Almost Heaven?

Air France delivered my bike to Dulles Airport after two days, but ignored my request to deliver it to the hotel and made me take a taxi back to the airport to pick it up.  Their luggage office doesn't open till 11:00 am, so another half day was wasted before I could finally get on the road.  (Have I mentioned what a wonderful organisation Air France is?)

A couple of additional little frustrations delayed me even further.  The new front pannier rack I'd bought in Manchester didn't fit.  The salesman had given me the wrong model.  Not to be deterred, I adapted it with cable ties and some spare bolts from my tool kit, turned a lowrider model into a distinctive-looking highrider, and loaded up.  A plastic strap inside my helmet had snapped too.  There's no way I'm going to ride without a helmet after a fall in England a couple of years ago in which I sustained no significant injury but had a cleft in the back of the helmet that looked like it had been made with a tomahawk.  I leave the rest to your imagination.  I snipped the protruding stub of plastic off with scissors and patched it up with duct tape.  (I'm a supporter of the theory that there are only two tools you need to fix anything: duct tape and WD40.  If it moves and it shouldn't, use the duct tape.  If it doesn't move and it should, use the WD40.)

Navigating out of the Washington DC area took me most of the day.  The traffic was heavy and the road signs were confusing, but I got a little hint of the enjoyment to come when several drivers leaned out of ther windows at traffic lights, asked where I was going, and wished me well.  This was my introduction to the extraordinary friendliness of many Americans towards strangers.  I was soon to experience much more.

Day One progressed from warm sunshine to drizzle to steady rain.  A disastrous wrong turn at an unsigned intersection took me down the eastern side of the Prince William National Park instead of the western, adding at least 50 or 60 unnecessary miles to my journey.  Putting that into the perspective of a 5,000 mile trip though, it's a small glitch.  I was starting to enjoy myself.  (I've decided to learn to think in miles by the way.  My maps work that way, as do the road signs, so it's a waste of effort to keep converting.)

The rain persisted and there was no sign of a campground anyway, so I checked into a mid-range motel in Dumfries (Dumb Freeze to the locals), Virginia.  Behind the reception desk was a large, friendly  black man whom I originally mistook for a local.  He turned out to be from Ghana, and we had a friendly discussion about our countries' prospects against each other in the first round of the World Cup.

Day Two progressed from misty drizzle to bright sunshine as I headed for the nearest point on the TransAmerica Trail at Mineral, Virginia.  Cruising through rural Spotsylvania, (Who thought of these names?), I passed a huge Civil War battle re-enactment.  Two opposing lines of white canvas ridge tents were arrayed behind replica (I hope) cannon on the edges of a field.  I'm not sure who won the original battle, but the Confederates were sure to win the re-enactment: grey uniforms outnumbered blue by about ten to one.  As I cruised by, a very large man in Confederate grey was preaching to a small congregation seated in camping chairs. I slowed to listen.  He said, "Let's not forget to praise Gaad", then began to sway from side to side, arms spread wide, singing (to the tune of Amazing Grace), "Praise Gaad, Praise Gaad, Praise Gaad," ...etc.  I rode on in awe.

So many houses here display American flags that they become almost invisible after a while.  Every second business logo has some version of the stars and stripes on it too.  At home, I always worry about people who display the national flag in front of their houses.  I remember Pauline Hanson's election posters, showing her wrapped in the flag, and I cringe.

At one point, I stopped to ask directions from a burly policeman in the fetching, chocolate brown uniform of the Virginia State Police. 

"Which road do I take to get to Mineral?"  I asked.

"Mineral?" he said.  "You want to go to Mineral?"

"Er, yes", I said,  "Mineral"

"Weeeeeeeeelll", he said, pushing his hat brim back.  "Now  you want to go to Mineral, is that right?"  All this in a perfect parody of a broad, southern accent.  I was trying really hard not to laugh, because I was fairly sure that laughing at a police officer in these parts is a capital offence.  Judging by the enormous sidearm on his hip, he would be competent to carry out the sentence summarily.

He continued:  "Weeeeell, now, you could go thisaway...." and he proceeded to turn a simple direction into a ten minute conversation, scratching his ear, readjusting his hat, shifting from one foot to the other.  It was an amazing performance.  Once out of his sight, I burst out laughing.  He was just being helpful of course, and I shouldn't laugh at him, but he was such a caricature of the southern country policeman I couldn't help it.

The next two days of riding through the lovely Virginia Piedmont were a joy.  The forest is lush and green, and there's lots of it.  Aside from oak and beech, there's maple, chestnut, birch and ....  Actually, I'm having you on a bit here.  I wouldn't recognise any of these trees.  I know they're there, but I know so little about Northern Hemisphere vegetation, it's shameful.  I did recognise holly though!  Now, show me a decent Eucalyptus Grandis ....

The forest is full of animal life too.  I know that from the roadkill.  I stopped counting after four snakes, one oppossum, six turtles, one deer, lots of birds and a squillion squirrels.  (That's a good number for squirrels.)  I rescued three or four small turtles (or tortoises, or terrapins - you know, crawly things with shells), that were sitting quietly in the middle of the road waiting for cars to squash them. 

From Charlottesville, on day four, I climbed up to the Blue Ridge Parkway at 3000 feet.  The climb was steep and tough, but I felt pretty pleased with myself as this is the biggest altitude gain in one day of the whole tour.  Ha! I thought.  Bring on the Rockies.  Had I studied the contour lines on the map, I would have realised that this section of the Parkway plunges back down to  1500 feet, then back up to 3,500, then down 1500, then up again, for forty miles!  By the end of the day I was wrecked, but what a ride!  The views are breathtaking; the road is wide and smooth; and no commercial traffic is allowed on it.  Each "overlook" as they call them here, was more spectacular than the last.  But wait a minute! These are the Blue Ridge Mountains; down there is the Shenandoah River.  My God! Could this be .... Almost Heaven?  Damn!  Now I'll never get that song out of my head.  And it'll be worse when I hit the Rockies.

After a glorious but punishing day and a half on the Blue Ridge Parkway, I took the exit for Vesuvius, Virginia, plunging over the edge of the ridge on the steepest, scariest switchback road I've ever ridden.  My brakes were smoking - that's no exaggeration. 

In the strange little town with the volcanic name, I came across Gertie's country store, decorated in pure southern kitsch and staffed by the delightful Tammy and Gertie who fed me fresh home-made chicken salad and coleslaw and a huge mug of glorious hot tea.  Paradise!

In closing, I have to relate something remarkable that happened to me a day later in the little town of Buchanan.  I rode up the main street around 9:00 am and stopped outside a cafe.  A local woman (elderly?  have to be careful here - probably five years older than me, so "middle-escent") greeted me at the kerb, and after a pleasant chat during which she asked where I was from and where I was heading, she recommended the cafe for breakfast, took me inside, introduced me to the owner, and left.  After a wonderful breakfast of eggs, bacon, toast and coffee, I asked for the bill, to be told by the owner that the woman who had brought me in had already paid it.  Now, how friendly is that!

Discovering America

Yes, I know it's been done before, but in a sense we all have to discover America for ourselves don't we?  Despite being commodified by its economy, controlled by its politics and swamped by its cultural output, most of us don't really know the place or the people. I certainly don't.  I've been jolted out of my assumptions and stereotypes almost every time I've met an American, only to slide lazily back into them when I let my guard down. So, why not explore the place by traversing it from east to west, around 7,000 kilometres, by bicycle? "Why not poke yourself in the eye with a burnt stick?" I hear some of you say.

America has always meant "overland journey" to me.  I first read John Steinbeck's Travels with Charley when I was in high school.  Steinbeck set out in 1960 with his standard poodle, Charley, in a pickup truck with a camper cabin on the back, to discover America for himself.  He was 58 at the time - a year younger than I am now.  From his home in Sag Harbour, New York, he drove thousands of miles through New England, the mid-west, the Rockies, California, the desert, the Deep South, appraising the landscape, the history, the social issues.  This was a travelogue ahead of its time: strident and unabashedly political.  Steinbeck was deeply shocked by the racist actions of white southerners, but generally enamoured of the oddballs and frontier types he met in the west, and overawed by the landscapes of Montana, the Pacific Northwest and the great deserts.  He made the great American outdoors live for me, and at the age of 15, I was hooked.  The seeds of this journey were sown way back then.

Simon Schama's brilliant history, The American Future, was a recent revelation. Schama follows significant American families through the generations, giving a personal twist to wars, crises and political movements.  At every stage, he links historical events to current affairs and future possibilities. Tim Flannery's ecological history of North America, The Eternal Frontier, helped to prepare me for the environmental experience and the complexities of Native American societies.  (I sort of knew there was more to the American Indian thing than galloping over the prairie hunting buffalo, but I had no idea of the complexity and diversity of pre-Columbian America before I read this.)  Bill Bryson's The Lost Continent gave me a foretaste of small-town America - highly relevant because my tour, along the TransAmerica Trail, avoids the major cities and highways in favour of  rural byways and small to medium-sized communities.  (The largest town along the route has a population of 160,000.)  Martin Fletcher's Almost Heaven: Travels Through the Backwoods of America offers a scarier vision than Bryson's whimsical and nostalgic tour, but Fletcher is English, and he did deliberately seek out the weird stuff.  Truman Capote's In Cold Blood might be set in the late 1950s, but has the rural Kansas it depicts really changed all that much?  Stay tuned and I'll let you know by the end of June.

The best appetite-whetter by far though was Don Watson's American Journeys.  Roaming the continent on Amtrak trains, and taking to a car when the railway options are exhausted, Watson explores America through conversations with academics and train conductors, politicians and storekeepers.  His beautiful., balanced prose and constant positive approach - always looking for what's progressive and good, but eloquently savaging the negative and bad - make this book a joy.  It's an Australian perspective too, which helps, and it's recent - published just before Obama was elected.

So much for the pre-reading: now for the logistics.  The Trans-America Trail isn't really a trail at all - it's a cycle route across the continent that avoids heavily trafficked roads and big cities in the interests of safe and pleasant riding. It doesn't avoid hills though, winding through the Appalachians, the Ozarks and the Rockies. An American Bicentennial project in 1976, the Trail starts in Yorktown, Virginia, picking up Revolutionary War and Civil War battlefields in its eastern sections, traversing the Great Plains through Missouri and Kansas, and roughly following the Oregon Trail of the wagon trains in its western half.  It touches on Yellowstone National Park and the Grand Tetons, crosses the Continental Divide at 11,500 feet in Colorado, and meanders up the Oregon coast to Astoria, just south of the Washington State border. The total distance of the Trail proper is 6,700 kilometres.  I'll be joining it at Charlottesville, Virginia, about 300 km from the start in Yorktown, but detouring from Florence, Oregon, south to San Francisco, so I expect to ride at least 7,000 km.

It hasn't really been a good start.  British Airways cancelled my flight from London to Washington because of a cabin crew strike, and re-booked me on Air France.  I wish they hadn't done that.  The Air France ground staff at Heathrow put on an exemplary show of rudeness and indifference, refusing to honour BA's conditions of carriage which would have allowed me to take my bike as excess baggage, paying only a small excess weight charge.  Instead they charged me 80 Euros without so much as a rueful smile or a hint of regret, and when I arrived in Washington - no bike.  The AF Washington ground staff had been trained in the same gulag: they told me the bike had been offloaded in Paris and might, just possibly, arrive late the next day.  Again, no apology or regret - just a sniffy implication that it was all my fault for presuming to transport a bicycle in the first place.  This bastardry condemned me to two nights in a fairly expensive hotel in the drab and soulless airport precinct of Dulles International, where my only entertainment has been wandering up to the drab and soulless mall for a drab and soulless (and tasteless) pizza and a bottle of Jacob's Creek Cab Sav.  They had the temerity to sell that to me at half the price I would have paid in Australia.  How rude is that!

However, I have already discovered something wonderful about America - bumper stickers and number plate slogans.  Today I saw a sticker with the silhouette of a stag on it, and the words, "You gotta kill it before you can grill it."  This could be interpreted as a pro-hunting slogan I suppose, but I prefer to regard it as simply educational.  A kind of public service information announcement for those of us who don't know esoteric stuff about where our food comes from.  The same car (an SUV you'll be surprised to hear) had both a National Rifle Association sticker and the number plate slogan, "In God We Trust".  I really am in America.

Chobe Wetlands and Okavango Delta

After re-negotiating the circus of the Zambia - Botswana border, we drove the short distance from the border post of Kazangula to Kasane, and into the Chobe National Park.  On a warm, sunny afternoon, we cruised the Chobe River and wetlands in a flat-bottomed boat.  We shared the boat with about twenty members of a Finnish camera club, whose massive lenses made our puny digital cameras look rather pointless.

The wetlands are wide and spectacular, and there was plenty of wildlife - hippos, elephants, antelope, fish eagles, warthogs - but the experience felt a bit artificial, with the constant chatter of high-tech cameras and the presence of other boats jockeying for position at every sighting.

Early the next morning we drove on to Maun, on the edge of the Okavango Delta, where we were to enjoy a much more authentic wildlife experience.

The Okavango River has its source in Angola.  When it reaches the edge of the Kalahari Desert in Botswana, it fans out across the flat landscape and forms the world's only inland delta - a vast network of pools and waterways dotted with wooded islands.  Every species swims here, even lions and leopards.

We entered the Delta by four-wheel-drive tray truck, bouncing over bush tracks through the acacia scrub and churning through streams and pools.  We were warned to be careful when the truck brushed through foliage: some acacias have three-inch thorns. Arriving at a village of traditional circular, thatched huts, we transferred to mokoro - traditional dugout canoes that are poled through the reed beds and narrow channels like gondolas.  In our case, the mokoro were made of traditional fibreglass.  The demand for this kind of transport would deplete the delta of large trees if the ancient dugout method was continued.

For the next two hours we enjoyed a gentle, gliding journey through beds of reeds and waterliles to our island camp.  The only sounds were the soft swish of the mokoro slipping through the water and the mellifluous banter and song of the boatmen.  It was hypnotic, lying back on our camping mattresses in the sunshine, seeing only reeds, waterlies and drifting clouds.

Our local guide was called Heaven - a gentle, softly-spoken, gracile man with peerless blue-black skin and a quietly authoritative manner.  He had learned to pole a mokoro from his father, who had learned from his father, and so on.  Bushcraft was second nature to him.  He told stories of his grandmother who was a loner, often venturing out into the bush unaccompanied to hunt and gather food or to collect grasses for thatch. Once she came across a lion with a fresh kill.  She wanted the meat for her family so she chased the lion away from its kill and carried the antelope home.  On another occasion she was charged by a buffalo - one of the most dangerous animals in the bush.  Unable to outrun it, she dived into an aardvark hole and burrowed down to safety, waiting until the buffalo had gone.

In the mornings and evenings at our Okavango bush camp, Heaven and another guide took us for walks on the surrounding islands.  We walked single file, Heaven in front and his offsider bringing up the rear, and were urged to be quiet.  I couldn't help but notice how different our version of quiet was from his.  He was able to walk soundlessly and gracefully through the long grass and spiny acacia thickets, watching where he placed his feet and keeping a sharp eye out for animals at the same time.  Meanwhile, we tourists stumbled into holes, jostled each other, apologised, laughed, cursed and barely managed to stay upright.  Despite our ineptitude, he managed to show us a large family of giraffes,  two bull elephants, an ostrich, fish eagles and storks.  The highlight was coming across a large pool surrounded by reeds and scrub.  Heaven directed us to high ground and began making hippo noises - grunts and growls and squeals.  Within a few seconds, a pair of ears emerged from the water at the opposite end of the pool and began swivelling around to locate the intruder.  Gradually, he tempted the hippo across the pool until it was less than ten metres away from us, and still convinced there was a competitor out there.

 

And it wasn't just about animals: Heaven's botanical knowledge was equivalent to that of traditional Australian Aboriginal people.  Virtually every plant had a medicinal or practical use.  His explanations of broad ecological interconnections  between plants, animals, humans and natural events and phenomena were a highlight for me - insights into the worldview of an intelligent man totally integrated with his environment.

In the heat of the day, he took us in his mokoro to a swimming spot - a pool of open water between the reeds, surrounded by water lilies.  I asked him were there any crocodiles around.  His answer: "Hmmm, yes.  Small ones."  We swam, and he sat in his mokoro fishing - catching several small bream and a catfish in about half an hour.

Our two and a half days and two nights in the Delta were over far too soon.  It will always remain the highlight of my brief time in Africa - not just because of its natural beauty and serenity, but also because of the opportunity to connect with a person of wisdom and dignity, at peace with his environment, who has no desire whatsoever for the material things that my culture is obsessed with beyond the means to provide for the modest needs of himself and his family.