Around lunch time

Around lunch time, I arrived at another tiny town without a restaurant, or bread, or bananas or anything for sale that a hungry traveller could eat except dry biscuits and Coca-cola.

They're not unpleasant, Maria biscuits, but it takes determination to eat a packet of fifty. Chew, chew, chew. Flood your mouth with coke. Swallow.

And sitting there by the dusty roadside, I thought about the distance this meal, this modern matzos and wine, had travelled. From the bursting metropolis in South Africa with it vast factories manufacturing biscuits by the millions and the thousand workers with huge spoons stirring the fizzing chemical vats where they make Coca-cola. From there, to here, to me, methodically chewing and swallowing.

And I realized that I this was the future, that every meal will be like this, some day, when we live in outer space.

In Blantyre

I'm in Blantyre. :)

I took a week (5 days actually cycling) to get here.

Part of the road is marked as scenic, but really the whole thing is beautiful. Malawian drivers are pretty polite. I was staying in Uganda so long, that now it's amazing to me to watch Malawian drivers respecting laws.

There isn't a lot to blog about. Weird small things mostly. At one point there was a broken down truck and they put bouquets of wild flowers in the road to alert drivers about the obstacle.

I'm going to Mozambique from here. I don't know the internet situation in Mozambique. It may be a while until my next post...

In Lilongwe

My bike is still here! I left it with the people at St Peter's Guest House and I paid them to store it for 60 days. They stored it for an additional 71 days after that.

I was mentally preparing myself to buy a local bike.

When you're cycling through Africa, there is very little margin for things to go wrong. For example, yesterday on the bus, someone could have stolen all my stuff while I was asleep. I keep a photocopy of my passport and $20 dollars on me at all times, in case something goes wrong.

Really, though, I depend on the goodness of people around me. It's amazing to me how good people have been.

Speaking of possessions, I have some new toys for this part of the trip. A road map. Some fancy imported chain lube. An eee laptop computer. I had a Nokia 810 PDA already, but I want to do some kernel hacking. We'll see how long it survives. I also have malaria pills, premoquine to prevent malaria and some other pills to cure malaria. Earlier I had tried to buy malaria medicine and people had sold me chloroquine as a cure or taken once a week to prevent malaria. Chloroquine makes me lethargic and grumpy. It's basically useless, so I wasn't taking it.

One thing I'm missing is my towel. I left it in Kampala by mistake. It was a Mountain Safety Research quick drying, extra absorbative, light weight, compactable camping towel. Seriously, it was a good towel. Ah well...

When I was in my early teens, Mom implemented a curfew where I had to be in the house before dark. Like every teenager I was stroppy and outraged. Mom explained, “I guess a new witch doctor has moved into the area, because there have been several witchcraft related killings recently. They could tell because the hearts, livers and fingers had been removed. Your father and I are just concerned that since you and your sister are the only white kids around, that might make you a target.”

I bet, if that witchdoctor hadn't moved into town or if he had used normal, non-human ingredients for his witchcraft stew, I would have turned into a total party animal. I would probably be out late every night carousing and club hopping instead of sitting quietly at home playing computer scrabble with the blinds drawn and the doors barred and bolted.

I'm passing through Tanzania now and took a few days off in Dar. You maybe saw in the news how a bunch of albino people here have been killed for witchcraft. My understanding is that it's often in rural areas where everyone knows everyone. For one killing where they had a suspect, it was an acquaintance of the albino guy who lured him away from his house at night.

I think Tanzania has more albino people than other countries I have been to. Perhaps I just notice them more in light of the news.

So far no foreigners have been killed. Our wealth helps us some ways. The local police protect us, to protect the tourism industry. Our relatives and friends would hunt the killers down. Expats get used to operating at higher security levels because people are trying to rob us all the time. We have our walls, razor wire, security guards, burglar bars, dogs and guns.

Starting off again

I have been staying in Uganda since Christmas and tomorrow I leave. I'm taking a very fancy bus to Dar es Salaam. From there I'll travel to Lilongwe. Hopefully, my bike is still there and I can cycle on from there.

The traditional ending for this kind of bike trip is Cape Town, but I'm only planning to go as far as Durbin. The trick is that when I hit Durbin, I'm going to loop back up through Botswana and end in Zambia.

I decided to change the ending when I was cycling in Ethiopia and everyone kept telling me that most people cycle through Sudan and go the whole way by bike instead of skipping bits here and there. Once I realized that my trip was completely ruined, I just said screw it, I'm not even going to bother going to Cape Town at all.

So Malawi to Mozambique, South Africa, Botswana and finally Zambia. It will probably take around four months. My parents will be in Zambia by the time I arrive. I also want to live in Zambia, so I'm going to try figure out a way to settle down there and make a living etc etc etc. That's what I have decided.

I'm extremely nervous about this next leg for some reason. I've had nights when I wake up worrying that my bike had been stolen and I just couldn't get back to sleep. Every time I leave my bike behind, I worry a lot.

I had the flu earlier in the week. I have a sore throat and it's turned into a sore jaw and ear. I'm also a hypochondriac. Whenever I get a sore throat, I secretly worry I have rabies.

My bus leaves Kampala tomorrow at 7 AM.

Dejen

Ethiopia has it's own ancient calender and time. It's desperately confusing to figure out the time and date is. For example, someone might say, "We'll start at 1 o'clock and end at 8 o'clock." But the 1 o'clock is Ethiopian time so really it means 7 am and the 8 o'clock is just regular 8 am.

Also computers are sometimes set to Ethiopian time and date. Sometimes the date is wrong so that they can use pirated anti-virus software. Other times the date is wrong because the CMOS battery died and it resets on bootup. Anyway, the result is that you can't check gmail because the SSL certificates are from the future.

Basically, what I'm trying to say is that it's as confusing as pants.

Ethiopia also has it's own ancient branch of Christianity. It was the day before Easter 2000 when I reached Dejen. For the fifty days leading up to Easter, Ethiopian Christians don't eat meat. I also didn't eat meat because it wasn't available. One butcher used the down time to repaint his shop.

Then on Easter everyone has a feast. Cattlemen from three hundred kilometres away drive their herds to Addis Ababa. I have never seen such happy butchers as in Dejen that day.

For myself, I hung out with a guy called Henok just shooting the breeze. At one point I was just joking and I said he should join me. But instead of laughing, he said it was a great idea. "So uh... What about your job you were telling me about?" Turns out that I had misunderstood, he didn't have a job currently. "But you were going to school though. You can't leave that." No no. School was out for two months.

In the end, I decided it would be pretty cool to have company so I agreed to buy Henok a bike and let him come with me. It was sort of risky thing, because he could have robbed me blind but he seemed like a nice enough bloke and I felt I could trust him.

Toilettes

We were discussing toilettes yesterday. My feeling is that Ethiopia has some of the worst toilettes ever.

In Egypt, guys are supposed to squat to pee because peeing standing up is considered unhygienic under Islam. Also since Egyptians often wear robes, you can pee more modestly squatting. In Ethiopia on the other hand, guys consider it unhygienic to step in pee, so they stand just outside the bathroom door and aim from a distance.

The good news for me was that in Ethiopia you can buy the same Egyptian brand of tissue paper. It comes in a pack of 10 tissues. I carried one in my pocket at all times. Other people cannot afford tissue paper though so a lot of newspaper and leaves are used. Newspaper would clog up the toilette so you have to throw it in the garbage afterwards. If a garbage bin isn't provided, then you can just toss it on the floor. I tried to explain to that tissue paper was OK to throw down the loo because it was designed to not clock things up, but everyone was doubtful. Also if there is a garbage can brim full of used newspaper, you may as well throw your tissue in too.

Some places are maybe too remote for a daily news paper and maybe they're inside a courtyard so no leaves are available. In that situation the hotel owners are supposed to leave some water so people can clean up. Some hotel owners are lazy. You can tell which ones are the lazest by the number of poo smears on the wall.

Basically everyone has the same amount of poo on their fingers and everyone shares a common desire of not crossing with another smear as you wipe your hand on the wall. It sort of creates a pattern. So all across the toilettes of Ethiopia you find the same disgusting finger painted mural of prairie grasses waving in a cool Autumn breeze.