The Red Cable

When jump starting a car, you must connect the positive terminal of the other car’s battery to the positive terminal of yours. Whilst the negative (black) jumper cable must be attached to the other car’s negative battery terminal, it needn’t be attached to yours. You can attach the negative jumper to any convenient unpainted surface on your car, where it won’t do any damage.

Given the last update, this one is going to be positively focussed. As such, I’m going to start with a list of the positive things that came about as a result of the Bushpig debacle and his untimely death (vale Bushpig):

1. I learnt an enormous amount about mechanics and bike maintenance;

2. I’ve learnt my lesson about mechanics and I'll do my damned-est to ensure the next bike won’t find itself unaccompanied in unsavoury hands;

3. We have been able to make up a lot of ground, more than we could have if I was on a bike;

4. Me made great friends in Kampala and our trip has now timed well to catch up with Rob in Malawi;

5. We ended up with an amazing group to hike Kilimanjaro with!

Kilimanjaro

Cam and I got out of Kampala like bats out of hell. We made for Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania and covered over 1,500kms in three days (no easy thing for the Badger on those roads).  We did a little shopping around Moshi for a good hiking company and discovered that one had a hike with a group of 8 doctors studying locally. Figuring that this sounded like a pretty safe option, literally, we went with it.

As it turned out, the doctors were a mix from the UK, Brazil and Australia.  Every now and again, you get caught up with a great group of people working together to achieve something and this was exactly that.  Ushar, Grace, Allison, Laura C, Laura G, Georgia, Syahir and Victor were not only great company, but they also brought the best out of our relationship with the 35+ strong contingent of Tanzanian porters, cooks and guides.

We also learnt a lot from the doctors. Every day and every night, Cam and I would get caught up in the inevitable doctor-chat, where we learnt heaps about Haemogoblins and Odemons (pulmonary and cerebral), Shistomiasis and other tropical diseases.  We were also able to teach them a thing or two about rocks and the body’s ability to clean itself.  Every night we would also have our Saps checked (the level of oxygen in our sap/blood) to make sure we were not going to die.  Which was comforting, at times.

We opted for the long, 8 day Lemosho Route.  There are other routes as short as 4-5 days, but after Kampala and our mad dash, we didn’t really feel like rushing things.  The Lemosho route started in lush, humid rainforest but quickly graduated into a starker, colder, shrub filled terrain.  On the first night, I was so glad that our guide had pulled me up on my rubbish BYO sleeping bag, stating matter-of-factly that if it took it, I would die.  From day 2, we were marching on the plateau from which the iconic, snow cap volcano peak rises.  So on a daily basis, we would have the glaciers and the peak on one side and a sea of cloud to the horizon to the other.  As Kili has the highest ‘relative relief’ (ie height above the surrounding terrain – 4,900 metres), at times it was like standing on the wing of a plane, high above the clouds.

Each day the walks were relatively stress free (a couple of K’s over a few hours) and our campsites became more and more spectacular. We would usually have several hours to soak-in the otherworldly scenery, fluctuating from hot, to freezing cold as the clouds passed over.  I have thrown up some photos, so please do check them out.

The day before summit day, we hiked to base camp, which was basically Mordor.  No vegetation, dust, rocks and very thin air.  As the hike to the summit starts at midnight, we were meant to rest up in the afternoon and conserve energy.  Instead, we decided to chuck rocks, which we have rediscovered from our childhood is a great past time.

Several years ago, I hiked to Annapurna Base Camp (ABC) in the Himalayas.  Other than a mild headache at the top, I didn’t find this to be a particularly difficult or strenuous climb.  At the time of the Kili hike, I was under the impression that ABC was 5,400 metres, so I was not overly phased by the prospect of hiking 5,950 to Kili’s summit.  However, I have since discovered that ABC is actually only 4,100… so really, I had no idea what I was in for.  It turned out to be one of the most physically demanding things I’ve ever done.

After barely any sleep, we got up just before midnight and started the steep 1,200 metre climb to the summit.  The night was clear and a strong moon was bouncing off the glaciers on the peak.  It was well below zero and I started to wish I had bought some gloves, whilst blessing having an extra-long sleeved jumper.  Unfortunately, after a few hours, Ushar fainted and had to head back down.  Others were also having difficulties, so the group was split up. It actually got to the point that I was dreading taking rest stops, as it only meant time to get cold.  I found myself walking and bopping on the spot to try and keep warm.

About halfway through the night I was taking a breath with every small step.  I was breathing at a jogging cadence, just to shuffle forward.  The music in my headphones had ceased to provide any motivation, the bopping had stopped and there were icicles in my beard.

It was a trudge.

At about 6am, a slow glow started to appear at the edges of the clouds on the horizon and for the first time in hours I had a feeling of certainty that I would be able to get to the summit.  As the sun rose, it was still cold, but I started to feel my toes again and I could take my hands out of my pockets (though still bunched in fist of the long sleeves). 

Stella Peak marks the point where you reach the edge of the volcano’s crater and is only 100 metres below the highest point.  I broke out my super cookie that I’d been saving (over 2,500 calories in one cookie!) and spat about half of it out.  I was so buggered I just couldn’t really stomach it.  We then penguin shuffled the last few hundred metres in the freezing sunlight around the crater rim to Uhuru Peak.  For me, there was no champagne or cheering, after a few quick snaps I gratefully started heading down, still panting. 

On our way back around the rim, we came across the other group, which had persisted with the trudge.  In particular, Laura C had engineered a stunning turnaround, having deposited some weight at Stella Peak.  When we had last seen her in the middle of the night, she was bent over double with cramp, but was now literally skipping around the crater.

We stopped briefly back at Stella Peak to share a few nips of Cam’s whisky that he’d been saving and I felt better from then on.  At the sight of the whisky, our guide Adronis, up until then reserved and professional, began leaping about like a schoolkid squealing “whiskyyyyy, whiskyyyyy..!”.  I cursed him for his energy, but appreciated his enthusiasm for the drink.

In shin deep scree, we practically skied down to base camp in the sun, peeling off layers in the dusty heat and feeling better by the metre.  By the time we got down, my lungs had been through probably the longest workout they had ever had, and were full of dust.  I felt like I could barely breathe, but was just glad to lie down in the tent.  I was buggered.

We soon discovered however that there were those in worse shape.  At Stella Peak, Allison had come down with pneumonia or perhaps worse, pulmonary oedema.  She looked like a ghost and was carted down the hill that afternoon. How she, Ushar and Syahir managed to march all the way down to the bottom of the mountain (to the hospital) that same day was extraordinary.  The rest of us descended 1,500 metres for our final night on the mountain and after a milo binge were in better spirits.  In hindsight, this would have been a good time for more whisky.

The last day was then a pleasant walk through the rainforest to the bottom.  We were reunited with Ushar, Syahir and Allison (who by this time looked miles better) and enjoyed a meat lunch and a few beers with the whole team.

It’s difficult to describe the sense of team that developed over the whole hike.  By the end of it, there was genuine friendship between us and the porters, guides and other support crew.  Each morning, we would be gee-ed up by the whole crew singing and dancing out the mountain songs. Their enthusiasm was as infectious as the afro-pop that would blare from a portable speaker dangling from the belt of our affably gangster guide, Amadeus.  An impossible romance grew between Laura C and a particularly handsome and sweet porter named Patrick-I (or Master P, as he is known in martial arts circles).  At our finishing lunch, several rounds of mountain songs were enjoyed that I reckon lasted an hour and I was dubbed ‘Simba’, a reference to the ginger mane I have been cultivating.  I will always remember this hike fondly for the group and the team we had, and the people we met.  

Malawi

After an all too brief night of celebrations and luxury with the doctors, we raced to clear Tanzania. In a bit over two days, we barrelled our way down to Malawi where we met our mate Rob on the Lake.

Malawi is a little country with a big lake and Rob is a big, red Dutchman with little reserve.  We met Rob in Kampala and immediately struck it off with him.  He informed us of his similarly crazy plan to ride a Honda XR Baja 250 from Uganda down to South Africa and a partnering of the Baja and the Badger seemed irresistible.  As it turned out, we would be chasing Rob rather than the other way round, but in the end the timing turned out well.

Having spent two and half months together in the Badger, together with the strain of the Bushpig’s passing, swapping Rob into the Badger and me onto the Baja was a timely switch up.  Also, by the time we met up, Rob had contracted some sort of dermatological bum disease from the Lake, making riding the Baja a giant pain in the ass, literally.  So, Rob climbed into the Badger and I climbed onto the Baja.

We worked our way down the lake and ended up in Lilongwe for some minor mechanical touch ups and to take a giant leap forward in terms of our daily quality of life.  Up until Lilongwe, we had been travelling with an esky that we eventually dubbed ‘the humidifier’.  Finding ice in Africa is not easy and even when you do, it melts quickly (without going too far into this, this is not just the heat. I didn’t think it was possible to ‘make’ low quality ice, but turns out it is...) So, after ruining several chickens and enduring far too much warm beer, we determined that we needed a fridge.  The fact that Malawi also usually only has power for about 6 hours a day reinforced this decision (Malawi – it’s beautiful, but nothing works; stunning, but nothing works).  We pre-ordered an Engel car-fridge to Lilongwe and this addition to the Badger was everything we could have hoped for.  Guaranteed cold beer, cheese and meat-for-days returned to our existence and our quality of life has soared as a result.

After Lilongwe, we went back to Lake Malawi at Cape Maclear. A false start saw us staying on the village beach, where the ‘old world charm’ of having the locals bathe and wash all their clothes and food did not overcome our general disgust at its all-round filthiness.  We did however eventually find a nice hostel to watch the sun set over Lake Malawi, boat to a nearby island to snorkel with hoards of electric blue cichlids and to feed the fish eagles.

We had hoped to go and hike the Mulanje Mountains, however this plan was foiled by a peculiar security situation.  Apparently the local denizens of the Mulanje area have recently been beset by vampires/bloodsuckers.  Mob justice has prevailed with a spate of killings of suspected bloodsuckers, including foreigners.  A recent military curfew had failed to resolve the issue.  As we hate vampires and our garlic stocks were critically low, we elected to give this area a wide berth.

From Cape Maclear, we left the lake and entered the furnace of Liwonde National Park.  At Liwonde it was sweltering and we again blessed the Engel.  The game driving at Liwonde wasn’t great, but this was more than made up for by regular visits to our camp by families of elephants.  At this camp, you literally had to be careful that there wasn’t an elephant hiding behind each baobab you passed.  On many occasions we found ourselves just metres from an elephant chilling out.  For such big animals, they are so quiet and they can be metres from you and you won’t know it, until they rip out a small shrub or tear a limb from a tree.  At times, they got stroppy and a quick false-charge would have us scuttling for cover.  Here, we were also able to go on a ‘game canoe' up the river that brought us just metres from hippos, though this time in the water.  The OH&S factor at Liwonde, low; the wildlife experience, high.

Mozambique

After the Kampala-coaster, we were afraid that a visit to Mozambique would be off the cards, despite it being one of our most anticipated countries.  Fortunately, the hustle through Tanzania and Malawi made it possible, with an abbreviated itinerary to Vic Falls through Zimbabwe, then down through Botswana.

Our first and primary destination in Mozambique was Mozambique Island on the coast. The drive from Malawi to there was majestic.  The landscape here in Mozambique is littered with huge freestanding granite monoliths, which punctuate the scenery like mesas.  This eased the pain somewhat of the awful local roads and a two day drive to the island.

Mozambique Island itself is a pretty little spit of limestone slashed about 1km off the coast, over the shallow flats.  The old Portuguese capital, it’s a small, bucolic island with cobbled streets and crumbling architecture.  We enjoyed a few days here, playing with Ridgeback puppies on the hostel roof, avoiding the heat of the day, wandering the photogenic streets and biding time until wine o’clock and seafood dinners.

Our strict itinerary demanded we leave Mozambique Island, but I wish we were back there.  We are currently in Nampula, a hard-edged mining town a few hours inland.  

Current Scenario

In the spirit of keeping this update positive, I will not address the current Badger issues prolonging our stay in Mozambique (that you may have seen on the FBook page).  I will write again once this is all sorted and the Badger is fighting fit. I hope to do so in the near future.

Also, I have thrown some photos from Uganda, Tanzania and Malawi up onto the page, so feel free to have a look at some of those. Unfortunately, I seem to have misplaced my SD card from the Gorillas in Uganda, so hopefully that turns up down the track.

Cheers,

Stu