Chapter 6
Day five.
The last day of my valid visa. After this, I’m not allowed to be here.
I’m not sure what that means. Am I a fugitive?
I need to get an extension...
To add insult to injury, all this processed food I've been eating has given me the squirts.
In spite of the ever-present danger of completely ruining my day, I head the long walk to the “Imigração” to chance my arm.
Cue a long, long wait.
Finally I get an audience. And not a moment too soon; things are getting loose in the guts...
I get told that they can do it; they can get me an extension.
I fill out the papers and they tell me to go and make a 9,000 kwanza deposit (100 plus bucks) into two different bank accounts and they'll stamp me in when that's done. Expensive, sure, but it's better than getting in deep shit later.
I ask how long the extension is for.
They don't know.
They check.
Then they change their mind; they can’t do extensions on “transit” visas. Impossible. Apparently.
They won’t bend the rules for me.
I plead.
They won't budge.
What a clusterfizzer.
They tell me to go to the border. It’ll be fine, they say. But I’m not cool with that; what border official worth his salt wouldn’t put me over the barrel for that? I should be so lucky if that’s all I cop, I can think of ways it could go much worse. After that shit with the Liberians and sweating my whole way through that bloody country, I'm not willing to tempt fate again.
I nag. And nag, and nag, and nag.
I grind them out till I manage to convince one of the underlings to write me up what’s basically a “please excuse my son from Phys Ed class because...” note.
I’ll be buggered if I know what it says; it’s all in Portuguese.
But it’s missing a signature or a stamp, and that won’t do; I’ve learned on the way that people will bow to anything that looks official enough, and this won't pass muster.
The minion says he won’t do a stamp or signature; it might get him in the shit with the boss.
So I ask to see the boss...
Two hour wait.
Just staring at a fucking wall, sitting on a flight of stairs.
I'm going to shit everywhere.
I’m getting flashbacks of being stuck on that boat in Bissau when I nearly shat all over the joint. That plank of wood...
Finally, the boss will see me.
I head into his office and explain the situation as quickly as I can.
He's cool with it.
Yipee.
I get a sheet of paper that’s looks the business, nice and official. Still got no idea what it says, but it’ll do. And if it works, it would have saved me a hundred bucks. If it doesn’t work, well, I don't care anymore.
I run, mostly from the knees down, back to the hotel.
Whoosh.
I find a burger joint for dinner.
Bowels be damned.
It’s weird. It’s wonderful. It’s awful.
On the surface, it seems odd to think of a burger as a downgrade from the normal fare, but it is. I’ve substituted mystery meat that is fresh with a high rate of turnover to mystery burger meat, which is, arguably, even more mysterious, and who-knows-how-old.
I don’t see anyone else eating this shit... Red flags.
Day six.
I feel like a criminal.
Like there’s some sort of manhunt underway for a dishevelled looking, scared white guy on a beaten-to-hell and ancient looking pair of wheels.
Runaway.
I’m not sure I can pull this off...
But, I’m buoyed by the fact that I’m pretty sure I can pull off today’s short ride. It’s the bridging gap-day that had to happen; my choices are to go the short two hundred clicks to a middling village, or go long, five hundred and fifty clicks the next town along, called Lubango. Piss on that.
My attitude to the world has taken a turn. My perspective's different.
I’ve zoomed out.
I've zoomed out a lot.
I've landed on the attitude of “fuck it”.
Fuck it.
I’ve been reading a bit too heavily on Marcus Aurelius lately, and summarised it all into those two eloquent words.
Fuck it: I don’t care if the bike dies today. I don’t need it. I don’t need anything.
I don’t need me, even.
So what?
So what if whatever’s been fucking with me for these last two months decides to end the game and kill me? So what?
This “puny arena of humanity”, in all the immensity of time and space; when you zoom all the way out on both scales, where does that leave you?
How can I seriously be taking any of this seriously?
Shadows and dust. All of it. Everything.
Fuck it.
On the topic of fucking things; Fuck Angola.
It’s not my Africa; I want the real Africa back.
I officially don’t like it here.
I haven’t liked it for the last couple of days.
This is a different world.
It's all I’ve wanted, all I’ve been hankering for, and it’s all finally here. But, as soon as I’ve got it, I don’t want it any more. I’m John Dorian and this Africa is my Elliot Reid...
I’ve got pizza and burgers, but I don’t want that anymore. I’ve got tarmac, mind-blowingly, brain-destroyingly gun-barrel-straight, featureless tarmac. All I wanted.
I don’t want it anymore.
I wonder if everything in my life I’ve ever wanted has been like this. You want something so bad, and then it’s not all it’s cracked up to be.
Angola, the place I’ve worked so hard to get into.
This place, it’s unrecognisable.
It doesn’t fit.
All of my Africa - this side of the Sahara desert - has all been variations on a theme. Things change, but they all stay the same; It’s all Africa.
This is different.
It’s like a cheap imitation of cheap American shit to appease the zombie hoard of expats chasing a buck; they’re everywhere. Oil and diamonds will do that.
It makes me cringe.
It’s the culture shock that I wasn’t expecting. Not one bit. And it’s hard to adjust.
Everyone wants what they can’t have...
I’ve wanted it for months!!
I want interesting derelictness back. I want rough back. I want grimy back.
And that's not even the half of the differences with real Africa; everything’s changed.
The depth of green has been slowly fading out from the forests of Gabon and through the grasslands of the Congo’s till now, finally, everything’s turned yellow. Not cool, interesting yellow either.
Bland.
Martian.
A Marscape.
There’s nothing to see; blank, boring landscapes as far as the eye can see.
The places are so thoroughly poor, in every way. So run down and derelict and just sad looking. The huts and houses, the same colour of the yellow limestone looking mountains, look like they’re grown there, rather than built there. They look like ant colonies, or a wasps nest.
There's no colour. No smiling.
The kwanza is killing me. The currency here. My god. It’s going to do me in. Gone are the day’s I could get by on a daily spend of something between ten and twenty bucks. A bottle of water’s costing me four bucks, for what used to cost two cents.
It’s a fucking outrage.
I blame the expats. It’s out of control.
Luanda, the capital, was gorgeous, modern, clean(ish), full of sky scrapers, it’s got a beautiful esplanade that falls right out onto a really nice beach. It’s cashed up and going places. There’s even an epic, massive, rocketship-like monument there that looks like a Soviet’s wet dream. It looks like something I’d build on Red Alert that would, I don’t know, electrocute Marines. It’s looks gratuitously expensive and artfully pointless.
All that money.
But the villages... Jesus. They’re the poorest I’ve seen so far on the way down.
The poorest by a fair margin, too.
These unlucky bastards look like they’re on subsistence living. Or worse. I’ve never seen such a sharp line drawn between the have's and the have-not’s.
Seriously: they've got fuck all.
Did I mention that it’s as cold as a witch’s tit? I’m freezing my plums off.
The sun is blazing bright overhead, we’re not at high altitude, and yet I can’t feel my ring and pinkie fingers on the handlebars, they're in a state of constant numbness from lack of blood flow. They've stopped working properly.
Tomorrow I’m going to wear a jumper. Believe it!
A couple of days ago I was a dehydrated sweating mess, and now I'm so cold I can't feel my fucking fingers.
Where the fuck are we? Are we still in Africa? Could’ve fooled me...
I’m sick of this joint.
Except for the sprung mattresses. And the hot showers. And rooms that don’t look like they’ve been freshly fucked in.
I’ll keep those.
The oil leak is driving me mad, "fuck it" attitude or not...
I guess that even through the leak is making a mess of everything, spraying oil everywhere all over my bags and bike and even me, it’s low enough to be manageable with top ups - I think. It's a crapshoot trying to judge by the oil sight glass. It’s just so fluky.