Jupiters Travels: Four Years Around the World on a Triumph (21 page)

He showed no signs of his ordeals when I met him, nor of the sleeping sickness he had caught and almost died of in Botswana. The Tanzanian police had threatened to shoot him, a mob had chased him through the streets of Karachi, but he was alive and thriving, though he thought he might have picked up bilharzia.

Naturally I was wondering how my experience would compare with his. I always assumed that, sooner or later, something very painful was bound to happen to me. Perhaps my appetites would be less aggressive than his, though. And already I thought I recognized how many incidents, especially those involving 'hostile natives', seemed to be brought on by the victim's behaviour. His riding style was certainly more extrovert than mine.

In other respects we understood each other really well. I knew from his way of describing places, people and events that we had both learned and felt similar truths. We were both having a rather comfortable time there on the coast, and we met like soldiers on leave from the trenches. When we left to ride off again, but in opposite directions, he said with half a sigh: 'Oh, well, back into it again.'

I knew he meant time to sweat out the beer and replace it with water, to shrink his stomach back to a handful of millet and mutton sauce, to forget about washing for a while and get back to the bare essentials. How good that will feel, I thought, once the withdrawal symptoms have gone and I'm comfortable again with the least I need to survive.

I fixed on a Sunday morning to leave Mombasa, to pack my things and go. When that morning came I was reluctant. The weather coincided with my mood. It was gloomy and uncertain. Any excuse would have done to keep me there another day, but none appeared and I did not have the wit to invent one.

The bike also felt off balance, as usually happened when my mood was unstable. I got an impression of confusion, as though the power was not being transmitted cleanly, and my ear picked up noises and vibrations that fed my doubts. The responses were fractionally less positive, the gears less than crisp, the handling felt off, and the whole thing seemed to rumble along in a disconnected fashion, instead of being the tightly integrated machine I was used to.

I was unwilling to believe that all this proceeded from my own mind, and I tried to diagnose faults. I checked the timing, the plugs, looking for loss of power, speculating whether a jet was clogged or whether the humidity was affecting the mixture. I looked at the wheel alignment and several times snatched a glance at my rear tyre, convinced that it must be flat.

There was nothing wrong and none of my speculations made sense, but my anxiety only increased. The road was wet from a recent shower and I moved over it gingerly, expecting to slide at any moment. There is a ferry crossing south of Mombasa, and I approached the steeply sloping ramp of wet planks with such nervousness that it almost led to a fall.

The road south was a good one and gave me no reason for concern but I watched it as though it were a venomous snake, and felt presentiments of disaster growing in me. The cloud thickened ahead. Within minutes it grew black as pitch, and thundered ominously, and I seemed to be heading for the heart of the storm. I felt imprisoned by the route, as though it were a one-way tunnel and I was doomed to go down it, come what may.

Waves of foetid air swept across the road from the forest which had been newly drenched. It was the first time I had smelled that characteristic warm odour of rotting vegetation which previously I had known only in the hot-houses of botanical gardens. It roused me and reminded me of the wonder and excitement I used to feel as a boy among those strange lush plants from the tropics, and I realized with a shock that I was sinking so deep into my state of alarm as to forget how fortunate I was to be experiencing these wonders for myself.

So, for a while, I rescued myself from my despondency. At that same moment the road veered abruptly off to the west and took me safely round the storm, and the bike seemed to run much better. I could hardly resist the odd feeling that I had been rewarded by some invisible trainer, nudging and cajoling me with lumps of sugar and a touch of the whip.

I set myself to look for the sources of my anxiety. What was I afraid of?

Was I afraid of having an accident? It felt like that. I felt as though I expected to fall off at any moment. But why? The road was good. There was no traffic. The bike was functioning perfectly well, for all my imaginings. Was it the wet surface? How could it be? My tyres were brand new,

and gripping the road fine. In Libya I had ridden hundreds of miles through rainstorms at much greater speeds without a qualm. And I had never fallen off in the rain yet. What was it then? Come on, dig! Was it the stories that Ian Shaw had told me? Had they unnerved me in some way? Surely not. I had always imagined that accidents would happen. I had imagined far more
gruesome
accidents than any he had described. If anything, his example was reassuring. Well, what about his nasty moment with the Tanzanian police? The border was only a few miles away now. What about that?

For a moment that looked likely. I always approached borders with great caution. They were potentially dangerous. Too much power in a few hands. Too much greed. Too little control. I was always wary of uniforms. And yet, I had never let the prospect of a border frighten me before. I had crossed five borders already in Africa, twice in quite unpredictable circumstances, and each time I was pleasantly surprised. My system clearly worked. I arrived early, ready for anything and quite willing to spend the day there if necessary. I was always received with curiosity and good humour. Why should this border be any different? And even if it was ... I shrugged. That was not what was bothering me. I felt sure of it.

Well then, what? I tried to pretend that it was nothing, just a passing fancy to be dismissed, but I knew that was untrue. And I wanted to find out. It began to seem passionately important to root this thing out. There was a nameless dread in me, and now was the time to put a name to it.

When had I last felt like this? To my surprise I realized that it had been quite recent, during the second week in Nairobi, only ten days before. What had
that
been about? I could think of nothing, except possibly the prospect of departure. But I had actually left Nairobi in excellent humour. There was nothing I could pin it down to.

When else had I felt like this?

Immediately my mind flew to the moment at Mersa Matruh when I had come across the taxi driver picking up my wallet; when I had unaccountably, and shamefully, obeyed his command and passed by, pretending I had seen nothing. The incident rankled deep in me. I squirmed as though touched by something foul. Then the border at Lunga Lunga came in sight, and for a while my speculations had to cease.

The crossing into Tanzania seemed a delicate matter in only one respect, and that concerned the hostility between the Black African states and White Rhodesia. Mozambique at that time was still Portuguese, and Botswana was observing a profitable neutrality, but Zambia was in total confrontation with Rhodesia, supported powerfully by Tanzania and Kenya. The border with Rhodesia was closed, and I would have to make a circuit via Botswana to get there and eventually to South Africa. It was not at all clear in those days what the Tanzanian and Kenyan attitudes were to traffic in and out of Rhodesia. Officially they would be bound to disapprove, particularly Tanzania with its heavily Marxist-oriented ideology and rigid administration.

What made travel in Africa so remarkable was that one never knew, from one week to another or from one frontier to the next, what was going on. The only way to find out was to go and see. I knew that a trickle of people had passed on the same route going north, and I had heard a few stories about how easy or difficult it was, but all I could deduce was that it was worth trying.

The customs officer on the Kenya side raised my suspicions by questioning me in detail about my journey, my plans, my views on Kenya and about the changes in Britain since she had lost her colonies. It was almost certainly just harmless curiosity, but it felt like a polite political screening. I did not have to lie, but I was fairly economical with the truth until he let me go.

On the other side I was received by a schoolmasterish fellow in a light worsted suit and spectacles. I was relieved to find that he was only interested in my money. He asked to see my travellers' cheques, which had to be recorded on a currency form. Then he suggested urgently that he himself could change the bits of Kenyan currency I had left.

'There will be no need to record it on the form,' he said, 'for doubtless you will be spending it immediately.'

Obviously he was planning to change the money himself at the black market rate and since it did not amount to much I let him get away with it, keeping only a few coins. While we did our business it began to rain heavily. I stood under the eaves of the hut looking mournfully down the road which had changed to dirt. The rainwater lay on it in sheets. It looked slippery and difficult, like red mud. It struck me that I had crossed into the monsoons now and that for several thousand miles I might be riding on wet surfaces. I had no idea how much of that would be dirt, but I was troubled by the prospect. I had had virtually no experience of wet dirt and it was not a good day to learn.

Also I was out of petrol. The pump marked on my map at Lunga Lunga had been closed. As I waited, wondering what to do, two tall and expensively dressed Africans on their way to Kenya stepped out of a Mercedes saloon, and I dickered with them for a litre or two of petrol to get me to Tanga.

'You'd better wait and see if they let us through first,' said one of them. 'If not you can take the whole damn car.' But they negotiated their passage, and I got my litre, grudgingly spared at a high price.

The route swung back to the coast and ran through a light red sandy soil, banked and ditched to channel the floodwater. For some way back

from the road, the ground was denuded by goats grazing. Huts thatched with coconut stood among the trees and palms, but very few people were out. Those I saw looked dull and morose. Although I found the going better than I expected, the damp grey skies and the sullen people threw me back into my earlier heavy mood. I passed close to a man walking with a panga swinging from his hand. He looked miserable and hostile. The two-foot long steel blade, razor sharp all the way round, gave me a start. I imagined the damage one vicious swing with that weapon could do. It could take my foot off, I thought.

I saw myself struggling with field dressings, riding the bike with one foot. An image flashed before my mind of a white-faced motorcyclist riding up to a hospital, collapsing at the entrance. The nurse pulls off his boot to find only a raw stump. 'We'll never know how far he came,' says the surgeon at the operating table. 'He died without regaining consciousness.'

That's ridiculous, I thought. The panga would have taken the boot off too.

Then, once again, I discovered what was going on. It seemed quite incredible that I could be riding along a dirt road in Africa engrossed in these macabre fantasies. What on earth inspired me to invent them? Anticipating difficulties was one thing, but spinning horror stories to make my own flesh creep was terrible.

It did not occur to me to ask myself whether I was insane. I knew I was more or less as sane as most people, for I had decades of experience to support the view. I could get along in society, and make a living. What other definition of sanity could there be?

Clearly it was all part of the same story that had been unfolding before; the anxiety of a lifetime slowly revealing itself.

I began to see that all these particular fears, of falling, of meeting with violent behaviour, of wildly improbably hazards, were only excuses for a fear I could not recognize. They were false messengers I decided, concealing anxieties of a quite different kind. These noxious vapours arising from some deep well of doubt and despair writhed and curled into whatever shape was convenient to haunt me at my feast. I was making it easier for them by offering them ready-made disguises.

I decided I would have no more of it. From then on let them do their worst unaided. I would no longer lend them the props of my imagination.

So my rational mind issued its tidy instructions and was completely-overwhelmed by the consequences. Fear simply roared up and engulfed me in a waking nightmare, all pretence thrown aside, shrouding me in a clammy grey terror to which I could put no name or origin.

It subsided soon after, and left me in peace for the rest of the day, and I felt some satisfaction at having at least flushed the enemy out. I was very
excited by all this mental turmoil. It seemed clear to me that my journey, the entire concept of it, was closely related to my struggles with fear. I had launched myself on a journey to circle the globe, but I seemed to be on another journey, as well, a great voyage of discovery into my own subconscious. And I trembled a little at the thought of what monsters I might encounter there.

The cloud lifted and dispersed, and the road came back to the sea at Tanga. The difference between the two regimes became immediately apparent. The town had been spaciously laid out in colonial days and was physically unchanged. There was none of the bustle and enterprise of Mombasa. Little advertising, little traffic, fewer shops, fewer goods, a quiet provincial backwater in dignified decline, at least to my casual eye.

I sat alone in a fine old cafe where nothing had happened for years. Beautifully made furniture in wonderful African hardwoods stood and seasoned while the proprietor grew older and more lethargic, presiding over an ever more limited range of food and drink. I ate some
sambusas,
deep-fried triangular pastry cases stuffed with spiced vegetable which are the Asian equivalent of a hamburger. After a cup of tea I moved on. It seemed a pity not to stay, but I had been still too long and needed to make some distance.