The Yoga Experiment

What exactly it was that possessed me to embark on a run still escapes me. Maybe it’s the stomach that is shrinking at a frustratingly slow rate even after 860km’s in the saddle. To add to the stupidity, I was running with Jim, a fitness freak of nature who casually decided to run up a mountain in Addis, and I wasn’t fully recovered from a bout of some sickness that started as a throat irritation before proceeding to all but shut down the sinuses before landing me with a phlegm-ridden cough. My chest was tight and nose running faster than my legs when I turned into the driveway of our mountain retreat, adding to which I had a good dual stitch going on and my calf was one optimistic movement away from cramping. Unfortunately, the latter duo couldn’t be blamed on the illness, rather from the naivety that led me to believe that a week of playing cricket during the day and drinking at night would somehow have a positive effect on my fitness levels. At least life amongst Eastern Cape farmers offered the consolation that I wasn’t the only one to be misled in such a fashion.

Breathing heavily, I stumbled into the lounge only to find a little yoga session on the go, spearheaded by an outrageously flexible Roby, whose every move was being attempted, all less successfully, by Tom, Matt, Daddy and Roby’s boyfriend, Michael. Near the end of their session of breathing and stretching in relative silence, Tom was showing how inflexible he had become since his knee injury while I noted to myself that the gap between his fingers and toes in full stretch was half that of mine when I - at-most annually - did the identical stretch.

Foolishly – it seems it was my day to play the village idiot – I sat down next to Tom attempting to replicate his stretch. I failed dismally. By this time the rest of the yoga class had retired from their session for a good chuckle, leaving Daddy behind with the enormous challenge of trying to get my fingers closer to my toes than to my knees. Considering he spent Friday through Sunday teaching drama and music to disabled children in a nearby town, I can only imagine Daddy thought the challenge an easy one in comparison. How wrong he was.

Within the first minutes of my debut Yoga class – something I had avoided at all costs after being put to shame a few years back in a Taebo class full of Kenton pensioners who could kick their feet up twice the height I managed – I gathered that breathing had an integral part to play in what I always considered a series of stretching exercises designed for earth-loving hippies. With my inability to achieve any notable breathing through my ailing nose, the impetus on breathing was all but lost on me.

Add to the fact that I was breathing like a Kudu shot in the neck – not by me, I’m a horrible shot – that I am not supple by any stretch of the imagination and any spectator has a show on their hands worthy of a circus in the days when it was still OK to parade blue-painted midgets around with Christmas hats and diapers. I can’t cross my legs – my knees are so high when I try that they act as a chin rest -, I can’t touch my toes unless my knees are bent at 90 degrees and when I was told to lie down with the back of my hands against the floor, my fingers curled up like a 90 year old with severe arthritis – think cricket umpire, Billy Bowden signalling a six. Maybe the fact that I was English speaking in my Afrikaans pre-primary wasn’t the only reason I was picked on.

While Daddy was talking in quiet, calm tones as I struggled to keep my eyes closed amongst the odd snigger here and there, my mind raced and gladly accepted the hypothesis that the reason my disgraceful lack of athletic ability that saw me running neck-to-neck alongside the 1^st team props in the 100 metre trials in matric – we were all doing it as a joke although the hilarity wore off a bit when I heard my groin snap – despite my mother being awarded honours for her feats on the athletics track was simply because I had not unlocked the potential of my rusty old muscles on an eternal sabbatical. Wishful thinking.

Daddy muttered a number of things to me in an attempt to relax my body and mind, one of which was: “Think about what you’re going to do today”. Despite my struggles to synchronize my breathing in the hope that it might ease the pins and needles developing along my calf it wasn’t difficult to fit in the probable program for the day. Our days in the retreat have already become a blur of relaxation achieved through reading, writing and delving in a bit of Canasta and Scrabble with the last hours of the evening, after the days supply of solar power and the generators fuel has run out, spent staring into the blue and orange flickering flames keeping us warm on the patio of our forest hideout.

Red Lorry, Yellow Lorry, Broken Lorry

Whereas last time I wrote what could probably be considered a short story about Ethiopia in the restaurant of a hotel that was so ridden with bed bugs that I am still scratching 4 days after leaving, in a town that had one computer with access to the internet that could only be used if you successfully coaxed the owners nephew from his umpteenth consecutive FIFA 98 game, I find myself writing this piece in a rather different setting: On the couch of a lodge tucked away in a forest at the foothills of Mount Kenya, a mere 10km south of the equator – which we crossed yesterday - after a breakfast of scrambled eggs and potato fritters made for us by the Lodge manager, Roby.

Having cooked up a storm including chipati – the Kenyan starch staple which is essentially a savoury pancake – and beef stew the night before, we negotiated our way through the awkwardness of not knowing if the meal she was cooking was for us or herself and her two friends, Daddy and Alacoque, who all work in various forms of theatre with the owner of the lodge, Keith Pearson. Supper was followed by a read on the outside porch in front of a roaring fire, keeping us warm from the crisp evening air. All the initial luxuries of our indefinite stay in Karichota Lodge, 15km south of Nanyuki, may seem somewhat out of character with the adventure we’re on and may even raise some eyebrows of those thinking of our trip as a year of roughing it, but I couldn’t care less, particularly in the light of the circumstances that landed us here from the Ethio-Kenya border town of Moyale.

Having crossed the border not long before the closing time of 6pm, Frank Alice Adams continued a little ritual of refusing to budge an inch every time he touched down on a new country’s soil. With Tom forced to push Frank with the help of ten locals at a time all laying a finger on Frank in an effort to claim a reward that Tom made perfectly clear he was not dishing out having not asked for nor needed the help, we found our way to a cheap hotel on the battered and excessively eroded dirt roads with the guidance of our self-appointed fixer, Alex – whose help we had also not requested let alone hinted at.

On the Ethiopian side of the border, prior to our in-the-nick-of-time crossing, we met Alex, a German cyclist a year out of high school who was cycling from Egypt to South Africa via a layover in Malawi to visit his girlfriend working on a school aid project (www.AidAndTravel.de). The five of us checked into a cheap hotel compound costing 300 shillings a person – a shilling having one-tenth the value of a rand -, rinsed ourselves off in a bucket shower and headed out in search of Kenya’s famous Tusker beer after warding off the mandatory attempt to rip us off by charging us for the unused bed in a 3 man room that we got placed into, despite the availability of a 2 man room a few rooms down. When it comes to dealings with the white man – Mzungu in Swahili as opposed to the previously loathed Ferengi in Amharic – locals are predictable in their attempts to wring us like a soaked towel of every last cent.

The next day we rose early, having to commandeer ourselves a truck after yet another failed attempt to grant us one at extortionate prices on the Ethiopian side the evening before to take us to the town of Isiolo, 560km south of Moyale, as the roads were all but impassable by bicycle and even more so by the fragile, beaten-to-shit Frank who was as mobile and useful as an 80-year-old man post heart-attack, stroke and triple bypass and one bout of flu away from being wheelchair bound for the rest of his existence. Add to the dilapidated roads the threat of bandits –shifters – fabled to patrol the roads, we decided it prudent to jump on the back of the lorry that parked outside our hotel just after 6 the next morning thanks to the fixer Alex, whose services we had dismissed the night before and his co-fixer, DJ Lia Lia dot com who we had chatted to the previous night, albeit somewhat circumspectly after we discovered a swastika scar that had been engraved into his skin on his upper arm – “young, stupid and drunk” was his excuse. The Lorry was already packed 6 bags of 90kg red kidney beans high and covered with a tarpaulin protecting it from the rain that had been coming down all morning.

We loaded our bicycle, bags and, with great effort, Frank onto the pile of beans hastily so as to allow the truck to negotiate the horrendous side-roads leading to our hotel in what had turned into driving rain. Having done so successfully, we were dropped off at a little café and treated ourselves to baked beans and chipati for breakfast as well as a cup of tea and coffee, both drinks severely lacking in quality compared to their Ethiopian counterparts. We had negotiated a price of 1500KES per person for the trip south, the same price for each bike and somewhat of a premium for Frank, who had to make the trip all the way to Nairobi for a standard patch up job.

Being the first ones on the back of the lorry, getting on an hour before our 10:30am departure, we found ourselves the most comfortable spots we could muster before locals started climbing the ladder and entering our little tarpaulin-covered cabin. The rain ceased as we took off in what we expected was a convoy of trucks, with the company of about 8 other people under the tarpaulin, 6 or so on top of it and about 5 crammed into the front of the lorry.
Although the border town of Moyale had a significant Ethiopian influence, the first two noticeable differences we encountered with the Kenyan people were the rounder cheeks and English proficiency, two traits that are in all likelihood after-effects of Kenya’s years as a British colony. Our fellow cabin-dwellers, mostly women, took to us somewhat after we started bouncing off Swahili words we had been learning. Despite the attempts at learning, picking up anything from conversations was futile as they were either too fast or not actually in Swahili but rather the language of the north, something starting with a ‘b’ – I’m no encyclopaedia, look it up yourself.

After a few bumps that gave us all a bit of airtime, no more so than Matt, Tom and Frank who were all placed directly above the rear axle of the 6-wheeler, and a moment where it seemed the truck was a touch away from toppling over onto its side, one particularly aggressive bump that would have led you to swear the driver had a career in motocross brought the truck to a halt as masses of dust entered the tarpaulin and settled amongst us, our bags and the bikes. Not surprisingly, the suspension had taken a serious knock, but seemingly not enough that the driver and his crew of 3 couldn’t beat back into working order after a delay of nearly an hour. Having peered above the tarpaulin for the first time in the trip we discovered that we were not, as previously suspected, in a convoy at all. We were just a lone, old, suspension-less truck trudging along barely recognisable roads at what couldn’t have been more than 30km/hour.

Not too long after we set off again – although time was somewhat of a mystery in the back of the truck that gave off the aura of a cargo hold in an old pirate ship with frayed ropes bearing a stark resemblance to Chen’s dreadlocks hanging down from metal beams – we heard the loud bang of the tyre bursting. The reactions of Tom and Alex were too much for the locals, who packed out laughing seemingly unperturbed by the fact that another delay was on the cards. The process of changing the tyre and tube was not a simple matter of chucking on the spares as it turned out that every spare tube was far from puncture-free and none in current working condition. Having tried, failed and tried again at fixing a number of the spare tubes with glue and pieces of rubber cut from the most unsalvageable of tubes we were once again mobile… some 3 hours later.

Day turned to night and our hopes of being in Isiolo on the evening of our departure had long since faded. It was midnight by the time we got to our halfway stop of Marsabit, where most of our fellow travellers jumped out. Without warning, the driver and his crew took off to a hotel for the night and left us trying desperately to find comfort and warmth amongst the bags of beans, bodies of travellers and accumulation of dust. The dust had gathered as much on our bodies and in our hair as it did on the bags and bikes and our filth was hardly a consideration amongst the largely failed attempts at coaxing ourselves into a slumber.

After repeated stops at checkpoints where friendly army and police officials requested the ID’s of passengers and the passports of Mzungu’s – unless you put on a sad face and said your passport was buried in the pile of bags under the cover – we clocked up our 24th hour in the back of the truck, documenting the moment in mock achievement in between two more breakdowns, one involving some form of engine failure and the other a broken bearing in the drive shaft that condemned us to the use of only the first 3 gears for the rest of the trip.

Having decided to write off the prospect of cycling the 100km distance between our initial destination of Isiolo and Karichota Lodge, near Nanyuki, we managed to get the driver – who happened not to be the man who had claimed to be the owner and driver in Moyale and with whom we had negotiated our journey – to agree to drop us off later on in his journey to Nairobi through a mixture of hand signals, broken English and the offering of a lukewarm Coke.

After dropping off the rest of the passengers in Isiolo, we were joined in our cabin by the 3 chaps forming the crew of the lorry and a 19 year old fellow on his way to work with his brother in Nairobi who had a relatively good grasp of the English language and explained how he had worked for his brother-in-law’s wholesaler for 3 years but didn’t receive a cent for his efforts after he had asked his sister’s husband to accumulate the money for him and pay him out at a later date. A camaraderie of sorts developed between the 9 of us as we shared the food we had been eating along the way – plain rolls, mini-vetkoeks, biscuits and a few bit-sized pieces of fudge. Our tarpaulins, spare jackets and a mat that I had used as a mattress the night before all became makeshift blankets for our new friends as our second truck-bound evening brought with it a chilly breeze.

Come 9 o’clock that evening, we finally pulled over on the side of the road in Nanyuki, the town which represented the end of our dusty, uncomfortable and most definitely unforgettable 36 hour experience having covered a mere 650km – a trip that would normally take a 6th of the time under normal circumstances back home. Jim, Alex and I said a temporary farewell to Tom and Matt - who had decided to leave his bike with us and go on to Nairobi to offer Tom some company and moral support – and pushed the four bicycles off into the crisp night air to find ourselves a bed for the night. After asking a few locals who were at an initial loss for words as to why the 3 of us were pushing around 4 bikes after 9 at night we were pointed in the direction of a hotel that allowed us to crash in a two man room at the standard price - 900KES for the room. Unbelievably, the hotel had a hot shower - which I flatly refused to believe after being told as much by one of the staff – as well as a little restaurant with four televisions showing DSTV.
The next morning, after a fantastic nights rest and an even better shower, we ventured into the city for a walk which included a visit to an internet café – the first one with a functioning connection since Addis – and a Spar-sized supermarket situated in amongst quaint and colourful shops offering a variety of goods and services, clean streets and overlooked by the snow-capped peak of Mount Kenya. With a week – give or take – at a mountainside retreat, I am in absolutely no rush to leave Kenya!

Ethiopa's Cycling Circus

I seem to recall that sometime in my high school English classes we touched on the topic of travel writing. If we did, I recall absolutely none of the skills the lessons were meant to embed. As far as the subject goes, my English career consisted of manufactured B’s and C’s achieved through minimal effort and scant enthusiasm. This changed somewhat when I managed to morph a topic into a chance to write or speak about sport. Humans are competitive souls - few more so than me -, sport is little more than formalised, score-keeping competition. Simple arithmetic (or is it algebra?)allowed me to relate most assignments with the slightest bit of wiggle room to some aspect of competition, and hence sport.

I now find myself a few thousand kilometres from the nearest bar televising Super Rugby and a few more thousand K’s from a cricket bat. Cycling isn’t really a sport, it’s an activity. At its most competitive, cycling is a race. Although I could pretend that cycling is a sport by referring to some obscure sports encyclopaedia like I am sure figure skaters and chess players oft do, this trip is about travel and my bicycle is no more than my means of transport - sorry Nelson.

We left Addis Ababa two weeks ago, and after an attempt to write about our stay there which I was not entirely happy with, I thought I’d give a journal format a bash. I’ve read a few of the kind, most notably Kingsley Holgate’s version of his ‘Africa Odyssey’, and tossed the book aside after a tiresome series of: “We got up, went there, did this, ate that, got bitten by mosquitoes, slept”. I might not have a glorious beard, but I’m hoping that where I lack facial hair of any significance, I can make up for it in telling a better story. Do not fear though, I am still working on the beard!

ETHIOPIA – THE CYCLING CIRCUS

Day 1 – Tuesday April 3^rd

Despite my body clock being significantly different to the rest of the chaps, waking up at 6:30am wasn’t as difficult as I had anticipated thanks to the pure excitement of hitting the road that had built up during my two week stay in the Ethiopian capital. The final stages of packing our lives into four pannier bags had to be completed in an equitable fashion so as not to avoid toppling over on my way out of the front gate, much to Tom and his cameras disappointment.

We navigated our way out the city with surprising ease thanks solely to a motorbike escort from Saeed, an avid motorbike traveller Matt had met in Sudan who had also volunteered his services to help Tom – who was staying in Addis - fashion Frank into a machine that resembled a working motorbike and not a museum centre-piece.

It took between 20-30 km’s of cycling to get out of the city itself thanks to a quick pitstop at Saeed’s home for a snack as well as the fact that suburbs on the edge of town are in the process of being built from nothing in an attempt to move all the inner-city shack dwellers to respectable looking apartments that will eventually be connected to the centre of town by some form of rail system.

While the sight of buildings and on-going construction subsided, the sight of people did not. The countryside outside of Addis was a mass of rolling, brown hills yearning for the start of the much talked about long rains that had hinted their arrival through almost nightly rainfall over our last week in Addis. We could hardly cycle 100m without passing human life gawking at our trio; helmet, sunglasses and spandex wearing aliens cruising bye. No matter the age, it seemed that most of the children and adults were out herding donkeys heavily laden with hay. On stopping for a break, a group of 6 young kids-come-herders watched intently as we sucked on our camelbacks and ate a few bananas while their donkeys continued on their merry way completely unattended.

The silent staring of our first stop was in complete contrast to the reactions we got when we cycled by. The sight of us would lead children to run back into their homes and notify all and sundry of our impending arrival or passing-by with shouts of: “Ferengi!” Having been warned by Matt and Jim about the excessive attention we would attract on our travels I had decided to adopt a ‘Smile and Wave’ approach to all onlookers, whether hostile or friendly. Hostility was very much a part of the first day, particularly as we passed through small villages. As my waves met deathly glares, the smile on my face became physically difficult to maintain, as it might in the 4^th retake of a family photo. Where we weren’t met by a glare or a reciprocation of the smile and wave, little kids would shout out: “money!” Whether all of them knew what the hell they were saying was highly doubtful because their cries were often accompanied by a smile and a wave from the safety of their little houses.

60km’s in, on our arrival in a small town, we considered calling it a day. The fact that the next town was a mere 10km’s away and that our arrival was far from well received with a stone being hurled at Matt followed by a close encounter with a panga-armed drunk lead us to push on a bit more before finally calling it a day.

A few hills, raw hands and a not-so-kind diagonal headwind meant that we were easily persuaded to call it a day at the first hotel we found in Lemen having covered 73km’s of a planned 280km before our first rest day. It didn’t take me long to realise that the word ‘hotel’ is used particularly liberally in Ethiopia with my first example being one with no electricity or running water and toilets that were no more than six door-less cubicles with holes in the ground that had been visited by apparently aimless patrons. The hotel set us back the equivalent of R20. The low price of hotels and the lack of any privacy absolutely anywhere on the road meant that camping had been set aside for emergencies only during our time in Ethiopia.

Distance: 73km                 Time on bike: 3h37

Day 2 – Wednesday April 4^th

With the unenviable start of a 2.5km climb to do with raw hands now covered with cycling gloves and a serious sunburn on the inside of my elbow where I had neglected to put any of what might be Ethiopia’s most scarce resource, sunblock, we set off for the reasonably sized, map-worthy town of Butajira. The tough start turned into a tough initial 20km’s where my lack of preparation showed as I trailed Matt and Jim by some way. The further South we went, the more noticeable was the tinge of green coming through where the yellow grass had been before. Also noticeable was an upturn in the friendliness of our many spectators. This friendliness came to the fore through the owner of a hotel who, after serving us a great variant shiro with injera – think a pizza sized, dark pancake – offered us a bed for a post-lunch nap free of charge. Even better news was that his hotel had a standard toilet, albeit flushed with a bucket – result!

The road became kind as we made our way to our destination, passing a few hundred school children on their way home and a group of friendly, talkative electricians who passed us a few times themselves as they made their rounds from one electrical pole to the next. We were also passed by a photographer on his way to capture the most remote parts of the tribal Omo Valley who Matt had previously met and whose guide I had met a few days earlier with Saeed. As they cruised off on their motorbikes up a long hill we were on our way up, I had to think long and hard about the rationalization of doing this trip on a bicycle and not something that didn’t involve excessive sweating, aching legs and a rather sore bottom.

Nonetheless, the second day of cycling was somewhat of a breakthrough mentally as I came to terms with the temporary pain that burnt through my quads during each and every uphill as well as the unavoidable tenderness of my backside that I hoped would cease to exist sooner rather than later.

With the clouds circling us and steadily closing in and the wind as fickle as the Newlands crowd - helping us up our last hill despite being a mortal enemy for most of the day - we managed to get into Butajira before the weather and deployed our fool-proof tactic of staying at the first hotel we found. After 150km’s of cycling I was all too happy to jump under my first shower on the road, no matter how cold it was.

Distance: 77km                 Time on bike: 4h00

Day 3 –Thursday April 5^th

Our third day on the bike got off to a cracking start.Before we stopped for a breather on top of a mountain overlooking Lake Ziway and plains that could have been used as a Hollywood alternative for a Serengeti set, we had covered 45km’s of flat road lined with friendly people by the dozen. I had also realised my first casualty when I noticed that my Camelback had fallen out from its perch under my pannier strap with spare spokes and spanner in tow. My only consolation was the thought of an astounded local figuring out the purpose of the water bladder. Our entrance into the town of Ziway – accompanied by a local who cycled into and out of town with us for a total of about 15km on his rickety, one-speed bike – marked our arrival on the main road which was flat for as far as we could see. The noticeable change from the greening, rolling hills to the flat, dry plains – other than the terrain itself of course – was the abundance of bicycles that were a rare sight anywhere else.

What the plains lacked in vegetation and views it made up for in a vast variety of birdlife. Jim is a bird enthusiast of note, pulling over every now and again for a closer look at a bird that, as far as I’m concerned, could be any of an eagle, a stork or a vulture. I was in no doubt – for a change – that the group of 20 or so birds fighting over the last pieces of a ravaged donkey carcass were vultures, even though I had earlier declared a tree full of storks as vultures.

The local hostility turned up a couple notches from our trouble free morning and shouts of “You” and “Ferengi” became all too common and more often than not said in an accusatory tone. Shouts of “money” were no longer accompanied by smiles and waves but with palms being thrust out expectantly. No more profoundly will the after effects of NGO’s be felt than in the reactions of children to white ‘ferengi’s’. Before a smile is shared or a greeting offered, kids on either side of the road shout phrases that they’ve learned to say before a simple “hello”: “give pen”, “give money”, “give exercise book”. The demanding attitude of the kids of school-going age is generally not shared by the excited toddlers or respectful older folk who, for wont of a better phrase say things like, “Where are you go?” without an inkling of what they might be asking, or “Good morning”, more often than not said in the afternoon.

Having arrived at a small town 80km’s into the day as early as lunch time, we decided to push on for another 40 after a break for lunch and a wait for some heavy rains to subside. The mind of a friendly local teacher was utterly blown when he was introduced to the technology of Matt’s Kindle – a primary source of entertainment after a long day of cycling.

Our lunch itself was the standard injera, which I have found to add a whole new aspect to cycling. With momentum being a key factor in assisting me up the small hills – no doubt due to the extra weight picked up after 5 months of doing very little back home – the flatulence brought on by the local staple does not have the much jested effect of a power booster. Instead I find myself in a post-lunch routine to maintain some sort of internal normality through the discomfort: pedal, bottoms up, release after burners, sit down, pedal. Not ideal.

After a day that was made tough by the sheer distance covered and time spent on my meagre excuse for a seat I had clocked up a personal distance record as well as a good case of the shakes from the days efforts… all too happy to find a bed, I crashed, and I crashed hard.

Distance: 127km               Time: 6h00

Day 4 – Friday April 6^th

Although we knew that this was our last day of cycling before my first rest day, we woke up and set off unsure of where exactly the rest would take place. Stopping in Shashemane for a relatively standard samosa snack, we called the Hot Springs nearby to inquire about prices. Succumbing to our budget befitting 3 jobless chaps fresh out of Varsity, we decided the Springs were a step too far for our wallets. Our other option was all but squashed by the previous days cycle as a detour toward a picturesque and highly recommended lakeside town of Arba Minch would entail 3 to 4 extra days of cycling as well as a foray back into the hills we had just escaped from. Although it might have been the least likely option a few days ago, we decided to take the easy gradual downhill to the town of Awasa for our day off.

Although the cycling side of the day was written off with relative ease due to the short, downhill nature of the journey, the social aspect wasn’t quite as palatable. Matt and Tom had decided that the four day period of cycling was an optimal solution both cycling-wise and socially. There are only so many days that you can smile and wave in response to rude demands and death stares, even though they might be in between a sea of friendliness. The day proved to be particularly testing as, no sooner had I left our mosquito-ridden hotel, I encountered immediate demands for money that took more than a little effort to restrain myself from responding with a backhand to the face. Stone-throwing is a much fabled pastime of Ethiopian kids with – according to a number of blogs written by similar adventurers – the targets being goats, cows and white cyclists. To try avoid this unfortunate reality I often resort to being overly friendly to adults in the hope that they will keep the youngsters in check, which they had done thus far. My first undertaking of evasive action was as a result of a child who could hardly be in school, a decent throw for someone that size but lacking the accuracy of a Dale Steyn bouncer, much to my relief. Not long before that some nitwit of a child had cracked a whip next to Matt’s bike which was returned by an angry flipping of the bird – the middle finger. With Jim always taking the lead, Matt was obviously not used to having me being at the back of the pack – something I’m sure he’ll be accustomed to in no time – and I had to pedal by the horrible, teenage, little shit thanking my lucky stars that the whip came down hard right next to my bike and not on Nelson, or on me.

On searching for lodging in Awasa, Matt managed to guide his rear wheel into a gap between concrete slabs acting as a bridge over a street-side gutter, damaging his derailer beyond our limits of repair. A search in town came up with a substitute that allowed him to use most of his gears and would have to do until a more suitable replacement could be sourced in Nairobi. The search for accommodation proved to be a particularly successful one as, for R50 (double our normal rate) we landed a place with carpeted floors, en-suite bathrooms with running water and a regular, flushing toilet, a basin that didn’t empty directly onto your feet, a cold but running shower with sufficient pressure,a mosquito net, electricity for the better part of the day, curtains that covered the width of the windows, linen that looked like it had been washed in the last year, a private gravelled courtyard and an owner who kindly allowed us to do some washing. All luxuries that we cannot afford to get too used to.

Distance: 50kmTime: 2h20

Total distance so far: 330km

One of the best things about writing is that it is considered a form of artistic expression, allowing the writer a certain amount of freedom. I’ve figured that if some fellow called EE Cummings can write poems and become famous for not using any punctuation and making very little sense at all, I can change the format of an article as I see fit… so excuse the inconsistency.

Our next stint of cycling saw us enter the highlands; mountain after mountain, hill after hill of tropical, fertile lands growing bananas, pineapples and chat (chut) by the bucket load, the latter a local favourite plant, the leaves of which are chewed one supermarket packet at a time. The bitter tasting plant gives the consumer a bit of a high - and exceptionally glazed eyes - while warding off tiredness and hunger. With our leg in Ethiopia landing in the middle of their pre-Easter fast, chat was a definite favourite with its uneaten stalks littering the floors of any little coffee joint. Playing the devil’s advocate, Chen (Matt) would often ask locals with a faint notion of the English language as to the reason that they have given up – or at least supposed to have given up – all food during daylight hours and meat, beer and sex for the entire arbitrary period of (+-)55 days. The answers were all different and all utterly nonsensical. To put it frankly, they had bugger-all idea behind the reason other than an apparent intention to please God, all the while having no qualms whatsoever with trying to charge us at least twice the rate for no other reason than our skin colour… and maybe Chen’s hair.

Chen and Jim had each had some sort of bicycle mishap in the first 20km’s of their respective trips. Although Nelson lasted a bit longer, after about 350km’s he decided he needed to make a name for himself and ran a flat on a downhill on what was an increasingly worsening road. As per usual, I was at the back of the pack and Jim failed to hear my shouts, leaving me alone with a crowd of more than 20 people that gathered within minutes to watch the white man fix his fancy bike with his shiny tools. My choice of fitting tubeless tyres with standard tubes proved to be somewhat problematic as I snapped a tyre lever and bent the other two in my attempt to remove the tube. After about half an hour of struggling, Matt and Jim appeared up a mountain having had to climb a couple of hills they had cruised down minutes earlier. Jim, being the most proficient on bicycle maintenance, jumped in to help but had similar difficulties – a relief to my ego. Fortunately, one of the onlookers offered a spanner which, unlike the file on my leatherman and the tyre lever, did not snap and managed to pry the tyre from the wheel while inflicting only slightly worrying scratches on the frame of the wheel.

The differing reactions we received were no more apparent than in our 4 days in the mountains. The odd, “fuck off” – commendable English my dear sir – and even an occasion of some little girl spitting at me – the little bitch missed -, along with a torrent of the usual phrases, most notably: “where you go” – asked repeatedly to all three of us and by every single person in a group of 10, all one metre apart, over and over again – couldn’t overshadow the reception we received during a 20km stretch in the mountains where hundreds of little children cheered us on with massive smiles and the friendliest of waves, shouting “ferengi’ in a tone of endearment, lacking all the aggression and scepticism of many of their fellow countrymen.

The mountains were an absolute bitch. Peak after peak, turn after turn, we were presented with nothing more than another uphill. I experienced massive sense of humour failures and the status of operation ‘Smile and Wave’: failed. Even though I reached speeds as mediocre as 5.5 km/hour, trucks were managing only marginally better up the steep ascents. At one point I grabbed a hold of a truck for a few metres before letting go, deciding to make my own way to the summit only to see Chen catch the lift a few hundred metres ahead of me.

Even though we only clocked 52km’s on my 6^th day on the bike, I was physically and mentally drained. That night, while sleeping in a shoddy room that smelt of rotten milk, I dreamt that I had sat myself down at a decent restaurant and chowed down toast topped with bacon, ham, salami and cheese – all but a sprinkling of cheese had escaped me thus far. One room down, while being chowed by bed bugs and kept up by a goat making human-like chundering and burping noises a few days before its imminent slaughter, Chen dreamt that we headed off only to go up more hills. One of our dreams came true the next day… and I only ate vegetarian food.

The mental setback of climbing even more after the previous day’s relief at having summited meant I was not one to mess with for the day. To keep my sanity amongst endless shouts of, “Where are you go?” and, “You, you, you” I made use of my i-pod for the first time thus far – don’t worry parents, I only put one ear in. Near the real peak, just after some despicable woman called out all the nearby children and instructed them to ask for money and pens, we met a Morden, a Danish, leather clad biker who had travelled down West Africa to SA and was on his way back up the East. Short as it was, it was terrific to be able to converse with someone on the side of the road with a decent grasp of English. Morden, an airline technician, had rewired his bike so that he had two of every cable and plenty of spares in the case of any problems popping up. His level of preparation didn’t help calm the nerves about poor old Frank, still sitting in Addis, waiting for some form of mechanical miracle to allow Tom to get on the road.

Having pulled into a smart looking hotel for lunch, we were on the wrong end of another rip-off scheme when we managed to land the only waiter who was happy to charge us 50% more than the normal price even after a nearby patron had told us the price he had paid for his injera. Matt won a small war when he managed to argue the price down with help from the receptionist, the only English speaking person on the staff. Settling in for a read after lunch to extend our break, we struck up a conversation with an Economist in the business of exporting power to Sudan and what turned out to be the owner of the hotel. Between the two of them they explained that the room prices are different for foreigners because the Ethiopian fiscal policy involved devaluing the currency to increase exports. This did not, however, explain the fact that it was only white foreigners who got the brunt of the step-pricing system.

For the first week I had managed to avoid doing my business in the hole-in-the-ground thanks to the sporadic appearances of regular toilets but I knew that my run had to come to an end. No pun intended. On the positive side, the ‘’’’toilet’’’’ at our hotel was the cleanest I had seen so far – which was to say that there wasn’t human excrement scattered around the hole -, that and the fact that we had toilet paper. There was, however, no shortage of negatives. The ‘toilet’ had no door and was right on the property boundary with a side street behind a fence of wooden slats a few centimetres apart with a woven mat covering most of the gaps. Every time someone spotted us cycling past they called their friends and had a good stare at us, so I didn’t have to let my imagination run wild to figure out what would happen if a little child saw a ferengi popping a squat. With a choice of two toilets I picked the one with the fewest cockroaches – it seems that human faeces is one helluva diet for these chaps because they were all bigger than my thumb! I stomped around them like an angry giant sending them crawling back down the hole and it was only a few days later that I discovered this particular cousin of the cockroach had the ability to fly. That could’ve ended badly. As far as the aiming was concerned, a basketball commentator would have described my effort with the phrase: “nothing but net”. To make the feat even more impressive, thiswas achieved while my quads were on absolute fire from a serious few days of cycling, not the ideal warming down activity.

Our last three days of cycling before reaching the border town of Moyale, which included a rest day in between, bore witness to yet another significant change in landscape. The highlands gave way to another flat plain of red earth, 3 metre tall termite mounds, thorn trees and other Acacia-type trees. We got an inkling of a feel of what it might be like cycling around game parks, seeing a Nyala spring across the road ahead of us, a few buck that might have been Steenbok skulking in the bushes, an aardvark and a honey badger – both in the form of road-kill –, baboons, nomadic herds of cattle and camels and a plethora of different kinds of birds. I have managed to categorise birds into three relatively broad types: an eagle (all big birds), Zazu’s (Simba’s ‘advisor’ in the Lion King – a hornbill apparently), and doves (all other birds, none of which are actually doves).

Despite a strange instance of both Chen and I being offered a child to take home with us on leaving a town – Chen was offered a baby and I was offered a 10 year old after I inquired as to why he wasn’t in school – I found the people of Southern Ethiopia to be very different from what I had experienced since leaving Addis. The people on the fringes of the road were all significantly calmer, even though just as surprised at our alien presence. The kids still waved enthusiastically, one of which doing so while taking a dump on the side of the road as we cycled by, but the chasing and demanding ceased to certain extent. Particularly out of the town, all women and young girls were adorned in colourful kikoya’s, often accompanied by beaded jewellery and corn-row hairstyles… an American tourist’s dream.

The cycling itself just never easy, no matter how much we wished it. If the terrain was kind, we would end up pushing on until we had very little left in the tank. By the end of a day Joseph’s breaks (Chen’s bike) would be chirping loud and clear above the Zazu’s and doves and Nelson’s chain wheezing like Graeme Smith after a quick single. We covered 300km’s in the last 3 cycling days to Moyale, where we settled into a cheap hotel, bed bugs and all, to wait – hope is probably a more accurate word – for Tom’s arrival on Frank. Our two full days in the Ethiopian border town have been spent reading, writing, scratching and meeting an interesting variety of people – including a man whose business is to smuggle Ethiopians to Nairobi before his brother takes them into South Africa -, many of which were somewhat inebriated in the middle of their week-late Easter celebrations, during which we managed to land a free chicken injera from the family running the hotel that quelled my insatiable appetite for meat to a small extent.

Ethiopia has been so different in so many ways. The people oscillate between friendly and hostile, helpful and rude in the mere matter of a couple hundred meters. The landscape, terrain, wind, rain and roads have shown their impressive ways of changing so as to always challenge our cycling circus. Reminders that I am far from my home in the Eastern Cape prop up a multitude of times in daily life with men holding hands in an expression of companionship as they walk down the littered streets and an unexplainable tolerance toward the Islamic calls to prayer that wake you up before the roosters get their crowing on and keep you up past our increasingly early bed-times in a country of predominantly Coptic Christians. Furthermore, the thought of watching a rugby match had to be banished from the mind so as not to avoid disappointment, leaving us to settle for watching Manchester United games in little make-do shacks packing in as many patrons as humanly possible.

 A tremendous pride in their avoidance of colonisation is blatantly obvious and oft a primary port of call in attempted conversations. This pride, along with the presence of NGO’s all too keen to signpost every little house or well that they had funded may be the fuel that fires the hostility we experienced every so often, most notably within 10km’s of completing our cycling in Ethiopia where a group of 6 kids, aged 12-16, created a mini wall ahead of me, only to follow me up a hill when I passed them demanding money while holding sticks that they resorted to throw at me after giving my bike a couple of provocative pushes from behind. Needless to say, so close to the end, I lost my shit, dropped my bike and picked up a golf-ball sized rock to hurl at the little fuckers as they scattered. Unfortunately, instead of sending them stumbling over rocks and head-first into a tree – that’s just me fantasizing -, I slipped on the loose gravel and rode away from my moment of rage with a graze down my leg. Matt wrote a piece on Ethiopia with the title including the word ‘pendulum’, and there is no better way to describe my time in a country I knew absolutely nothing about before embarking on this journey –other than the fact that their inhabitants can run for days. Just as the hills were a never ending series of ups and downs, so were the experiences in general. All in all though, the ups were worth the downs.

Distance covered in Ethiopia: 870km.

Adiós and Amesege'nallo' Addis

It is an incredibly odd and somewhat exhilarating feeling having a school of dilly teenage girls screaming themselves hoarse at your expense, asking for autographs and blushing uncontrollably as a group of their friends whip out their fancy camera phones to snap pictures of the occasion. Odd…but pretty cool at the same time.

Our two weeks in Addis have cruised by so fast that, a day before our planned departure, we decided to postpone the beginning of my journey on the bike by another day. Having been so immersed in doing pretty much nothing at all, we’ve managed to neglect the important things and have decided that, instead of trying to fix Frank and get packing, we might as well just spend another day being hungover and useless – something we have become quite adept at doing.

Addis has been an amicable host to the Majestic Imperials – an informal and completely unofficial name stolen from a local Reggae house band. The city is full of life, full of character and full of people. Despite the fact that the first road I strolled down wouldn’t have passed as a pathway used by cows en route to the dairy, the infrastructure is half decent and only improving as the skyline is littered with semi-high rise buildings making their way above the mix of old brick buildings and tin shacks, all surrounded by very optimistic scaffolding structures made from Eucalyptus poles somehow joined together in a formation more fragile than the Arsenal defence. Ten thousand kilometres from home, the concept of African Time is as strong as ever as the amount of buildings on their way up outnumbers the builders at work on them.

Nonetheless, construction seems the industry to be in if Antonio and Rihanna are to be believed. The latter is a construction student at Addis University, whom I’ve dubbed Rihanna because she reckons people note a resemblance between her and the Caribbean singer, and because I couldn’t hear what she introduced herself as. She might have actually borne some resemblance had she a full set of white teeth and no faint shadow of a moustache. I must also add that, had the people making the comparisons been as aggressively hit on as I was, they may have been seduced into saying exactly that by the tight leopard print clothing and obvious intent that failed to interest me. Despite requesting a quick Amharic lesson – a language exclusively Ethiopian, of which I know how to say ‘hello’ and ‘thank-you’ (amasege'nallo'), often as a substitute for the other – all she tried to teach me to say was: ‘I like you’.

Matt, Tom and I were enthusiastically invited to join the afore-mentioned Antonio and two construction colleagues under his watch for coffee at our local grocer who operates out of tiny structure backed by a sheet of corrugated iron and shaded by cloth hung up by wooden poles. The young lady’s stock consisted of avo’s, red onions, potatoes, bananas and mangoes – a variety not improved upon by most other vendors in the city. As a side to her questionably fresh foods she sold coffee, heated by little coals, to patrons seated on a choice of three little futons and a couple crates in a set up seen around every corner of Addis. The shot-sized cup of coffee topped any I’d ever had at UCT in my desperate attempts to maintain consciousness in between study sessions, while putting Nescafe to absolute shame.

Antonio’s hospitality was mirrored by many people as we strolled the streets of Addis, visiting the commercial hubs of Piazza and Merkato , the latter of which is Africa’s biggest open-air market and what I can only assume is the local shopping area, visited by only one other ‘Ferengi’ (white foreigner) on the day Jim and I went to check it out. It took us a little while to accept the company and help of locals who jumped at the opportunity to chat and put their English to the test, but once we realised that they were not in it to make a quick buck we were lucky enough to meet some interesting locals – including a group of 3 self-proclaimed ‘Mary J’ salesman – who saved us from hours of hopeless searching and wandering as well as the ever-present tendency for vendors to try and rip us off for every cent we had. It was by no means an unfamiliar sight to be greeted by enthusiastic and appreciative locals as we strolled on by, thanking us for visiting their country and asking us how we were despite not being capable of understanding a word of our response. Every now and again an obviously poor child would badger persistently for money, shouting: “You, You, You, One, One, One”, or simply hold their hands out dangerously near your crotch and follow you hundreds of metres down the street. Although the beggars were no more plentiful than back in Cape Town, they were different in the sense that the majority of them were in the twilight of their long lives or somehow particularly unfortunately deformed.

In general, our stay was a mellow and relaxing one where we lived in Addis for two weeks rather than visited the Ethiopian capital, if that makes any sense at all. If it wasn’t for my glaringly obvious differing skin colour to that of the masses, I would have felt more like a local than a tourist, thanks in no small way to the expat community Kizzy - a connection of Tom’s who has all but given up her home for the entirety of our stay - wasted no time in introducing us to through trips down to the local bar; The Road Runner, and a couple of house parties and braais ending up in various clubs around the city and eventually a series of profound hangovers, least enjoyed by Jim who could hardly eat until well into the afternoon on each occasion. It must be the altitude.

Most of the expats that Kizzy introduced us to were teachers at the same International School that she worked at, predominantly British and all with an interesting story of their own about how their life journey brought them to be teaching in Ethiopia. One of the teachers we met during the second of our 2 Wednesday afternoon football games on the school field invited us to have a chat to one of his classes; an offer we happily accepted.

Having cycled all of 2 kilometres -my first 2kilometres of the trip – to the school on Friday, I had no idea what it was I was going to say thanks to no preparation nor any cycling experiences to speak of. Knowing how talented I am at writing absolute crap, I figured that I may as well speak in the same vein.

Matt and Tom must have had to deliberate at some length to figure out how they would incorporate me into the presentation but, after what was probably a serious brain-wracking session, they decided that my perspective would be of some sort of value; the perspective of the unfit, rather out-of-shape, very average Joe about to embark on a not-so average journey.

What was supposed to be one English class turned out to be an entire day of 3 presentations to a total of 9 classes of kids between the age of 13 and 15 as well as some informal chats to 2 penultimate year Science classes. Jim and I chipped into a brilliant presentation by Matt and Tom that included the 3 videos they have produced and published on their website. To say the classes lapped it up would be an understatement: we were watched from across the road during our lunch break by some of the girls from our first class, asked for signatures and photographs and left every class to students whistling and applauding as the presentations concluded with the screening of the border dance video – a ritual I’m yet to figure out how I can possibly contribute to. The last showing of the video –by which time we were pretty sick of watching – ended in a small but confident Indian chap getting clapped onto the stage to do a moon walk-come break dance gig and an absolutely euphoric class leaving their final lesson of the week.

The euphoria spilled out onto the school yard as we headed out the gates to more applause, screams and shouts of: “I’ll add you on Facebook” behind Frank - Tom’s motorbike-with-sidecar - who took a record low 20 kick-starts to get going. The reception deserved no less than a non-stop 1500km trek straight to Nairobi. Instead, we pulled over 40 metres down the road at a bar to share a few draughts with the teachers before cycling home to have a look at my Accounting Board Exam results: “Richard Brotherton, we are glad to inform you that you have…passed”. The euphoria rolls on!

Tomorrow (03/04) we leave for our next leg to the Kenyan capital, Nairobi. The plan is to stay at a lodge on the foothills of Mount Kenya if we are lucky enough to be invited by a friend of a friend of a cousin of a friend. Other than that, the plans are minimal: we will leave sometime tomorrow morning and aim to reach a destination that we’ll figure out after we choose which road to take. With the school send-off in a mind, a new dodgy haircut and a belly that is yearning for exercise; I cannot wait to hit the road and put some mileage onto the new, knobbly tyres of my noble steed, Nelson.