Jupiters Travels: Four Years Around the World on a Triumph (22 page)

From Tanga the road was once again a good tar highway, and struck inland to meet the main highway between Nairobi and Dar es Salaam. The land was richly green, with mountains rising to the right of me, and great sisal plantations all around.

Then I took the turning south towards Dar and Morogoro, and sped over the green hills and under the overcast sky as far as Mwebwe by the Wami river.

There were two strings of huts, one each side of the road. I was attracted by one on my right painted in a jolly colour and called a hotel. Some pleasant women sitting outside and sewing smiled as I passed, so I stopped and asked how much a bed would cost. They suggested five shillings and showed me a reasonable portion of partitioned hut. I hung my mosquito net and walked up the road to where the truck drivers ate. The staple diet was
posho,
a mash of cooked corn, like the Italian
polenta.
With it came a bit of chopped mutton and peppery sauce. You could have a spoon if you wanted. There were
sambusas
and sticky sweet stuff and tea.

After nightfall the low-powered lamps and wicks ushered in the familiar mysteries of the evening, casting shadows for the imagination to fill. I watched shiny brown fingers dipping into the
posho
and rising to sharply profiled African faces, listened to the fluid chatter of African voices breaking every now and again into some quaint English
cliché
, and mused over my morning's discoveries. I knew that I had never known a more intense period of mental activity. There was something almost

physical about it, like riding a tiger in the mind. I was sure it could only be the beginning.

That night my dreams were interrupted several times by a threatening presence. I would be engaged in quite innocuous or cheerful activities, when this dominating figure rose up to overwhelm me with fear and helplessness. I could not recognize it, but knew it was male. Dark hints echoed through the tunnel of years from a forgotten childhood.

The next day the sense of fear lingered only for a little while as I consciously tried to penetrate the identity of the attacker, but it was followed by a sense of unusual tranquillity. I felt, without quite knowing why, that I had made a significant advance. There had been no victory, the battle would be resumed another time, but I thought I had caught a glimpse of the enemy within and knew that it belonged not to the present or the future but to my own buried past. I had not overcome it, but in that one episode it had lost much of its power to overcome me.

Those who find romance in communications, who delight simply in the idea of spanning vast distances, must dream of the highway from Cairo to Cape Town. If and when it ever comes about, it will certainly be one of the world's great thoroughfares, to compare with the Pan-American Highway and the Bombay-Istanbul route. The plan has existed for some time. I rode on some of its sections; in Southern Ethiopia I saw parts of it under construction by Israeli and Ethiopian teams; north of Nairobi the bed was laid and in use, though untarred. In the south the road was much more advanced, but in both hemispheres it was hopelessly compromised by political upheavals.

For myself, the mere idea of a highway running the length of Africa soon became tedious and without intrinsic merit. A book which I had found by chance in Benghazi and carried with me through Africa had some relevant things to say, though it was written on a different continent in an earlier century by a man who made a virtue of staying in the same place. It was a collection of the works of Henry Thoreau, including the journal he kept when he lived by a pond called Walden.

He wrote: 'We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate.'

If Thoreau were alive today he would have full confirmation of his fears. Instant information is instantly obsolete. Only the most banal ideas can successfully cross great distances at the speed of light. And anything that travels very far very fast is scarcely worth transporting, especially the tourist.

The highway from Dar es Salaam to Livingstone is fifteen hundred miles long. It was notorious in 1973 as a 'hell run', known as the Tanzam Highway. When Rhodesia and Zambia closed their border, it was the only natural route from Zambia to the coast. Primarily Zambia had to export copper and import fuel, and the Tanzam Highway was put to maximum use. Unfortunately it was not, at the outset, in very good condition, being only partially tarred. Petrol tankers raced down the highway at suicidal speeds. Maximum turnover meant big money. Reckless, half asleep, drunk or drugged drivers hurtled over the dirt and often enough hurtled off it into the rocks, trees, gullies and each other.

That was how I imagined the highway to be at the time; a dirt road in the monsoon rains, churned up by drivers willing to risk anything for an extra load. In fact when I did reach it the road was being rebuilt as part of a Canadian aid project. If anything, that made it worse. The surface was temporary and dreadful and there were frequent diversions into the surrounding countryside, but the Hell Run traffic had slowed to a crawl and lost much of its terror. I found the going manageable, and by the time I got to Morogoro I was quite at ease.

Outside the bank, where I had changed money at a suffocatingly slow pace, a European came over to admire the motorcycle. I liked him immediately, as I liked most of the white men who had chosen to go on living in African countries after independence. His name was Creati. He was an Italian who had been taken prisoner during the war in the desert; shipped to a camp in East Africa he had taken up the option of staying after the war. He was a motorcycle mechanic and had a workshop in Morogoro. More astonishing still, he had recently bought the entire stock of parts from the Triumph agent in Dar es Salaam who had been forced out of business.

It was a providential meeting, because a minor accident had ruined my speedometer cable. Registering my speed was hardly important. Speed limits, if they existed, were purely nominal, and in any case I knew what speed I was running at just by the feel of the engine. But I found it disconcerting to have no record of distance. Petrol stations were far apart, and the quality of the fuel was poor. The octane value, I was told, might be in the seventies or even less, and I needed badly to know what my consumption figure was to avoid running dry out in the bush. Creati had one cable.

'It will cost you forty-five shillings,' he warned.

I agreed readily. It was cheap at the price anyway. In such circumstances one does not argue about shillings. We went back to his shop and I told him where I had come from, and where I was planning to go.

'How about forty shillings?' he said.

'Okay. Fine,' I said.

'I'll tell you what,' he said, handing it to me. 'Give me thirty shillings,' I did. He drove a shrewd bargain, that Creati.

After Morogoro I was prepared for the road to get worse and worse. Instead it improved rapidly and, as Creati had promised, it soon turned into a spanking new tarred highway.

Above me the sky was in a constant turmoil of clouds forming, condensing, collapsing to the ground and reforming. When it was not raining it was generally overcast. The air was very warm and moist. All around stretched the lush green grasses and trees of Mikumi National Park. I rode on a while and came across an elephant. It stood a little way back from the road and faced me, arrested in the act of chewing a
trunk load
of grass. The grass stuck out on either side of its mouth behind the trunk like a cat's whiskers, giving it a rather undignified and lugubrious look. We stared at each other for a while. Then I got the definite feeling that it was fed up with me and planning to do something about it. I kicked over the engine and rode on.

Further along a small troop of zebras also stood, grazing, and again I stopped. All stood still as statues, heads turned to face me from whatever position they had been in. Their small, round ears strained upwards and seemed to tremble with the effort to pick up any slightest signal. Their markings were immaculate, as if freshly painted on with immense care. All wild animals gave this impression of a sharpness and clarity that was new to me, and I began to remember zoo animals as having lost this edge and looking faded and grubby by comparison.

Nothing ever enchanted me so much as coming across wild animals. I thought often how human society had impoverished itself by driving this element out of its life. In Africa I began to see the human race, sometimes, as a cancerous growth so far out of equilibrium with its host, the earth, that it would inevitably bring about the destruction of both. Not an original thought, but it came to me repeatedly.

Viewed in passing, the undulating country attracted me strongly. So far, I reflected, I had not once camped out in the African bush, and I stopped the bike to consider how I would go about it. Immediately the countryside took on a quite different aspect. The grass which had seemed so enticing now looked long and coarse and extremely wet. My small one-man tent would have been lost in it. Even getting to it was a problem. A ditch too steeply cut to cross with the bike ran alongside the road. I went on for twenty miles looking for higher ground, or a clearing, and a way across. Then a small side road appeared and I followed it to Mikumi Park Lodge. The lodge was a palatial hotel built to strip wealthier travellers than I of their foreign exchange. I skirmished briefly with temptation and surrendered to the special off-season rate. My struggles with the long grass could be resumed another day.

The rainy season naturally kept sightseers away and there were few visitors: two Canadian engineers working on power transmission lines alongside the highway; two American embassy wives on their way back to Lusaka, and a young Indian travelling, as all Indians seem to do, 'on business'.

The landscape pushed out to far distant hills, and below the lodge was open pasture and a water hole where an elephant stood in contemplation. Much of the afternoon I spent on the terrace watching and photographing a party of Marabou storks on a hillock close by. Presumably they were hoping for kitchen scraps. They seemed bored and grumpy, and creaked about aimlessly on arthritic-looking legs, occasionally ruffling their seedy feathers. I tried not to be misled by fancied resemblances between animals and humans, but the Marabous defeated me. With their wings folded behind them like the tails of an ancient dinner dress and their stooping rheumatic gait, I could not help imagining them as a group of elderly soup-stained waiters hoping for employment.

The engineers were informative about Tanzania. The country had eleven million people who lived on a very primitive diet, mostly maize, though they said there was no starvation. There was no known mineral wealth and Tanzania depended entirely on agriculture. The gross product per capita came to about $60, and some efforts were being made to introduce cooperative farming. President Nyerere they believed to be scrupulously honest, and though there was some tribalism in government it was nothing compared with Kenya.

The Indian came to sit with me later at the dinner table. He was a young, intense fellow with a shock of black hair. I listened to his story with fascination. He had left Zanzibar, he said, after the revolution, which had been very unfavourable to Asian families. His Zanzibar passport was cancelled when he left, but he had a British passport also, and with some friends he hoped to get to England. They tried first to get up through the Sudan from Kenya, but were stopped at Juba and sent back. Next they tried Uganda, but again were sent back to Kenya. He then went to the British High Commission in Kenya, presumably knowing that it was a desperate throw. They took the passport and, he says, told him, 'You won't be seeing that again.' He thought they had burned it.

That had been in 1963. His life's dream now, he told me, was to build a raft of mangrove wood twelve feet wide and forty-four feet long (he had the drawing) with which he said he would float on the currents from the Zanzibar coast to Australia.

I left the lodge next morning eager to know the country better. The first stretch of road was particularly beautiful. The road ran beside low mountains on the left, and then crossed them. For half an hour or so, the Great Ruaha River tumbled past me, swollen and red from the rains. Tribes of

baboons appeared occasionally at the roadside or on the ascending rock-faces, and the country itself seemed alive with its constant changes of perspective, the rise and fall of the mountains and the gushing streams. I rode one hundred and fifty miles without seeing a single person. Sometimes I glimpsed a hut among the trees. Once I stopped, thinking that somehow or other I ought to make some contact with people, but the general silence, the overcast sky and the wetness sapped at my resolution. I fidgeted uneasily at the roadside, feeling like an intruder, watching the small settlement for some sign of life, and when none appeared I climbed thankfully back on my machine and rode away.

The rain held off and there was even a burst of sunshine at midday when I reached Iringa. I climbed up to the town, a busy junction on the direct Nairobi to Lusaka road. With trucks and buses coming and going it seemed very lively, but on examination there was really very little there: a few shops with the barest provisions, no buildings I could see of any interest, nobody who seemed worth approaching. I ate the inevitable
sambusas
with a kebab and a cup of tea, and set off once more. Almost immediately came the first rain, and I packed myself into my rain gear which seemed to restrict and separate me even more from the world.