Jupiters Travels: Four Years Around the World on a Triumph

by Ted Simon

  Fort Victoria is Rhodesia's tourist trap for visiting South Africans. It funnels them right into the curio shops.

  'Get yourself something Unique, something Arty!!!'

  Beit Bridge, the South African border, is a long, dry ride south. On the way a million storks make a swirling, towering column in the sky, marshalling themselves for the journey to Europe.

  The South African Immigration and Customs authorities can afford to be a good deal fussier than the Rhodesians.

  'Do you have your return ticket out of South Africa, Mr. Simon?' says the first official.

  'Well, hardly. I was booked on a ship to Rio, but the sailing was cancelled.'

  'In that case I must tell you that you are classified as ^Prohibited Person.'

  He gives me a leaflet and a form, and I see that there is hope here even for prohibited persons. All I need to do is make an interest-free loan to the South African government of $600 for the duration of my stay. This money can be used to purchase a non-redeemable ticket, or it will be refunded at the exit point. Ho-hum. I suppose they're good for the money, but I know there will be complications. Luckily I've got the $600.

  Now for customs. I get this young fellow, full of bounce. He is even Whiter than White, but of course I am used to it now. He's got on the usual white gymnastics outfit, but unlike all the other officials who have some mark or rank on their epaulettes, he does not even have epaulettes. He is so junior he hardly even exists, and he's trying to make up for it.

  First he packs me off across the road to get a road safety token,

  whatever that may be. On my way back I see them all gathered round the bike. I'm so accustomed to the sight that I imagine they are admiring it, as everybody else does.

  Inside the office Billy the Kid fixes me with his dull blue eyes.

  'Now Sir, have you got any meat, plants, firearms, drugs, books or magazines, cigarettes or tobacco?'

  'Yes, I have a book on Christianity.'

  'Christ - i - anity?!!' He is incredulous.

  I ask if he's heard of it, but he's too busy thinking about his next move.

  'Have you anything else to declare?'

  'No.'

  He has a thin voice that shoots into an upper register on certain words.

  'Then why Sir,' he pounces, heavily, 'do you not declare the sword?'

  The sword? Good God, yes, the sword. I forgot I had a sword. It's not my sword. I met a man in Cairo who wanted to emigrate to Brazil, but he was not allowed to, so he was trying to get his stuff out of the country first. He gave me $2,000 to send to his brother, and then asked if I could carry his father's ceremonial sword. I thought it was a genial idea, and I attached it on the opposite side to the umbrella. I never gave it a thought.

  The Kid shows me his collection of confiscated arms. He is very proud of it, particularly a three inch dagger he took only the other day. But a sword! That's a real prize.

  ‘I shall have to take it away from you, Sir. I'm very sorry.'

  He sounds delighted.

  'I'm afraid you can't,' I say. 'You see, it isn't mine. Anyway, it isn't actually a weapon. It is a family heirloom.' ‘I cannot let you take this sword, I am sorry.'

  'Well, how will I get it back? Obviously I cannot just abandon it. It does not belong to me.'

  'We shall see if we can wrap it and send it under seal and at your expense to Brazil.'

  I can tell he's improvising now. The ground is slipping away under his feet.

  'Why can't I collect it at customs in Cape Town?'

  He is looking very confused. His neighbour at the next desk who has a broad gold band on his shoulder and seems to be keeping an eye on him, leans over to him and says softly:

  'Why don't you go and ask your father?'

  Daddy, of course, is the boss. ('Ach please, Daddy, let me go to Customs, and confiscate my life away like you?')

  A party collects in his office to inspect the weapon with enthusiasm. Daddy draws it from the scabbard and makes a few experimental strokes.

  'How can we stop the natives having them if we let you in with this’ says Number Two.

  Does he imagine the 'natives' engaging in knightly combat, cut, thrust, parry, according to the rules of chivalry? 'Natives' don't need swords. They have pangas, which they use to cut cane, and grass, and if necessary, throats. I think these white knights are mad, but this is not the moment perhaps to say so.

  Now Daddy has an idea. 'Son, see if you can seal it into the scabbard, and then wrap it up well so no one can see what it is.'

  The Kid is happy. He's got his orders, which he can carry out to the letter, to the very seriph.

  'Come over here Sir, please. Now, Sir, you see I am going to wire this hilt to the scabbard, and seal it. You see there is a number on this lead seal. If this seal is broken you go straight to jail.'

  'What happens,' I ask, 'if someone should happen to steal it from me.'

  'You go straight to jail. Same thing if you lose it or sell it. Straight to jail. Now Sir, I am going to wrap this sword up in brown paper which will carry the customs seal also, and I am bound to warn you that if it is tampered with in any way . . .'

  'Straight to jail,' we cry in unison.

  He manages quite well with the paper, but the sealing wax is too much. Little drops of it keep falling on his plump white thighs and he's dancing with pain and frustration. He is able at last to get some wax to stick to the paper, but it is obvious to me that the first rainstorm will soak it to a mash.

  'Usually,' he says, primly, 'we get the natives to do this sort of thing. Now I must ask you for a deposit so that we can be sure you will declare the sword in Cape Town.'

  But this is too much for me, and I am glad to see the older man shake his head, silently and repeatedly.

  'All right,' says the Kid, as if it were his idea. 'You can go.'

  From Beit Bridge it is only three hundred and fifty miles to Johannesburg. I imagine that I will arrive there tomorrow night, and set off to get as far as I can today. A considerable range of mountains, the Soutpansberg, bars the way, and the road climbs up into a cold cloud. There are tunnels to pass through, and on the other side, some rain. At a small town called Louis Trichardt I decide to stop and treat myself to a hotel, which proves to be memorable because of the dining room. This is a large square room, with a smaller room inside it, like nesting boxes. The smaller room has glass panes for walls and is the kitchen, and all the cooking can be watched from the dining room. In a London restaurant this could be an ingenious and even attractive idea, if rather courageous. Here in South Africa it has a gruesome feeling, because the kitchen staff, naturally, is black. We, the diners, are white. The owner patrols the dining room in a

  planter's safari outfit, and oversees both parts of his business simultaneously. I watch the 'galley slaves' with a sick fascination. They do not talk to each other, or show the slightest expression of pleasure, fatigue, self-consciousness or, indeed, any emotion at all. The scene, to me, is so highly abnormal, and to everyone else it is so completely normal, that I feel I have wandered, by chance, into a land as strange as any Gulliver ever visited. I make a conscious effort to reserve my judgement. The logic of the arrangement is all too obvious.

  I am now only two hundred and eighty miles from Johannesburg, an easy day's ride. The significance of this day's journey is great. Since Cairo I have been riding with a damaged piston. It seems scarcely possible that the engine has been able to survive this far. Not only the distance, more than seven thousand miles, but the conditions of heat and effort, especially in the north, must have put the machine to a very severe test. Now, one day's ride from here, are all the facilities I need to overhaul the cylinders, re-bore, put in new pistons, and do anything else. Up to now, at best it would have meant shipping parts from England with great delays and bureaucratic entanglements. Most of the way it would have been impossible.

  My confidence in the Triumph has gone beyond surprise and gratitude. I now rely on it without question, and it
seems past all coincidence that, on this last day, the unseen fate working itself out in the cylinder barrel should manifest itself. It is not I who is looking for significance in these events. The significance declares itself unaided.

  Just beyond Trichardt, in the morning, the power suddenly falters and I hear, unmistakably, the sound of loose metal tinkling somewhere; but where? Although the power picks up again, I stop to look. The chain is very loose. Could it have been skipping the sprockets? I tighten the chain and drive on. Power fails rapidly and after about four miles the engine simply stops in first gear. There's a strong smell of burning. Is it the clutch? It seems to have seized, because even in neutral it won't move.

  Two friendly Afrikaaners in the postal service stop their car to supervise, and their presence irritates me and stops me thinking. I remove the chain case to look at the clutch, a good half hour's work. Nothing wrong, and then my folly hits me. I tightened the chain and forgot to adjust the brake. I've been riding with the rear brake on for four miles, and the shoes have seized on the drum. Apart from anything else, that is not the best way to treat a failing engine.

  I put everything together again and set off, but the engine noise is now very unhealthy. A loud metallic hammering from the cylinder barrel. A push rod? A valve? I'm so near Jo'burg, the temptation to struggle on is great. At Pietersburg I stop at a garage. The engine oil has vanished.

  'That's a bad noise there, hey!' says the white mechanic, and calls his foreman over.

  'Sounds like piston slap. The piston's seized.'

  'Can I go on like that?'

  'As long as it's not too far. You'll use a lot of oil.'

  From Pietersburg to Naboomspruit is thirty-four miles. I stop for more oil, but the bike won't even start again properly. I realize I must give up Jo'burg. It is 4 p.m. on Thursday 21 February. I realize that with the bike running well I could still have made that original sailing date in Cape Town. The thought gives some satisfaction.

  I spend two days at Naboomspruit working on the engine. On the first day I take the barrel off. The old piston has shattered its skirt. The crank case is full of broken metal. The con rod is scarred, the sump filter in pieces, the scavenge pipe knocked off centre. The sleeve of the bad cylinder is corrugated. I have kept the old piston from Alexandria, and put it back thinking it might get me as far as Jo'burg. With everything washed out and reassembled, the engine runs, but no oil returns from the crank case. The second day I spend on the lubrication system, picking pieces out of the oil pump. On Sunday, on more smuggled petrol, I set off again, for twenty blissful miles before all hell breaks loose. The knocking and rattling is now really terrible. I decide that I must have another look, and by the roadside I take the barrel off again and do some more work on the piston and put it back again. By now I am really adept and it takes me four hours. There's a black fellow sitting there with me most of the time, just happy to be there and watch and have little things to do. He comes off a farm nearby, and I go there for water just as they're eating lunch. From the kitchen I can see into a small furnished room built separately from the house, where a young girl is eating alone. I catch sight of her only for a moment and see nothing describably wrong but it is obvious that she is mad. Intuition works so fast in some matters, why not in others?

  My work has not improved things. The rumbling continues and the trouble is evidently in a bearing. I limp slowly to Nylstroom, and plan to take a train to Jo'burg, but Nick the Greek at the Park Cafe is very friendly and finds a fellow with a pick-up, willing to take me to Pretoria, using my petrol.

  This fellow is an Afrikaans butcher, but although he subscribes to Apartheid, I find him unusually tolerant and good-tempered. It turns out that three years ago his wife, driving this same road in a van, was blown off by wind and crushed almost to death. She has now recovered all but the use of her left leg which is still bound up. I meet her too, a cheerful, handsome woman. His story of those three years, during which he also built his own house, is very touching. It occurs to me that these people would be good to have on one's side in adversity, and then I wonder

  whether they choose adversity for that very reason. Is that what is meant by the 'laager mentality'? If so, there is less hope for South Africa than I thought.

  He puts me down at Mader's Hotel because it has a large car park, suitable for unloading the bike. Mader's is a great cavernous place, like a railway station, and intensely gloomy. I'm ten minutes too late to eat. No dinner, no drinks after 8 p.m. I have to fetch fish and chips from a shop and bring them back. As I sit in the green light of a morbid aquarium I see a couple sitting nearby. He is grey and shrivelled, his face mud-coloured by sun and alcohol, in a slovenly safari jacket. She is fortyish, with black-frame spectacles and biggish breasts packed into a sleeveless blouse. Then the man beckons me over.

  'She likes you,' he says without preamble, pointing at her. Then, after a pause, 'You can sleep with this woman tonight.' I excuse myself, lamely, but he wanders off apparently unconcerned.

  'He makes my life a torment,' she says. 'He's my husband but he is still in love with his first wife.'

  The word love falls to the floor like a cigarette butt, waiting to be trodden on.

  I was in Jo'burg for three weeks, and lived in style and comfort. I saw the sights, lived the life, visited the black township, and learned something of the good and bad side of South Africa. As in Nairobi, I found that the experience was in a different coin to the experiences on the road. In these big cities, where most people confront 'real' life, struggling for money and security, I was not able to find much that was new or fundamentally interesting. I was happy enough to fall into the easy way of it, absorbing pleasures and information like a sponge and getting by on conventional truths. All forms of life are fascinating, but 'The Journey' seemed to float in another dimension.

  Joe's Motorcycles on Market Street, as agents for Meriden, took the engine to pieces again and sent me off with a re-bored barrel, two new pistons, a new con rod, main bearings, valves, idler gear, and other bits and pieces. The broken metal had penetrated everywhere and again I was struck by the force of the coincidence that all this havoc had been wrought virtually within sight of Johannesburg. I was very susceptible to 'messages' and wondered whether someone was trying to tell me something, like, for example, 'I'll get you there - but don't count on it.'

  A good deal of my time in Johannesburg was taken up in trying to find an alternative sea passage to Brazil. The Yom Kippur War still dogged my destiny. Since the war, Arabs having turned from open warfare to economic aggression, oil was twice the price, shipping was totally disoriented, and passenger berths were suddenly unobtainable. At last, through a contact in a big trading concern, one ship came to light that could take me to Rio. The Zoë G, a small cargo vessel under Greek ownership, would be sailing out of Mozambique for Rio de Janeiro at the end of April. It would cost me the same as the air fare, but the bike would go free. I was delighted. It could not have suited my idea of transatlantic crossing better. I had time to travel to Cape Town, and then to ride round the south coast of Africa to Lourenco Marques, and a quite different aspect of Africa, a Portuguese colony. It is an ill war that blows no good. Loaded with addresses of friends of friends, I left on the last long leg to Cape Town and the Southern Ocean.

  The weather played tag with me, and I was dodging between storms and rain clouds all the way from Johannesburg. On the second morning at Kimberley it looked wet from the moment the sun came up. The light was the colour of reflections in flood water, but the sky was a clear eggshell blue when I set off at eight. Although wisps of cloud began to marble it, I thought I would probably stay dry until noon.

  These calculations have become second nature to me since I entered the heavy rains south of Mombasa and my record of accuracy is improving steadily, to the point where they offer a sort of workmanlike structure to the day. I still need this reassurance, although it makes no practical difference to my behaviour. I would ride on whether it rained or not, and onl
y the most violent showers would stop me. It is not cold, the waterproofs work well enough, and the road is good level asphalt, but I have still not taught myself to enjoy the prospect of rain. Whenever it threatens to fall, a vague uneasiness begins to squirm somewhere below my stomach. Nothing much, but enough to remind me that there is still plenty of anxiety waiting for a pretext to engulf me.

  My encounters with the weather continue to be like reconstructions of a personal struggle on an epic scale. On the broad landscape of Africa, under the bright tropical sun, a bank of cumulus cloud appears out of thin air and grows with stealthy speed into the solid likeness of doom itself.

  In an otherwise clear sky one of these monsters straddles the road ahead, growing at a mile a minute, like an airborne octopus of mythic proportions, its base filling with inky blackness, already feeling out the ground with stray tentacles. To leave the sunshine and ride underneath this devouring creature with its foetid breath and bulging carcass is like challenging the Dark Tower; as impudent and terrifying as that. To know with the intellect of what flimsy stuff this thing is really made does not disarm it, when you have already fought to exhaustion with even flimsier devils of your own making.