A game for gentlemen played by thugs

Football is important here. That’s a bit of an understatement but I’m determined not to use the “matter of life and death” quote which gets way too much exposure anyway. But football is everywhere. Working class Tanzanian men wear a pair of trousers, flip flops and an old T shirt, everyday of their lives, and second-hand football tops are the most sought after. I don’t believe there is actually anywhere to buy new clothes in Mtwara, but every few hundred metres through the town there is someone hanging 2nd-hand clothes on a tree to sell. Tree shops are the place to browse and try things on, if you have put old garments in the containers at recycling centres, a lot of them end up here. And a Man Utd or Arsenal shirt will be sold the moment it hits the bough. Every Tanzanian will, if asked, tell you their favourite team, but I have yet to hear any preference outside “the top four”. A lot of guys will keep their options open by having a team in many leagues; I asked a taxi driver once who was his favourite side, and he was still talking about 5km later, “...in Germany it’s Bayern Munich, they were unlucky last year, in Spain I like Real Madrid...” I’d probably have got a more concise answer asking a British cabbie his views on the asylum system.

Then, speaking of transport, there’s the dala-dalas. These are horrifically damaged old minibuses, usually Toyota Hiace, which run an unscheduled, unsafe but inexpensive transport service around every Tz town. The sides of the vehicle will be stencilled to show you its route, but the rear will have been lovingly decorated with slogans or portraits, in a “graffiti” style (and I’m talking old Skool New York here, none of your new-fangled subversive Banksy stuff). Often there is a religious motto, roughly 50:50 split between Christian and Muslim, which I like to think of as a plea for forgiveness of their driving style, although sadly I have yet to see the bible’s shortest but most apt verse; “Jesus wept”. But everyone has their priorities, and there is usually some other much larger font advertising allegiance to Liverpool, Barcelona et al, often accompanied by the name of a favourite player. A recent in-my-head straw poll surprisingly revealed Carlos Tevez to be the most popular icon. I have seen exceptions, one dala-dala up in Dar publicises the Taliban, and there is also, locally, the inexplicable:

I don’t understand.

Hairdressers adorn their walls with large and often fairly good portraits of premiership footballers, usually black and good-looking; Theirry Henry, Michael Essien, but also for some reason that whinging little cheat Ronaldo. I presume this is so that the customers can sit and point to the star who they wish to look like, which is one of several very plausible reasons that you never see a painting of Robbie Savage. Saturday nights in a bar with satellite TV are a lot of fun. The atmosphere is a bit like being at the game, rival groups of fans sit in opposite corners of the room, shouting and swapping banter. I recently was the only white man in a packed hotel bar watching Blackburn fail to score at Anfield. Both sides also failed to entertain, frankly, but even as the night wore on and the Guinness slipped down, there was no danger of me nodding off as the large local fella to my left would scream “Eh!” and slap me heartily on the thigh whenever Liverpool got remotely close to scoring. Wearing shorts as I was my leg began to turn the colour of Torres’ shirt.

And yet domestic football here is rubbish. I mean terrible, the national side is riddled by in-fighting and struggles against the likes of Sudan, and despite being managed by a Brazilian recently failed to qualify for the knock-out stages of the African cup of nations. I can’t remember off the top of my head whether Tz have qualified for the next World cup, but even on African soil I would put a few quid on them making the short trip home “without troubling the scorekeeper”, to coin my favourite cricketing phrase. I’ll cheer for them of course, but if you want a flutter, there’s my tip.

Biltong and Body Hair

It’s been a long time, dear readers, and for that I apologise. I can only say that living in Tanzania is kind of 24/7, and trying to do a job at the same time is mental. Obviously about 15 million Tanzanians manage it, and we will manage it, but setting these things up takes some time.
General update: Our freight arrived, mainly intact, and it felt like Xmas three times over, unwrapping all of the things we have been missing. Unwrapped a fair few things that we have no idea why we ever bought, never mind brought with us, but at least they don’t have to go back again when we leave. The house in Dar is shaping up well and feels a bit homely now that we have some things we recognise in it, like saucepans and Finding Nemo on DVD.

One of the biggest sources of relief in the freight was our bikes, which arrived and were unpacked with about 48 hours to spare before we left for Johannesburg and the MTN Panorama Tour (a bicycle race to you and me, hence clearly not much fun sans velo). This was our first genuine week off since we came to Africa, and we were looking forward to it massively. I was treating it as a “big push” in my cycle training for the Ironman, some good long days in the saddle to toughen the legs and the butt. Suze hadn’t done much cycling except on her monster of a Chinese commuter bike, so it was a good chance for her to improve fitness and enjoy riding again.
I decided to take it pretty seriously, and try a few things that I will do on the day in France, including shaving my legs, for the 1st time ever. This is common practice among racing cyclists, partly because aerodynamics can account for literally 80% or more of your energy, and partly to make it easier to clean/repair the skin if you come a cropper. But what a job it was. Strewth. My empathy goes out more than ever to any ladies reading, who presumably go through this far more often than me (although to be fair my legs probably started out a lot bushier). It must have taken nearly an hour, and that was with me doing one leg and the wife shaving the other! It looks pretty freaky until you get used to it, too.
Once we started riding we were glad to have taken every possible advantage. The race is a behemoth, nay, a leviathan of effort. 115km on the first day and less than 10km must have been flat. We were riding for over 6 hours if your include water breaks. The fancy-pants Garmin bike computer-GPS thingamy on Suze’s handlebars reckons we burnt nearly 4000Kcal by the end – that’s about 2 days of food if you’re not doing much. We got there, with gritted teeth, screaming thighs and a little sunburn, but we doubted our ability to complete the race (3 more days to go, all in the same terrain). However, never doubt the restorative power of dried meat products. A little biltong, a little chilli drywoers (kind of soft spicy salami, delicious) and gradually everything seemed more possible. Suze was amazing. I mean I had been training for this, albeit on a different bike and on easier landscape; she hadn’t ridden more than 30 minutes in one go since November, but she slept off the pain and fatigue and when we awoke at 0500 again, agreed to take a swing at day two. Day two was a little shorter, and we finished in a mere 4h15m or so... On the finish line we got talking to the organiser, who was so chuffed to have “international” entrants, that we had to go up on stage at that evening’s medal ceremony, give an off-the-cuff speech and receive a 1000 Rand prize just for turning up!
I’ll spare you the ups and downs of the course, suffice to say it remained as long, hard work. Mornings were recurring at 0500 and in the evenings we delighted in stretching and ice baths. But it also reminded me how much I love to ride a bike. Day three was another 6 hour epic, and I genuinely believe I could have kept going for 6 hours more. The machine felt more and more natural to me. It was a joyous and, dare I say it, almost spiritual experience. The bike and I were one thing by now. Somewhere in my shoes and my saddle was the point where biology stopped and technology started, but the border was getting increasingly blurred. I wasn’t on a bike, I was part of it. I didn’t care how steep it got, I could ride up walls. I didn’t steer the bike, I just had to see corners and we were around them. I was riding an intention craft, if anyone has read Phillip Pulman.
The final day was a team time trial, on a shorter but abruptly hilly course. By this stage we knew that only a break (to body or chain) could prevent us finishing, but Suze was understandably exhausted. We fought through it and even made up a few places in the mixed division, to add to the several teams who had dropped out behind us when they found how hard it was. I’ve been presented with a fair few medals at the finish line of running or cycling events, but this might be the first time that it felt to me like I truly deserved one (and the Mrs probably deserved two).
South Africa, generally, was great. Not without its problems, of course and although I haven’t been before, occasionally you do wonder about the apparently slow pace of change, socially. There may not be official apartheid anymore (in fact Zuma and the ANC were re-elected by a landslide on the day we arrived) but socio-economically, the white-skinned people are still wearing the white-collars, if that’s not too clumsy a way to put it. Nonetheless in comparison with Tz, there was no escaping the facts that SA is affluent, friendly, efficient and so, so easy. The lovely lady in the outdoor shop where we spent our R1000 winnings, remarked that we were lucky to live up in the “real Africa”. It was a nice thing to hear but I haven’t yet worked out how much of it I agree with.