One for the Road Stories only I can tell. Journeys you can make as well. _________________ Bjørn Christian Tørrissen Translated from Norwegian by a Babel fish URSINE SELF-PUBLISHING NOMADS Excerpt from the book One for the Road Please consider getting the full version of the book from bjornfree.com © Bjørn Christian Tørrissen 2008 Published by Lulu The book was first published in Norway in 2005 by Kolofon Forlag AS, under the Norwegian title I pose og sekk! Cover design in cooperation with Elisabeth V. Bjone Maps and photographs © Bjørn Christian Tørrissen [email protected] / www.bjornfree.com Set in Palatino Linotype ISBN: 978-1-84799-453-0 The small print: All rights reserved. Bjørn Christian Tørrissen is the author of this work. If you want to recycle anything in this book, obviously apart from just the actual paper, you have to ask him if it's okay first. He's very friendly and eager to share his works with the world, so don't worry. Just drop him an e-mail at [email protected] where you ask him nicely, and you'll probably receive a positive reply right away. Unless you're planning on making money from your reuse, that is. In that case we may have to talk things over a bit first. In and Out of Africa A couple of years had passed since my trip to Antarctica. August was ageing. Myself, I was only days away from turning thirty. It's an age where talking to friends often brings news about acquaintances that are expecting children. Mothers in the making will tell you how amazing it is to be pregnant, to feel life growing inside of them. A unique privilege. For women only. Something a man can never fully understand or participate in. “Bah, humbug!”, say I. I had spent some time that summer reading up on Africa. One of many things I had learned was that simply by going for a swim in pretty much any natural lake, river or pond in Africa, before I knew it I would be full of developing life, despite my chronic lack of ovaries. Schistosomiasis, also known as bilharzia, is a most fascinating, contagious and lethal disease. It spreads through contact with fresh water. You don't have to swallow it, it's enough to barely touch the water. Maybe you dip your toes in the lake for a few seconds to cool off at the unfortunate moment when a millimetre-long larvae floats by. It will effortlessly penetrate your skin. Inside, the larvae enters your bloodstream and follows it until it reaches your liver, kidney and bladder region. There it settles with great satisfaction and grows until it reaches the length of a centimetre or two. Then it starts producing eggs. 103 The host, meaning you, is unlikely to notice any of this until several years later, when your kidney or liver suddenly stops functioning. In the meantime, the larvae inside you will have produced an enormous number of eggs and released them from your body by putting them inside your urine or your faeces. By their calculations, that should give the eggs a fair chance of reaching fresh water. If they do, the eggs will hatch to reveal new larvae, and here we find the most incredible part of this mechanism of contagion. These larvae can not invade a new human body just yet. First they must enter the body of a particular aquatic snail and develop further. Only after having done so will they leave the snail. Now they're ready to invade another human being. And they will. At first glance this might seem like a hopelessly elaborate concept, doomed to fail. Unfortunately it has proved to be a ruthlessly efficient procedure. In most of Africa's fresh water sources these larvae exist, from the Nile Delta in the north to various South African watercourses at the other end of the continent. The possibility of fathering countless larvae was not the only reason that I wasn't particularly tempted to go to Africa. Several other issues also rendered Africa unappealing to me. Norwegian newspapers have always reported stories of war, starvation, diseases and disorder in Africa. And worst of all, deep inside I couldn't get over how a roaring lion in the intro to a TV series every week throughout my childhood had sent me hiding under the couch. Without even being part of my actual world, Africa had always scared me. Anyway, I was just days away from turning 30, and stupid Bjørn had decided that a goal of mine was to have visited all seven continents before then. There was only one continent left, and I had the time and the money I needed to complete the list. So there you have it, my shallow and uncomplicated reason for going to Africa. My journey offered a taste of the third world already when I boarded the plane from London to Cape Town. There were no chickens or goats running up and down the aisles, but I was seated next to a beast. She was the mother of all nightmares of any cabin crew, swearing and threatening everyone around her. She kept complaining and whining loudly about 104 absolutely everything from the political situation in South Africa to the incompatibility between the width of the seats on the plane and her choice of body shape. In addition she was frighteningly ugly, even by British standards. Yet I was happy to have her there. I spent half an hour convincing her that I neither spoke nor understood English, and after that she ignored me. She also kept the in-flight attendants away, so that I could sleep instead of being woken up for food and drinks all the time. I could even sleep well. The monster had scared away the man who should have been sitting between her and me, so I had space to stretch out my legs. The poor man spent the last ten hours of the flight somewhere else than in his seat, that's all I know. South Africa is far away from Northern Europe. Measured in kilometres my home town Oslo is about as distant from Cape Town as from Hawaii. Yet I could get off the plane after the long flight and not have to adjust my watch. I had travelled halfway around the world and not even left my own time zone. I did, however, have to adjust my sense of time with about six months, due to the southern hemisphere's opposite seasons. 105 I had never even entertained the possibility that Africa had seasons. Everyone knows it's just an eternal desert in the north and a jungle further south, right? Not so. Southern Africa appeared to have seasons, and very much so. Somehow it felt wrong to leave Norway in a late summer thirty degrees heat and arrive in a Cape Town where snow ploughs patrolled the streets. Well, it wasn't quite that bad, but it had been snowing in some higher regions of South Africa just a few days previously, and the air felt distinctly chilly as I walked out of the airport. Fortunately, on my way to the city centre I happened to catch a glimpse of a zebra in a park we passed. It made me feel at least a little bit as if I had finally arrived in the mythical and tropical Africa. My journey wasn't exactly meticulously planned. Actually it wasn't planned at all, but an hour before I left home I had found the Web site of a hostel in Cape Town that seemed nice. “Have a nice stay in safe surroundings”, the hostel bragged. The safe surroundings turned out to be a fortress constituted by the hostel itself. On a street corner outside it some sullen down-and-outs stood close together, drawn to an open fire in an old oil drum. They scowled at me. The driver of the airport minibus took off with screeching wheels as soon as I got out of the vehicle. I was alone in Africa and on the wrong side of a wall adorned with the efficient third world version of barbed wire; numerous razor-sharp shards of broken bottles cemented in place. Puzzled about what to do next I saw no better option than to knock on the only door there. As in a badly written movie script a narrow panel in the door moved to the side, and two enormous, staring eyes appeared. “The eagle soars over the mighty mountain”, I said, guessing that it might be the current watchword. An eyebrow on the other side of the door was raised considerably, but it must have been obvious to the guy inside that I was new in town and innocent. The door was opened and quickly closed again behind me. 106 Inside the walls I entered a parallel universe. The atmosphere was cheery and lazy. Backpackers, hippies and a group of British school children on a really long field trip enjoyed breakfast under the morning sun. The walls were covered with happy African colours and patterns. There was even a small, inviting swimming pool there, admittedly with what appeared to be a thin layer of ice floating in the water. I was granted a basic room with a bed and a valid (but boring) PIN code for the front door. They also gave me advice regarding what I should and shouldn't do in Cape Town (well, most of the latter, really), and finally a wish of good luck with doing whatever I chose to do while in South Africa.