In the past week we have entered a new country, Mozambique, we have covered a lot of good mileage and, with the introduction of our new team member, the Norwegian powerhouse Gunnar Kornberg, have enjoyed a new perspective on the trip.
It's been fantastic to welcome Gunnar as part of the team. Although several of our friends had motioned some interest in joining the tour, for one reason or another Gunnar is the only one (mad enough?) to have ended up joining us. The connection is perhaps slightly tenous but sets the tone for the type of tenacious athlete he is. On a trip to Bergen to visit my dad, it was suggested that i go for a run and cycle with Gunnar. Sounds good, i thought. . As we set off on a "short" run to the top of the local cable car i felt comfortable with the pace but he soon stopped. "That is the warm up done, now we do 4 minutes on, 4 minutes off". Suffice to say that after a few repetitions it all melded into 8 minutes of just-about-faster-than-off as i struggled to keep Gunnar within my distant sights. Nevertheless, two years later and after a volley of emails, Rick and I awaited his arrival on rainy Blantyre Saturday. He arrived looking exceedingly fit, healthy and well-prepared for the trip, counting amongst his training a 320 km one-day epic solo cycle through the Norwegian mountains, that's 18 hours of cycling in total...
For Rick and I its been a pleasure to have a fresh perspective to re-energize on the trip. After nearly three months of cycling together you often running out of things to say and we had become accustomed to peddling along quietly with each other, mulling over our own thoughts. We now had the opportunity to relive the original excitement and experience of our trip, reminding us of why we originally chose to do it and quite how different this all was to our normalities of daily living. It also gave us a chance to recount some of our favourite stories and impart some of our "tricks of the trade".
In terms of our journey, I think its best to pick up where Rick left off, with the incredible hospitality and generosity shown to us at every angle by all peoples. As i write this, i am sitting in the kids bedroom of a family in Chimoio, in North-Eastern Mozambique, our rest stop after three days cycling from Tete. We spoke to them yesterday a few hours before we were to arrive, on a number given to us by Fraser and Candice, our newly made friends in Tete, and were warmly welcomed into their home with a tasty Macaroni cheese dinner. It's the latest of a long line of connections, along we are fortuitously passed from family to family. To describe the kindness of Fraser and Candice is honestly difficult. When we arrived late in the evening we had planned to stay just one night, however within a few hours we had been convinced to stay another day and join Fraser Tiger fishing on the Zambezi for his day off! At every turn we were fed and watered and were even invited to their 10 year old daughters birthday party. It was fantastic to feel so welcomed and part of their family for two days.
Beyond these families, we benefit on a daily basis from the benevolence of the passing stranger. As we stopped for lunch in a local restaurant on the way out of Tete, no sooner had we sat down than we found a round of soda's courtesy of a Mozambican gentleman in the corner. He had passed us 20k out of down and felt he owed us a drink in respect of our challenge. In fact, that whole lunch we paid only for one bottle of water, as another gentleman bought us a further round of drinks. The whole concept of openness, sharing and generosity is overwhelming and slightly baffling to us insular Europeans, but is one which we will all try and spread on our return home. If only to rebalance our karma to which we are currently heavily indebted!
The lunch was also a memorable one for one other reason; the celebrations of Mozambican Women's Day. The role of the woman in Sub-Saharan Africa has been well documented, but cannot be overstated. As far as we have seen the stereotype still remains strong, especially in rural areas. We have often entered towns for our midday stop and had drunken men slur broken English in our direction from the bar, while their lady counterparts quietly go about their business selling food and wares, collecting water and tending to their shambas. But on April 7th in Mozambique it is Womens day and the chance to throw off the yolk of their daily chores and do whatever they wish! We had our lunch accompanied by a group of women in matching kanga's bearing the face of Josina Machel, a female independance freedom fighter who died on April 7th in 1970, they danced and enjoyed perhaps one of the most well-deserved beers around.
The town of Tete is a fascinating example of the economic revival going in many parts Africa. It is spread along the banks of the enormous Zambezi river, as David Livingstone called it "Gods Highway", and has the claim to fame of being the "hottest town in Africa" (our hosts have had to twice replace their thermometres as they burst from the heat!). Passing through the town the pace of development is startling, from a relatively quiet town concerned mainly with Tobacco processing a few years ago, the discovery of $4 Billion reserves of coal have transformed it into a bustling industrial boom-town. Concerned of the heat we left early on the morning of Saturday 7th May on our road out of town, passing housing developments which a few years ago were deemed worthless scrubland. For the first section of our trip we were honoured to be joined by Salmar, a friend of Fraser who had recently completed the Cape Epic, an 800k off-road race around Cape Town with over 16,000 metres of height gain, not a challenge for the faint hearted!
For me, the journey onward from here leaves a short, painful and hazy imprint on my memory. The night before we left Tete, i started to feel unwell. I had headache, stomach pains and nausea. Being a good doctor i took no medicine and went straight to bed, sleeping through supper and waking 12 hours later the following morning. Feeling somewhat refreshed, and with the urgency to keep moving on the road i felt good to go. Sadly things didn't miraculously improve and within an hour i was sweating profusely and struggling to keep pace with Rick and Gunnar up the hills. As we set off from a short morning break i was on the verge of vomiting and our pace slowed up again. Gunnar and Rick kindly took my heavier luggage and, with my eyes firmly fixed on their back tyre, guided me into lunch.
As a doctor with a budding interest in all things tropical, i'm still not sure what it was/is that brought this on, the only certainty is that the list is a long one with options ranging from viral to bacterial to parasitic (sadly our Rapid Malaria tests failed to work, no doubt due to being stored in >40 C). What i do also know is that for the next three days i continued to feel rotten and struggled with the pace of the trip. The three most resounding feelings i remember from these two days are the frustration, anorexia and tiredness. The frustration that no matter how hard i pushed there was nothing i could do to keep up with the Rick and Gunnar, hills that would have previously been a comfortable climb became severe mountain passes. The loss of appetite was disconcerting for two reasons, firstly it was an entirely new feeling for me, despite the 6 1/2 hours cycling i felt absolutely no desire to eat, but equally because it gave me an impartial view while watching Rick and Gunnar hoover everything edible in sight, and then continue on their search for calories. I almost couldn't believe that i was also in this slightly crazed state of hunger for all of the rest of my trip. Finally the tiredness was overwhelming, as we cycled past shaded trees i imagined curling up underneath one and closing my eyes, for two days after lunch i fell straight asleep and each night was knocked out by 8. The good news is that things are better and that i can eat, whether this is the natural course of things or due to a course of antibiotics, i'm not sure (and i'm not sure i care!).
For Rick and Gunnar, the experience of these three days is, i'm sure, slightly different as they were able to concentrate on the finer elements of the trip. We were lucky enough to enjoy beautiful sunny weather, often not too hot in the early morning and therefore pleasant for cycling. Out of the tree and bushland rose dramatic rock fortresses, which excited the climber in Rick and, in combination with the Portuguese colonial feel, gave the area a similar feeling to Northern Spain. On our second night, we enjoyed camping with a local family, in the midst of their circular thatch and mud huts, a new experience for Gunnar which Rick and i were happy to share. And, a quiet, good tar road made the cycling as pleasant as could be.
It's now the 10th April and we have 8 days of cycling left until we reach Maputo. The feeling of almost reaching the end is one that for a long-time seemed too far away to conceive, but has arrived more quickly than we had imagined. Still, the trip has so far thrown up the unexpected at every turn, i have little doubt that there is still plenty ahead before we arrive in Maputo.
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| Team on the way out of Tete with Salmar |
It's been fantastic to welcome Gunnar as part of the team. Although several of our friends had motioned some interest in joining the tour, for one reason or another Gunnar is the only one (mad enough?) to have ended up joining us. The connection is perhaps slightly tenous but sets the tone for the type of tenacious athlete he is. On a trip to Bergen to visit my dad, it was suggested that i go for a run and cycle with Gunnar. Sounds good, i thought. . As we set off on a "short" run to the top of the local cable car i felt comfortable with the pace but he soon stopped. "That is the warm up done, now we do 4 minutes on, 4 minutes off". Suffice to say that after a few repetitions it all melded into 8 minutes of just-about-faster-than-off as i struggled to keep Gunnar within my distant sights. Nevertheless, two years later and after a volley of emails, Rick and I awaited his arrival on rainy Blantyre Saturday. He arrived looking exceedingly fit, healthy and well-prepared for the trip, counting amongst his training a 320 km one-day epic solo cycle through the Norwegian mountains, that's 18 hours of cycling in total...
For Rick and I its been a pleasure to have a fresh perspective to re-energize on the trip. After nearly three months of cycling together you often running out of things to say and we had become accustomed to peddling along quietly with each other, mulling over our own thoughts. We now had the opportunity to relive the original excitement and experience of our trip, reminding us of why we originally chose to do it and quite how different this all was to our normalities of daily living. It also gave us a chance to recount some of our favourite stories and impart some of our "tricks of the trade".
In terms of our journey, I think its best to pick up where Rick left off, with the incredible hospitality and generosity shown to us at every angle by all peoples. As i write this, i am sitting in the kids bedroom of a family in Chimoio, in North-Eastern Mozambique, our rest stop after three days cycling from Tete. We spoke to them yesterday a few hours before we were to arrive, on a number given to us by Fraser and Candice, our newly made friends in Tete, and were warmly welcomed into their home with a tasty Macaroni cheese dinner. It's the latest of a long line of connections, along we are fortuitously passed from family to family. To describe the kindness of Fraser and Candice is honestly difficult. When we arrived late in the evening we had planned to stay just one night, however within a few hours we had been convinced to stay another day and join Fraser Tiger fishing on the Zambezi for his day off! At every turn we were fed and watered and were even invited to their 10 year old daughters birthday party. It was fantastic to feel so welcomed and part of their family for two days.
Beyond these families, we benefit on a daily basis from the benevolence of the passing stranger. As we stopped for lunch in a local restaurant on the way out of Tete, no sooner had we sat down than we found a round of soda's courtesy of a Mozambican gentleman in the corner. He had passed us 20k out of down and felt he owed us a drink in respect of our challenge. In fact, that whole lunch we paid only for one bottle of water, as another gentleman bought us a further round of drinks. The whole concept of openness, sharing and generosity is overwhelming and slightly baffling to us insular Europeans, but is one which we will all try and spread on our return home. If only to rebalance our karma to which we are currently heavily indebted!
The lunch was also a memorable one for one other reason; the celebrations of Mozambican Women's Day. The role of the woman in Sub-Saharan Africa has been well documented, but cannot be overstated. As far as we have seen the stereotype still remains strong, especially in rural areas. We have often entered towns for our midday stop and had drunken men slur broken English in our direction from the bar, while their lady counterparts quietly go about their business selling food and wares, collecting water and tending to their shambas. But on April 7th in Mozambique it is Womens day and the chance to throw off the yolk of their daily chores and do whatever they wish! We had our lunch accompanied by a group of women in matching kanga's bearing the face of Josina Machel, a female independance freedom fighter who died on April 7th in 1970, they danced and enjoyed perhaps one of the most well-deserved beers around.
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| Well-earned beer on Mozambique Women's Day |
The town of Tete is a fascinating example of the economic revival going in many parts Africa. It is spread along the banks of the enormous Zambezi river, as David Livingstone called it "Gods Highway", and has the claim to fame of being the "hottest town in Africa" (our hosts have had to twice replace their thermometres as they burst from the heat!). Passing through the town the pace of development is startling, from a relatively quiet town concerned mainly with Tobacco processing a few years ago, the discovery of $4 Billion reserves of coal have transformed it into a bustling industrial boom-town. Concerned of the heat we left early on the morning of Saturday 7th May on our road out of town, passing housing developments which a few years ago were deemed worthless scrubland. For the first section of our trip we were honoured to be joined by Salmar, a friend of Fraser who had recently completed the Cape Epic, an 800k off-road race around Cape Town with over 16,000 metres of height gain, not a challenge for the faint hearted!
For me, the journey onward from here leaves a short, painful and hazy imprint on my memory. The night before we left Tete, i started to feel unwell. I had headache, stomach pains and nausea. Being a good doctor i took no medicine and went straight to bed, sleeping through supper and waking 12 hours later the following morning. Feeling somewhat refreshed, and with the urgency to keep moving on the road i felt good to go. Sadly things didn't miraculously improve and within an hour i was sweating profusely and struggling to keep pace with Rick and Gunnar up the hills. As we set off from a short morning break i was on the verge of vomiting and our pace slowed up again. Gunnar and Rick kindly took my heavier luggage and, with my eyes firmly fixed on their back tyre, guided me into lunch.
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| "I Love Tete" |
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| Early morning with Mozambican family |
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