We cast a strange shadow as we roll across the Dona Ana Bridge over the Zambezi River: two men, a bicycle and a backpack. Workmen in yellow hard hats laugh, and other bike riders, mostly men ferrying crates of empty beer bottles, swerve around us. Women with babies tied on their backs simply gawk, heads swiveling as we pass. I’m sitting on a homemade bike rack on the back of a two-wheeled steel tank called a Hero Royal, doing my best to keep my heels out of the spokes. My arms are around the waist of a ropy teenage boy who stands on the pedals. Below us, the early-morning sunlight eats through the mist that lingers over garden patches on the floodplain. Malawi is somewhere up ahead. Behind is Vila de Sena, a village in central Mozambique.
As we near the center of the bridge, I recall how it felt, sitting on the lumpy mattress in my hotel room last night, exhausted after a day of buses and bush taxis, to be pulling out the first of the eight red envelopes in my pack—one for each week of my journey across Africa. The letters were a parting gift from my fiancée, Laura. When—if—I make it home, we’re getting married.
Laura and I had become engaged six months prior, on Valentine’s Day. But I had always had a bad case of cold feet. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to be with her—we’d been together seven years, and I knew she was The One—but as an independent only child, the idea of making a lifetime commitment to someone else, even one as wonderful as Laura, terrified me.
Then, a few weeks into our engagement, I had stumbled upon a book that mentioned a rebellious young British explorer named Ewart Grogan. In 1900, the 24-year-old Cambridge dropout had become the first person to walk from one end of Africa to the other, taking two years to travel 4,500 miles “from the Cape (of Good Hope) to Cairo.” He did it to win the hand of the woman he loved, New Zealand beauty Gertrude Watt. She was rich, and her snobby stepfather had challenged Grogan to prove his worth. Grogan proposed his Africa expedition, a journey that would almost certainly kill him. Naturally, the stepfather accepted.
I was hooked. Not just because Grogan’s was an incredible, virtually unknown story, but because the more I read, the more I became convinced there was a lesson in there—some insight into the wisdom, courage and conviction it took to go to such extremes just to be with someone else, to make a life-changing leap and follow through to the end, no matter what.
I then made a second, stranger proposal to Laura: I asked for an eight-week leave of absence from our pre-marriage countdown to retrace Grogan’s journey, 21st-century style, from South Africa to Sudan, all by public transportation. In so many words, she said that if this was what it would take for me to settle down—and if we could finalize our guest list before I left—she’d buy my plane ticket and drive me to the airport. Five days ago, she’d done just that, pressing the envelopes into my hand in the departures queue at the terminal.
Sitting on the lumpy mattress in Sena, I tore open the first one. “I can’t wait to spend the rest of my life with you,” the card inside read. “Let the adventure begin!”
It made me smile with a stab of longing. But the feeling soon faded. I hadn’t been away long enough to miss her badly, yet. This early in the trip, my mind was full of Africa. Traveling here, especially by public transportation this far off the tourist trail, demanded a radical mental adjustment. Everything was different here, from the utter absence of personal space to the constant smells of leaded gasoline and strange things burning.
