Description
Ride north from Cape Town to England in 1955. Keep the motorbike. Fondle it from time to time. Dream of travelling with it through Africa once again – when the time is right. Realise the moment has arrived when a first-born son leaves school. Then head south from London nearly thirty years later, with him on another bike and the old machine making its second major foray.
Head for Africa again, for the same Great North Road, for the thousands of miles that lead all the way to Cape Town.
This was the essence of Anthony Smith’s adventure. On a chill day in 1983 he and Adam set forth on two Triumph Tiger Cubs. Their aim was to journey south along the same route that he had travelled north some three decades earlier. Of course they Knew that much had changed.
The continent had been almost entirely colonial in the mid-1950s and, for an Englishman in particular, travel in Africa’s eastern half had then been straightforward. Not so in 1983.
They knew that independent Africa possessed both danger and considerable difficulty. There were to be frightening confrontations, as well as flea-pit standards of first-class accommodation, octuplicate paperwork, a dead body in desperate Uganda, and many days of very little food. But there were also better days, wonderful chance encounters, the traditional Africa, its warmth and enthusiasm, its beauty and appeal.
There was also the moving relationship between father and son. Other travellers found it strange – ‘very weird’ — that the two of them should wish to travel together, but they did and the two sets of opinions often failed to coincide.
The trip is therefore seen with several pairs of eyes, the remembered sights from 1955 and those of 1983 viewed from two such different angles.
The result is one of the most fascinating and fast-moving travel stories, revealing modern Africa in a unique manner, and always exciting while the two of them encounter it together on their four-month trip the full length of the continent.
Hardback in good condition for age. With good clean dust cover.
