Note: Africa Days is a series of posts based on journals and letters from my years living in Kinshasa and traveling across Africa, beginning in 1974. You can read previous and following posts on this site.
In the spring of 1976, as our final year teaching at The American School of Kinshasa drew to a close, we found (at last!) a used VW bus for sale. We determined to turn it into not only our transportation but also our home for the coming year, as we made our way up out of Africa and then across Europe.
We named the bus Miles Motuka (motuka is Lingala for motorcar), though every now and then we called him Miles from Nowhere. I say “him,” because this vehicle became a beloved figure in our lives. We certainly didn’t know it at the time, but we’d be traveling and living (full or part-time) in Miles for the next three years, joined during the last one by a little Paris-born girl named Laura Grace.
But back to Kinshasa. We spent $2,600 for the bus itself and almost that much outfitting it and buying what we needed for the trip — from spare parts to interior fittings to food and supplies and the cost of visas for 15 countries. We drew up a design for the interior and hired a wonderful craftsman/carpenter, Kidiela, to build it out. (Mostly of mahogany, if you please.) A friend installed a second battery off of which we could run our interior lights and radio and cassette player. I sewed curtains and cushion/mattress covers. Mike became a self-trained mechanic. We had bought backups for almost every part — from the clutch to two spare wheels — many of which we would indeed deploy. (Mike once had to drop the engine, guided mostly by a detailed manual.) We had sand ladders and a shovel, cables and towlines and many jerry cans for fuel and others for water.
We had a sink and a jug with a faucet braced above it, a stove and a siphon for a shower, and mosquito netting so we could sleep in the heat with the roof and windows and doors open. Our sofa made into a comfy double bed. Our desk/dining table folded down. Our closet had a sliding door. Our bookcase had a French dictionary, an atlas, an almanac and books on philosophy, history, art, poetry, memoirs, a songbook, essays and novels. Our cabinet held the food we’d stocked up on at the commissary, from coffee to canned meats to sugar to dried milk to pasta to raisins and crackers, which we’d supplement with vegetables and fruits along the route.
Given the abysmal state of Zairian roads, we would need to put Miles on a boat on the Congo River to get him out of Zaire (and later, as it turned out, on a train from Mali to Dakar and then on another boat to get him to Casablanca until, finally, Miles joined us on a ferry across the Mediterannean to Sicily).
We sent friends and family what we called “a tentative itinerary. It can be at best only approximate due to roads being washed out, mechanical issues, unforeseen political developments that might close borders, and our own whims.” We sent addresses for U.S. embassies where we would check for mail (“hold for arrival”). We noted that we’d make a decision in Bamako, Mali, as to whether to attempt a Sahara crossing. We’d done a lot of preparation in the hopes of making that happen, but our big investment in the future was in Miles, and we dreaded the idea of having to abandon him in the Sahara. (Most vehicles making the crossing were four-wheel drive.)
We sent 17 boxes of books and two barrels of personal effects to Mike’s parents in Minneapolis, noting that it might take six months for the barrels to arrive. Finally, when school ended, we collaborated with another couple to run a summer school for a month. We netted $3,500 to add to what we’d saved in our two years of teaching.
On July 7, our trip began at last.
Letter home: “Our dream is coming true. We are on the Colonel Ebeya, a 3-tiered riverboat pushing two barges loaded with hundreds of people and a third loaded with merchandise, including a beautiful (to us) blue-and-white VW combi whose interior is a house fit for kings, not to mention a motor-parts store. We have labored painstakingly on this trip for a year and dreamed of it for three. The past few weeks have held little but the final assembling of all the tiny pieces. Yesterday, as the boat’s engines roared to a beginning, we found that the assembled product works.“
The boat trip took a week, a very pleasant one: watching life on the Congo River roll by, reading books, enjoying days without an alarm clock (we’d tossed into the drink the one that had so rudely interrupted our very early mornings in Kinshasa).
When the crane lifted Miles off the boat in Bumba and placed him on dry ground, we heaved a sigh of relief.
We should have held our breath instead. There was all-too-little dry ground over the miles to come before we reached the Central African Republic. The Belgians’ total lack of investment in infrastructure was a gift that just kept on giving. I lose track, reading my journals, of how many mud holes we got stuck in — fearing each time that we might not make it through.
We once ended up jacking up both wheels, putting “everything under the sun under them — sand ladders, cables, palm fronds “ — and hiring two men to help me push us out. We crossed our fingers and powered through huge pools (burning out a clutch in the act). We changed flats, pumped up tires, patched tubes. And, against the odds, we trucked on.
At night we’d camp along the roadside, for lack of any alternative. Oddity that we were, we became a traveling roadshow for the populace. We once counted 50 people assembled to view our morning ablutions. At one village, someone drummed ahead a message to the next about our impending arrival. When we got there, a crowd had assembled on the road to greet us.
There were 12 days of this.
At last we reached the Ubangi River, where I boarded a little motorboat that took me across to the Central African Republic. (The border crossing was — unusually enough — uneventful. A friend from our embassy in Kinshasa had cabled ahead about us.) There I cashed some travelers’ checks and sought out the ferry chief. Within a couple of hours, I was standing in the middle of the otherwise empty ferry, crossing the river toward Zaire, shouting above the motor, “I am the captain of the Queen’s nav-ee” and looking at Miles and Mike in the distance, in Zaire.
We drove Miles onto the ferry. It had been three weeks since we’d left Kinshasa. Our two years in Zaire were over. From now on, there’d be challenges aplenty. But at least the roads would be better.