From Lilongwe

I take the Great East Road out of downtown Lusaka, already miles behind Guy, who is racing towards the airport in a taxi, his bike boxed up and London just a day away. As I make my way into the rising sun, the traffic gradually thins and after a couple of hours I see the first wave of swelling hilltops emerge out of the misty horizon ahead. I am soon climbing across thick forest through the foothills of the Luangwa valley. In the glare of the midday sun the road winds up and up, my battered Converse turning stubbornly and my whole frame tense, locked into the slow rhythm of the climb. I hope for a downward slope at each bend, but the road winds on up relentlessly through the thinning trees. At last I see the top and I stop for a minute to look around at the dense forest, cascading down into the bowling valleys from the lumps of hilltop behind me.

By late afternoon I reach Rufunsa, a dusty strip of bars and general stores, 160 km east of Lusaka. It is Friday and men and women stoop under corrugated shelters drinking murky beer from the severed ends of plastic bottles. Grainy Zambian music blasts out from a generator-powered black speaker outside the bar and all around people stare impassively at me, as I wheel my bike through the hazy dust. I order a drink and sit in the shade, watching a young man beside me carefully pour a sachet of liquor into a glass bottle of Sprite. An old man walks towards me, wide-eyed and unsteady. As he gets closer I see flies feeding on weeping lesions in the patchy grey stubble around his lips. He doesn’t notice, or doesn’t care, and opens his mouth to speak, showing a few chipped yellow teeth. Muzungu, Muzungu. Money. Buy me one beer. I stare up at him in the glare and watch the barman push him into the road, helpless and sad.

The barman towers above me. He has terrible burn scars running up his left arm and neck and tells me that Muzungu, white men, don’t stop here, but that there will be no trouble for me. He offers me a room to rest in and gives me water. To reassure me it is drinkable he takes a long gulp from my bottle, wiping the drops from his mouth with the shrivelled skin of his thick forearm. He shows me the room and I lie down on the mattress on the stone floor. The plaster on the stained white walls is cracking and the only other object in the room is a candle stub in a bottle of beer. When I was in Lusaka I had spoken to a hunter about this leg of the route and he had told me about a cook on one of their trips who had stopped here in Rufunsa. He said the cook had refused to sell some meat to the locals and they had set fire to his room while he was sleeping.

Tired from the day’s ride I fall asleep early. At first light the area outside the bar is littered with hundreds of empty yellow beer cartons, quivering gently in the light morning breeze. I head onto the road and am soon climbing again, across great mounds of forested hills, tumbling towards the Luangwa Rift Valley. Thick Miombo trees shoulder the tarmac, broken by shady paths that lead to huts hidden behind the leaves. It is still early and the air is cool and dense around me. The smell of morning wood fires, being lit outside the huts, blows across the road and a thick layer of fog hugs the canopy in the valley floor to the south. I ride all day and camp just off the bank of the Luangwa River, pitching my tent in the fading pink twilight.

The following day I ride 160 km over the last of the rift valley hills and across the fertile plateau of the lower Zambezi to a town called Petauke. I pass countless small towns, all made up of a single row of buildings facing the highway, all falling down into the dust. The store fronts bear the faint logos of Coca-Cola and other big brands, whose goods the grocers and bars have never stocked. I buy some bananas from a stall and look at the neat piles of bright red tomatoes, laid out on row upon row of rickety wooden tables. I wonder who buys them. Every village I pass has a school marked by a sturdy headstone, bearing the name in bold and the school’s motto beneath: Chitimbwe Primary School. Motto: Look to the Future and Have a Vision. In clearings between the trees there are nondescript brick churches of the Seventh Day Adventists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, God’s Embassy, and other sects I have never heard of. All empty and dark inside.

I reach Petauke just before dark and check into a motel, where I have supper with a young government worker. He speaks softly about corruption in Zambia, about how chiefs are paid to direct their village to vote one way or another, and how politicians side with the most powerful party, irrespective of ideology. He looks sadly across the table and tells me about the theatre group he is head of in Petauke, about the lack of funding and prospects for artists and actors here. I tell him emptily that Zambia seems very happy and how England has its problems too: Meaningless clichés that neither of us believes.

The next morning, while it is still dark, I am sick twice and take a double dose of antibiotics before riding a shallow climb out of town. At the crest of the hill I stare out at the road shooting through the endless plains of elephant grasses into the soft yellow cloud ahead. My stomach cramps as I ride and I struggle to go quickly at first, but reach Chipata, a town 30 km from the Malawian border, before nightfall, having covered 200 km. I rest for a day here and head out of Zambia on Thursday, past children playing see-saw on a fallen tree, and past men walking beneath swaying palm trees to Chipata’s sand coloured mosque, across the border into Malawi and on through the flat, bustling countryside to Lilongwe.