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Page 3 of 6 And so another bike was purchased second-hand for my father and off we went with, I believe, the reluctant blessing of my mother. We met the great Red Adair in the bush of Mozambique putting out an oil fire. (He spoke American like an actor in a cheap film and my brother  and I laughed out loud until we realised he wasn't acting!); we drank dark red wine from tin mugs and stale rolls with Portuguese truck drivers, unshaven and bogged to their axles in mud somewhere along a narrow track in the bush far from anywhere. “When it's gone, it's gone!” they shrugged philosophically when my father asked whether they had enough for themselves. Then into tsetse-fly country, trying to ride through soft sand with the dreaded flies biting one's arms and back and neck, falling off in the dust when slapping at them. I remember weeping silently where my father couldn't see and wanting it all to end; then my father on hands and knees, kissing the tar when the dirt road ended, faintly ridiculous but we laughed our relief that the worst was over; cool drinks at roadside stalls and a mouldy bun, hard like a cricket ball, from a Portuguese trader woken from his corrugated iron shack in the bush early on a Sunday morning. In a town, talk of the bodies of shot Frelimo piled in the bush, dowsed with petrol and burned...I can remember crouching on guard in front of a crackling fire, deep in the Gorongoso wilderness, squeeze-bottle of ammonia (our naive weapon carried strapped to the cross-bar of the bikes) in my terrified hands, listening for lions. A four-hour stint, frightened of things in the shadows beyond the firelight as time dragged its feet, the sleeping forms of father and brother increasing my isolation; and then, next morning, a hundred metres along the track, the heavy pug marks of a lion... The memories are there still and they are mine. No one can ever take them away or the modest achievement of our journeys. And I believe I am a better person now because of them. They gave me something I still carry with me now. When my wife and I married, our first vehicle was a Land Rover and we honeymooned across the Kalahari desert, the Okavango swamps and Moremi and Chobi game reserves - special times in Africa's wildness. And then, over the years, Namibia and the mountains of Lesotho and Botswana again and again, seeing the wilderness areas so desperately loved diminishing as tar roads and tourists and fences and civilization paced across the land with relentless efficiency. We always regarded ourselves as travellers, never tourists, and the joy of pulling off the track and into the elephant-smashed bush or camping next to a mountain stream unsullied by the filth of previous campers was something to be cherished. Before our two children were born, we yearned to cross Africa in our Land Rover, but sadly we belonged to a pariah nation and the taint of our South African citizenship blocked us anywhere north of Rhodesia and Malawi. At one stage we toyed with the idea of forged passports but then Gareth came along...
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