A Hat a Kayak and Dreams of Dar

Terry Bell

Description

In December 1965, in a smoke-filled hotel room in Morocco, South African journalist Terry Bell accepted a challenge: to paddle a kayak from London to Tangier. At the time, Terry and his wife Barbara were living as political exiles in London. By August 1967, they agreed it was time to get back to Africa. But they decided to up the ante. Their plan: paddle 11 000 kilometres from England to Dar es Salaam in a 5-metre glass fibre kayak.

Informations

• Publié par: Cover2Cover Books
• Date de parution: 07 mars 2018
• Nombre de lectures: 8
• EAN13: 9781928346654
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 6 Mo

Extrait

Dedication

This book is dedicated to adventurers everywhere and especially to Kent Warmington, whose challenge and pursuit of the hat started us on this haphazard journey.
Contents
List of maps
Preface
Thanks
Prologue
Chapter 1 A hat on the hippie trail
Chapter 2 How to escape without a passport
Chapter 3 A kayak called Amandla
Chapter 4 A shambolic departure from Chiswick
Chapter 5 Sand, mud & the Thames estuary
Chapter 6 Fog, a tidal surge & a nudist colony
Chapter 7 Incognito into the French canal system
Chapter 8 In the wake of Robert Louis Stevenson
Chapter 9 An anniversary dinner to remember
Chapter 10 Aqueducts & terror on the Rhône
Chapter 11 Avignon, a water rat & rosé
Chapter 12 Aigues-Mortes & a Vietnam lesson
Chapter 13 Being blasted by the Mistral
Chapter 14 Caribbean hopes & a hut in Aigues-Mortes
Chapter 15 Jock of Gibraltar & the horror of Monte Cassino
Chapter 16 Important lessons in Morocco
Chapter 17 Braving the sea and bells in the buff
Chapter 18 The magnificent Costa Brava & early warnings
Chapter 19 In fog without a compass
Chapter 20 Rough water & mutiny
Chapter 21 Farewell to Amandla , welcome to 3rd-class rail
Chapter 22 No man is an island
Chapter 23 Heading south in a converted British Post Office van
Chapter 24 A car called HOPPERLI & the fate of the hat
Epilogue
Culinary canoeing – by Barbara Bell
Kayaking: know what you are doing
Imprint
Endnotes
List of maps
Dreams of Dar: proposed versus actual journey
First lesson in inexperience: seven days to get to Dover (Chapters 4 to 6)
And so to the Rhône via canals and rivers (Chapters 7 to 11)
By river to the Mediterranean Sea (Chapters 11 to 15)
Leaving Amandla for the winter; travelling overland to Morocco (Chapters 16 to 20)
Farewell to Amandla: the last stages (Chapters 21 to 24)
The journey of the hat

Preface
Gentle reader,
You are about to embark on a most unusual adventure, in the company of two blithe-spirited, but highly principled, romantics. You will be taken back to the world of the 1960s, before mobile phones and laptops and low-cost flights. Back to a time when high-flown dreams could be launched, and the grisly realities they inevitably encountered often resulted in even more bizarre and colourful escapades. You will paddle across waters high and low; scrabble around the back streets of the Mediterranean world (both northern and southern shores); hitch-hike and travel in improbable vehicles across miles of desert; and live on bananas in Santa Isabel, Equatorial Guinea, before reaching the destination of East Africa.
I offer a word of introduction to the two characters you will be travelling with, whom Cervantes himself would have admired.
I met Barbara Edmunds and Terry Bell as fellow South African activists in Johannesburg in the early 1960s, when the drama of the Rivonia Trial was unfolding, Nelson Mandela was sentenced to life imprisonment and the security police were triumphant. In 1964 Terry and I found ourselves in adjacent cells in Pretoria Local Prison and cemented a friendship that has endured through many twists and turns over the past fifty years, as we episodically encountered each other in London, Zambia and the Cape. Terry and Barbara now live in Muizenberg, on Cape Town’s South Peninsula, and I on the Atlantic Seaboard, in Hout Bay.
Terry is a prolific journalist, and the author of a serious and unsettling study of various raw and rancid matters left trailing in the wake of the defeat of apartheid: Unfinished Business — South Africa, Apartheid and Truth . A flamboyant personality, he is also a modest man. It was only after much urging that he and Barbara set pen to paper to tell us the inside story of their epic adventures as they attempted to canoe from Chiswick in London to Dar es Salaam in Tanzania in the fateful years of 1967/68. Barbara is more than the backroom partner here, even though her painstaking and detailed research forms the core of much of the writing. Hers is the steadying and guiding influence and, most importantly, the voice that is able to say “NO” when impossibilism threatens. We are all fortunate in that letters and recordings have survived that have made it possible for our canoeist authors to capture some of the immediacy and detail of their adventures, and bring to life the Dickensian array of characters they encountered.
It was normal for young South Africans of our generation to camp in the bush, cook food over an open fire, and think nothing of long-distance travel in ropey vehicles. But the Bell venture goes much further than this. There are undoubtedly vicarious pleasures ahead for those less inclined to spend their nights under open fishing boats on remote Spanish beaches. Or who wish to experience from the comfort of their armchairs the pleasures of third-class travel on trenes de correo or living in a shack in Gibraltar. There is also a serious historian of the battle sites of the oppressed struggling to emerge in Terry, which adds a further dimension of interest to this picaresque voyage.
Perhaps one day you, too, gentle reader, may seek to fulfil a dream.
Dr Sholto Cross is a former political prisoner, exile, international consultant and was previously director of development studies at the University of East Anglia.
Thanks
T here are so many people — past, present and posthumous — to thank for the role they played in the production of this book. First and foremost is Barbara’s late father, Rex Edmunds, who made up an album of every postcard we sent as we travelled. He also kept all the reel-to-reel taped messages we posted. Without these, fallible memory would not have been adequate to the task. Similarly, Kent Warmington’s memory and habit of retaining letters over half a century were invaluable.
Over the years there have been numerous requests that we write this book. But it was John and Erica Platter who finally persuaded Barbara and me to get going. It was also their idea that we should include some of the recipes gathered and tried out en route. Still, nothing more would have happened had it not been for the enthusiastic reception of the idea by the great team at Cover2Cover Books.
Thanks must also go to Neville and Muriel Rubin for providing the modern fluviacarte , the map of the French waterways; to our photographer son, Brendan, who upgraded fifty-year-old photographs, and to our artist daughter, Ceiren, who provided line drawings to illustrate Barbara’s section on canoe cuisine. Alide Dasnois provided invaluable advice as a reader of the first draft and we had an excellent editor, Sandra Dodson.
But it is to all those people in England, France, Spain, Gibraltar and Morocco who helped us — and often taught us more than they may have realised — that we owe a special debt of gratitude.
Terry & Barbara Bell
Prologue
I n December 1964 I hitch-hiked from Johannesburg to Cape Town and back. Not once, but twice: a five-day journey covering 3,000 kilometres. I had the good fortune to be accompanied by Barbara Edmunds, whom I’d met a short while before. By the end of the trip I declared that she was the only person in the world I could travel with. She was great company and didn’t mind walking long distances or standing on the roadside for hours on end. She was also a very good cook. And she never made a sarcastic remark about my olive green bush hat with its mock leopard-skin hatband.
I had been released from detention in August that year after nearly two months of solitary confinement under apartheid South Africa’s ninety-day law. Aware that I was under fairly constant observation by the security police, I decided to adopt a peripatetic lifestyle. Hence the hitch-hiking adventure.
When another round of political arrests began, I made my way to Zambia. Barbara and I kept in touch and later met up in “Swinging Sixties” London, where I had been granted political asylum. Although there were lucrative scholarships and work available in London, I resented my deportation and was determined to get back to southern Africa, hoping to be on hand for what I thought would be imminent political change in South Africa. So when a friend challenged us to a long kayak journey, it seemed logical to return by canoe.
This book — or one like it — about a shambolic kayak voyage and the world’s most travelled hat, was to have been completed forty-seven years ago. But the notes, manuscript drafts and rolls of film recording our adventure were stolen, along with virtually everything else we owned. We were left with no more than a passport, the clothes we stood up in and a small amount of money. It was only eight years later, following the death of Barbara’s father, that we fortuitously discovered he’d kept an album with all the postcards we’d sent to Barbara’s parents during our travels. He had also kept the eleven reels of audiotape we’d posted. A few years ago we had the tapes transcribed onto CDs. Remarkably, after nearly half a century, all but one of those tapes were still audible.

Yet it was only in 2016, after a discussion about kayaking and writing with journalist and South African wine guide supremo John Platter, that we finally embarked on the writing of our story.
This book started as a tale about a kayak called Amandla and a haphazard voyage. But that olive green bush hat with its mock leopard-skin hatband assumed a charac