Llévame de viaje

¿Pero qué cojones…?
 

Disclaimer:  this rant-post is extremely not recommended for anyone with any kind of affiliation to church, being it of any kind, model, color or faith. So if you count yourself into any of the aforementioned groups, better don’t read any further or either eat this.

Motherfuckers. Sons of bitches. Reckless bastards. The more I travel through Africa the more I hate you. You fooled me good, right? Not just me, you fooled us all, all those naive idiots who used to go every Sunday morning to the church. Every Sunday that basket, with the sermon asking for “Help the impoverished kids in Africa”. Poor kids those in Africa. Yeah, right.

Well that was long time ago, so long as I don’t step on your brainwashing centres. But it wasn’t until now that I had the chance to travel through this, your sandbox, where you did send so many donations. What exactly did your lies do for those poor kids in Africa?

Each and every country that I lay my feet on, specially the poorest ones, are PACKED with religious schools. In Malawi it was a constant, every single village had at least 2 or 3 of those. Of course here everyone wants his piece of heaven, so we have Baptists, Evangelists, Catholics, Protestants… even Adventist of the seventh day (wtf?)…

Anybody could read up till here and get mad and ask me, “So what exactly is wrong in all of this?”. Nothing, there is nothing wrong. But there’s nothing right either. Years worth of donations from all around the world to “help” those poor black kids have just created a full generation of illiterate uneducated kids (and not-so-long-kids), who can’t add or subtract when they give you a price, not to mention about converting currencies and multiplications. But nevertheless, EVERY FUCKING EACH car in Malawi, Mozambique and Tanzania are packed with stickers carrying messages like “Only God can Judg me” (no, it’s not my typo), or “Onle one God”, or praises to the creator like that. But as you read, half of them are mispelled.

Every time I see one of these schools I get pissed. Kids still have absolutely nothing to do or hope for, still can’t do a damn fucking thing on their own and still can’t read or write. But they certainly do know who they should pray for a favourable harvest season.

And while this thought crosses my mind, there is always the same song in my helmet. From Reincidentes. The lyric goes something like…

“You protected our ruin, you protected oppression, you protected your money, you protected the biggest bastard. I just hope for seeing you in front of the firing line one day, never pay for my existence, never ask for forgiveness”.

Go to hell.

I did not update the blog lately. Some time ago I stopped writing every day and some people have been asking whether something’s wrong or I just did not want to write anymore.

My “excuses” -which are not so much of excuses- are, ordered from smaller to bigger: lack of time, lack of sleep, excess of Amarula, and finally gigantic piss with Android’s app for Blogger, which on top of being hard to use it also deleted my post about Lesotho with no option for recovery. After many hours writing it. It managed to make me miss Wordpress in the end…

So now we are in Tanzania after crossing Malawi -although that will be another story, coming up soon, I promise) and the Internet access is ridiculously cheap (3Gb pack from Airtel, 22.5 CNY, there you go- and I will try to update this more regularly.

Thanks for following and reading me, it’s always a good feeling against the lonesome of the road.

We get up early thinking it would be a good idea to cross two borders in one day. Our goal: getting to Maputo, Mozambique’s capital city, by tonight. The route is about 300km long, but we know that two border crossings can be a whole world.

We ride the 20km to the border of Swaziland, on road scattered with holes, through forests and forests of…well, that very tall tree with a thin trunk that grow perfectly straight, you know which I mean, right? Well I don’t. I’ve realised that I am completly useless when it comes to vegetation and I could not name a tree if it wasn’t a pine tree. As I was saying, forests all the way to the border.

Getting into Swaziland turns out to be super easy, the paperwork takes a minute and people are nice and helpful. Have a nice stay in Swaziland! So here we come.

Swaziland, for us, has been three things:

First. Another example of how prejudice is worth crap and how it vanishes whenever you travel. You read the Wikipedia, Wilitravel and wikiwhatwhat and think you are going to find a shitty country, nothing but orfan youngsters with AIDS walking along the road begging, (what am I saying road! I meant dirt path) and that’s that.

Reality hits us on the face with a relatively clean country, with perfectly well paved roads with a bunch of modern cars riding on them. People are busy going places and yes, they make a living mostly out of agriculture but noone looks idle. Not even one person on our way has been just sitting there looking at the world go by.

We ride across the city of Manzini which turns out to be a bustling urban area with markets, department stores western style, giant screens and even a friggin’ highway crammed with cars. Hold on, weren´t they dying of hunger here? Either cars are REALLY cheap here, or this people live with more than a dollar a day.

Second. Swaziland is a dull country. During our route through it we looked for something to take pictures of, somewhere to stop and look around. But there wasn’t anything particularly interesting.

Third and most important, twice during our time in Swaziland we came across… the Google Street View car! Mom, I’m gonna be famous! We have (more or less) exactly the coordinates were we saw them, let’s see if we made it in the picture :)

And thus, driving 80 really boring final kilometers in a prefect straight line through sugar plantations, we finally got to the border of Mozambique.

Borders are great places to learn stuff. For example, when you go across “nobody’s land” and you get to Mozambique and two men come and ask you for your paperwork “to speed things up”, be suspicious. They try to catch you off guard so that you don’t realize what’s going on. You get there and you give them stuff, they give you stuff and that’s it, we’re ready.

Oh, by the way, you need to get insurance. That’ll be 200 rand.

No, dude, I don’t need and insurance, I already have one.

Oh, ok. But you have to give us 200 rand to pay for the forms we gave you that will allow you to ride the bike anywhere in Mozambique.

What? Let me see, I already paid for my visa and I’ve not been asked for any other money.

Sure, that’s because I did the paperwork for you and that is 200 rand.

Mmmm I don’t believe you. Hold on, I’ll bring the officer and he’ll explain it to you.

The officer on-duty excuses himself saying his English is too poor (of course) and he does not understand what you are saying. But they weren’t counting on my Portuñol! (Portugués + Español = Portuñol) In a terrible Portuguese I ask the officer if the form has a price and I tell him those guys are trying to get 200 rans out of me. The officer sort of smiles on the side of his mouth, looks at them like saying “sorry dude” and lets me know we owe nothing and we can go. Wooohooo my Portuñol has been useful!

We go through the last barrier, we are finally in Mozambique. And right away you can see you are now in a different country.

Mozambique is (finally) something that resembles Africa. Or what we were expecting to see  in Africa. Buildings on the side of the road are half torn down, everything looks old and like it’s been through decades of conflicts. The border is overflowing with drunk and crazy ex-soldiers and busybodies. The landscape is completely different and gets a red tinge to it.

You can see right away that cars are way older and rundown. Except those, and here comes the irony, with a Swaziland license plate.

We soon get to Maputo. Huge city with and huge traffic problem, and going over those 3 last kilometers takes almost an hour. And then right there, on the corner of Salvador Allende and Mao Tse Tung, we fin Backpackers’ Fátima, recommended everywhere but with pay Internet. And packed with Spaniards, by the way. It looks like findig a decent Internet access is gonna be hard, so for the time being you’ll have to live with deferred-published stories.

Mozambique awaits, long, all the way to the north. We’ll go over the coast to Beira before we head back inland to Malawi.

Bon día!

After our great adventure through Lesotho, it seems everything is tasteless and South Africa appears now as an old, known and almost boring place.

We find the landscapes in the Golden Gate natural park hardly noteworthy. It was actually yesterday that we rode through it (but it didn’t fit in last night’s post and it is really a wonderful place that would be worth a visit just by itself. 25km of road that goes through a natural park almost stealthily and humblily; a natural park which seems to be kept away from human touch, with its dreamily flowing rivers and mountains packed with grottos that is looks almost like a piece of gruyere cheese, endless prairies on which packs of antelopes, horses (and hundreds of animals we cannot tell apart due to distance and the upcoming night that was turning the light off) take a walk carelessly.

The day after, on the other side, we were faced with the disapointment that was Royal Natal national park which turned out to be a fantastic campsite for unstoppable but with really nothing worth mentioning for the driving-through biker. All that time lost in seeing…nothing we set ourselves to get to the East as fast as we could setting our goal on getting as close as we could to the border of Swaziland. More than 400km on a straight line going through vast meadows scattered with farms, grazing and a few historical sites that hosted who knows which battles (well, actually, I do, the second Boer war, where the Dutch fought the British).

Hitting the gas as much as we could, letting the bikes enjoy the speed trip the mountains had denied them for the last three days,  we got closer and closer to the border. We got there late, almost at night, but safely, towards our last South African destination for a the time being Piet Retief, a shithole located a short 40km away from the land of the mad king.

Tomorrow we will leave for Swaziland, minute country ruled by an odd king that gives himself private jets and 356 Mercedes Benz cars for his birthday; that has more than 17 wives and chooses the arbitrary death of whoever pisses him off, but still keeps the unswerving loyalty of his subjects. Subjects that make it through the day with less than 1,25 dollars a day, fighting the plague that AIDS’s has become, affecting more than 50% of the population still in age of having children and whose life expectancy is 47 years.

We will cross the country of the mad king, if the state of the road allows so, in a single day, to get to the capital of Mozambique, Maputo, beginning our way to the north.

Until then, we’ll just get another stamp on our passport tomorrow. Still 7 to go. Will you miss it?

I will keep this entry short because I am completely exhausted.

We are enjoying Lesotho so much that we have decided to take advantage of our three day visa and leave the main roads to visit the Highlands, i.e. the mountains. It’s ironic to talk about “Highlands” when the lowest point in this country is 1600m high. No joke.

So we venture along the A3 which, acording to the GPS is a gravel road but in real life is a beautifully paved road that could have been put down yesterday. We ascend for about 80km without even one straight stretch, but also no signs of gravel, that is an invitation to enjoy each turn on the bike. The sights are amazing but you soon forget about it because the road is just so, so, so much fun, and it never ends, and you get lose yourself in this waltz with the bike: left and right and left and right…

Any bikers’ dream. We see maybe one car pass every half an hour and there’s always enough visibility to be warned and get ready so you’re not taken by surprise. The plan is to get to Mokhlotong (yes, that’s the actual name of the place), which is the only city in the Highlands, sleep over there and tomorrow maybe see if we can cross the border at the Suni border crossing. The road here is signaled as “4x4” only, although speaking to some locals they tell us with these bikes it is perfectly doable. After having listened to so much bullshit about Lesotho, you really don’t know what to believe.

About 90km from Mkhlotong the road loses the asphalt and the gravel starts. Oh well, we can do this in a couple of hours, no doubt, which would make it 4:30pm at destination. Viable. But each kilometer we overcome the road gets worse and worse. From gravel to stones, rocks, wheel tracks and occasionally, mud. It’s unbelievably hard to go on at this point. But theres nothing here, and it keeps on looking like it’s going to get better.

Riding accross wheel tracks is an act of faith. You’ve got to blindly trust the bike, press the gas firmly but carefully and never, never hesitate. If you hesitate and you stop, you will fall. On a slope, I am following Mauro, he takes the wrong side of the road and half way through our way up he thinks it twice. He crosses a wheel track almost parallel to the slope and due to the time it took him to think that over, the distance between us is too small and I have no space left to be able to hit the gas. I gear down, run out of inertia and stop. My foot feels for the floor in vain and as if it were in slow motion the bike leans on the side down to the point of no return. I get tense, don’t reach out with your arm, don’t reach out with your arm…

I get to the ground. I’m covered in mud all the way to the helmet. Luckily there’s no stones here, only mud, so I fall soft. Ella has leaned on her side but on a slope there is just no way I’m going to be able to get her standing by myself. The locals call out on Mauro and tell him what happened, who comes back thinking the worst. I can read his eyes saying “not again, not again”. But no harm was made, except perhaps my pride. Such a stupid fall.

We move on and we come accross the highest point in our route, at 3200 meters, where we finally see some snow and we find dusk as well. We’re still 24km from the place we know will give us shelter. We need to camp now there’s still some light. Even though we are in the highest fucking point in the route. A lady walks by while we’re setting camp and tells us to go one kilometer further down the road and ask for lodging. She’s scared something might happen to us, this place is not safe.

So we pack our stuff back and go back to the “road” at night. First gear and really slow. And we keep on going just like that for another 15 kilometers until we get to the backpacker spot we’d heard about. Exhausted, but happy we made it. It’s 7pm.

Lessons learnt: we need to pack canned food just in case (we hadn’t eaten all day) and we’re going to keep ourselves over asphalt as much as possible. Oh, and over off road dirt roads like this, our average is 20km/h.

My leg has a scratch and a big ass bruise, probably because the bike fell on top of it. In the morning it is just fine, but last night it was swollen like nothing I’d ever seen in a human being. The effort after the fall didn’t help at all. It doesn’t hurt and everything moves to the right places, so it’s just the fall. But then again, lesson learnt.

(If you are here just for the pics, it’s probably better that you check my Facebook album)

Morning. It’s cold. It feels almost new feeling cold, used as we were to sleep sweating barely 2 days ago. In a short while Craig, the guy from the rental, will come and pick us up.

First African surprise is that Craig (as almost everybody around here) don’t follow the African time cliché and shows up almost 10 minutes earlier at the Bed and Breakfast we’re staying. The BnB actually looks much more like a summer holiday villa for families with 2 bedrooms, 4 beds, 2 bathrooms, open kitchen, living room and even a swimming pool. There you go. 325 bucks each the night (325 zarbucks, which means around 215 rmb). BnB my ass!

We have a nice breakfast with Craig, his associate Steve (a really fun guy who resembles a lot to The Big Lebowski) and the couple of oldies who run the Lavender Cottage, talking a lot about all and nothing: our experiences in bike trips, where each one comes from, what the heck do a Spanish and a Swiss in Shanghai… the usual stuff.

After the breakfast we start our quest to buy the 2 or 3 small chips we had pending, like, for example, just to say, silly details like the malaria pills. Oh, but wait a minute, first we need an ATM and get cash and pay the rental guy. Easy peasy. Right? Well, maybe not so much. Our whole day went lost in getting our cash out of our chinese bank cards, which only work at FNB’s ATMs, which happen to have operational limits of 2000 zarbucks each time you use the card (and after that your card is ejected and you need to start again) and even better, a daily limit of 10000. We need 57000 each one. And that’s just for the bikes. Way to start. A ForEx office offers us to use our European cards, but only if they are credit ones (Mauro’s is debit). And with a 6% commission fee. Any better offers?

After trying to hack all the possibilities, pay with almost all the USD we carried and take as much as possible from my Visa debit card, we finally could use Craig’s online paying system, which only gets Visa and Master card, and where he gets ripped off by an 8% commission fee. But hey, he’s the one making business here, right? Actually he was super helpful and even reduced our deposit fee to half, which was a big chunk (15000 zarbucks, almost 10000 rmb).

Finally and once the cash issue was arranged (and chifan time already reached) we get started. We manage to get the malaria pills thanks to Steve’s blarney talking to the pharmacy girl (so that she would give them to us without any medical prescription) and we get all the missing details, simcard included. When we finally arrived at Craig’s shop it was already past 2pm. It will go even longer up to 4.30pm fixing the luggage, learning the bikes’ tricks, signing the contracts, and so forth. Only then we were ready to go.

Welcome! says the customs lady. We are in. We are here. No problems, no single-multientry visa fuss. Nothing. Just a tiny stamp and there you go, there are some others waiting.

And then, out there: the sky, the air, thousand of scents hitting you. And the mountains. And the sea.

Cape Town, or more precisely the part we saw today (Sommerset West), seems more like one of those american movie suburbs, with big houses of one floor in even bigger plots. All too quiet, too clean, too cool. So far not too much Africa. But still I like it.

This feeling that I will love Africa grows steadily.

More tomorrow. And with a motorbike.

The world flies quick under my feet. At 10.000 meters altitude everything looks so small and insignificant… Hour after hour those seas, valleys, mountains, fade away in the distance as if they were a simple scale model. These are hours most people consider as wasted, with not much to do with. Some play cards, others watch movies on their personal video systems, or their ipads. Only a few read a book. Most of them just sleep.

For me these are moments of myself. Time to look inside, to look backwards. How did I get here? Is this the place I wanted to be some years ago? Seems impossible not to ask easy questions like, are you happy with what you are doing right now? It seems as impossible fall into thinking how pointless is where you wanted to be, since the facts are that you are here, whether you like it or not.

However I have to admit from time to time I enjoy these times for myself, a bit of talking to me, to make peace with myself. As a good friend taught me some time ago, enjoy this time since it’s only for me and nobody else. During the 9 hours this flight lasts there are no meetings, no compromises, I don’t need to look good to anybody, make anyone happy, nor worry about what time it is. An airplane trip becomes then time to relax, to release all responsibilities, since nothing at all depends on you. A time you are able to disconnect, to relax, to close your eyes and seek what is the truth inside yourself, what does it mean to be the person you are, dedicate some time to yourself, to redefine yourself it needs be. Search for your inner peace, get ready to be who you are when you leave the airport. What’s your next destination? What do you expect form it? What do you want to do with your time in the next days, or months? And above all: What do you plan to make it happen?

I have to confess something.

I remember long, long time ago, when I barely had any kind of self consciousness, when I still raised my arms asking the grownups around to take me up and to make silly faces just to make me laugh. One of these grownups was my grandfather Nicolas. The last memory I have about him was at the hallway in his place, one of those long corridors that seem to have no end. He was coming back from the street, and I was waiting there for him. I stood in the corridor, my arms raised. I don’t recall whether I said any word, or just stayed there waiting for him to cheer me up. But I do remember his laughter. His face full of marks, smiling and making silly faces so that I would laugh. Nicolas died when I was about 2 or 3. I’m not even sure when. But one day he was gone.

I remember a hospital. A waiting room, since children were not allowed in. I remember rain, and a 70’s green phone boot, and questions to my mum whether that was the phone that E.T. used to phone home. I also remember that Nicolas never went back to that corridor. Or any other place. He just disappeared. He vanished, became nothing, just a memory.

Back then I had no fucking clue what death was. I just know I felt confused because that man was there no more, and everyone else was sad. I took many more years to get to know what was that thing of dying. Many years after Abu departed. Abu was my grandmother. I don’t even remember her name, and I don’t care that my family read this and think I’m a moron, because for me she was always just Abu. Abu died at her place, and I remember everyone crying, and Abu lying there lifeless. Being but not being there. I remember promising her I would not cry, because everyone else was doing so, and somebody needed to stay in one piece.

Life went on and taught me many things I did not want to learn, like out there there were things called wars where people killed each other not really knowing why. Or doing so, what’s the difference? In any case I had to serve in the army and for me that was just a boring thing that I did not want to do, simply because it was cool to go against the rule. I kept using the excuse that I was in university to postpone the service some years, and considered to claim to be conscientious objector even though I did not care at all to be honest. But in fact that objection became a truth and I realized I had like a million reasons to not want to serve in the army. I did not want to learn how to use a weapon. I did not want, under any circumstance, make any person to cease to exist.

Death itself was a very well defined concept in my mind, and I had already a clear idea that one day it would be my day. But back then I only worried about that moment to be a quick, painless one. And I did not care about what happens at that moment, since it would be not important any more, it would just be. It would only matter for those who stayed, like that day years ago around Abu. I was not afraid of death. Death was simply natural.

Some day, around 2 or 3 years ago, I woke up one morning terrorized by a nightmare. In that dream somebody died. It wasn’t me, but I could feel it in my flesh. And all of a sudden a terrible fear was born about the nothingness after death, about the falling into the void of memory. For a couple of weeks I was convinced that it had been some sort of premonitory dream, and that someone close was going to die. The dream became recurrent, and the anxiety every morning put a knot in my throat that killed me day after day. Time went by and nobody close died, and slowly that dream stopped bugging me. But the fear to nothingness stayed.

During the last two years I’ve been trying to find a way to leave that baggage behind. Religion is not for me and I don’t believe in the afterlife. I tried to simply forgot about it, but every time I read about death (specially in a war) that old sensation comes back and poisons me for a couple of days. Only a couple of weeks ago I was finally able to realize that every single day, when I fall asleep I do die, just to resuscitate the next morning. And now I know it will be a day that I won’t resuscitate. I let me be driven by the joy of every morning’s resuscitation, of having one more day to enjoy and do something with. I am still working on forgetting that ugly sensation once and for all, but for now I’m okay with feeling alive every time I wake up. And to fight death with life, trying my best to do whatever makes me feel alive.

Airplanes are perfect places to think about oneself, for making peace with yourself. I have been carrying this weight for way too long, and so far only one person knew about it. This is my fear, and this is my way to exorcise it.

The trip has begun. It’s time to feel alive.

As it usually happens, time jumps on me without prior notice, and when I want to think about it I realize it’s already that moment, that one in which we leave, that one in which nothing is ready yet, that one in which you run out of time and you stand there asking yourself as a fool, “How is it possible that it’s already time? Where did the days go?"

Time, always sweeping you over like a brake-less steamroller, always one step ahead from you. Time doesn’t go slowly. You lied to me, Madonna…


In any case, mr. time pushes us ahead to the edge of that springboard, where the only thing you can do is to chug your fears and jump waiting for the best.

There we go. t - 5 days. Next Monday, in the night, we will be on a plane heading Cape Town. There is no step back.

Fasten your seatbelts.