It only takes one

Never Alone 2013 Gear Checkup

It only takes one

It only takes one
Posted on: Tuesday, December 10th, 2013 at 6:29am

It’s been years since I’ve lied awake all night, tossing and turning. After about 5 hours of it, it dawned on me – I should write a blog post that I’ve been meaning to do for the past month! It’s mostly just filler, as I need to put a post inline to make sure my travel/mapper renders properly, there has been another one written for weeks already, but I was waiting for this one first.

I did make it to Zambia eventually, quickly moving from 80km days to 110km+ days due to the sheer boredom of cycling on the Great North road of Zambia, constantly being passed by long haul truckers (no, not the bikes, these ones are maniac petrol delivery vehicles), and “new” used vehicles that were imported from Japan, being speedily delivered to their new owners. Apparently there is a bonus on what time they arrive in, and also they move quickly as they are prime targets for carjacking, with the thieves whisking them back away and selling them in the underworld. The roadside scenery wasn’t so exciting – trees, and grass, the odd truck that loses it’s cargo. Flat.

Looking back, it had to be likely the most boring 5 days of travel in a long time, I was hitting 100km by 10am most of the time, so spent the majority of the day sitting under a tree reading, waiting for the searing heat to lower before finding a place to camp out/stay for the night, eventually meeting up with a friend from the Netherlands and seeing her new lodge that she had been working on opening for a while. I’m helping out setting up an internet café for the community, which has been a fun way to pass the time over the past month.

Coming into Lusaka, I didn’t know what to think, 3rd time back, I have some history here, and I know the city inside and out. The last two visits were off the charts great, this one, I’m not so sure about. It’s not that there has been any bad things that have come up, the city hasn’t changed much, the government has in a very strict way, and my friends and near family are still here, welcoming as always, friendly smiles, and the weather is great. I just don’t think I’m wearing the rose coloured shades with this visit, or perhaps I’ve spent far too much time in Eastern Africa specifically in Nairobi and Kampala to see how African metropolises merge cosmopolitan at the same time. Again, no cut on Zambia, or Lusaka, I’ve had some amazing times here again, but something keeps going through my head “I’ve been here, I’ve done this”..

Oddly, Lusaka is one of the few places that my mind flicks a switch, and I find myself being a dumb dumb smoking cigarettes again. It’s always short lived, I make up for the time that I’ve quit (12 months!) and go crazy for a few weeks, ‘willfully poisoning myself’ as one of my readers put it a few years back, and then just stop like that, not to think about it again. This place is funny. It only takes one puff and I’m back at it. I’ve stopped again but it’s always interesting to see what the trigger is.

So the internet café project is completed, what else have I been doing with my time? Fixing my bicycle for one. I’ve replaced the front wheel, the rear Rohloff gear components, mounted new lights, cleaned everything up, purged half of the contents of one of my panniers, regreased everything, mounted a new light, replaced my tent, mattress among other minor things. This bicycle is strong and sturdy and ready for whatever I throw at it again. It was a learning lesson from September onwards to cycle with a bike where parts were failing regularly – I was still able to move, I just had to be patient, not get completely stressed out on the road, and just move forward. That I did.

Other things I’ve been doing solo, is a few months back I had a complaint from a reader who in politer terms said “your layout sucks!” – So I took thought about that for 2 months, and made a new option for the readers. See that little gear to the right of you? That’s your new settings box. In there you can change the layout of the menus (top or left), the size of the text, or the new lower bandwidth site that works great on your desktop and on the mobile too. Whatever you do, it’ll remember your settings for the next time you visit. Most of the time if you are on what I classify a mobile device it’ll automatically redirect you, and on that (mobile) site you can set do the same, force yourself back to the desktop version. Basically I’ve always built these sites as a way to experiment, keep current with what’s going on in the web development world (read: I’m not a web developer, nor was I by earlier profession, this is just hobbiest junk) and sometimes it doesn’t work for everyone. Bandwidth is always a concern in Africa so maybe the mobile site works for you? You can always access it at http://mobile.tiredofit.ca – Same content, lower bandwidth. Fun nerdy project when I wanted to be away from people, and actually harder than it looked – the site runs on WordPress, and running two seperate themes is close to impossible. I reworked the internal code of the WordPress software and then handbuilt logic to redirect and wrap the two sites together while sharing the databases. I don’t want to do it again, like most things I do for fun. Maybe it’s time for a new hobby. If this is after one comment, I can’t imagine what I’d do with 10 comments, go ahead, I’m bored.

I’ve been not staying at the typical place in Lusaka due to some changes in the living arrangements there, but instead moving about house sitting at various friends places here and there, perhaps this is adding to the unsettled feeling that I’m feeling this time around. It’s been good, but certainly missing the private places I could call home when taking other extended breaks. I tried to find something here in town, but prices are completely out of control. Something that I’d pay $400 usd for in Kampala for a month is $1800 usd here. No thanks. It just reinforces my idea that I have to keep moving. I have yet to arrange for a Congolese Visa yet, but thinking in the next day I’ll head down to the embassy and query what the requirements are – am expecting minimum $275 USD for the visa, strict in and out dates, and that’s even before entering into the country. First two weeks of January seems like a good time to go, and if the Visa is denied? Who knows. I’m definitely not going back to Tanzania, 6 times is enough, which leaves the Southern countries like Lesotho, Swaziland, Madagascar, and Angola open. Really hoping to head North though. Am just waiting for a package of socks and other trinkets to make their way over from Canada, and my (hopefully repaired) laptop to be returned from South Africa after being lost for 3 weeks by the courier system and I’ll be back in the saddle moaning about something or other.

Now time to see if sleep can come.

Elevation Chart

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