Coming Home

Deciding to come home was a heartache. People ask us now, “Was it a surprise for your families?” It was a surprise for US! All along, we’d been hoping to return by air to Cairo and make our way home from there by public transport. But it was Christmas. We’d been away for over eight months. The travel was nearly always fun but rarely easy. The Middle East held huge appeal but it would be chilly at this time. There was a reasonable flight through Cairo to London. We chatted about it and agreed, home for Christmas. We were distraught to have missed out on Lesotho and Johannesburg but I suppose you just have to learn to stop.

- Malachy Harty

Journey's End

It was very nice to come home for Christmas. Everyone looks wonderful – they’ve all been shopping and had the hair done for the festive season. Then there are the lights, decorations and most importantly, presents. Sorry, did I say that? No, it couldn’t have been me. I have come back from Africa a changed woman. No capitalists here! Hell, no!

I’m sorry to say that I am still the same materialist today as I was on April 13th 2005 when we set off on this trip. The first thing I bought at the airport was perfume, possibly the most decadent substance ever created by man.

I had worried that I wouldn’t be able to cope with wasted resources and over indulgence and first world life in general but I have in fact embraced the lot with venom and gusto.

What has been a bit of a shock is the extent to which people are rushed off their feet. The sorry fact is that we have time for no one, not even ourselves. In Africa, when someone enquires after your health, they will also enquire about the entire family. People have time for people, it seems.

Another surprise is how many people have been following our trip. I don’t know how many people have asked about the malaria. It’s wonderful that so many have kept track of us but the timing of our return has been problematic. The articles were not current and many now suppose that because they’ve only just read about the malaria that we came home early.

In fact, we finished the trip ahead of schedule and were lucky enough to be able to find a flight home before Christmas. I hate that people should think that Africa proved too challenging. In fact, Africa was not a problem. Tough in parts, but generally, wonderful. It’s quite damaging for its image if people imagine we aborted our trip.

Now that we are back, we have a few challenges to face. We must wrap up the project - write the last of the articles and organize school visits for the New Year. When that’s done, we face the more difficult challenge of putting our old lives back together again. I would like to go back to college but I loved writing for the Imokilly People and particularly enjoyed taking photographs. I’m not sure what Malc wants to do either. And then there is us. We’ve been in each other’s pockets for the last eight and a half months. We must try to grow our own relationship. Maybe put it back together is more accurate… There’s certainly a lot to do.

Blue? No, not really. I had a great time. I’d do it again in a flash. It was a wonderful trip. The people were fantastic. We saw and did amazing things. It was the trip of a lifetime. But I’m very glad to be home. It’s nice to see family and friends and my piano. I’ve been anxious to get going on the next project – whatever that may be. It’s life that’s really the adventure, not Africa.

PS. Music is wonderful. Keane. The Pixies. Johnnie Cash. It’s all good. My God, how I missed it. A pox on those rats who stole our minidisk players.

- Niamh O Riordan

Cape Town, South Africa

We met two wonderful people at the hostel and agreed to travel to Cape Town with them. Their names were Justin and Becky. He was from South Africa. She was from England. The two had travelled overland from London through West Africa in their own car. This seemed unimaginably epic to me. They’d travelled down the left hand side of the map and we’d travelled down the right side of the map and we would travel the last few thousand kilometres together.

The roads were wonderful. Tarmac about half the way the dirt the rest but the roads are well maintained so you can belt along them. Namibia is one of Africa’s least densely populated countries. It seemed that all there was to see was roads and more roads. But having said that, the landscape was stunning. Epic landscapes, sunny sandy plains and that tiny rivulet of road stretching to infinity in front of us. That first night, we camped beneath the stars and exchanged stories over the ‘braai’ (BBQ).

Early the next day, we drove out to the famous sand dunes of Sossusvlei. These red dunes are the oldest in the world and the largest. We climbed to the top of one of them and had a wonderful time running down the side of it. Running downhill was surreal – we felt like astronauts. The whole landscape was surreal. Justin had a wonderful time throwing the jeep around in the sand too, much to the chagrin of Becky who anxiously reminded him of the last list of repairs to the car. We jumped on the back for a while, hanging on for dear life with massive grins plastered across our dusty faces as we bounced around the lumpy, bumpy, twirling, swirling sand.

We took off that day and drove hard, stopping only to buy food at well-stocked garages on the road. We arrived late at a motel that night and checked in to sleep. The following morning, we hit the road again. We crossed into South Africa that day. It was monumental. South Africa would be the last country on our route. It was still early December. We might even make it home for Christmas. The guard took photos for us and we were in high spirits indeed crossing the border.

That day we drove all the way to Cape Town. There is something about nearing the end of a journey. All of a sudden, you cannot wait to finish and so it was for us. Malachy and I were happy to take our time but Justin and Becky were anxious to push on. We arrived into Cape Town that night. We watched the city sparkle into view – shiny, pearly lights for miles and miles. The first thing we did was stop off and buy a bottle of cheap sparkling wine. The second thing we did was spend a couple of hours travelling the last couple of kilometres as the car decided to give up at the last hurdle. Then, we checked into our backpacker lodge and then we celebrated.

The journey was finished. We’d arrived in Cape Town. We would spend a few weeks in South Africa becoming reacquainted with modern life. We did some shopping. We did some sight-seeing. We travelled to the wine regions, the Cape of Good Hope and Cape Agulhas, the southernmost point of Africa. We stayed at an Irish friend’s holiday home. Every second person in South Africa is Irish, it seems. People would ask not if we were Irish but which part of Ireland we were from. I had my hair cut in Cape Town by a Kanturk lady. Can you imagine?

After a few weeks, we were ready to wrap up. So we decided we would come home.

- Niamh O Riordan

The journey to Namibia

We managed to find a cheap lift from Zambia to Windhoek, the perfectly ordered, model like capital city of Namibia. On the first day we covered 1,200 Km during daylight hours. It was terrific. We have moved so slowly since Cairo and here we were on empty roads of unblemished bitumen that stretched all the way to the horizon like fresh jet trails.

We stopped three times. Once to inspect a hippo, dying slowly in front of a buckled safari 4X4 and a couple of times to buy meat pies and chocolate in clean, well stocked, expensive supermarkets and petrol station shops. We used the word ‘expensive’ a lot once we set foot in Namibia.

Flat Botswana, across the Okavango River and hours of flat Namibia are an awesome sight to behold. Crazy hills appear at last, proudly holding weird quiver trees atop their barren rocks. Farm gates punctuate the unending fences at each side of the road, leading to houses somewhere over the horizon. Warthogs and strikingly handsome oryx liven up the roadside very occasionally. The country seems almost void of people.

We spent the night at a campsite a few hours from Windhoek, in one of those farms in the middle of nowhere, miles from the nearest road, not to mind town. After an impossibly red sunset, it rained on us just before we could get our leaky tent up. But we dried out as we shared what little food we had with our companions. Our Namibian driver and a Canadian tourist flirted incessantly with each other. It makes those 14-hour drives much shorter when you have someone to chat to, you may be sure.

Before falling into our canvas tent, we watched yet another spectacular African lightening show.

The next morning, we arrived into Windhoek; squeaky clean, too much parking space, not enough cars on its wide, perfect streets, not enough people on its empty pavements and completely without character. Even the smartie coloured houses don’t make it look anything more than a perfectionist’s model city. And did I mention that it’s expensive?

- Malachy Harty

Livingstone and the 'Vic' Falls

We stayed at a backpacker joint called “Jolly Boys”. What is a backpacker joint? It’s self-catering, cheap accommodation, with a restaurant and pool and filled to the brim with westerners, just like yourself, who imagine that they have in fact discovered “the real Africa” when in reality, they couldn’t be closer to home. We stayed in a thatched hut called the ‘Hippo’ room: it was hardly larger than the bed and the windows were made of netting. What Jolly Boys are good for is organizing activities.

We had been looking forward to the Vic Falls for a long time and Livingstone is the place to be if you plan on doing any of the hair razing activities you can do there. We decided to take a microlite over the falls and to book white water rafting as well as an ‘Adventure’ day.

We arrived at the take-off site just before dusk and would be the last to fly that day. The flight lasts a mere fifteen minutes and brings you out over the falls and back again. There you are, strapped in with a loose, little seatbelt and nothing around you but clear blue skies. No windows. No walls. No Ceiling. No floor. You are a flying bicycle with wings. The view, as you can imagine, was stunning. The take-off and landing were gut wrenching and all I wanted to do was another flight.

I decided I wouldn’t do the white water rafting with Malachy. I had had a taste of near drowning when we tried it in Jinja, Uganda and I was not in the mood for more. I kissed him goodbye, asked him not to get himself killed, and promptly ran out the door to join him. I don’t know what possessed me. But it was worth it. “Talk about the crocodile! The CROCODILE!” yells Malachy, sitting beside me. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, as we meandered down the mighty Zambezi River, between bouts of near-death rapids, we spotted a croc, lounging on a rock, working on his suntan. Was that before or after we went for a swim? I can’t quite remember. The rapids themselves were good too. Our guide was excellent. “If you end up under the raft, just shout, and I will swim down to you ‘Rambo Style’ and rescue you. But if I find you smoking a cigarette down there, I will not be happy!” He did a wonderful job. We would shoot a rapid and looking back at that wall of water he would say “You don’t want to go swimming there. If you go swimming there, you wont come up for two weeks.”

Then there was the adventure day. This involved some abseiling in the morning. I tried to rapel down the sheer cliff face (think Mission Impossible – you run down the cliff face first) but didn’t have the nerve. Malachy pulled it off though. Fair dues. Then there was the wire. They harness you onto a horizontal wire that stretches across the gorge and you run off the edge of the cliff and are carried across the gorge suspended from the wire. Malc did not enjoy this so much and I thought it was boring to be honest; I was psyched up for the swing. Imagine a pendulum, which starts from a horizontal position. But it’s actually a swing with two people strapped into it and when you begin to fall, you FREE fall for fifty or so meters first, before going into the swing. It’s difficult to imagine but that’s what we did. There are no words for the terror. I was glad when it started to rain because it meant we didn’t have do chicken out of doing it a second time.

-Niamh O Riordan

Dar es Salaam to Livingstone

The train from Dar Es Salaam to Kapiri Mposhi near Lusaka, Zambia, was delayed by 20 hours, but once we were aboard, we were seduced into the relaxed life of long distance train travel. There was no use asking when we would arrive. This one should take about 48 hours.

Before night fell, the train entered the vast Seleous Game Reserve, where we were treated to the enchanting sight of many giraffes, elephants and gazelle. Despite pointing out these beautiful animals to a group of Hong Kong card players, they were just as disinterested in the passing wildlife as the grazing wildlife were unperturbed by the passing train.

Unlike Addis Ababa, Nairobi, Kampala and Dar, Lusaka lacked the shiny glass towers. Instead, slightly outdated, concrete blocks fringed the wide main thoroughfare. Well-dressed young men followed us on the streets with perfume or clothes, desperate for some money in this time of hardship and food shortages in Zambia. As usual, we were able to fly in the face of local problems… we shared the tastiest, most succulent T-bone steak in the world. We only stayed a single night, anxious to push on to Livingstone and to hit Cape Town for Christmas.

The comfortable bus to Livingstone sped through thinly wooded, unspectacular, flat landscape. It was possibly the least impressive trip of the entire journey. But we arrived early thanks to light traffic and wonderful roads. However, as the roads improved we became more removed from the life around us. As we searched in vain for cheap, local restaurants in Livingstone, it became very clear that the days of mingling with the locals were over. We were funnelled into relatively expensive backpacker hostels and restaurants.

-Malachy Harty