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Published: February 13th 2018
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Straw ceiling in Gweru Leaving Mom for Zimbabwe took a while, endless paperwork and 61 dollars later, visa fee, road tax, insurance and a carbon dioxide fee,
The coastal plain was gone and the sun also, replaced by a slow chilly rain, Africa, Africa is hot they told me!
Some places are hot but the you get up on the high plain, the high veld, it’s not hot anymore and with the rain it dropped to 15C which is of ok if you’re not on a bike with some wind chill factor to count in.
Rant: May the devil and all his little devils and all the other helpers, lawyers, reals estate vendors, inland revenue and other riff raff take the vendors and makers of so called water proof motor cycle gear and put them on endless trips on bikes through endless rain until they learn to make proper gear and not some cheap shit made in China.
Rain ain’t no problem as such if you’re dry.
And there I was moaning on the bike feeling sorry for my self and seeing the people on the road walking bare foot and then I was a bit ashamed of my self
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Don't steal my toilet cistern but still wet and miserable.
The landscape was very nice but you don’t feel like un zipping your jacket and getting out the phone to take some pics, at least I did not, sorry not pics.
I got to Gweru found a room and had a hamburger, yes a fucking hamburger, the only place that was open after 7 pm.
I was hungry as hell, the breakfast in Chimoio was a cheap and cruel joke on a weary traveller.
There are not many cosy little roadside restaurants on the high veld, to be quite frank, none.
They had very iffy looking pie at a petrol station I was sorely tempted but decided that my intestinal flora most probably was not up to it.
In the morning the night watch man was gathering mangoes from tree in the garden so I had a breakfast mango
Two options the next morning, a six hundred plus km trek direct to Vic falls or a 150 km quickie to Bulawayo and a slack Sunday there and the hauling ass on Monday, Bulawayo won.
I wish I’d been here before the independence , it must have been
a splendid place, broad avenues and beautiful buildings.
On thing to be said of Robert Mugabe, he definitely knew how to fuck up a country, and royally at that.
The people I’ve spoken to are really happy with the new president, I hope for them that he’s not as big a crook as Mugabe. According to what I’ve heard he’s invited the white farmers back hinting about compensations , Thirty years or whatever of total corruption and mismanagement has left one of the wealthiest countries in Africa as a pauper.
I’m staying in a nice old hotel the they’re renovating.
I’ve also broken the law, I took a pic of the court house, an offence .
One thing that strikes me compared to Asia, Vietnam for instance, is that there are very few bicycles and and motorbikes around, there were some motorbikes in Mozambique, but here people walk, there are always people walking along every road that I’ve been on, also in Kenya and Tanzania, and many without shoes.
Sometimes I’ve seen them walk bare foot with their flip flops in their hands.
I’ve seen three white people, four if I count what
I see in the mirror in Zimbabwe.
And wearing by bike gear for most of the time, paler than a fish's belly, I stick out like a polar bear in a coal mine, or a klan member at a gospel sing along.
Almost everyone stares t me, but then again I'm used to it.
For dinner I went to the local restaurant and got a T-bone steak that can't have weighed more than a 100 grams before they put it on the grill, that was one sorry excuse for a steak.
My lovely hotel as it turned out had no hot water in my room so I had to grab my towel and what not and trot down to another room for a shower, well saying it was a shower is to exaggerate.
I got humid very slowly in a luke warm drizzle, my fancy newly renovated bathroom only had cold water.
The girl in the reception said that they had breakfast in the morning for 10 dollars but when push came to shove there was no breakfast, they pulled out the kitchen due to renovations.
My secure bike parking was inside the
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It's a criminal offence to take pics of the court house. dining and conference room that also was under renovationI.
I got a nice breakfast in a new smart place for less money so well fed I set forth to Vic falls, it was the GPS's lucky day, only one road there and 438 km later i got there.
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