind us, and parked as close to us as he could. This diverted the skipper’s attention and he moved off shouting for the crew to secure the landing plates.

Pedestrians swarmed onto the ferry and stood or crouched in the rain, taking up every available space left after the cars, bikes and truck had been secured. Some of them had umbrellas, and an elderly guy came across and stood close to me so that I could share his large red umbrella… He kept muttering “eh… Sorry Boss!!” every few minutes…

“So here’s the guy responsible for this weather…” I thought to myself…

“Apology accepted…just don’t let it rain that hard again, see!!” I said to him…

“Thank you, sah!” was his solemn reply…   

“Thank you for sharing your umbrella with me,” I said to him…

“Eh… Sorry Boss?”

“You don’t speak much English, do you?” I said…

“Thank you, sah!” was his solemn reply…

Our bikes were wedged between a truck and two vehicles, while we crouched under a flimsy shelter watching the rain fall… In the background the chaos on the Zambian side of the river is evident…

The Big Fella sits proudly on the deck of the ferry, while we cross the Zambezi, on our way to Livingstone and the “Smoke that Thunders”…

Somewhere between the hotel and this ferry, we seemed to have crossed an invisible line… Up until then we had travelled in what seemed to be a framework of law-abiding citizenry, living in a country that albeit infra-structurally challenged, still managed to operate with a degree of civility… Once we crossed the Zambezi, the rule of law seemed to have been washed eastwards with the current… There was a palpable difference between Botswana and Zambia…; we had passed from a place that was “trying to get by, and making it,” to one that was “desperate and unsure”… I mentioned my feelings to Allan as he leaned against the railing, and he agreed with me…

“There are degrees of civilisation I think,” he said quietly…”and I think we just dropped a few…”

I was summoned by a clerk of sorts, who asked if I was the “Expedition Leader”…. Allan had sent him across to me with the register which had to be completed before we docked in Zambia… I filled in the water-logged book, the pen hardly making any impression on the wet paper, while Allan grabbed my camera and took a few photographs…

The “Expedition Leader” fills in the ferry’s logbook while the rain beats down…

I wish I had been able to take more photographs of the landing on the Zambian side, but I was already down to one camera, the other having given up the task of documenting our trip… I did not want my remaining camera ruined as well…

In short, we disembarked into a scene of utter chaos… Trucks were blocking the road which led up to the customs offices, and most of them were axle deep in the mud. I did not believe we would make it the few hundred metres to Customs…not without dropping the bikes… Allan wormed his way between two trucks with his lighter bike, and I just followed, fingers crossed… He then went down a slope, and came up on the far side, mud flying off his rear tyre… My bike weighed at least 60kgs more than his did and I braked at the top of this ditch to get my head around what I was about to attempt… Allan had stopped in the mud on the far side, his boots completely covered in mud where they rested on the ground next to his bike… He was shouting something to me, but with the rain and the trucks hooting and revving their engines, I couldn’t hear him…

I let the clutch out and went down into the ditch, keeping the revs high, and changing to second gear as we levelled out at the bottom… The “Big Fella” roared up the other side, slipping and sliding almost sideways at one point… I made it to where Allan waited and we rode the last section through thick mud together, legs out to steady ourselves, my heart beating like a trip-hammer…

We were immediately surrounded by about two dozen unsavoury types, each shouting for our attention… I ignored them as I dismounted, took my helmet and gloves off, and then gave them the most intimidating stare I could muster… After a short while, the hubbub died down, and they moved off a few metres and watched us as we worked out what had to be done to get us free of this Border Post…

While Allan looked after the bikes, I took all our documents and went about the stressful business of getting us through the border and into Zambia. First we had to pay for the ferry, which was R50.00 for each bike, then it was R20,00 police clearance each, then R100.00 Carbon Tax each, then I had to get Allan a visa which cost R730.00, and last but not least, R300.00 Third Party Insurance each….. With my wallet R1670.00 lighter, I made my way back to Allan, still in pouring rain… It had taken an hour and a half to get the paperwork done… I have little patience with these jumped-up peasants, masquerading as “officials” and I was madder than a snake at this stage… Each one that I dealt with gave me the distinct impression that I was being conned in one way or another… Everything had to be negotiated… The Third Party Insurance guys “could not find the receipt book” for instance… I knew then that our money was going to go directly into his pocket, and refused to pay for the Insurance until the book was found…

Allan was standing in the doorway of the “Police Station”, (a 20’ shipping container), engrossed in what was happening inside… I called him away, and he came splashing through the mud and rain. He came up close to me and I could see that he was in some distress… “They’re torturing some kids in there!!” he said… “Come and see what’s going on….” The look on his face, told me that he might be contemplating interrupting whatever was going on inside the office that the police were occupying… I said as firmly as I could, under the circumstances, “Allan, get on your fucking bike, put your helmet on your fucking head, and let’s get the fuck out of here…” I swung my leg over the saddle and started my bike and after a few seconds he followed suit…

We rode through deep puddles of water and mud, through the gate and down the road, all the while rain pouring down upon us. We were soaked through to the skin, my gloves stuck to my fingers, slipping on the throttle and clutch levers… Visibility was down to a few metres… Just then a large brown pig came trundling across the road, head down and paying no attention whatsoever to the two bikes bearing down on it… I swerved to avoid the pig, nearly knocking Allan off his bike, as he was trying to come alongside to talk to me…

A kilometre down the road, we came to a T-junction, where the M10 crosses east to west, from Sesheke to Livingstone. We turned right and stopped a few metres away… Allan got off his bike and walked over to me; his visor was up and with a strange look on his face told me what he had seen in the little office…

“They were jumping on their feet and hitting them with a pool cue, Dude…!” were the first words out of his mouth…

“They were just kids, no more then fifteen…!”

Apparently these four young guys had been caught stealing a tent and a packet of batteries out of one of the trucks, and had been handed over to the police while I was getting our papers sorted out… Allan had gone over to shelter from the rain and stood in the doorway of the police office. He heard screaming and crying coming from inside and looked in to see what was going on… Two policemen were holding one of the guys facedown on the floor, while another stamped on the soles of his bare feet and a fourth beat him with a pool cue, breaking it over his shoulders…

I took my helmet off, and we sat in the rain for a while, saying nothing… I then tried to explain to Allan that Africa could be a brutal place, and he’d have to get used to the system of “jungle justice” meted out in these more remote parts, where magistrates and judges counted for nothing…

I suppose it was a combination of the weather, the stress of the border post, and the anguished look on Allan’s normally happy and smiling face that brought on a wave of intense melancholy in me… The world seemed to tilt at that moment…I felt overwhelmed by it all… My mind flew back 25 years, to a place not more than 200km west of where we now sat, to a little known camp on the Luangundo River, where it crosses the Caprivi to empty into the Delta; where Zambia, Angola and Namibia meet; to a time where torture and violence were a means to an end, a way to extract information we believed was vital in order to save the lives of our own troops… a place where I planned, supervised, and participated in acts similar and in some cases more brutal than that which Allan had just witnessed… Scenes I had buried in the darker recesses of my mind for many years… The ghosts from my past raised their heads and marched forth again…

I felt hot tears running down my cheeks, mixing with the rain…and my throat closed up… For a few minutes I battled to breathe, sobs wracked my body as I sat on my bike, head resting on my tank bag, so Allan wouldn’t see… There was a lot about this world that “was not right…” Here I was, sitting on a bike in the pouring rain, far away from friends and family, my dreams of the “happy ever after” life in tatters… Sure, it wasn’t right…

The rain beat a tattoo on my back… I do not remember how long we sat there, rain beating down around us… I was eventually shaken back to the present by the roar of Allan’s bike starting up…My vision was blurred and my head felt filled with cotton-wool… We rode the last sixty odd kilometres at a snails pace, no more than 60km/h…each wrapped in our own thoughts, Allan shaking his head every few minutes as if to rid himself of what he had witnessed at the border… It would take me a few days to push back the demons that had come out to play in my head…

We turned north onto the T1, the main highway running south to north through Zambia, and a little further on rode into the outskirts of Livingstone. We parked our bikes in the main street, took off our jackets and helmets and sat on the steps of Barclays Bank, trying to decide what to do next… The Jolly Boys Backpackers was one block up from where we sat, but we needed to find a “money-changer” and we needed to buy a Zambian starter pack for our phones… We were soon haggling with “Kelvin” a 20-something youth with a baseball cap saying “I Love Zambia” on it’s peak…

We settled on K520.00 to R1.00 as an exchange rate and had him supply two starter packs and 50 000 kwachas of airtime from friends of his, at the same price as we would have bought them in a store… Promising to use him as a guide the next day, we rode around the corner and in through the gates of Jolly Boys Backpackers… It had been an energy-sapping, emotionally draining last few hours, and I was glad that it was almost over… The large gate slid shut behind us and we rode up to the top of the concreted driveway, parked under the branches of the large Mahogany tree growing there… A number of the bar’s occupants came out to greet us, and welcome us to their digs…

I could hardly believe that we had woken up that very morning on board a luxurious houseboat, been waited on hand and foot with our every whim taken care of, and then just a few hours later we were experiencing the harshest of weather combined with the brutality of “African Justice”… The contrast was just too great to fully comprehend… But this was Africa, I reminded myself, and this was happening a thousand times every day, all over the continent… It was quite and peaceful behind the high walls of Jollyboys Backpackers…we were sheltered from the madness outside…albeit for a short while…

Jolly Boys, our base for the next two days, while we do the Vic Falls and see the sights…

We settled into our “hut”, unpacking from the bikes what we believed we would need for our stay here, and then retired to the bar… It seemed the best thing to do under the circumstances…

After draining a few Mosi’s (the local beer) we ordered a plate of chicken and rice, and began taking an interest in the folk gathered around us in the bar. There was a dreadlocked guy covered in tattoos that we began chatting to. He was an Italian, who spent most of his time kayaking on the major rivers in Africa… He had just arrived from Uganda, and was about to experience the mighty Zambezi for the first time… We wished him luck with that, thanking our lucky stars that we had chosen bikes rather than kayaks to experience our adventures on… He had a close friend who had ridden his motorcycle around the world and written a book about this travels… Claudio dashed off to his room and returned with the book, which he presented proudly to us…

We read excerpts from the book, and commented on the many photographs that were displayed in it… Allan and I looked across the table at each other and nodded our heads… We were doing this…here and now…our photographs were our “proof of life”, and we were part of a select group of people that could do long overland trips on a motorcycle…

Entrance to Giraffe Room, our washing hanging out to dry….

Parking close to all the important amenities is a must…..

© 2008 TBMH