The Zanzibar Tour Days 19, 20 and 21

The Old Legs Tour was created to raise money for desperate pensioners struggling to pay medical bills, pay rent and even buy enough food. We are now on the Zanzibar Tour days 19, 20 and 21 riding our hearts out – every donation you make gives a pensioner some dignity and a better life.

June 15 2023 – Day 19 of the Old Legs Zanzibar Tour – from our bush camp on the edge of the Selous Niassa Wildlife Corridor to a less stunning bush camp 20 kilometers short of Tunduru.

Distance – 122 kilometers
Total time elapsed- 8 hours 15 minutes
Total ascent – 1155 m
Av heart rate – 124 bpm
Max heart rate – 163 bpm.

Today was all about the Miombo woodlands we rode through, and the forever views stretching away for miles and miles in every direction, courtesy of some stupidly steep hills that we rode up. Apparently we also rode down them but I never got that memo.

Even though we didn’t see any game, bar 2 hyenas and a civet car, the bush in the Niassa Selous Wildlife Corridor through which we rode for most of the morning is right up there as some of the best ever and it has escaped the ravages of the charcoal trade thus far. I think they take policing in Tanzania seriously and long may that continue.

The hyenas I saw were both unfortunately late, squashed extremely flat by the thousands of coal trucks that to and fro daily from Songea to the port of Mtwara, but I am sure they were magnificent specimens back in the day, ditto the civet cat.

The coal deposits in the south of Tanzania must be huge and are serviced by literally thousands of trucks.
Apparently it takes 2000 coal trucks to fill a ship. But the trucks did not detract from the ride in the least. The truckers were all well mannered and especially considerate of the cyclists, hooting politely to let us know they were there and giving us all the room we needed on the road.

I went from hero to zero on the bike, suffering a hangover porridge day in the saddle, especially after lunch. I am sure the hills that I climbed were steeper than the hills Pete Brodie and Zack Patinois climbed next to me. Pete and Zack pulled the short straws and swept for strugglers and stragglers at the back of the peloton, namely moi. But I am very happy to ride slow and at the very back, because it gives you time to stop and smell roses, and to soak up the experience like a sponge. We are almost two thirds through our adventure and before we know it, it will all be over.

I especially enjoyed our interactions with the locals. I was seized by hunger pangs about 20 kilometers before the lunch break. My allotment of jelly babies for the day were all ready a distant memory. Zack and I stopped in a tiny village to buy some samoosas from a lady on the side of the road. Because I was completely knackered, Zack was in charge of negotiations. Greek Cypriots wrote the book on trading. It was a pleasure to watch Zack in action.

That our purveyor of fine foods had as much English as Zack has Swahili wasn’t a problem because Zack is also very good at charades. He communicated our desire to purchase her samoosas clearly, by scoffing down three of them. I especially love meat samoosas and also dived in. Three samosas later, I still wasn’t sure what type of samoosas I’d eaten, because they were empty, entirely devoid of any filling. Which is sort of like eating an ice cream cone, without the ice cream.

Come time to pay the language barrier grew.

Clearly alarmed by the shoplifting in progress, the samoosa lady solicited the help of a passing motorbiker. Negotiations commenced. Zack in action was a joy to behold. The sign language was impressively fast and they both looked like they were being bothered by a swarm of tsetse flies. Zack and the motor-biker scribbling invisible numbers on an invisible white board. Then Zack closed the deal. He snapped up the 6 samoosas for 5000 shillings. Given that she’s just bought 10 doughnuts for 1000, Vicky thought Zack had been ripped off.

The empty samoosas were delicious and worth every penny that Zack paid for them. I came away from the impromptu food stop with a top tip. Always negotiate the price before you eat the goods.

We descended off the plateau down into farmland, mostly small holders. Tanzania is God’s own country and if you are a farmer, you can grow anything you want to grow. We saw crops of tobacco, papaya, cassava and maize, and a big plantation of coconut palms even though we were still 400 km from the beach. If I was 40 years younger.

My porridge day turned into a stodgy porridge day when my kinetics coach, Vicky Bowen, picked up that I was riding with a sqwonk knee. I asked Rafe to ride behind me and have a look at my suspect knee. He agreed that the knee looked dodgy and diagnosed it as possible curvature of the spine. Which put bees in my head and imaginary pains in both knees.

Long story short, turns out the cleat on my right shoe was 10 degrees off centre and my comfortable saddle installed in Malawi was 10 degrees off centre the other way. I am glad I picked up the problem straight away after a thousand kilometers.

Until my next blog, have fun, do good and do epic if you can – Eric Chicken Legs de Jong.

* Names and images may have been changed for privacy reasons

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June 16 and 17 2023 – Day 20 and 21 of the Old Legs Zanzibar Tour – from one bush camp in the middle of the nowhere, Tanzania, to another one.

June 16 stats
Distance – 121 kilometers
Total time elapsed- 8 hours 35 minutes
Total ascent – 938 m
Av heart rate – 120 bpm
Max heart rate – 170 bpm.
Temperature- 34 degrees

June 17 stats
Distance – 77 kilometers
Ride time elapsed- 4 hours 18 minutes
Total ascent – 579 m
Av heart rate – 120 bpm
Max heart rate – 159 bpm.
Temperature- 34 degrees

NB These are Angus’s ride stats. Alas, mine were far less impressive, but more of that later.

Apologies for the break in transmission, due to cell phone signal failure and a wobble.

This blog is coming to you from a bush camp about 5 km past the village of Ngwale which is on the map, but only just. Night-apes sound like they are being murdered in the trees all around us. We hear them at every bush camp. I am blogging with my foot in a bucket, but more of that also later.

We just finished 3 tough days back-to-back looking to get off the highway and back on roads less travelled. On paper and in the planning stages, the days looked big but doable. In the flesh, they were brutal.

We have 8 days back-to-back bush camping in front of us and are properly off grid. We’ve not had cellphone signal for 2 days and our Ezytrack tracking device stopped tracking in Songea. It is quite daunting that no one out there knows exactly where we are, but also quite refreshing.

We are showering using water drawn from rivers, hot if you are one of the lucky fish first to shower, but cold if the batteries run flat. Last night we were down to two cold beers in the fridges and expect the ice to run out tomorrow. NB one of our inverter batteries in Christopher fritzed, and the charging system along with it, but we are still enjoying our best adventure ever.

We rode through the town of Tunduru early in the morning. For months Tunduru has just been the name of a distant spot on the map. In real life, it is a crazy, hectically busy market town, full of noise, colour, motorbikes and tuk-tuks.

They don’t do formal retail in Tanzania, but the support crew were able to shop hard for some few essentials, including new deep cycle batteries for Christopher, fuel, water, ice, and a bottle of brandy for Pete, which cost him $12.82, so it should be quite good stuff.

Just after Tunduru, George Lockhart was robbed at gun point of 20,000 shillings a.k.a. $8.54, an Old Legs first.
George, an avid photographer, had stopped on a bridge to take a photo of the river below. An angry man came barreling out of the bush like a troll, brandishing a shotgun. He was the keeper of the bridge and told George in gesticulations and broken English that his photos had compromised national security, and he was demanding 20000 shillings in compensation, or else. Anyone who can act out national security in charades, would absolutely ace Bangkok. George comes from South Africa and knows full well the consequences of or else, so he paid up in a hurry.

Rafe, Angus and I also stopped for photos on the same bridge a few minutes later, and attracted the attentions of the same robber troll. The troll was short and squat like in the nursery rhymes and the ancient single barrel 12-gauge shotgun looked huge in his hands. The hole in the end of the barrel looked especially huge. He demanded money of me. I’m not sure why, but I told him I was Russian. Clearly that conjured up images of being invaded and bombs being dropped on his schools, his hospitals and his head, because the robber troll quickly turned his attentions to Rafe instead. Silly man.

‘Give me your money’ the robber troll demanded. Rafe weighs in at 6 foot 4 inches, but looks bigger when he is angry. Rafe was plenty angry and crapped upon the hapless robber troll about his piss poor take, take, take attitude. The poor chap was confounded and gave us a 100% discount on the toll, and sent us on our way.

I stopped at a police checkpoint 10 kilometers down the road and reported the robber troll and asked the cops to arrest him and/ or shoot him dead. Oh how the policemen laughed and laughed. Should any policemen in Tanzania wish to follow up on this story, the river was the Muhesi.

We turned off the tar and onto the dirt with thick trees and bush on both sides. It felt good to be back on dirt, even though it was deep sand in places.

We passed some Tanzanian smallholder farmers. They were poor like Mozambicans and were trying to scrabble a living amongst the tree stumps in the half cleared lands. Somewhere along the line and without noticing the downhills, we have dropped back down to 400 meters and for farmers, that spells hot and dry. Mostly we saw tatty maize, a tall legume bush which we thought might be chick peas, cassava, and some cashew nut trees.

Their villages were ugly, consisting of a few square mud huts under see-through thatch with bricked up windows to compensate, apart from the one chap who had constructed a splendid double-storey hut with an external staircase that looked as though it might fail Australian health and safety audits.

The poor farmers. If and when they are able to coax a crop out of the hard soils, apparently the elephants come crop raiding. The villagers were quick to warn us of elephants marauding ahead. We were very excited to see them, but didn’t. Alas. Fingers crossed for tomorrow.

We bush-camped next to a river 5 kilometers past the village of Ngapa. George dug a pool in the riverbed to wallow in. I wallowed in it after George, and found it suspiciously warm. George has a good poker face.

Cedric enjoyed a roaring trade at his medic’s clinic. Everyone has scratches and cuts on their legs which have gone horribly septic, we think per kind favour of either the flies, and/or some dodgy rivers that we waded through.
Grass seeds were a major culprit. Kim had a minuscule seed in her foot which transformed into a massive septic sore the size of a dollar coin, or a South African 5 Rand coin. Hanny trumped Kim with 3 grass seeds in one even bigger wound.

I was at the back of the queue with a small and very modest scratch near the bottom of my right shin. But by morning, my ankle had swollen to the point where my lower leg almost looks muscular, but I am known to exaggerate. I popped an antibiotic for just in case.

Alas. 10 kilometers into the next day’s ride I suffered a major wobble on my bike, and had to get off, before I fell off. I feel generally crap and worry that my body is at a low ebb.

I sat out the last 67 kilometers of the ride, sleeping in the back of the black Isuzu. I must be knackered because I slept through the most epic rickety, wooden bridge crossing on Tour thus far.

FOMO hurts more than infected bodies. I hate it in the back of the car, but I also know that I am not good to ride. As soon we got into camp, I sat with my foot immersed in a bucket of salt and Dettol water, hoping to get the puss out of the wound. But that doesn’t looked to have worked too well.

My veterinary consultant, Vicky Bowen, thinks my lymph system is infected. She prescribed 3 vigorous massage sessions with hot, hot water to dissipate the infection up into my body. Third degree Vicky said that many of her horses have suffered the same condition over the years, and she has never had to shoot a single one. Bless Vicky and I love her dearly, but vigorous massages couples with third degree burns hurt more than infected lymph systems, so I am going to throw job lots of antibiotics at the problem going forward.

We are riding to Zanzibar to raise money for Zimbabwe’s pensioners. My black mood was lifted by a video of Martin Carroll, walking with a Zimmerframe in his new home at the Salvation Army, Braeside. Martin broke his hip 8 weeks ago on a lonely mine in the middle of nowhere that he called home. With huge help from Mr Mthethwa the surgeon, the Old Legs Medical Fund was able to buy Martin a new hip, and we’ll pay for his Salvation Army board and lodgings going forward. After years on his own, Martin is thrilled to live amongst friends. But for our donors, the Old Legs would not be able to help people like Martin. Thank you and God bless.