The days were scorching hot now as Tom pedalled deeper into Africa. He cycled through Kenya and Tanzania. He was sweaty all the time, even in his tent at night. The refreshing swim in Lake Tana felt like a distant memory. The land was hot and dusty. Weeks would go by before Tom next found a nice clean river to swim in and wash his clothes in. Thorny acacia trees provided the only shade for Tom to rest underneath, though he learned the hard way to not bring his bike near to them. Their sharp thorns easily punctured his tyres.
Cycling through Kenya and Tanzania felt like riding through one of the wildlife programmes that Tom used to enjoy watching on TV with his sister, Jo. He thought of her sitting on the big old beanbag at home in front of the television. He laughed as he imagined her face if she suddenly saw him on his bike pedalling across the screen in the background of a nature programme!
Although he had seen elephants on TV and at the zoo, Tom could not believe his eyes when he actually saw one in the wild. It was a quiet evening. Tom was sitting outside his tent happily rubbing the dirt from between his toes. A big pan of noodles was bubbling on the camping stove. The sun was just starting to set. It was one of those brilliant red African sunsets you see on TV. Everything was peaceful.
Tom looked up from cleaning his feet. His heart thumped suddenly in his chest because walking across the grassland in front of him was a family of elephants! A father, a mother, and a little baby elephant. The “little baby” elephant was actually bigger than Tom’s tent! Tom did not know whether to be excited or terrified. These were the biggest animals he had ever seen. They would squash him flat if they sat on him. Tom was both frightened and excited.
The elephants had not spotted Tom. So he moved very slowly to fetch his camera and take a photograph of this special sight. He couldn’t wait to show Jo this picture. She would be so jealous. This was one of the best things that he had seen on this incredible ride. He watched the elephants until they had walked out of sight far across the plain. He kept very still and quiet until they had gone. By now his noodles had cooked too long and were really soggy. But it had been worth it!
That night Tom found it hard to fall asleep in his tent. His excitement at seeing the elephants had slowly changed to worry. He thought to himself, “If there are elephants here, what other animals are there?”
Suddenly his eyes opened really wide.
“What if there are lions?!”
And as soon as he thought about lions he was very worried indeed. After many months of cycling there was not a lot of fat on Tom so he didn’t think that he would make a very filling lunch for a lion. And because he had not washed or changed his clothes for weeks he hoped he might be a bit too smelly to be very tasty. But he was not sure how fussy lions were with their food. He hid a little deeper down inside his sleeping bag. Of course his tent and sleeping bag would not provide much protection from a hungry lion but it made poor Tom feel a little better. He shivered nervously.
Tom normally loved camping, but he did not enjoy it that night. Every gust of breeze, every far-off sound made him jump. Every little noise began to sound like a pack of hungry lions sneaking up on him. He imagined huge teeth drooling and then crunching him up. He imagined a huge lion licking his lips after finishing him off, giving a happy, full-up, Tom-flavoured burp. Tom had a terrible night’s sleep!
He was very happy to eventually see the sun rising. The long night was over. Tom was exhausted. He dragged himself out of his tent, stretched, and looked around. He felt a bit silly, now that it was daylight, at being so scared in the night. It was just a normal sunny morning like every other day in Africa.Tom brushed his teeth and splashed cold water on his face to help him to wake up. That felt much better. He treated himself to a double-decker banana sandwich for breakfast (that’s bread-banana-bread-banana-bread) and climbed back onto the bike. It felt even better than usual to be riding quickly through the cool fresh air of the early morning.
Tom decided that he did not want to sleep out in the countryside in his tent again until he was away from all the big animals. It would be safer if he stopped in a village in the evening and asked permission to sleep there.
And that is how Tom found himself drinking the bowl of blood and milk in a village of red-robed Maasai warriors. It is a ritual they carry out on very special occasions. The men’s wrists and necks were wrapped round and round with beautiful bright beads. They carried spears and shields, like you see on the Kenyan flag. When Tom had arrived in the village after another long day’s ride, he had not been afraid of the spears. He had actually been glad to see them: these men could definitely keep him safe from lions. Maybe he would get a better night’s sleep than last night! He asked the village chief for permission to sleep in the village for the night, explaining that he was riding round the world on his bike and that he was scared of lions.
“Of course you can stay here!” laughed the chief. “We are very happy to be able to help you on your long journey.”
As well as elephants and occasional traffic, Tom shared the road with lots of people on bicycles. Children cycling to school, grown-ups riding to work, or farmers carrying their vegetables or pigs to market. Many people had decorated their bicycles with coloured tape or tied bunches of plastic flowers to their handlebars. And they had musical hooters instead of ordinary bicycle bells. The roads were busy. Tom also passed ladies in bright dresses carrying huge bunches of bananas balanced on their heads as they walked. They usually had a small sleeping baby strapped to their back as well. Often the ladies would smile and give Tom a banana or two as a small present. He would munch the sweet fruit as he rode or sit down in the shade of a baobab tree to enjoy it.
Tom followed a broad and winding river for several days from Tanzania into Malawi. It dropped down towards Lake Malawi, one of the biggest lakes in the world.
Rising up from the far shore of the lake was a ridge of steep mountains. The side of the lake that Tom followed was flatter. Tom breathed a sigh of relief, remembering how hard the mountains had been in Ethiopia. At night the sky was full of stars. They seemed so close that at times Tom would try to reach out and touch them. Tom would pitch his tent on a warm sandy beach and go for an evening swim. They were good days. The lake was blue and beautiful. It was so big that it looked more like a sea than a lake.
The villages in Malawi were made up of neat, thatched cottages with small vegetable gardens outside them. There were lots of rubber trees growing as well. Each tree had small holes cut into the bark. White liquid rubber oozed out and was being collected in plastic bottles. Villagers sold this rubber in the market. It would be turned into things such as balloons or welly boots which would then be sold all around the world.
Tom noticed something strange about some of the cars that passed him in Malawi. At first he thought he was seeing things. But no, some of the cars really did have big fish dangling from the wing mirrors! How strange! So Tom stopped to ask a boy for an explanation. The boy told him that people bought fish from Lake Malawi to cook for their families back in the city. But the cars were very hot inside because of the sunshine, so the fish would start to stink before they arrived home. So people hung them from the mirrors to keep the fish a bit cooler and to stop their cars smelling.
But the fish were nothing compared to Tom’s surprise when he came across cooked mice for sale as a snack! Children were standing beside the busy road with rows of cooked mice on sticks. They were apparently a popular and tasty snack. Tom looked at them in amazement. He tried to decide which he would prefer to try: a cooked mouse, or another snack he had been told about: a burger made from the clouds of flies that rise from Lake Malawi at certain times of the year and are caught by local people in big nets.
“Mouse kebab or fly burger?” Tom wondered to himself. “Mouse kebab or fly burger…?”
The decision was so difficult that in the end he decided to settle for some sugarcane instead. That was much nicer than eating a mouse! Sugarcane is the plant that sugar comes from. It looks like a fat bamboo cane. You bite off a chunk, chew it and suck the juices. It is like chewing a stick except that it is a stick filled with sweet, delicious sugar. It is somewhere between eating a stick and eating a stick of rock candy at the seaside. Once you have sucked all of the sugar from your mouthful of cane you spit out the woody mess that is left.
Tom couldn’t think of anything better than a day’s bike ride, a stick of sugar cane, a swim in a lake and a night sleeping under the stars in his tent. This was the life.
