Andersen I Never Intended to Be Brave

A Woman's Bicycle Journey Through Southern Africa
1. Auflage 2011
ISBN: 978-1-935766-25-4
Verlag: Windy City Publishers
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 274 Seiten

Not yet ready to return to the States after her service as a U.S. Peace Corps volunteer, Heather Andersen sets her dream of exploring southern Africa by bicycle in motion. Her group dwindles to just two before the trip even starts and she finds herself traveling with a man she's never met before. Tension between them builds until the inevitable split, and Heather continues on alone through unfamiliar lands. With great appreciation and understanding, she vividly describes her surroundings, the colorful people she encounters, and the adventure of traveling in foreign cultures as a solo woman on a bicycle. With the question of whether it's safe never far from her mind, she forges her own path through southern Africa-and life. Along the way, she trusts her intuition and the kindness of strangers, appreciates the rhythm of an unscheduled life on the road, and rediscovers her commitment to leading the life she wants. If you've ever wanted to go somewhere completely unknown to you, or just want to experience it through someone else's eyes, I Never Intended to Be Brave will take you there.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Andersen, Heather

Leseproben

“I want to meet Paul,” says Elias again as we get off the plane in Blantyre, Malawi. “Okay, but I haven’t even met him yet,” I reply. I only just met Elias, who is returning home from a military training in South Africa, sitting next to him on the plane. With a ready smile, he wanted to know what was bringing me to his country, the “warm heart of Africa,” a phrase I will hear repeated many times over the next few weeks. I explained that I was beginning a three-month bicycle journey here. “Alone?” he asked. No. I told him my story: I’d tried to put together a small group through a cycling organization but had found only one person to join me—and would be meeting this person, Paul, for the first time when we landed in Blantyre. He raised his eyebrows. African men and women don’t travel together unless they are related, and Elias seemed unable to grasp that things were different in other cultures. He was educated and spoke English well. He understood all my words individually, but the concept of traveling with someone I’d met only through email, which he vaguely knew about but had never used, was just too foreign a concept. Throughout the flight, I asked Elias questions about Malawi and asked for his help pronouncing a few basic words of Chewa, the most commonly spoken language in the country. But he kept returning the conversation to my mysterious riding partner and asking me where Paul was. I kept telling him I wasn’t sure but he should be on this plane with us. As we get off the plane, Paul and I are able to identify each other by our carry-on luggage: panniers, or saddlebags, that clip onto a bicycle’s rack. He looks like the bad photo on his web site—dark, brown, layered hair with a bit of wave, silver-rimmed rectangular glasses, medium build—but, with hunched shoulders, seems tense, unlike the easygoing guy I’d imagined from our emails. As I walk toward him, I wonder what he’s really like? How well do I know him? We introduce ourselves and get in the “foreign passports” line to officially enter Malawi. At times over the past several months, as I corresponded with people who were interested in joining me, I wondered if this trip was really going to happen. Now I have my answer. Here I am in Malawi, planning to spend the next three months cycling through Malawi, Zambia, Botswana, and Namibia with someone I’m just meeting. Elias’ unspoken question, “Why are you traveling with him?” is one I will come to ask myself. I’ve just finished my U.S. Peace Corps volunteer service in the tiny southern African country of Lesotho but I’m not ready to return to the U.S. I feel a strong need to see more of southern Africa, a region I was originally drawn to for its mix of culture, wildlife, and scenery. I don’t want to return to the U.S. and start characterizing all of Africa as Lesotho. I do want to see more of the continent and understand the differences among the countries. Contrary to the portrayal of Africa in the media as a war-torn, insect- and disease-infested, poverty-stricken monolith, it’s an incredibly diverse continent, with terrain ranging from desert to mountains to rainforest to farmland. Like Europe, there are some similarities from country to country but also vast cultural differences across the continent. In my two years in Africa, I’ve met Kenya’s Masai who still subsist largely on milk and blood, watched Basotho horsemen wearing blankets as coats ride by in Lesotho, sweltered bicycling across the equator in Uganda, been snowed on both in Lesotho and atop Mt. Kilimanjaro, watched a leopard hunt, seen cheetahs lounging under a tree, and met some of the warmest people I’ve ever known. Paul is an American from the Chicago area taking a year off work to travel primarily by bicycle. He has already cycled in New Zealand and England on his own, is curious about Africa and wants a cycling partner for this portion of his trip. When we first agreed to do this trip together, we thought it was going to be as a group of three. Then our third person, a woman who’d emailed me that she was definitely committed to the trip, disappeared from contact. I have no idea whether she flaked out or died or what, but it’s just Paul and me. We have been corresponding by email for about six months and seem to have similar interests and travel styles. As we stand in the immigration line in the airport, Elias comes over to introduce himself to Paul. He reiterates an invitation he made to me on the plane to call him when we get to Zomba, where he is stationed, and he will show us around. After meeting Paul, Elias moves over to the more quickly moving “Malawi passports” line. “Do you want to put the bikes together and ride to Doogles?” I say to Paul after we clear customs. By email, we decided to stay at Doogles, a backpackers’ hostel with a camping area, so we’d have a meeting point in case either of us was delayed. “You mean you want to bike now? From the airport?” He sounds surprised. “Sure, it’s what I usually do on a bike tour. But you’ve traveled farther than I have to get here. We can find a taxi big enough for our bike boxes if you prefer.” As usual for airplane travel, our bikes are partially disassembled in cardboard boxes. He does, so we find a taxi, or rather one finds us, as several taxi drivers approach us, offering their services. “You need taxi?” After setting up our tents at Doogles, we sit at thick, wooden tables in their open-air restaurant, order dinner, and talk about the trip. Paul asks me a lot of questions about Africa, including whether I’ve been sick. “Not seriously. I had a bad cough during Peace Corps training, a cold or flu-like thing once, and my stomach has been queasy at times, but no awful debilitating illnesses.” “I’m going to eat whatever you eat,” he says with a smile but a serious tone. “Okay, but I’m a vegetarian, so that’s what you’re committing to.” I smile, too. “Well, maybe I won’t eat only whatever you eat.” Two days later, we are on the road. “How far is it to town?” asks Paul. “Which town?” replies Herman, whom we’ve just met. If I believed in omens, I’d have to say this seems like a bad one. Only a few hours into a three-month bicycle journey, we are already lost—and not simply lost but lost with the sun setting and a broken bicycle. After taking the obligatory beginning-of-a-long-journey photos, we cycled out of Blantyre, early in the afternoon, staying on the main road south. We were surprised when the road turned from asphalt to dirt. I suspected we might have missed a turn. This road didn’t look or feel like a main road—the dirt and lack of traffic made me dubious, but Paul insisted it was. He had asked a local cyclist if we were on the road to Thloyo, and the cyclist had responded, “yes.” In Africa, however, yes is frequently the right answer to give a foreigner. Tell him what he wants to hear, the thinking goes—don’t be the one to disappoint him. If yes had been the honest answer, though, we should be only a few kilometers from Thloyo, a sizeable enough dot on our map to be able to count on finding accommodation, when we stop by the side of the road because Paul’s rear wheel isn’t spinning as freely as it should. While he’s working on his bike, a short but stout, bearded, white South African in a small white truck stops to ask if we are okay. Herman introduces himself and we learn from him that we are definitely not on the road to Thloyo. We are on a backroad to Mulanje. We accidentally left the main road when it veered right and we stayed straight. This explains why the road we are on turned to dirt. We hadn’t missed a sign; there wasn’t one. If there had been, it should have read “Welcome to Africa, where logic does not always prevail.” Herman works at a road camp just off this road a few kilometers back. He tells us we’re about thirty kilometers from a town in both directions on this road. Paul thinks he can eventually fix his bike but we’re running out of daylight. I ask Herman if the road camp has anywhere we can spend the night. “No,” he quickly replies. “What about somewhere we can set up our tents?” “No, definitely not.” His abruptness shocks me. Africans are generally much more hospitable than this. Camping along the side of the road without enough food or extra water is not an appealing option, especially for our first night on the road, but what choice do we have? No other people or villages are in sight, and no one else has passed since we stopped. Herman says maybe he could give us a lift to one of the towns but he has to check with his boss first. Paul thinks he might have to return to Blantyre to get a bike part anyway. Herman drives off to check, promising to return soon. Paul stares down at his bike in frustration, but I am more optimistic. “As long as there are Africans running that camp, we’ll have a place to stay and probably also dinner with them tonight,” I say. I am confident that Africans’ strong sense of hospitality would not allow them to leave us stranded here, despite Herman’s initial outright rejection of the possibility of accommodation. Even after putting on long pants and jackets, we both get chilled waiting for...