jonnywhite

When last I wrote I was looking forward to a Safari in the Serengeti and the Ngorongoro crater. We spent our 3 days off hanging out of the roof of a jeep and saw every animal you could want to see in Africa. Particularly incredible were lions slumbering on huge rocks jutting up from the plains (think Lion King for the scenery), a leopard sleeping in a tree, giraffes, hippos, elephants, cheetahs, a rhino, and wildebeests, hyenas, zebras, and impalas 20 feet away. The animal highlight, however, was a bush pig that did a midnight raid for a KitKat bar wrapper in the tent of one of our riders - a kindly, quiet British lady. The pig ripped and broke the tent but was no match for Judy, who screamed and punched the pig in the face repeatedly until it ran away. This lead naturally to delightful fun for the remainder of the trip in sneaking around making pig noises outside tents at night.

And after a lovely rest, complete with a feeling of guilty pleasure for not riding for 3 days, we’re back on the road. We just spent a wonderful seven days riding through Tanzania on dirt and mud roads with an absolutely incredible number of thorns, and thus an incredible number of punctures (I think the record was 7 in a day). We also had rain most days and nights. Changing tires and running out of spare tubes (and so repeatedly patching old ones in the mud and rain) had some of us a little flustered, however the group’s (and my) spirits are now high. We’re going to hit pavement tomorrow and there are only 2 days of off-road riding left in the whole trip.

I had a realization whilst riding in a particularly bad mood after 2 flats and a crash exacerbating my hand injury in the rain on the morning of my birthday. I was questioning (again) what the heck I was doing here and concluded that I could see the trip as a circumstance I was caight in or as a decision that I'd made. If you see life as a series of circumstances you are caught in (work to make money, make money to pay the bills, pay the bills to keep working), then taking hard earned time and money to suffer riding everyday and sleep in the dirt at night makes no sense, when you ask yourself what you are doing it for. BUT, if you see life as a series of decisions, and in each one you can choose to expand your horizons and challenge yourself or to stagnate and shrink away, then all of a sudden there is a great reason to be on this trip. I think that this type of thinking is one thing that has made the company on the trip, a bunch of wierdoes choosing to ride 7 hours a day and camp without even water for washing some nights for 4 months, so interesting and has allowed us to help each other and keep on.

So with our good spirits, a bunch of us hit up a local pub last night (conveniently the day following my 25th) for some silliness, which has been rare because we’re normally too tired and normally sleeping along the roadside. The evening had lots of laughs and ended back at camp with us zip-tying some of our slumbering comrades’ tents closed and pulling out the poles, which leaves the sleeper basically confused and swimming in a nylon sack. The evening then really ended with some tackling between sleepers and trouble-makers, but we’re friends again this morning.

And so on we go. We’re 4 days from the Malawi border. Tanzania has been quite rustic, with hardly a paved road, even in the cities. there have been locals all along the road and at our camps mostly living as they have for a few thousand years, herding and hunting animals while dressed in cloth and carrying bows, spears, and swords. Four nights ago a few of our group were lucky enough to wake up and very very warily, initially, join a tribal celebration in the middle of the night a few hundred meters from our camp. They danced and sang and drummed in the pitch dark without being able to see the faces of the hundred or so children and adults dancing, singing, and drumming with them. They could hardly put the experience into words (or walk) in the morning and were a little freaked out by some parts of the celebration (seizures, chanting, everyone talking over each other in prayerful tones at once) but didn’t regret the experience at all. I wish I had been there but I was, as usual, passed out in my tent by 8pm and sleeping like a log. Somebody will wake me if such a chance comes up again.