Jonny Bealby - Running with the Moon: A Boy’s Own Adventure: Riding a Motorbike Through Africa

Contents

Jonny Bealby was devastated when his fiancee Melanie died unexpectedly while they were travelling in Kashmir. Two years later, still heartbroken and utterly disillusioned, he took on the challenge of a lifetime. Setting out with only his motorbike for company, he began a daring and dangerous journey around the African continent in a desperate attempt to unearth some meaning in his life. Bittersweet, bold and beautifully told, Running with the Moon is a tale of true love and loss, of exploration, adventure and courage.

Jonny Bealby was born in 1963. Educated in England, Scotland and Canada, he developed a passion for travel and on leaving college journeyed extensively in Australasia and the Far East. Since then he has earned a crust in a variety of ways: as a singer in a band, a stunt horse rider, circus roustabout, motorcycle courier and photo-journalist to name but a few. As a writer and traveller he has visited more than seventy countries and has had articles featured in a variety of publications including the Daily Telegraph, Observer, Elle, Global and Traveller Magazine. He is also the author of Silk Dreams, Troubled Road and For a Pagan Song and now runs the adventure travel company Wild Frontiers (www.wildfrontiers.co.uk). While not travelling, he lives in London.

Also by Jonny Bealby

SILK DREAMS, TROUBLED ROAD

Love and War on the Old Silk Road: On Horseback through Central Asia

FOR A PAGAN SONG

In the Footsteps of the Man Who Would Be King:

Travels in India Pakistan and Afghanistan

This book is for Melanie

Wherever your travels take you,
the moon is always there,
and I am the moon...

SOMETHING WAS WRONG, I knew instantly, almost before I woke up. Melanie lay on her back, her breathing shallow and uncertain. It seemed to be getting weaker. I leant over and touched her face. She was burning up, soaked in sweat, clammy, as though she had a high fever.

I jumped out of bed, a tight feeling of panic gripping my chest.

What the hells wrong with you? I shook her. Come on babe, wake up.... Nothing. I shook her again, still nothing. I slapped her gingerly and even found myself throwing water in her face, thinking, Well it works in the movies, but this was no film, this was horribly real. There was nothing, save her rasping, ever-decreasing, breath.

Help, Jonny. Get help!

I ran to the door and looked out on a crisp, bright October morning. Mist rose effortlessly from the lake which stretched away to the edge of the valley and the white peaks of the Himalayas beyond. Javed, the youngest of the Nadro family, was passing by, preparing breakfast for the houseboat guests.

Javed, somethings wrong with Mel. Quick, get that German who arrived last night... I need help.

He hurried away, reading the urgency on my face.

I ran back into the room. She lay in the same position, pale and inert. Her eyes were now slits, only the whites showing. Panic seized me completely, an iron fist holding me. I was paralysed with fear and confusion.

Kneeling by the side of the bed, I slipped my arm under her neck and held her.

Then it happened; she exhaled a small breath and with it she was gone. Just like that. There was no struggle, no pain or last-second realisation of what was happening to her, she just went, as vividly as if she had got up and walked out of the door. I stared in frozen horror as my wife, my future, my hopes and my dreams disappeared before my eyes.

What is wrong? asked Marcus, the German policeman who now stood behind me, Can I help?

Do something, I yelled hysterically. I think shes...

We must get her on the floor, he said, the training of his profession taking over. We carried her across the rosewood room and laid her down. The silk blouse she was wearing clung to her body and her hair stuck to her face.

You blow in her mouth, he instructed, and I will massage her heart. I did as I was told. I blew and he pumped but there was nothing.

Wake up, a voice inside me was screaming. What the hell are you doing, you cant go like this... WAKE UP! But deep down I knew shed gone, Id seen her go. I knew but I couldnt believe.

Marcus sat up, shocked. His eyes would not meet mine. He said simply,... shes dead.

WITH THE SHIP lurching and staggering in the storm I felt drunk long before I was. Soon people were throwing up. Nobody cleared the vomit away, it was simply sprinkled with sawdust much in the way Italian waiters cover pasta with parmesan cheese. Neil and I sat in the bar with Pierre, a fellow traveller from France. North African men squeezed in beside us smoking and drinking coffee and alcohol. The latter surprised me, their smoking did not. The smell was suffocating.

As I began to feel sick, annoyed with myself for getting carried away and drinking too much, I started to feel blue. On the World Service evening news the announcer had given us the depressing information that Zaire, a country almost unavoidably on our route, had just broken out in civil unrest, all the foreign nationals were being evacuated and the borders closed. Neil and Pierre were locked in an unbelievably boring conversation about bikes Do Yamaha wheels take seven-inch or eight-inch spokes? Which nut takes a nineteen-millimetre spanner? so when the man next to me plonked his turbaned head on my shoulder and started to snore, I decided to get some air. Vicious forks of lightning split the sky like cracks in the firmament. The waves pounded the hull and spray lashed my face. A fierce wind took my Manchester United cap clean off my head and planted it somewhere between Corsica and Ibiza. It seemed apt, considering theyd just lost their first match of the season, but it only helped to bring me down a little further.

I had been thinking a lot about Mel recently, especially on the journey down through France, and now I missed her more than ever. She was, after all, my travelling partner, not Neil. She should have been there. Her beautiful little face would have been so excited at the prospect of another journey. Normally, large expanses of water act as a calming influence on me, but not then. The ferocity and anger of the sea seemed to reflect my own feelings. Buffeted and damp, I fought my way back inside, sank onto an empty bench, and slept.

By morning the storm had passed, and with it my dejected spirits it looked like being a fine day. Standing on the bow, we seemed to be heading straight into the sun, away from Europe and its troubled past and on towards a new, exciting beginning. Zaire may have been in turmoil, as, no doubt, were countless other African states, but so what? I had never assumed the journey was going to be easy, I wouldnt have wanted it so. Africa. This was what I had been waiting for.

At noon I had my first experience of African bureaucracy. We had all been lined up to have our passports stamped at the pursers office. After a wait of one and a half hours I finally reached the front, only to be told: