Bikers are as Rare as Dodo’s
Added on Wednesday, June 11th, 2008 by Carole Nash Editor
Flamming trees
Zambia is as big as France, England and Ireland put together. The road from the Tanzanian border to the capital Lusaka was going to take me three days hard daylight riding. From the bike there was almost a miasma of nothingness, sameness, if you like of scrub and bush that was hundreds of thousands of acres deep. Yet it is in the detail where you feel where you really are. Tourists hardly ever come this way, preferring instead to fly into one of the national wildlife parks, at South Luangwa or Lower Zambezi and bikers are as rare as dodo’s. They really are a special species to get this far. In Zambia you have reached deepest Africa, not dark as with the bestiality of the Congo, but deep. When you stop with the engine off, you hear nothing. You are completely alone. You are on an undulating plateau that drops steeply down to Lake Tanganyika in the north, to the Zambezi River and the Congo and to the south it slopes more evenly. All around you the miombo woodland comes to the road, Acacia trees wave when the cool breeze gets up. As if guarding the bush, stacks of charcoal stand in their nylon bags, by uprights and crossbars, on a carpet of ash. Sometimes the road climbs onto higher ground and when an army of trees looks like it has marched from the edge of the world, a visual sense of the size of Zambia is gained. More humbly, the road intersects all of this, and from above, it would look like the puniest forays of man into nature.
Towns in Zambia are set off the main road. Highway life is different to town culture. You can travel the length of Zambia and not pass through a town. Off the highway I rode into Isoki, a frontier town with an unmade track for a main street. This was a place that Lusaka had forgotten. It was a place not touched since independence forty years ago. The incidence of HIV related illnesses including AIDS and tuberculosis is as high as 35% in these backwaters and could be double that. In the Chimbas Restaurant I spoke to an old lady who cared for the towns sufferers. As soon as the girls get infected their family throws them out onto the street in shame. They run back to the man who infected them and become pregnant. This is such an ordinary story in towns like this; no one raises an eyebrow anymore.
On the outskirts of town there is a note on the toilet block that ‘time travellers’ may pass through. When you look into the eyes of people on the street you know you are a spaceman from another world. For all the real understanding you gain of each other it is as if you are looking at each other through frosted glass.
Down the road, the town centre of Mpike was not visible from Cims restaurant where I had a chicken pie from a modern counter display. Modernity here feels out of context with where I spend most of my time, riding across the bush. Mpike roadside was clean, quiet and had a good hotel on the right as I came in from the north. Birds sang in the veranda then trotted about without a care in the world. I had not seen a single cat since Kenya.
Being a Sunday gave road-life a general air of sanctity. Everyone was dressed in shirts and ties and perhaps it was a phenomenon to this part of Zambia, like good boy scouts, all the boys and young men wore blue. Little girls were dressed in perfectly clean Sunday best pink frocks and all the small churches sitting discreetly amidst the elephant grass had their doors swung wide open, waiting for the congregation to appear at eleven o’clock.
The wind was cool and the sun was warm. The air was dry and there was a complete absence of mosquitoes and biting insects. In fact, the Zambian climate at this time of year was just about perfect.
In the café I made to leave as men stepped inside to eat wearing their ill-fitting suits. The trousers on rural African men are always too long, folds and turn-ups gathering around their shoes. They would look more substantial in tribal wear.
I was hoping to reach Mkushi by nightfall but that was impossible. There is always something small to see. The flaming trees of Thika were lipstick red and the railway station at Kalonje was a ghost waiting for the bi-weekly train from Dar es Salaam.
Already striations of shadow were falling across the road. This served to camouflage the surface making it difficult to see the potholes. At Serenje I needed to fuel but the electricity to the town and the gas stations had been disconnected for repairs so I couldn’t go any further so checked into a lodge for the night ready for my assault on Lusaka.
