exactly eleven hours with just the sound of the motor

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onwards!

yesterday morning once the freeze had lifted from the ground i lit my motorcycle up and banged west, buckling through durban, popping, backfiring and wobbling on blown bearings, worn out bushings and a loose chain. the bike has lost metal somewhere, the chain can become no tighter and has resigned to derail over any slight bump of the road, causing me to shutter to a halt and have to toil in the oil and grease to spin it back on to the rusty gear. even on the freeway, the horrid winding freeways of south africa that seem to twist through the entire country and overlap the small country roads, in south africa you must take the freeway because there are only freeways.

my motor now only wishes to ride eighty kilometers an hour, down hill, which makes the freeway an awkward and embarrassing place to be. south africa is a real country, the people who live here are real people, people by the definition of people. it makes my situation awkward and embarrassing. i am a humble young man in dirty rags, without shoes, grease impregnated in my skin, in my hands and my face and my motorcycle is ugly and unimpressive. these characteristics categorize me in this country as a hopeless invalid; farther north these same characteristics cause me to be regarded openly as a sort of loose, lovable adventuring youth who by any means must be aided on his lovely journey.

the country is beautiful. between durban and east london every conceivable style of countryside lay out in order: there are foothills, marshlands, badlands, deserts, rain forests, jungles, plains, prairies and deltas, all in a short space of a few hundred kilometers. i cut through and drifted in awe and was hailed upon by gravel and rocks from roaring semi-trucks and little flying cars and vans and i caught little bugs in my teeth and then the sun came down and the freeze came down with it.

it took an extra three hours in the pitch black along the freeway with the rock spitting semi-trucks and neon stars and the milky way and a sliver of a moon for guidance. the headlight on my motorcycle becomes brighter the faster that i go and dimmer the slower. i took the darkness of the country as slow as i could manage being on a national freeway. a motorcycle is a lonely transport. i drove yesterday for exactly eleven hours with just the sound of the motor, the wind and strange noises from somewhere that convinced me of some horrible explosion or seizure that would lead to my being tossed to the road. with just a road coming at you and these sounds, for eleven hours, your mind becomes a screen to which fantastic things are played upon and lure you against your will to watching. it is hard to watch the road and the mind together. riding a motorcycle for a long distance must be similar to being locked in a dungeon, only the destination is freedom, the destination of being released from the dungeon.

the destination is cape town, a beautiful apartment and leah and all the spoils of africa gathered together in one funny city eight hundred kilometers from this place i am now and i will be released.

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