Motorcycle Diaries

Three days ago Mhina, one of my colleagues, asked for a word with me. "It's a secret". So we stepped outside and he told me that a friend of his, Dickson, who lives in a village about an hour away, had found "an asset". (Mhina is the commerce and book-keeping teacher so a lot of his vocab is subject specific.) He said it was something old - maybe English or German. It was neat timing because I've just finished a novel called "The Book of Secrets" by M.G. Vassanji. The eponymous "book" is a diary lost by a colonial officer in 1914 and found in the 1980s by a teacher in Tanzania. So I asked Mhina to find out more. Over the next day or two I learnt the following: The village is called Sejeli. In fact Mhina did his last two years of primary school there, living in his uncle's house because his father heard that the school was better than the one in their village. Dickson is a former classmate. That was all fairly clear, but the information on the asset itself was tantalisingly confused. It is in a building/It is buried in open ground. It is a metal box/It is a machine. It has English or German instructions/directions. There are two assets. There had even been a third but they had shown that to some other wazungu who had taken it away. I decided I could spare a few hours and a few thousand shillings so at 8am on Friday I was waiting for Mhina at the bus station. We got a bus to Mbande on the road to Dar es Salaam where Dickson and another man met us. A dirt road running North-South crosses the main road at Mbande. Dickson first pointed Southwards towards a fairly distant hill and said one asset was on top of that "mountain". Then he pointed North and said the other asset was 10km up that road, beyond Sejeli which Mhina said was one or two km away. But how to get to either of them? The main problems being lack of any suitable transport and not enough money to pay for it anyway. Eventually we settled on the Northern option because a man with a motorbike had some unintelligible (to me at least) connection/claim to that one. The piki-piki man was summoned, we handed over 10,000 shillings, I clambered up behind him, Mhina got up behind me on the luggage rack, and off we went. 30 minutes later we passed through Sejeli and Mhina pointed out his old school and his uncle's house. I pointed out that it was a lot further than 2 km. Mhina said "Sorry, I don't know how to use kilometres." After another hour in the saddle it became clear that none of them did. We travelled along the red dusty track, passing occasional ox carts, bicycles or other piki-pikis, weaving our way through herds of livestock, crossing dry riverbeds, the driver sometimes having to "paddle" with his legs, crossing wet riverbeds, and two more villages. It should have been quite enjoyable - lovely open bush dotted with thorn and baobab trees.

But squashed between the driver and Mhina, having to sit slightly leaning back, became excruciatingly uncomfortable, and of course the lovely African sun was beating down all the time. There were a few shouted conversations across me and then Mhina would point to a hill and say "It's there". But we always just roared on past. I began to wonder how far a bike can go on one tank, and hoping it was about as far as we had come. Then after 2 hours we stopped and asked two ladies the way (I think). We then pulled into a farmstead where Mhina and I detached ourselves with difficulty and tottered over to a shady spot under a tree. We shook hands with the family and after more talk we got back on, this time with four of us, one of the farmers (luckily quite a small chap) perched on the petrol tank. We journeyed on, with our pilot pointing this way and that; the track became a path, weaving through tall maize, the leaves whipping our legs. Then we left the path and bumped across the bush until we ground to a halt in a thicket at the base of a small rocky hill. We fought our way up through thick and thorny bushes with the two locals arguing about where to go. The p-p man said it was two years since he had been there.

After a bit of backtracking we eventually came out on a rock ledge under an overhang and we flopped down to admire the view. It was exactly the kind of place where you find cave paintings and sure enough when I looked round the rock was covered with white geometric doodles and stylised animals (see Ageing Rock Artists blogpost). Leading down from the painted surface was a tunnel-like cave entrance, narrow and carpeted with bat poo - the sort of opening a potholer would describe as "a nice little feet first slide".

Which is exactly what piki-piki man proceeded to do - a few startled bats flew out as he slid in - armed with my torch.

"What's down there?", we shouted. He said there was a sort of cement frame on some rocks. It didn't sound worth the trouble so the rest of us gave it a miss. P-p man then popped up from another unpleasant-looking hole on the other side of the rock, and dusted himself down. Mhina and I decided that that was probably it as far as assets were concerned so we scrambled back down the hill to the piki-piki, except that we couldn't find the piki-piki; we had been all round the rugged rocks and lost all sense of direction and, in the face of all evidence to the contrary, Mhina and I just assumed the local guys knew what they were doing.

We blundered about for an hour or so before Mhina spotted a flash of sunlight reflected from a wing mirror.

Then we couldn't find the others, we coo-eed and hollered for ages before first the diminutive farmer then p-p man finally emerged. Readers, you are not going to believe this next bit; p-p man couldn't find the key. He was sure he had it when he heard our shouts so we spent another half hour searching the area before it turned up under the bike. So at 5pm we finally set off back. A lovely long trip in the late afternoon light, first to drop off our pilot, then the long haul to Sejeli. Halfway there the question of how far the bike can go on one tank was settled and Mhina and I sat by the road eating sugar cane while the driver puttered off to find some fuel. Then we got going again and called in to see Auntie and Uncle who gave Mhina a big bag of maize (was this the real reason for the trip?) At 7pm we were back at the main road where Dickson was waiting for news and neither Mhina nor I really knew what to say to him. As we squeezed into a dalla-dalla to get back to Dodoma, Dickson thrust a little package with a few mineral pieces into my hand and asked me to find out if they were precious stones. I got home at 8.30, burnt to a crisp, wind-blown, hungry, thirsty and bemused. If you have read all this expecting something more interesting I can only apologise. That is how it is here. If you try to get to the bottom of things you just go mad. OK. That's it for now. Must go out and talk to myself with my pants on my head and two pencils up my nose.