Day 235

Sleeping location: Bukoba Coop Hotel, Bukoba, Tanzania
Distance (km today/total): 15 / 14837
Estimated climb (m today/total): 0 / 118000 
Price of safety: ca £750

Day in three words: Well that escalated

In the night we were woken by a massive storm with raging wind and rain and incredibly loud thunder. Lake Victoria seems to be the place to go for storms, we have seen about one a day when we’ve been on it. In the morning waves were still crashing vigorously onto the beach by the hotel, which seemed to be a bad omen for the overnight news, which was bad in two big ways. First, Turkey had suspended all flights to the UK, meaning our booked flight home with Turkish was now junk. A quick look at flights suggests that there aren’t going to be many out of Tanzania for too long. Second, the UK that we have to get back to is now in full lockdown. Any chance of staving off reality for a bit longer is gone. 

After a breakfast/strategy meeting we decided to first head to the small airport in Bukoba and see about getting flights to Dar or Zanzibar; there are no other real options for flight home and the distance is just too far to get there quickly enough. The airport is probably one of the loveliest I’ve seen, surrounded by green hills with a single runway jutting out in the lake. We found an Air Tanzania rep who was nice but a bit useless, and then followed her to her office to book flights for the following day. This process could only be done in cash (£130 ish each) so after trips to the ATM we started throwing it around like Monopoly money, with all the extra fees for our bikes. 

Once back in our room it hits that this is really it. It’s been coming but it still hurts and we have a little sad moment together. But the next job is to book flights from Tanzania to the UK. This presents a problem when we realise that the convenient flight from Zanzibar to the UK has tripled in price since breakfast and we can’t afford it any more. BA was the airline using a crisis to make as much money as possible, in case you’re wondering who to avoid flying with in future. We had to settle for one three days later with a huge layover in Qatar, which was still way more then usual (£620 one way...).

With this unsatisfactorily sorted we had to figure out how to get the bikes and all our stuff ready for a flight. This involved a couple of mad dashes around the town’s markets to buy random bits and bobs. We each bought a cheap “big luggage” to put most of our stuff in, then took differing approaches to the bikes. Rebecca didn’t do that much, but I am way more precious about Maggie so I decided to deconstruct and make her as compact as possible. This was made a lot easier by Philip from the previous night, who was amazing and offered us loads of help and advice, and agreed to look after some of our stuff, including Maggie’s wheels*, until we are back. Then my poor baby had her pedals, saddle, handlebars and forks removed, until she looked less like a beautiful bike and more like a pile of scrap metal. All the fragile bits were wrapped up in cardboard and I used a plastic colander with a hole in to guard the chainrings. This sorry mess was then wrapped up in a cheap plastic floor mat and tied up with paracord and cable ties. The resulting package looked like Maggie had been the victim of a mafia hit and was ready to be dumped off a bridge. 

After getting all this done our stress levels had come down a far way from the chaos of the morning, so obviously the universe had to get them back up with a new issue. We were called from our room to the hotel dining room, where a patronising, pompous doctor was waiting with two acolytes. He began to talk about the fact that Tanzania was now quarantining people coming into the country. We tried to point out that a) we had been in the country 5 days, b) we came from a place with no coronavirus cases, and c) quarantine would cause us to miss our flights home, but he couldn’t bear being talked over and held court with a load of bollocks about how serious this was and how we needed to comply with the rules of the country. The twat then made us write a little essay about why we thought we shouldn’t do the quarantine, then made us go and wait on an answer as to whether we would be allowed to leave or not. This was unbearably stressful. An hour or so later he called for us again and said that, yes, we would be allowed to skip the quarantine that had been brought in five days after we entered the country (and, as we later found out, only applied to people entering the country after that date), shouldn’t we be grateful. I wanted to punch the fat shit in the face but assumed that wouldn’t go down well.

After our heart rates returned to safe levels we finished our packing and went for some food and a few beers. We were in a bittersweet mood and still worried about things going wrong on the long journey home, but sitting near the lake and its gentle waves was calming. This was hands down the most stressful day of my life, and one of the saddest too. The last kilometre has been ridden; who knows when the next one will be. 

 

*I have another set in the UK so she can be reassembled and ridden. This will also make coming back out a lot easier, and my beautiful hand built wheels will not be bashed about by twelve different sets of luggage handlers.