The US of A

Posted on 24 May 2011 by Permacyclists

Photos available here

So long since our last update, I bet y’all thought we were dead! 

No such luck, although we did come close to it.  Or no, that’s a bit overdramatic, and I shouldn’t speak for Annabelle.  But for my part, I certainly felt like I was almost dead.  It turns out I was not alone sitting in seat 15B on the flight out of Lilongwe – I was sharing the space with a few hundred thousand of my closest friends who just didn’t want me to leave Africa behind…

Schistosomiasis for some, Bhilarzia for others – a very unpleasant way to spend the first few weeks home for me!  It was a bit difficult to get through that initial re-entry period, with reunions with family and friends accompanied by a pesky lingering abdominal pain that seemed to befuddle all the doctors.

We found the right pills in the end though (Prozyquantil: 2$ in Malawi – 200$ in NYC), and I have to say, it was almost worth it for the pleasure of the doctor visits, just the sight of otherwise stoic Manhattan physicians turning white when I told them where I’d just come from. 

“You actually swam in Lake Victoria?  Are you nuts?” 

But there was nowhere else to wash ourselves!  And besides, let the record show that my schisto was not acquired on Mfangano Island, but more likely somewhere in Mozambique or even Malawi, where we didn’t swim in any fresh water but may have washed with some that was contaminated.

Otherwise, coming home after a year and a half in Africa, we weren’t quite sure what to expect.  We had missed so much – films, current events, deaths, births – would we have any place back home? 

It was a real joy to find our friends and family though, and to see that time and distance can’t break apart the strongest relationships.  Which is not to say that things haven’t changed at all – we saw friends and family who had become mothers and fathers since we last saw them, who had published books, who had changed careers, bought houses, written plays and movies and opened Tai Chi studios…  And yet invariably we managed to sit and talk as if nothing had happened and no time had gone by.  It was a real treat that made it harder to leave again – it’s nice to have people who know where you’re from and what’s important, and being far from those people is probably the hardest thing about traveling – even worse than the schistosomiasis if you can believe it. 

Also though, after our decision to give up the bikes and continue on down to Rio by public transportation, the question weighing on our minds as we rediscovered New York and Brussels was whether we were we were alone to feel the gravity of the situation, the looming crisis of climate change. 

At first, all around us things seemed to be going on as usual.  Manhattan luxury stores seemed just as packed as ever, there were more iPhones on the street than we had imagined possible, more and more people were telling us about their plans to fly around the world or even just across the state for short vacations.  In Brussels, friends told us of a popular backlash against environmentalism, with ads now mocking concern for the environment.  In New York, a huge network of bike paths had elicited a backlash (though what doesn’t elicit a backlash in New York), with an angry resident calling cyclists, “terrorists.” 

Personally, I started to doubt whether there was any problem: surely if we had done irreparable harm to our climate and the very survival of life on Earth was in jeopardy there would be some kind of response, right?  People wouldn’t just go on calmly with their daily lives as if nothing was wrong, right? 

So don’t worry, everything must be fine, just relax and have another cheeseburger…

And then during just an hour watching CNN we saw news coverage of unprecedented tornadoes in Missouri, of catastrophic wildfires in Texas, of a food-safety scare in California…  Not to mention the flooding in Memphis, now pending in New Orleans.  Or the hydro-fracking spill in Pennsylvania.  Or the company responsible for the Gulf of Mexico oil spill applauding itself in its annual report for its exceptional safety record in 2010.

It all felt like a scene from Eaarth, or Hot, or Six Degrees, or Storms of my Grandchildren, or any of the other books we had been reading recently about the pending climate crisis.  Things weren’t looking good…

We spent a month in New York trying to get ready for the road down to Rio, and it was while we were there that our plans changed once again.  We were talking with a friend at ATD Fourth World when we had the idea of bringing a video camera with us for our trip down to Rio.  If we wanted people to see what we saw, and to have the same sense of the changes going on in the world today, then we would have to bring them along with us – and maybe along the way we could cure our own pessimism some as well and find other people who were taking action against climate change and who might be able to show the rest of us the next steps forward. 

It isn’t like nothing is being done, we just have to find what’s out there.

So we have decided to start filming our trip, going out of our way to find as many organizations working for the environment as possible.  Hopefully we can put it all together into some kind of documentary film at the end covering the people we’ve met, with maybe a sense of what sort of actions are being taken around the world, of what ordinary people can do and what works.  All of it building up of course to the Rio summit that is still our destination: June 2012, the UN Conference on Sustainable Development.

We left New York a month ago with a video camera in hand and five billion ideas bumping around our heads.  We then spent three weeks in Asheville North Carolina learning about natural building – cob, adobe, straw-bale, timber-framing, bamboo, etc.  Forty percent of the world’s resources (and CO2 emissions) are linked to the building industry: natural building is an abundant, cheap, durable, and ecological alternative.  We built a small house, a barrel oven, a fireplace, and various other projects and met some of the most wonderful, engaged people we have met all trip as well.

Now, we are back north in Washington DC.  From here we will make the big turn to the south, heading out by train to New Orleans, then across Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona before heading down into Mexico.  We hope to visit some Transition Towns along the way over the next few weeks, and to make it to an organic farm in Puerto Vallarta by mid-June.

Our next update should come from there, where hopefully we’ll speak a little Spanish and have a bit more optimistic news to share!

As always, thank you for your support.  Your comments and e-mails are more than welcome – and for all our friends and family: we miss you dearly, thanks for welcoming us home so warmly!

Posted in USA | Tagged , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Malawi

Posted on 12 March 2011 by Permacyclists



Photos available here

As I write this, sitting on a bed in a hotel in Lilongwe, a massive thunderstorm is slowly gathering and crossing the city towards us, and the sky outside our window is a dark gray.

We have just a few days left in Africa, the continent that has been our home for the past sixteen months.  It has been a long sixteen months.  We covered 12,302km by bike, from Nairobi to Cape Town and then back up to Northern Mozambique.  If we were a little disappointed not to peddle the last stretch into Malawi, it is a small disappointment and one that we’ve all but forgotten now.  We have no regrets over anything that has happened over the past sixteen months, and the opportunity to cycle and travel on this continent is something we will never forget, that we will forever be grateful for. Continue reading →

Posted in Malawi | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | 6 Comments

Mozambique

Posted on 2 February 2011 by Permacyclists

Photos available here

Practical information for cyclists is available here

If we were a little relieved to be leaving South Africa, we weren’t quite ready for Mozambique…

After a quick interlude of two days to cross Swaziland (a country which merits a much longer visit than that), the border gave us a taste of what was to come.  Just across the frontier, the road goes from crisp black asphalt to a pot-holed and rutted track that probably was paved at some point…  though there isn’t much sign of it now. Continue reading →

Posted in Mozambique, Swaziland | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 4 Comments

Eastern Cape

Posted on 26 December 2010 by Permacyclists

Photos available here

Practical information for cyclists available here

Well, it has been a while since our last update, and a strange while at that, with thousands of kilometers covered, though not many of them by bike…

After our meditation course and then family visiting, we got back in the saddle outside East London.  It had been a while since we had last biked, and we were ready to get back on the road and start moving again.  Sure we’d put on a few pounds since we were last in the saddle, but we had come down from Kenya, we had been on the road for a year, we could take anything a sissy country like South Africa could throw at us for sure!

Or so we thought before we reached the Transkei…  Crossing the Kei river, we entered one of the former ‘Bantustans’ created under apartheid to serve as pseudo-independent countries for the blacks – if they were all citizens of different countries, the reasoning went, then when they came to work for the whites they would need visas and work permits and could be more easily controlled.  Only South Africa ever officially acknowledged their independence though.

All of this is similar to American history of course, and having driven through Indian reservations in New Mexico and Colorado and Montana and South Dakota, I had some idea of what to expect – dispossessed native people are never resettled onto beautiful expanses of fertile land.  What I didn’t expect though was that the Transkei would be basically un-bikeable.

Not that there aren’t roads or shops or places to camp – just the endless endless hills!  There is not a stretch of five meters in the whole area that is not on some kind of slope, probably at close to 90°.  Along the coast this makes for some spectacular scenes, with waves breaking along stretches of remote beach and tidal pools mixing with the mouths of the dozens of rivers that cross the area.  Inland too we had some of the most beautiful campsites we have had all trip, a few nights with our tent pitched just on the edge of a ridge looking out over green valleys with more hills rising in every direction.

We inched our way along the first week of cycling though.  We pushed a lot, and were grateful to make it just 50km a day.  The hills combined with the summer heat left us dehydrated and fighting off heatstroke – we definitely weren’t ready for this when we left East London.  We camped at night at clinics and missions.

Every province in South Africa is like a separate country.  There was the desolate Northern Cape, the totally westernized Western Cape, and now the thoroughly African Eastern Cape: no more cattle fences lining the road, the houses were thatch-roofed homesteads, children were chasing our bikes along shouting “sweets!  sweets! sweets!” until we thought we’d go nuts.  Ahhh Africa, we’d missed it actually, and the Transkei felt like something of a homecoming.

Though this is still South Africa; elsewhere in Africa, if you stop along the side of a dirt road in a beautiful rural spot with a view over a green valley and sit to drink some water and rest your legs, passing cars will probably ignore you, or just stop to ask where you’re going or where you’re from.  Not so in South Africa.  In South Africa, passing cars stop to tell you you’re not safe.

“It’s not safe here!  What are you doing here?  This is a wild place, it’s not safe!”  was the greeting that interrupted our rest on several occasions, invariably coming from rich-looking drivers in brand new SUV’s and pickups.  We would look around ourselves after they drove off and wonder – maybe they’re right?  It sure doesn’t look dangerous though…  And that hill up ahead looks super steep…

Now, the subject of security and paranoia in South Africa could get me going on a ten page rant, and so I’ll try to be brief.  Anna and I are not total idiots.  No matter what you think of two people who quit their jobs to go live in a tent along the side of the road in Africa.  We’ve been cycling for over a year now without any problems, I’m from New York originally, Anna was a criminal lawyer in Brussels – we’re not completely naive on the subject of crime. 

And so, when we’re sitting on the side of the road in a scene so idyllic it looks like it’s cut from The Sound of Music and someone tells us we’re in danger, we just don’t see it…

We decided then to ask local people what they thought – is it dangerous here?

“Here?  No!”  They would invariably say, laughing at the idea before becoming serious and adding, “But South Africa is very dangerous, you really need to be careful everywhere else.  Here though, it’s safe.”

Again and again as if we were biking along under a bubble of safety through the Transkei, from shop-owners, from security guards, from taxi drivers or from women selling food along the side of the road: “South Africa is very dangerous – but here it’s safe.”

All the way until Coffee Bay, where we checked at the local hostel.  Asking for a quiet spot, we were directed to pitch our tent fifty meters away from the rest of the hostel, blocked from sight and sound by a stand of thick trees, on the opposite side abutting a dried out river bed with almost no barrier between us and groups of young men wandering back and forth all day trying to sell us drugs.  Camping along 125th street couldn’t have been less appealing than this spot.

Surely this, we thought, is dangerous!

“No no no,” we were told though when we asked at reception: “Here, it’s safe!”

Here it’s safe?  When we thought we were in The Sound of Music it was dangerous, but now that we’re in New Jack City it’s safe?

We moved our tent closer to the rest of the guests anyway.  So much for listening to the locals.

Anyway, suffice it to say that the more time we spend in this country, the less we understand it.

And then our cycling came to an end.  We rode out of town a few days later for what became the shortest day of our trip – 1.5 km outside town my back wheel derailed and after a spectacular slow-motion fall while climbing another vertical Transkei hill (with of course a small audience of people watching and laughing at me), we found the rear gears were wobbling on the wheel.  Nothing to it but to head to the nearest decent bike shop, in this case in Durban.  We tossed our bikes on a bus, bidding the Transkei a reluctant farewell.  It had been a beautiful stretch of riding, a whole new side of this incredibly complex country, and some of the best cycling we have had the whole trip.

It was a good time to head to Durban though – that night I started coming down with odd flu-like chills and a pounding headache.  Tick-bite fever was the diagnosis – my first mysterious African fever!  It felt like a rite of passage somehow, and we took it easy over the next few weeks as we crossed the country by bus to meet our friend Megan and then head to Lesotho to do some hiking and renew our South African visa.

Lesotho is a country which merits far more than two weeks’ visit.  The mountains are spectacular, reminding us of Mongolia or Central Asia.  The ubiquitous horses help too of course.  But ten days in the end was all we had.  With Megan shipped back to the US, we headed back to South Africa, taking minibus taxis to northern Kwa-Zulu Natal where we WOOFed for two weeks, milking cows, making cheese and butter, and launching an epic battle of wits with a band of pigs that just didn’t want to be fenced in.  The pigs won in the end, and were last seen happily eating Emu food as we left the farm to head back to Durban.

Which is where we are now, reunited once more with our bikes.  We spent Christmas with some other travelers and on the 27th we are taking one last bus – to Swaziland this time.  From there it will be back on the bikes for real, no more public transport, and hopefully no more fevers or broken wheels.

It has been almost four months now that we have been in South Africa, and it will be bittersweet to leave.  We have met some wonderful people here and have made many new friends.  South Africans of all colors may well qualify for the friendliest people in Africa (and that is really saying something).  Not a day went by that we weren’t offered assistance, even when we didn’t need it.  And once you get into people’s homes, there is a sense of hospitality that I would guess few countries in the world can match.

At the same time though, the fear, the racism, it wears on you after a while.  While many of the people we have met really do represent the “Rainbow Nation” image of post-Apartheid South Africa, going about their lives with no concern for skin color – there is still a shocking amount of fear and hatred  in the air on both sides of the racial divide.  Just the moment when you’re sure that South Africa is the most wonderful country in the world is invariably the moment when you meet one of those people.  You’ll be walking down the street as Anna was in Durban and an old white man out for his evening walk struck up a conversation with her and in less than a minute said “I know you’re a foreigner, you think all people should have equal rights and all that.  But the African man is different you see…”  and whoosh, all that love and kindness is a distant memory.

After four months, we’ve hit our limit I think.  It has been a great time here, we can see why this is the “Beloved Country,” but we need to move on.

And we have to move on in fact.  We’ve bought our plane tickets out of Africa – now just to push on up to Malawi, where we catch a plane back to Europe on March 6th before moving on to continue our biking in South America…

We wish everyone a happy new year, and thanks as usual for all your comments and support.  Feel free to sign up for our Google Group if you’d like to get an e-mail when we post – or become a fan of our page on Facebook (just search Permacyclists) if you want the occasional little update on our progress.

Posted in Lesotho, South Africa | Tagged , , , , | 8 Comments

Vipassana

Posted on 15 November 2010 by Permacyclists

(A selection of photos from the past year is available here)

One year on the road! 

One year since Anna finished her job in Brussels and we pushed our shiny new bikes from her parents’ driveway to pedal to London.  One year ago we were fighting the Flemish wind and winter rains and a storm across the English channel – a far cry from the sunny South African skies that surround us now. 

It has been so much more than a year for us in terms of all we’ve experienced and learned.  It’s hard not to feel like we’ve been on the road for decades, or even for our whole lives – maybe we will start celebrating November 17th as a birthday of sorts…

We ended our first year on a bit of a different note – not cycling (we haven’t touched the bikes since the last update in fact) but instead on a ten-day silent meditation retreat. 

This may seem like something of a nonsequitor of course (weren’t we supposed to be biking back to Kenya?), but actually it is just as connected to the biking as anything else we’ve done.  We’ve been interested in learning meditation for some time now, but it was only once we started cycling that we realized just how important it could be for us.  Not that we’re not happy people – we are, we’re the happiest people we know in fact (except for Charlie, who we met in Namibia and who’s been cycling for nine years…) – but something which has surprised us maybe over the past year has been the extent to which external circumstances can only partially bring you happiness. 

You can bike and travel and learn about the world and meet all kinds of extraordinary people, but in the end: wherever you go, there you are.  And if you’re not at peace with yourself, you’ll never be at peace with your surroundings. 

This is something we really learned in the desert – day after day with no distractions your mind just goes on a loop, reviewing every bit of insecurity or stupidity that has ever passed through your life.  You start to feel like you’re biking around the inside of your own head rather than the world. 

And then add to that the fact that we may be happy biking, but that we won’t be biking forever, that someday this will all end – and then what will we do?  What will have been the point of it all if we’re miserable the moment the wheels stop turning?

After reading some about Buddhism (merci Matthieu Richard), we both felt like the time was right to learn some meditation.  Friends in Brussels had told us about Vipassana, and when we e-mailed asking for more information they responded with a link – www.dhamma.org – and the news that there is a center near Cape Town and a class at the end of October. 

Sure, why not?

I don’t think we knew what we were getting into.  I would love to say that we researched various schools of meditation and thought through our choice and evaluated the options… But no, it was just what our friends told us to do.  But that’s okay, it was the right choice for us: Vipassana is non-sectarian and non-religious, it doesn’t cost seven million dollars a day (it’s free), there’s no chanting to any deities, no rituals or rites, just observing reality as experienced by the body at the present moment.  

It sounds so simple… 

And yet, not simple at all.  Two breaths, and up, I’m off wondering whether I left the oven on, but no, I don’t have an oven, though it would be nice to have an oven, I could make quiches and casseroles, and baked ziti – when was the last time I had baked ziti, when was the last time I even heard the word ziti.  Which is a funny word for sure: ziti ziti ziti ziti… and ten minutes have gone by without paying attention to any breaths at all. 

And so on, for eleven hours a day, for ten days straight…

All in silence.  There is no talking allowed, no eye-contact, no smiles or hand signals.  This is a bit of a pain when your wife is sitting across the room from you and you’re sure she might know whether you left the oven on or not, and I’ll admit that we did make eye-contact some after the eighth day, but otherwise there was nothing… 

Though for the rest, the silence wasn’t too difficult for us actually – the cycling helped.  If you have biked across Zambia, Botswana and Namibia, you’ve experienced silence.  Even in a couple, on the road with no villages we still just roll along with no one to talk to.  And then add to that years spent working as a writer – spending my days with no colleagues but the voices in my head – and yeah, silence wasn’t too much of a shock.  Though silence for ten days and not being able to write, that was a bit harder than expected.

And so little by little the exercises got more complicated, though always based on the same idea – observing reality as experienced by the body at the present moment.  After ten days, we were allowed to talk again, and though the week had been full of doubts and frustrations and boredom, suddenly we were all overwhelmed by the feeling that we need to do it again! 

Certainly for our part, we feel like we have taken the first baby steps down a new path.  Vipassana is a valuable tool, but it is deep and complex, and I don’t think we can say after a ten day course that we really grasp where this will lead us.  There is a heap of philosophical reasoning behind all of these exercises, and I haven’t touched on it here but feel free to find books or to visit www.dhamma.org if you would like to learn more. 

I do think we feel more at peace though, if only a little, and so we are trying to continue with our daily meditations to keep that feeling alive.  And who knows, maybe if we have a good enough base in the technique our post-cycling days will be every bit as happy and satisfying as our cycling days.

We have time though – one year down, three (four?  five?  six?) to go!

Posted in South Africa | Tagged | 11 Comments

Western Cape

Posted on 17 October 2010 by Permacyclists

(Photos available here)

Leaving Cape Town wasn’t as easy as we had expected in the end.  After ten months on the road with the south-westernmost city on the continent as our goal, we couldn’t quite tear ourselves away once we got there.  After a few days of wandering, we felt right at home, and even found ourselves whispering to one another: “This looks just like New York!” 

And of course we realize that Cape Town probably doesn’t look like New York to anyone but two cyclists who have come down through Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, Tanzania, Zambia, Botswana, Namibia, and the Northern Cape just to get there.  The city is different from any other we have passed through since we left London: small street-side cafes, art galleries, vintage clothing shops, tons of outdoor stores and bike shops, and all the while this huge mountain a sort of axis mundi in the middle, the city resting around its feet.

Part of traveling well is being able to feel at home wherever you are, and we are definitely getting into the swing of it.  Though of course in Cape Town this was easier because we had such great couch surfing hosts, because we got led up Table Mountain by friends we had met in Botswana, and because people we had never met before and who had no reason to be so kind to us took the time to repair all of our broken camping gear and to offer us tea and advice and even a new used cell phone. 

This country is unbelievable sometimes!

But then get on the road we did, following the southern coast past bays swarming with whales and beaches packed with penguins and along some of the most spectacular riding of the trip so far: rocky mountains looming to our left and crashing straight down into the sea to our right, with just a narrow road somehow carved out of their side.

At Cape Aghulas, we reached the southernmost point of the African continent and then finally got away from the traffic onto some dirt roads to reach the “Garden Route”  – a stretch of coast so named since it was once apparently so beautiful that it was considered a sort of Garden of Eden.

No more, however.  Pine and eucalyptus plantations have taken the place of the indigenous rain forests; only 15% of the forest cover from the 1960′s still remains.  That last bit is struggling to hold on, with fast-growing invasive species like acacia morensii crowding out the slow-growing indigenous fynbos.   Billboards at the entrance to every town tell us that there is a massive drought going on, that reservoirs are down to 12% of capacity in some cities.  With all that deforestation, is this such a surprise?

This then is the other side of the familiar western world we had found in Cape Town; “Civilization” is what we have been told to call it.  Since Zambia, passing travelers and locals alike have been using that word to describe what we would find south of them, usually with a sort of glowing admiration in their eyes: “You’ll like South Africa, it’s really civilized…”

South Africa is what Africa dreams of being.  “Modern,” “developed,” “civilized,” whatever aggrandizing term you want to apply, this is the western world in Africa.  For two cyclists of course, this is not without its upsides: we pass supermarkets daily, the tap-water is drinkable, there are nice municipal campsites where we can end our days – it’s some of the easiest riding we’ve had since our trip to the Netherlands.

At the same time though, the western world comes with its usual set of problems.  Beyond just the destruction of the garden route, we spend entire days biking through man-made deserts: over-grazed pastures, thousand-acre monocultures, ranches of homogenous cows and sheep, and everywhere signs of desert encroaching on the massive industrial farms.

The contradictions of the western system seemed written on the land and people all around us; abundance and scarcity walking hand in hand.  In a typical day we bike through at least one township, and at least one luxurious stretch of enormous country-houses.  Perhaps most telling, one-third of South Africans suffer from obesity; having escaped the trap of under-nourishment, South Africa now joins the wealthy nations in suffering from problems of over-nourishment (or really, just another form of under-nourishment).

The other day, we watched a slide show of our photos from the trip up to this point.  Looking back at all the dirt roads and villages and all the endless streams of children who chased us along all those roads and through all those villages, we were nostalgic for “Africa.”  We almost had to remind ourselves that we were still in Africa, that the road we are rolling our way slowly along runs all the way to Kasama and to Dar es Salaam and to Mfangano Island and all the places we have been to so far, all those places who wish more than anything else that they were this place.

And of course I don’t want to say that Africa doesn’t have its problems, that everything is just perfect up north, but I can’t help but wish a different future for Africa than this one – one that feeds more people without destroying the land; one where greater living standards doesn’t mean greater inequality; one over-nourishment doesn’t replace under-nourishment.

But then… Is such a future even possible? 

Though maybe I can think of all this so calmly because we’re sitting here at Wild Spirit, a hostel that is a sort of island of peace amidst all the madness.  With a serious ecological approach to preserving the land, the forests here are thriving and the people as well.  We came for just one night, expecting to move on in the morning; we were welcomed like family though, and exchanging work for food we have been here for a week.  We spend our days helping in the kitchen and pulling out those acacia morensii that are sucking up the local water and crowding out the local vegetation.  At night, we eat local vegetarian meals on the balcony with a group of people who have become friends.

We move on again tomorrow though, heading back to Cape Town for a 10-day silent meditation retreat and then another family visit.  We hope you are all well, and of course we always welcome comments, questions, anything else people have on their minds…

Posted in South Africa | Tagged , , , , , , | 3 Comments

Namibia

Posted on 28 September 2010 by Permacyclists

Photos available here

Practical Information for cyclists available here

The essence of the route from Windhoek to Cape Town was pretty much summed up in the first two days on the road.

The first day, we learned about water.  That night, despite having been told by several people in Windhoek that there would be “plenty of farms” along the way where we could fill up our bottles, we ran out of water.  The problem wasn’t that there were no farms, but that the farms there were were all either behind locked gates or so far from the road that cycling up to them was out of the question.  In the end, after the sun had set and before the moon, waning but still almost full then, had risen, we were saved by a group of farm workers returning home at the end of the day who showed us where there was water and where we could pitch our tent.

Water was a worry for most of the ride, and though we made an effort to always carry enough, we ran out once more later in Namibia, after a ninety kilometer stretch without even a locked gate or a distant house, and then once more on our first day in South Africa, when a sudden wind storm blew so strong we couldn’t keep our bikes on the road and had to get off and push before the sun set and the sand started blowing in our eyes.

Both times though, we were saved again by the kindness of the locals.  In the first, we happened to find a distant homestead where we could fill up our bottles; in the second, we camped without water, but the next morning were invited to stay and eat and drink to our heart’s content in Steinkopf, the center of the kingdom of Manuel, a Portuguese immigrant and businessman who has such a reputation for welcoming passing cyclists that he has been written of in several books, and that we had even heard of him all the way back in Zambia.

All of this just leads to what we learned our second day cycling out of Windhoek: that people in this part of the world are about as welcoming as any people anywhere could possibly be.  The second day was when we were finishing our lunch break on a dusty dirt road and a truck pulled up with a group of farm workers bearing a note for us: an invitation to stop at the farm down the road for a cold drink. 

Such an invitation is nothing to laugh at when cycling in the driest desert in the world.  We were on our bikes and on the road in a flash, but in the end, Joachim and Adele’s hospitality was such that no matter how fast we arrived at their place, we were hard-pressed to leave, and had to reluctantly tear ourselves away after a cold drink, dinner, a shower, a bed, and breakfast.  Two days later we were welcomed once more by friends of theirs, eventually returning to the road with a bag full of olive oil, olives, spinach, broccoli, carrots, and seven kilos of oranges.  The string of hospitality continued from there on out; with invitations every few days, we were eating well and living the good life for most of the ride down, even up to just outside Cape Town where the wonderful Fauré family invited us in for yet another good night’s sleep and even our first South African braai (picture it as a sort of BBQ on steroids).

The nights sitting and talking with our hosts, clean and warm inside, were particular treasures since the days on the road were about as hard as any we’ve yet had.  We took dirt roads most of the way, and between the corrugations and ruts and sand patches and the 40°C winter heat, there was rarely a day we didn’t end up pushing and sweating and earning every kilometer.  The recompense came at the end though, when, if not invited by a local farmer who took pity on us, we would camp along the side of the road in the crisp cool silent desert night.  The stars were almost bright enough to read by, and the traffic so light that we could have pitched our tent in the middle of the road and not had a problem. 

Though most of this changed in South Africa.  Since the night camping in the bush during the sand storm, we have been sticking to campgrounds when not invited, and doing a little couch surfing along the way as well.  All is just as well though, since our gear has been wearing down these past thousand kilometers.  We snapped a tent pole, our tent fly has developed innumerable small holes, our stove is broken, our camera lens is broken, and I burned through two pairs of sunglasses. 

Which I suppose gives the impression that we limped our way into Cape Town, but the truth is far from it.  With all the wonderful people we have met these past few weeks, we are actually enjoying ourselves as much as we ever have, and if our things are broken, our spirits are as high as ever.  Riding into town at last, cars stopping next to us at lights to ask us where we had been biking from, Table Mountain finally looming above us after so many months on the road was a real reward.  For ten months now, when people asked us where we were going, “Cape Town” was our answer, eliciting laughs or grimaces or grunts of disbelief eventually yielding to “It’s all downhill from here” (never true) and “You’re not far!”

And now here we are!

We’ve spent the past days getting our gear back in working order, which in this wonderful country has meant even more welcoming people going out of their way to help two wandering cyclists.  If there is a more friendly part of the world, then I don’t know where it is. 

This past weekend was national heritage day in South Africa, a national holiday also known as “Braai Day.”  Desmond Tutu himself, in a radio message, urged the whole nation to celebrate South Africa with a braai and we were happy to oblige. 

And now when people ask us where we’re going? 

We say: Kenya!

Posted in Namibia, South Africa | Tagged , , , | 3 Comments

Photo Update: Namibia

Posted on 3 September 2010 by Permacyclists

Well, it’s everyone’s favorite time- when we update our website without all the blabla that usually accompanies such occasions! Yes, it’s just photos, taken this time during the three weeks spent driving around Namibia with Anna’s father and brother. We managed to cover 4000km in three weeks (or half of the distance we had biked through 8 months), and hopefully the photos capture a fraction of the amazing things we saw.

Now we are sitting at a campground along the Orange River just on the border with South Africa. We’ll cross over tomorrow, hoping to make it at long last to the Cape of Good Hope in a few weeks’ time.

Hope all is well with you, and bonne rentrée!

Posted in Namibia | Tagged , | 1 Comment

Botswana

Posted on 15 August 2010 by Permacyclists


Photos available here.

Practical information for cyclists available here.

When you’re pedaling for your second day in a Namibian national park, and you know that you’re fifty kilometers from the next human habitation and that there are elephants, leopards, and lions somewhere around, the sight of the sun nearing the western horizon is not uplifting: you just want to get the hell out of there.

And so it is on our second day in the Bwabwata National Park in the Caprivi Strip, though we actually haven’t seen any of those animals.  We have been assured they’re around by every person we meet, and there have been plenty of signs along the road to warn us of their presence, but actual animals have been limited to a group of kudu a hundred kilometers behind us.  We begin to doubt the existence of any elephants – and lions?  pure myth! 

“Let’s just camp here,” Anna says as the sun disappears over the horizon. “There aren’t any animals.”

“There aren’t any animals” – the African equivalent of “It could be worse – it could be raining!” – in the next two kilometers we startle two groups of elephants eating calmly in the bush by the road – sending them running off into the trees, quickly lost from view in the dusk light.

We decide not to camp here.

We bike on under moonlight to the edge of the park where a group of workers repairing the fence make room for our tent at their campsite.  Dinner is pasta with beans, the more luxurious of the two meals which will sustain us for most of the way to Windhoek (the other being rice and beans).  There is not enough water to wash, but we have enough to make tea, and along with our neighbors we are asleep by ten o’clock, glad that the animal noises around us come from the other side of a huge electrified fence. 

It was a longer day than expected obviously, but waking up the next morning we are glad – this means we will arrive in Botswana on July 1st, Seretse Khama Day.  We’re big fans of Seretse Khama, the first president of Botswana, who was a natural leader and yet who almost never got a chance to lead, enduring seven years of exile in the UK because the British government, ignoring the popular wishes of the Bamangwata people, did not want to offend the South Africans and Rhodesians by allowing an African leader to be married to a white woman.  And then we say Africans don’t know about democracy…

In the end, I don’t know what we expected to find on Seretse Khama Day exactly, but I’ll admit it was a disappointment.  The only sign of the holiday was that the banks were closed, and we had to spend an extra night at the border to change money. 

Our route was to take us along the west bank of the Okavango river and then across the Kalahari into Windhoek.  There were three things we knew about Botswana when we arrived: Seretse Khama was a good president, the San (the “bushmen”) still lived there, and the Okavango river delta is one of the natural wonders of the world. 

With Seretse Khama Day a bit of a bust, we went on then to Tsodilo Hills, one of the major sites for San rock paintings and for traditional San religion.  We had changed our whole route to pass by here, inspired like most visitors by the stories of Laurens Van der Post, a South African who wrote about Tsodilo in the 1950′s when he set out to contact San communities still living autonomously in the Kalahari.  The book about the expedition, The Lost World of the Kalahari, is a great bit of writing, though it epitomizes the problems of modern traveling and travel writing: Van der Post has an authentic experience of an increasingly rare culture, he writes about it to protect it, and then hordes of tourists, anthropologists, and cycling hobos like ourselves read his book and set out to find that same experience.  The rest is obvious: tourists want authentic culture but they don’t want to walk (build roads!), or sleep out of doors (luxury hotels!), or even think of a dirty bathroom (flush toilets! showers! swimming pools in the desert!). 

Writing in the fifties, Van der Post describes Tsodilo in a pristine state, almost unknown to the outside world, still an important religious site; writing in the eighties, in The Voice of the Thunder, he laments what the site ultimately became and the role he inadvertently played in the process, with an airstrip recently built to allow overweight western tourists to come spend a few hours looking at the thousands of paintings and the San reduced to selling cheaply made bows and arrows to earn enough money to eat.  While we were there, Tsetsana, our San guide, told us there are plans to start a game park in the area.  No matter that there is no permanent animal population or permanent water, the idea is to drill a new bore hole, build fences, and bring in the menagerie. 

“Tourists like to see animals,” she told us. 

Indeed.

What is perhaps the final act for the San though came at the end of July, when we were already in Namibia and the Botswana supreme court ruled that the last San communities still living in the Kalahari Game Reserve, while having a legal right to their land had no right to the water which would allow them to stay on that land or to dig new water holes.  What the eventual result will be is unclear, but the prospects that any San will be able to remain in the Kalahari, 450km from permanent water, are unlikely.  Meanwhile, a luxury tourist lodge (with swimming pool!) has opened in the reserve, using the very water the San are not allowed to touch.  I can just picture the San artwork which they must be using to decorate their walls, the quotes from Van der Post in their publicity materials… 

Though at the same time, it is not just tourism that is behind all this – the Kalahari also represents one of the world’s major sources of diamonds, and with the diamond trade 45% of Botswana’s GDP, the last bit of land the San claimed as their own after 2000 years of being squeezed out of the region first by the Bantu expansion and then by European settlers, is at last far too valuable  to be left to “uncivilized” people such as themselves…

It is the present day equivalent of the genocide of the American Indians, and we could see it all playing out along the route, whether it was the village of D’kar, built by a San community to give themselves a place to live outside the government reserves, where the familiar scars of fourth world poverty were written on the faces of everyone we saw, or at Tsodilo where we were lucky to be in town for the local dance competition, with both San and Batswana adolescents together dancing traditional Bantu dances and performing dramas on drugs and AIDS in Setswana… 
 
From Tsodilo, we pedaled out to the main road and continued south along the western shore of the Okavango.  We had some worries about being able to see the Okavango, since one other thing that Botswana is famous for how insanely expensive it is for tourists.  And yet, after a few days of searching in Etsha 6, we found ourselves there, in a flat-bottomed boat, gliding through the Okavango Delta.  There are more details about how we worked out an affordable trip in the section for cyclists, but suffice it to say it is possible, don’t listen to the Lonely Planet. 

The delta itself is overwhelming.  The floods this year were exceptional, and we pushed off from the shore six kilometers away from the normal debarking point, gliding through submerged fields for the first hour before reaching the main channel and the endless stretches of reeds and papyrus that make up most of the delta.  A narrow channel no wider than the boat was the only sign of any human presence; the occasional island peeking out now and then though sitting at water level it was always a surprise when it did.  Our guide, John, born in a village in the delta, never hesitated during the two day trip though, not when the narrow channel seemed to vanish, not when there were elephants passing by our campground, not even when we were charged by a hippo.  Well, a little when we were charged by a hippo… 

Getting back to the mainland, we floated along in the bubble that an experience of pure wilderness gives, where suddenly the world of humans seems impossibly loud and face-paced and just generally bothersome. 

It was only later that we learned how rare this experience may one day be – the Okavango river is fed mainly from the rains in Angola, and both of Botswana’s upstream neighbors, Angola and Namibia, have been exploring plans to dam the river for irrigation and hydroelectricity.  The result would be catastrophic for the delta, which relies on the unique characteristics of the Okavango river to avoid drying out in the dry season, making it the major source of permanent water in the Kalahari and a tremendous economic and environmental resource for the people who fish and herd and guide tourists there.  You would like to think it would never happen, that human beings are too smart to destroy something so complex – and yet it’s just what we have done to the Hadejia-Nguru wetland, the Logone river, the Hamoun wetland, the Aral Sea, the Rio Grande, the Yellow River…  The list goes on and on..

Coming back from the delta, we were basically in Windhoek, just a little question of a thousand kilometers of Kalahari desert to cross.  Once again, we found ourselves pedaling along, fighting the wind and the mental battles that make up a ten day stretch with almost no change in scenery: flat gray sand scattered with clumps of dry brown grass, squat trees and shrubs with menacing thorns stretching off into the distance.  The Kalahari is actually classified as a semi-arid region, and there are huge stores of underground water which help feed the vegetation; there are also more classical desert sections of sand dunes, but not anywhere you would choose to bike.

The days began to take a familiar rhythm, waking up with the sun to break the ice on our water bottles before cooking breakfast (it’s winter here), then fighting the wind and boredom for five hours with occasional breaks for snacks, all the while trying to make sure we reach the next decent-sized town so that we can fill up on water.  The first bit of uphill we reached was just on the Namibian side of the border and at its top that we met Charlie – cycling around the world for nine years now.  He is the sixth cyclist we have met this trip, and by far the most experienced, so we managed to corner him for tips on all the various routes to come, on all the countries we would like to visit.  Charlie had just returned to Africa after a stint in Asia – “It’s too fucking easy there,” he told us. “I missed Africa.” 

After a few rest days couch surfing in Gobabis, we then made the final two day push into Windhoek, with our bikes giving out on the last hills in town, our chains gliding along the gears without any purchase, and my chain snapping in two.  There is a great bike shop in Windhoek though, and after they diagnosed stretched chains and pledged to nurse our babies back into shape, we slept easy.  And yeah, we also slept easy since we had a decent bed for once – Anna’s family were in town to visit…

We’ll have another update in a few weeks, as always, feel free to sign up for the Google Group if you want an e-mail notification when we post. And thanks as always for all your support and encouragment!

[And for more information about Seretse Khama, try the book Color Bar by Ruth Williams; for more information on the state of the world's rivers, try When the Rivers Run Dry by Fred Pearce]

Posted in Botswana, Namibia | Tagged , , , , , | 5 Comments

Zambia

Posted on 20 July 2010 by Permacyclists

 

Photos available here

Practical information for cyclists available here

So, in early June we set out from Kasama to make our way south, heading through Lusaka and Livingstone (Victoria Falls) to the Namibian border and the Caprivi Strip.  In total, it was about 1500 kilometers of riding through some of the dullest terrain imaginable…

But no, it wasn’t all that bad.  Part of the problem I think is just that when we imagine biking in Africa while we’re sitting in an office in Europe or the US  and we haven’t seen the sun for three days, we imagine it as jungles and savannahs and constant excitement and adventure.  In reality though, there are long long stretches like northern Zambia, where the terrain is flat, the road is straight and well-paved, the traffic is light, and the villages or towns which might break the monotony are hours of riding apart.  I picture it as something like biking across Nebraska maybe, or North Dakota – not something to rush out and do right away…

Though that is just the biking, and if we have had to focus and push ourselves to make it through our five hours in the saddle, it has been all the easier since where we end the day has been all the adventure we could hope for. 

There was the night early on, for instance, spent in a small village near the Tanzanian border.  Francis, who cycled along next to us at the end of the day and invited us to his home, set us out on a mat before his house after dinner and then essentially played the role of MC for two hours as all the children of the village huddled around us to ask questions about our trip, to learn more about the first whites to have visited their village in two years – for many of the children the first they had ever seen. 

And yet their questions were the same as anywhere else – How far do you bike a day?  What do you do about wild animals?  Where do you sleep at the end of the day? 

In the end, after establishing that Anna is Catholic and Dave a Protestant (it’s easiest this way), the whole village announced that they approved greatly of our mixed marriage, and set out to sing hymns, taking turns between the Catholics, the Protestants, and the Jehovah’s Witnesses, though in reality everyone seemed to know the words to all the songs. 

“Will you sing for us now?” Francis asked then – a rare request for any member of the Meyer family to hear. 

We paused, thought it over, debated any songs we might know in French and English, preferably religious of course lest we blow our cover…  We settled on ‘Silent Night’ – not the best choice evidently since after the first syllable the entire village burst out laughing and didn’t stop for at least ten minutes.  We laughed along with them though, it’s just how things work here sometimes: if you can’t laugh at yourself, you won’t last long.

And there were plenty of other notable nights as well: the night spent camped in the front yard of the local witch doctor’s house (the first thing she said to us was: “Do you have pills for my knees?” – as her son explained to us, “She isn’t that kind of doctor…”), visiting the local chief the next morning for a royal audience (he gave us a bag of peanuts); the night spent watching WWF Wresting DVD’s in Paul’s jam-packed home, his baby melting into tears every time he looked at us, the ghosts sitting in his living room; the night spent camped at the base of a cell phone tower, guarded by a team of men who assured us every few minutes that we were perfectly safe there; the night on the crocodile farm; the night treated to a massive feast by two development volunteers in Mpika; or even just the numerous nights spent camping in the endless Zambian bush wherever our five hours of cycling happened to leave us – even if it was just the tall grass on a hilltop not ten meters from the passing trucks..

The biggest challenge – other than biking five hours through terrain so exciting that you could mistakenly think you were just passing the same tree over and over, though the arrow-straight road would cure  you of that notion soon enough – has been the lack of restaurants  In East Africa, the short break for tea and chapati, or beans and rice, came to be our lifeblood – a great way to meet people and to see local villages.  Zambians haven’t quite taken the tea culture of their eastern neighbors though (the lack of a Swahili influence maybe?) and so the tea and lunch breaks have been replaced by cans of beans and water along the side of the road.

Another change has been in the reception we get as whites – never an easy question in Africa.  In the east, everyone assumed we were rich of course, the same seems to be true everywhere we go.  At the same time though, people didn’t seem to care that we were white really, or if they did it was more because it was a funny and curious thing, and people would often approach us to talk and find out more about where we were from. 

In Zambia though, the further south we went, the more we started feeling suspicion, initial coldness from people.  Though of course once you break the ice they are as warm and welcoming as anywhere else – at first though…

It is a different history down here.  Zambia, formerly the colony of Northern Rhodesia, was exploited by the British essentially as a mining enterprise (copper primarily, though as a couple of geologists we met in Livingstone told us, there may be a whole lot more than that in Zambian soils), with the proceeds being heavily invested in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) where there was a more substantial white population.  It was only through great efforts on the part of Zambian (and Malawian) exiles at the time that the colony (along with Nyasaland – Malawi) was not simply combined with its southern neighbors in fact, and thus subsumed by their racist governments. 

Even after independence, the presence of the racist governments of Namibia (part of South Africa at the time) and Rhodesia on Zambia’s borders remained a menace – combining with Angola and the DRC to make for as difficult a regional situation as any African country can claim to have faced, with the exception maybe of another of Zambia’s neighbors, Botswana.

Today things are even more complex: many of the white Zimbabweans who have fled the catastrophe Mugabe created in Zimbabwe have come to settle in Zambia, often at the invitation of the Zambian government.  We were surprised often as we biked along roads lined with enormous conventional farms (again, picture Nebraska) to see pick-up trucks driven with one white man (invariably overweight) in the front and several blacks (invariably thin) in the back.  It felt almost like biking through the Jim Crow south sometimes…

One night for instance, a local white farmer offered to let us pitch our tent on his land, even letting us load our bikes and bags into his pickup truck for the 2km backtrack to his drive-way.  We lifted them in with the help of the black farm manager who was also there.  When we made to ride in the back though, we were invited up front – the farm manager can ride in the bed with the bikes of course. 

After dropping us off, our host set off again into the cold dusk – alone in the cab now, shouting orders all the while out the window to the manager, still holding on the roof and riding in the bed…

When people twice my age start calling me “Boss” at every introduction, I start feeling a little weird. 

This is a sign we are getting farther south though, closer to the Republic of South Africa, the “Rainbow Nation,” and we are excited to feel like we are moving along, curious to see what lies ahead.  For all the long stretches of open road, Zambia is a beautiful country with wonderful people, and it was not without some sadness that we crossed the border into Namibia at the end of the month…

Otherwise, all is well, thank you as always for your comments and messages of encouragement, they brighten our days to say the least! Our apologies also for the sporadic nature of our updates, but good internet can be hard to come by.  If you would like an e-mail notification every time we add a post, don’t hesitate to sign up for our Google Group!  Thanks!

Posted in Zambia | Tagged , , , | 7 Comments