Jupiters Travels: Four Years Around the World on a Triumph (18 page)

Of course the whole village knows there's something up. Little naked black spies have been buzzing round the compounds for hours. As we proceed across the dunes, a mob of the curious follow at a respectful distance. What puzzles them is the time of day. It's much too early for dancing, but I insisted on pictures by daylight. On the chosen site a big fire is started immediately, and the two innocent black beasts are ceremonially speared, gutted and tossed into the flames in one piece, hide and all.

The girls are rehearsing, hands linked in a line, singing a chant and making little runs across the sand. The men insist on posing for endless group shots, faces set in the sternest expressions, except for Minderbender who fools about constantly in his khaki shorts, ruining the fake authenticity and making it real. Then they dance and I have to go leaping and squatting and rolling about on the ground with my 28 mm trying to
remember how David Hemmings did it in
Blow Up,
until the light dies and it's time to carve the goats.

By now the camp followers have caught the scent of sizzling hide and are assembled on the rising ground watching enviously, and in their front rank are several ancient geezers with expectant expressions. The tribal butchers begin cutting the animals into lumps and laying them out on a table of branches and green leaves, but there's trouble in the air, and I hear voices raised among the warriors. Not too loud, as yet, because their mouths are full of meat and gristle, but as the meat dwindles away, the altercation becomes more heated and to my surprise half the first team gets up and stalks off, looking very fierce.

'Ah,' says Emmanuel, T am sorry but we must finish now.'

There has been a schism in the tribe. A heresy has been exposed. According to tribal tradition the goats should be sliced up in a certain way, and the choice cuts offered to the tribal elders first (who would undoubtedly accept). Fuck that, said Minderbender and his Revolutionary Council, why should the old geezers have the best bits. They weren't even invited. But some of his followers are not so staunchly progressive. Having licked their chops, they decide it's time to suck up to the elders, and they stage a Royalist Demo and Walkout. Under their tablecloths, it is whispered, they carry extra pieces of goat for later.

A good afternoon's work. I got my pictures; I have shown that the Turkana are indeed conceited, treacherous, and all the rest. And I have demonstrated what one tourist and a couple of goats can do to rip apart the structure of a tribal society. Tomorrow the sightseers can come on their 747s from Frankfurt and Chicago and clean up the remains.

There is nothing left for me to do but to gather up my souvenirs and fly back to Nairobi. I wonder, would it have been like that if I had arrived on my motorcycle? No. I'm sure it wouldn't. Flying, I realize, can be very, very dangerous. I hear the purists mocking me. Motorcycles, they say, are just as alienating as aircraft, same technology sliced a different way. They don't understand. It's the effect on me I'm talking about. The long, hard solitary journey induces a different kind of respect. I mean to keep it that way from now on.

But then, I would never have got the pictures. Oh God, I don't know, and it's no use asking the Bishop. . . .

I wanted to get to Mombasa and drink a beer.

I not only wanted it, I expected it. Life in Nairobi had softened me. Instead of a beer I had a flat tyre.

'Bloody hell,' I said bitterly. 'Just the sort of thing you'd expect.'

Petulant. Frustrated. I raised my voice. Why not? Empty highway. No one around.

'Isn't that just bloody perfect?' I shouted.

'Yes', said God, but I didn't hear him.

I swore at the top of my voice and the word lost itself in the tangle of weeds at the roadside. It became time to do something useful.

I was annoyed because I had just had two weeks in Nairobi to overhaul and repair the Triumph, to wash it and grease it and fit fine new leather bags on the tank, and new tyres and tubes on the wheels, and here I was a hundred and fifty miles down the road to Mombasa with a puncture, and a lot of dirty, uninteresting work in front of me. Furthermore it was midday and I was two degrees south of the Equator and almost down to sea level at the hottest time of the year and wearing a flying jacket.

Hot as it was, I found the flying jacket comfortable to wear as long as the bike was moving. Its stiffness saved me from a lot of the fatigue that comes from being continually buffeted by the air, and I was spared the
problem of finding somewhere to pack it. I knew it looked odd to be wearing sheepskin in the tropics and I enjoyed the effect, but when the air flow stopped, I had about thirty seconds before I reached boiling point, and my thirty seconds were up.

I trundled the bike carefully on the wheel rim off the edge of the road, kicked out the swing stand, dismounted and threw the jacket to the ground. Then the gloves. Then the helmet. Then I started on the baggage.

Not even a mad dog would do this in the midday sun, I thought.

In Nairobi they had warned me. It's a good tar road to Mombasa, they said, four or five hours in a car, but the road surface gets so hot that it causes punctures. In Nairobi I had let someone else fit the new tubes and he had pinched the rear one with the tyre levers, making so many holes that I put the older patched one back instead. Now the heat had melted off the patches. That is what I thought had happened, and it gave me a good chance to put the blame on someone else.

'Bloody fool,' I said. But the bloody fool was me, for being too lazy to do it myself, and for not starting earlier in the morning when the road was cooler.

Normally a puncture was not a disaster. With practice and an hour's energetic work it would be done. First I had to take all the heavy stuff off the bike, because with the rear tyre flat it was impossible for me to lift it on to the centre stand. And on a soft surface I had to find something firm to lay under the centre stand as well. I got out the tools, and soap, and a cupful of water and a rag. Then the right exhaust muffler had to be dropped, which means unscrewing a couple of small nuts with their washers and laying them carefully on the outspread rag. With this done the spindle could be unscrewed and withdrawn from the axle, and the spacer and wheel adjuster with it, and all put on the rag away from grit and concealing clumps of grass. I tried to think like a manual.

Then I had a good trick I had discovered. With the swing stand out as well, the bike would lean over to the left at a crazy angle and there was room to take the wheel off the splines and slip it out from under the mudguard. Without this trick, or something similar, it was impossible for one man to remove the rear wheel. It was called a Quickly Detachable wheel, and it was certainly easier than taking off the sprocket and chain also, but it had not, I thought, been brought to a pitch of great refinement.

With the wheel off, having remembered at the last minute to detach the speedometer cable, there were the security bolts to loosen. These were two bolts which clamped the tyre to the rim and caused many spectators to wonder why I had three air valves on my wheel instead of the usual one. The nuts could be hard to undo because of the filth that gathered on them, but I had two pieces of plastic tube over the bolts packed with

grease so that, once loosened, the nuts could be quickly spun off with the finger. That saved about ten minutes each way.

New tyres were harder to get off, especially with the rather small levers I was obliged to carry, but the soapy water helped a lot. Unfortunately when I pulled out the tube, the rim belt which came with it, snapped. The rim belt protects the tube from the inside of the rim where all the spokes come through, and it is obviously safer to have one. I had no spare, another reason for cursing.

There was nothing wrong with the old patches after all. There were two new punctures on the inside of the tube, tiny slits, and near them I noticed score lines and places where the rubber had blistered.

'Shit and damnation
’
I said, and
'Merde puissance treize.'
I swore a lot in those days, in a rather dull way but with feeling.

Clearly the old tube was no good any more, and I would have to repair the punctured new one. It was difficult in that heat, with the flies refreshing themselves on my sweat, to be thorough, particularly with the clumsy patches I was carrying at the time.

The best trick in my repertoire was provided by a company called Schrader in Birmingham. They made a valve with a long tube which I could screw into the engine instead of a spark plug. As long as you had at least two cylinders, you could run the engine on one and the other piston would pump up your tyre. So I was able to pump up the tube, and it seemed alright.

I put the puncture routine into reverse. The tyre rims slid snugly into place on the soap, and the wheel pumped up hard. Twenty minutes later I had everything back on the bike and was washing my hands in the last of the soapy water when I saw the tyre was half flat.

The life drained out of me then. I could not even find the energy to swear. I dropped down on the jacket and pulled out my cigarettes, and tried to think about other things. It was very pleasant here, I thought, if you had nothing to do. Hotter than Nairobi, certainly. But not too hot. Not at all. And pleasantly dry.

I looked at the vegetation alongside the road, trying to recognize it or fix it in my memory, but I could not make out anything characteristic enough to attract my attention. There were various wild flowers that looked to me like wild flowers everywhere, and low shrubs and bushes that looked the same as any others. I was annoyed by my inability to see plants clearly and remember them. It was a great drawback. Above all things a traveller should have an eye for natural detail, I thought, since that is what he sees most of the time. There was some bamboo and I was glad to find at least one thing I recognized, not knowing that there were over two hundred different species.

Beyond the low vegetation, where the land had once been cleared for
road making, were trees, equally unknown to me, leafy and of medium height. I walked to the edge of the wood to relieve myself and wondered whether some enormous beast was at all likely to come crashing towards me through the undergrowth. Probably not, I thought, since I had seen small farms through the trees as I rode along. In fact, just a mile or so back I had passed a petrol station at a crossroad, with a sign. What had it said? I looked at the map. This must be it. Kibwezi Junction.

I was wondering what to do next when I saw Pius coming towards me, though of course I did not yet know his name. He was a fat man in the best sense of the word, not gross or obese or flabby or bloated, but of a prime meaty plumpness to make a cannibal's mouth water. His black body was enticingly wrapped in a gaily flowered shirt, and he sat astride his little Yamaha motorcycle on jovial terms with the world and with a measured sense of his own importance in it. I waved to him and he stopped beside me.

'Can you help me, I wonder ..." I said.

'Absolutely,' he said. 'Most definitely. I see you are having trouble, isn't it. A spot of bother.'

'Well, my tyre's flat . . .' and I went on to explain.

‘I
will introduce you to Mr. Paul Kiviu,' he burst out enthusiastically. 'Definitely he is the very man of the moment. He is manager BP station Kibwezi Junction and he is my friend.'

Mercifully the road was level at that point. As I pushed the loaded bike along on its flat tyre, Pius bobbed around me like a butterfly, calling encouragement, imploring me to believe that my troubles would soon be over. His good nature was irresistible and I began to believe him.

In any case I was happy that something was happening and I was in touch with people. At the time it seemed to me that what I wanted was to have my problem solved quickly to get on my way. I had a boat to catch in Cape Town and the journey was still the main thing. What happened on the way, who I met, all that was incidental. I had not quite realized that the interruptions
were
the journey.

Paul Kiviu understood my problem. There was nothing he could do about it, but he understood it and, as they say, a problem shared is a problem halved. Pius did not so much understand my problem as appreciate it. He revelled in it, celebrated it, but Paul understood it because he had problems of his own. He was accustomed to them, and he was the first African I had met who was marked by them. He was small, thin and intense, and showed signs of worrying.

His BP station had a servicing bay and pumps. The main building was a sheltered area with coloured metal chairs and tables, served by a small lock-up kitchen where a girl in a headscarf pushed sweets and drinks and snacks across the counter. It was clean and polished and quite the most

modern thing for miles around. We had some fizzy drinks and potato chips and thought about what to do.

It was simple really. I needed a new tube and it would have to come from Nairobi. The punctured tube could be repaired of course, but there was a very long way to go before I could expect to get a new tube. There would be nothing in Tanzania, I guessed, or Zambia, and in Rhodesia, with the blockade, it might be difficult. When I saw how the old tube had perished it made me unhappy to be without a new one as well as an acceptable spare. So I would call Mike Pearson, the Lucas agent in Nairobi, and ask him if he could get an inner tube to me somehow. And a rim belt too.