My kant van die draad

It was Tom who made it sound romantic and exciting to hitch-hike. In the best tradition of dyed-in-the-wool bloody idiots everywhere, I believed him. I hitch-hiked several times and managed to cross not just South Africa, but several other countries in the process, too.

 

I cannot recall the first time I hitch-hiked, but it was probably in Tom’s shadow. He taught me some tricks: don’t walk along the side of the road – you stand still, stand well clear of other hikers, try to look forlorn, but not scruffy or criminal, try to make eye contact when the car approaches. In any case, those first times were exciting and different. You meet new people – some just like you and others even more weird.

 

Some of my first hikes were around Cullinan and Pretoria and from my hometown in Kimberley to Tom’s place near Jwaneng in Botswana. All of this fairly painless and interesting. We once got a ride in a prison lorry, full of real-life prisoners (we got to ride in front, of course…)

 

The Africa ‘Transect’ – March 1993

 

My most audacious and interesting hike to date was in 1993, when Tom and I hiked from Jwaneng up north through Botswana, then through Zambia and finally through Malawi before threading our way back home.

 

Preparations

We started out preparing for the trip by buying some tinned food and packing light. We had those simple ‘fishing’ style canvas backpacks that you could buy at PEP or Ackerman’s for under R 20 in those days. No fancy Karrimor’s or First Ascents – those were either way out of our price range or did not exist yet. To the bottom of each pack, attached with a thin piece of nylon rope, came the sleeping bags and ‘loafer pads’. A tent on top of Tom’s pack and the little gas stove and a small pot on top of mine completed the outfit. We each had about two changes of clothes and were carrying 8 or so tins of food, some rice and a water bottle. That was it – all set for a big African adventure. Between us, we had the Pula and Dollar equivalent of R 350 (South African Rand) to our names. I reckon it was about US$ 80 or so in those days’ money. 

 

Start

Tom’s dad took us from Jwaneng and dropped us off on the far side of Gaborone. So far so painless. We quickly got a lift that took us quite some way – beyond Mahalapye and to Palapye, where the driver turned off to Serowe. It was still fairly early in the day and our spirits were high – we were on the road! It was not long before another lift came by that took us to Franscistown. From here, yet another lift quickly got us to Nata, because we headed north-west through Botswana instead of going through Zimbabwe. (I forget the reason, but somehow it made sense at the time)

 

A successful day 1; the Zambezi

By roughly 13:30 the afternoon, we were at the roadside outside Nata – north, on the road to Kazungula. And then the BIG WAIT. We stood by that road for just over 4 hours in the sweltering heart and I was convinced I could hear lions roaring nearby. We were tired, hungry, thirsty, sunburnt, possibly a little dehydrated, listless and all romantic visions of an African adventure were long forgotten by the time that the kind Mr. Ken Hahn rolled by in his little Corolla Station wagon and offered us a ride. As it turned out, this was probably the nicest lift I ever got hitch-hiking. By the time that night came around on our first day, Ken had not only given us lift to a lodge in Kasane where we stayed over in a campsite for the night, but also invited us for dinner to his lodge and promised to pick us up the next morning for the onward journey into Zambia. Two things I will never forget of that night, is the long, slow, ice cold Zambezi beer I had with the other two gents on the deck of the lodge, looking over the hippo’s and crocs lazing on the banks of the Zambezi. The other is the snorting, scuffling, trampling and general mayhem the hippos caused in our camp, not much more than 10 steps from our perilously perched little tent that same night. After 8 or so Zambezi’s, no-one pitches a tent like the picture on the bag…

 

Zambia

The next morning, we were off and across the Kazungula ferry into Zambia. Ken payed a hefty fee for customs to bring the little car, which he imported through Durban in South Africa, into Zambia and this caused significant border delays. We were only in Livingstone by that afternoon and decided to stay to see the falls. We spent the morning of the next day swapping money, bartering for local handcrafts with our T-shirts and tinned food and seeing the falls. There are simply no words to describe the sheer size and noise of the ‘smoke that thunders’. Many years later, I have seen the Grand Canyon and Niagara falls and still, nothing took my breath away like Vic Falls.

 

We pushed on through the night and into Zambia, still with Ken in his little car. At intervals, I slept in the back seat while Tom relieved Ken at driving duties. We all took turns driving, sleeping and navigating/ keeping the driver awake. We made slow progress during the night. The roads were absolutely appalling and we never went faster than 35km per hour, to avoid damaging the little car through the potholes. Regardless of our best efforts, sunrise the next day found us only just approaching the bridge over Kafue river and with the rims on the Corolla looking decidedly second-hand. Luckily, we suffered no punctures in the night. We could only cross the bridge once the crossing guard woke up, so we waited it out. It would take us another full day to reach Ken’s farm outside Chipata.

 

Here, Ken introduced us to his wife and daughter and showed us around a bit on his expansive tobacco farm. Most remarkably, they had a Malawian servant named ‘Spech’ (Because he’s special) Spech was impeccably dressed in a black and white half-suit with an undercoat and would answer to a bell on the table at dinnertime, then briskly proceed to the kitchen to prepare you anything your heart desired. How very colonial! We were awestruck at this remnant of a different epoch, alive and well and living in Zambia, of all places.

 

We made the best of Ken’s hospitality and stayed the night. Our clothes had started to ‘pong’ significantly by this stage, but Spech delivered all our clothes cleanly washed and pressed the next morning. Ken dropped us off just out of town on the road to Malawi, which was not far anymore. We stood by the road for quite a while. If you think lifts in South Africa or even Botswana are few and far between, try Zambia or Malawi. We finally got a lift to the Zambian-Malawian border with a bus full of very happy and excited people. I still don’t recall who their group was or where they were going, but we immediately struck up animated conversations on the bus and learnt some local phrases. The bus took us as far as the border post on the Zambian side of the no-mans-land. We had to walk the distance between where the bus dropped us and across the no-mans-land to the other borderpost. We passed rolling green hills and some of the most achingly beautiful countryside I’ve seen before or since.  As we proceeded, many local kids came running up to us and we attracted quite a little crowd. They all tried their very best English on us: “Good morning”,  ”Hello”, “How are you?”, “I love you”, “Give me money”, “Give me food” These phrases were about the full extent of every conversation we had perhaps a hundred times over in the 8 or 10 kilometres we had to walk to the other border post. In the event, it took us all day to get through the no-mans-land, through the border and into Malawi.

 

Martyr’s Day

We arrived in Malawi early on the 3^rd March 1993. Now, for anyone familiar with Malawi, this is Martyr’s Day. A very significant national holiday on which the whole nation mourns the freedom fighters who have lost their lives liberating the country. There are no shops open, no busses, no transport systems running, nothing. We were warned that you could get arrested for even smiling or laughing on this most revered day. So, as solemnly as we could, we walked across town to the far side of Mchinji, were we waited for lifts towards the lake. We eventually got a lift right into Salima and walked the few kilometres down to the lake for a swim, with scant regard for bilharzia or other hazards that this lake sometimes suffers from. That night, Tom and I made a fire larger than usual and cooked ourselves a lavish meal. Rice with peas and tuna from tins – enough to fill each of our large blue enamelled camping plates to the brim. It remains one of the most memorable meals I’ve ever had. 

 

Coming back

 The next day we lingered at the lake after breakfast and we argued a bit over where to go next. I was rearing to go north from here, but Tom had studies to return to and our funds were running low, so we started on the road back.

 

We got a lift back to Lilongwe, but there our fortunes ran out. We had stood by the roadside for well over 8 hours when night fell. We were on the west side of Lilongwe, just out of town and en route to Chipata, back the way we came. Just as the night set in good and proper, at around 8 pm, a car came by and stopped. I don’t recall the guy’s name, but he was a missionary all the way from California and warned us that it’s dangerous out at that part of the road at night. He took us to the mission, where he introduced us to his lovely wife, Mary, and their two kids. They had a nice house on the property and Tom and I had long, hot showers before we turned to proper beds for the first time in what felt like weeks. In the morning, Mary made true, proper American flapjacks with maple syrup for breakfast. Another culture shock – right here in the liver of Africa. As we headed out to the road after breakfast and hearty greetings, some other missionaries from the compound came by. They said that they had been watching the news and that a civil war had broken out in Zambia. At that moment in time, Zambia was between ourselves and our ‘home turf’, so we had little choice but to continue.  

 

Mind your fingers!

We got a few lifts back to the border with Zambia and crossed over without any hassle. In the no-mans-land beyond the border control post, there were very few lifts and we paid a taxi to take us over (along with quite a number of other people who also squeezed into the little car. As I got into the car in the passenger seat (left-hand side in this neck of the woods) and closed the door, I caught the hand of a person behind me who was holding onto the door pillar to squeeze into the already very full back seat. I spent the rest of the trip apologising profusely in a language that was clearly not understood by the hapless victim of my doorframe. On uphills the little car, which was only about 40 years old or so, managed all of 40km per hour. On downhills the driver switched the engine off to conserve fuel and we made brisk progress, albeit without much in the way of brakes. We made it to the Zambian border post without further incident and checked through.

 

 

Lovely ‘do’ don’t you think?

In Chipata, Tom and I had a disagreement about something. I can’t recall what, but we ended up not speaking for the rest of the day. To add insult to injury, night fell seeing us still on the outskirts of Chipata. We could not a flag a lift for the whole day. We resolved to sleep under an awning used by a builders’ yard just outside the town, amongst some half-bricks and heaps of riversand. It started raining, but we were fairly dry at first. A few drips and drops on our sleeping bags was about all we felt before we fell into the sleep of the dead. We were not, however, the only ones seeking shelter from the storm that night. We were plagued throughout the night by mice that either crept into our bags or waded through our hair. It was truly dreadful. In the morning, Tom and I counted the mice that we had killed in the night, mostly by smashing them hard against your own skull with your bare hand as they crawled through your hair. We killed well over 20. The other 200 got away, I guess. Also, of course, that persistent drip became a miniature Vic Falls from the roof and we got up cold, wet, and with our clothes and sleeping bags soaked through.

 

The big bus cometh

 We went back to the road cold, wet, miserable and in low spirits. By 10 o’clock the morning, we still did not have any luck with lifts and we were getting hungry and thirsty. These were desperate times, and we walked to a nearby bus stop. We made some enquiries from the other people obviously waiting for the bus and decided that we would also get on the bus to Lusaka when it came. The bus came, and we were assured that there was plenty of space for us. The bus was the stereotype for every African bus you would see in a movie. It came complete with chickens, goats and other ‘passengers’ on board. Our space was the sum total of about 40cm of the back bench, between two very wholesome African ladies. We got on, dropped our bags and started chatting. It was searingly hot and the people in the bus were sitting intimately close, so the bus developed it’s very own olfactory equivalent of the Oort Cloud very soon. The tiny windows provided some respite every time the bus went fast enough to generate some draught, but that was about twice, so not much help in general. The bus stopped at Kachalola for a bathroom and food break, and we got out and into the local market. I was starving and homed in on the offering of fried bread. (similar to ‘vetkoek’, in my tribal tongue) I greedily dug out a handful of these breads from under a small heap of dead flies and gorged myself. So far so painless – there are pills and drugs back home – I must just make it there, and hunger is a more immediate threat than cholera or whatever.

 

We mounted the bus again and drove uneventfully into Lusaka. The trip cost us the equivalent of R 5 (South African Rand) for 500 km, or one cent per kilometre, and is therefore still the cheapest form of transport I’ve ever used. In those days, this would be about US$ 1,30 for 500 kilometres.

 

Accomplices to GTA

On the far side of Lusaka, we got perhaps the second nicest lift of the whole trip. Three guys in a Toyota Hilux stopped and offered us a lift all the way through the border, into Botswana and to Gaborone. We were very grateful and piled in. The Hilux was very uncomfortable, but it was a good lift. Tom is not a small guy, and neither was any of the others, so the three of us in the back had to synchronise our mutual bodily orientations as we snoozed away the miles in the back seat. We crossed the border before it closed and were happy to be back in Botswana. At a fuel stop in Nata, Tom chatted with one of the guys and he was getting worried, because it seems that lifts like this are not free in Africa. These guys were expecting good payment for getting us home. This was trouble, as we were almost completely out of money. Tom essentially gave the guys all the money that we had in order for them not to leave us right there, and we continued. We drove through the night and arrived in Gaborone the next day. Tom speaks more than a little Tswana and later told me that the car we travelled in, was stolen and the guys were taking it to South Africa to sell it there. We made our way to Jwaneng uneventfully and got home to just shower and lay in our beds for two full days. We were severely sunburnt and utterly exhausted. We ate like hogs from the home cooking at Tom’s house. On day three after our return, I headed home myself, hiking back to Kimberley. I was out and back for just about 3 weeks.

 

It will be the understatement of the century to say that I will never forget that trip. It was filled with strange and wonderful sights, sounds, people and places. I changed, too. You only dig out bread from under a pile of dead flies once from sheer hunger before your personal objections to certain types of food or their preparation seem petty and insignificant.

 

 

Looking back now, more than 15 years after the fact, it remains the sort if thing you do when your gonads are doing the thinking. I will most certainly not attempt it again, though I felt safer then than the numerous times I hitchhiked in South Africa after that. At junctions like these, everyone always says: “Oh, but you could do it – the world was a different place then…” Rubbish! – it was always a dangerous and stupid thing to do, but it remains an experience that I shall never forget and a good tale in the bag for the children. 

 

 

Tom and I are still best friends, even though we see each other only rarely these days. I still keep the shoes that I wore on that trip as a memoir of the many, many miles that I walked through a sweltering Southern Africa that summer.  

It’s a good thing that these memories remain indelibly etched in my mind – I never packed a camera.