Walking Across Africa

Forty years ago, Patrick Nash took a ten-month walk through the heart of Africa. We talked to him about the journey that inspired his latest book, Shots Across the Water.

Music: © Barney & Izzi Hardy 

Transcript

Peter This week we're talking about backpacking in Africa; not now, but what it was like forty years ago. After a successful career as a social entrepreneur, Patrick Nash has finally found the time to write about his adventures as a young guy fresh out of uni all those years ago. It's a fascinating tale of living on a shoestring and your wits in countries that have since changed beyond all recognition. Sadly, not always for the better. We caught up with Patrick at his home in Wales. Patrick, welcome to our podcast.

Patrick Well, thank you very much for having me.

Peter The first thing I want to ask you is, why did it take you so long to write? I think it took you forty-five years.

Patrick Well, it actually only took me a year to write, but obviously I wrote it forty-five years after the event. And the reason for that, if you read my first book, you would probably know, because my first book is the story of my career as a social entrepreneur, which literally started within weeks of getting back from the Africa trip. It was not planned and I didn't interview for anything. I literally just was in the right place at the right time. And I spent the next forty-one years setting up and running social enterprises, charities, more social enterprises. And I was so busy doing those. And then when I finally retired from that, I decided to write. Various people have said you should write a book about your career as a social entrepreneur, and that took me about four years. Right at the end of that, I saw a little something about Bradt Guides, the publisher, and I sent them an email and they got back to the next pretty much the next day and said, ‘Let's do it.’ So here we are.

Felice Amazing. So you did it without an agent or anything. You just went straight?

Patrick Well, I did it without an agent, but it was a hybrid publisher, so I put a bit of money in and they put money in. So we all spread the risk on it. Which, because I was in business for so many years, I understand that that sort of deal quite well, you know what I mean? They were fantastic. They were just brilliant because I self-published the first book and it was much easier doing it with Bradt.

Peter So turn the clock back to 1980. And there you are, aged 22.

Patrick Yes.

Peter And you're at Bristol University just finishing a degree in economics. And you think suddenly. ‘Well, I think I'll go and walk around Africa.’ Is that how it worked out?

Patrick Yes. I can give you the slightly long form version of that or longer form version. We didn't travel a lot as a family. I was brought up in south London.  I went away to school at a reasonably young age, which I absolutely hated, and when I left school I got a place at Bristol University, but I deferred it for a year because I just needed to get away and travel. I'd been in such a kind of enclosed, slightly repressive environment that I just needed to get away.

I worked my passage on a ship to Australia and travelled around Australia and discovered a love of travelling, which I'd never done. I think we went to France once as a family when I was eight or something. So that kind of got me the bug. In the holidays from university I used to go and work in pickled onion factories in Holland and stay in a tent and do twelve-night shifts and earn at the time was a humongous amount of money, tax free. Then once I'd done about six or seven weeks of that, I hitchhiked down to the Greek islands and sleep on the beaches and all that. So I got into the habit of going away every summer.

Then towards the end of university, I got 2:1, people were wanting to go to the recruitment fairs and all that sort of thing. I just can't be doing that. Just the thought of working for the civil service or a private company was just too horrendous. I was quite keen – I've met a lot of people who had done the famous hippie trail to India, ‘Oh great, I'll do the hippie trail.’ But of course it was 1979; at this point, the Iranian Revolution had happened and the Soviet tanks had moved into Afghanistan, and it closed down for a bit. Probably closed down forever, actually. I'm not sure it's really happening much anymore.

I had a friend who was doing VSO in what was then called Swaziland, and I thought, ‘Oh fine, I'll go to Swaziland. I knew nothing about Africa. I'd read the Conrad book Heart of Darkness, and I'd read a couple of the Lawrence van der Post books, which I loved. But beyond that, and a map I bought at Stanfords, that was all I knew. So I was a little ill-educated, and set off to see the friend in Swaziland. I never made it to Swaziland.

Peter So you set off with £250 in your pocket?

Patrick Yes.

Peter Traveller's cheques?

Patrick I took dollar cash and one of those belts with a zip. Remember them?

Peter Very well.

Patrick I'm sure you do. Yes. I have one of those, and I never got burgled. Lots of crazy things happened, as you've read. But I never got burgled.

Felice So what else did you take with you? I know you took a huge pile of postcards of London.

Patrick Yes I took about fifty postcards, I think. And yes, somebody said to me, ‘You need to have a gift to give people,’ which was a very wise thing.  I thought, ‘What can I take?’ Because I literally had a really a really small Army Surplus…you remember the Army Surplus shops, one of those little rucksacks? I mean, nothing like the sort of spectacular things you see today. And I thought, ‘Postcards, they'll be brilliant.' I took postcards of London and they were my thank you cards. They loved them.  I'm so glad I did that, because otherwise it would have been a bit embarrassing, I think.

Peter So you crossed the Channel. Tell us what happened.

Patrick No, I didn't cross the Channel. I actually took a flight to Tel Aviv, and I'd always wanted to go to Israel. I thought, 'Oh, Israel's near Africa, I can go there.' And I thought I'd work on a kibbutz. But that didn't work out because I was quite into left-wing community activity. I was quite into that at university and quite politically and environmentally active. And so I had that sort of background there. So yes, I took a flight to Tel Aviv, which on an El Al flight, which involved going to Heathrow for about six hours before the flight, and being frisked by God knows how many border force of various nations.

I rocked up in Tel Aviv with nowhere to stay and as it turned out, nowhere to work. And somehow it all went okay. I met someone on the plane. She took me back to her family, she was visiting her family. She lived in London. I stayed with her brother in Tel Aviv for a week, and he found me somewhere to work. And I went off to work on the West Bank. I now realised was an illegal settlement, but there we go.

Peter Do you know the time?

Patrick No, my politics was quite narrow, I think. I didn't have a global political outlook in the way that I might have now, and certainly after that trip.

Felice So you had to get two passports? Well, it's like nowadays they give you a little slip, and they just put it in your passport and stamp that when you go to Israel. But then they probably didn't.

Patrick No they didn't. And I went to the old passport at Petty France and amazingly, after a significant sort of pleading, I managed to get a second passport. And actually, when I was writing the book, I looked up and you can get a second passport still, but normally for business purposes, but to solve these sorts of problems.

Peter So it's not actually that difficult to do. I was a foreign correspondent, a war correspondent.

Patrick Oh, okay.

Peter I actually had two passports for years and years and years. That was work. But you could carry on and use them any way you wanted. So yes, I had most of my life had two passports. I now have one.

Patrick Well, the good news is I have two passports now because my mother's Irish.

Felice I have two as well because my mother's Austrian.

Patrick There you go. It's great.

Felice Yes. Very good.

Patrick They're very useful thing to have, because whatever else you do...after Brexit.

Peter Whatever else you do in life while travelling, you do not want to lose your passport.

Patrick Exactly. Which is amazingly, so far not happened to me.

Felice I think one of the exciting things you found in your book was crossing borders into new countries, and not knowing what would happen each time.

Peter Well, yes. Talk us through it.

Patrick Well, the first border – do you mean from Israel into Egypt? Yes. So that was very exciting because obviously I'd heard about the Camp David Accords and then the peace treaty a couple of years later. It was Jimmy Carter's most famous hour, really, wasn't it? So when I went out there in January of 1980, the border was about to open. But as it turned out, the border wasn't open until early March. For people who were travelling on foot or in cars, I think the airlines were opening up before, but once I got to Israel, I wasn't going to use a plane again. I couldn't afford to use a plane. Planes were much more expensive in those days, if you remember.

So I just had to wait, really. And then eventually, we got news that...I think I actually phoned up the British Embassy for some those days. They answered the phone. It was brilliant. I managed to get a reasonably accurate lie of the land. So off I went. I left the moshava where I was working, which actually I really enjoyed. I had a great time there and really had a lot of respect for the Israelis who were there, but also spent a lot of time in the town of Jericho, which was a non-Jewish town. So it was just Palestinians. I spent a lot of time with the Palestinians there, and I worked with Palestinians in the fields. So I kind of got quite educated from both sides on that, which I think is a good thing.

Felice Definitely.

Patrick Particularly today, to not be polarised, really. Then I hitchhiked down to Gaza and then got in a shared taxi from Gaza to the border, and the Israeli side of the border was quite scary. There was a lot of men with guns, and they were very, very nervous about this border that I'm guessing a lot of people in Israel didn't really want it to open. So it was quite aggressive and all that sort of stuff. And anyway, eventually you then had to pay to go in from where I'm sitting, a particularly expensive bus. It's probably the most expensive bus ride mile for a mile I've ever been on to go. Literally about half a mile from the Israeli barrier and the Egyptian barrier.

We got to Egypt. They were all over us. They were so happy to meet us. There were about four or five backpackers and they were like, 'Welcome backpackers.' It was really quite fun. We stayed there for a while. I met this guy, actually, who I travelled with, a Dutch man called Henk, who I think pops up in the book a bit, and I did going down Egypt with him and it was fantastic. They bought us coffee and all sorts of things. Cakes, I think. So it was quite a welcome. Then he found a shared taxi with about eight people on, and we headed off to the Suez Canal and then over on the ferry and then another taxi. So I went from literally Gaza one night to Cairo the next night.

Felice That's amazing.

Patrick Which was great.

Felice So how do you remember all the details of what happened? Did you take notes at the time?

Patrick I did. I wrote a diary. It's the only time in my life I wrote a diary, so I did. I have these little notebooks I've carefully kept for years, and various partners and children have said, 'Why do you keep them, Dad?' I go, 'You never know.'

Felice True. But you didn't take any photos, you said, because people didn't welcome cameras and there weren't mobile phones then, were there?

Patrick Weren't mobile phones? Barely telephones. I think I asked a few people I knew who travelled, not necessarily in Africa, but had travelled out of Europe, in the United States and Australia, who said, I had a few friends who said to me, 'If you want to get close to people, don't take photographs.' I took that on board and I'm really, really glad that I did, because time and time again people said to me, 'I'm really glad you haven't got a camera.' In some parts of particularly Central Africa, the taking of a photograph was, you know, a terrible thing to do. It had an impact on the spirits and stuff like that. And I love taking photographs, but I'm quite respectful of taking photographs of people because I feel like actually, that's not my decision. So it was a good decision. The publishers were really not happy about it because they were looking forward to lots of lovely pictures in the book, but heigh ho. We don't have pictures, we just have maps.

Felice And did you plan your route beforehand or did you just go wherever it took you?

Patrick I looked at the map and certainly I was imagining going down to at least Uganda. The Kenya-Tanzanian border wasn't open in those days because there was tension. The advice was pretty clear that you wouldn't get across it, although there are a couple of borders I was told that about. I did get across, so I could have tried it. I wasn't sure what I was going to do after Uganda, but I was planning to go to Swaziland. But in the end, that didn't happen, which I think was actually great; I think it was a really good decision.

So yes, I didn't really have a plan. I had a map and it didn't have many roads on it. So, for example, getting from Khartoum to Uganda, there was one relatively straight way, which is down to Juba and then across to Uganda. And there was only really one way of doing that. But I could have gone through Ethiopia, but there was a civil war there, Somalia, there were a lot of refugees, Ethiopian refugees in Sudan. As the trip went on, I was prepared to take more risks. But in the early stage, I think I was a little bit more cautious.

Peter That's understandable. You find your feet as you went along, so to speak.

Patrick Yes, exactly. That's a good description. Yes, that's exactly how it is.

Peter So then into Uganda, which is a country I spent some time in,

Patrick I did Egypt first, so I sort of jumped there. So can I bring us back to Egypt? I loved Egypt. Egypt is fantastic. I stayed in hostels in Egypt. I travelled with this really lovely Dutch guy. He'd never been there ever. And he was just had a month off work and was doing Egypt, really. So we travelled together and we used the trains, occasional buses, didn't hitchhike in Egypt, but loved it.

I was big into history as a kid, so I was very excited about the pyramids, but I wasn't up for paying for anything, so I had to blag my way into the tombs and into the Pyramid of Giza and all of that. But it wasn't that difficult, and people were very up for letting me blag my way in. I really like the Egyptians. I've been back there once and I did really like the Egyptians. I thought they were warm, quite funny.

The food was amazing. I'm a vegetarian and the food was absolutely fantastic. It was all beans and rice and chickpeas and vegetables and pretty much a vegetarian diet, which is what I was used to. So I was really happy with the food there, and I just enjoyed the people and was there for somewhere between three and four weeks, I think, until I got down to Aswan and then got the ferry, which is just an amazing. The ferry was brilliant.

Unusual Cuisine

Felice You're a vegetarian, as you just said, but in one place you went, you ended up having to eat a sheep's eye.

Patrick I did.

Felice That sounds absolutely disgusting.

Patrick It was pretty hideous.

Peter So beyond Khartoum, you got a train down to Khartoum for a couple of days.

Patrick From there onwards it was hitching a ride on the lorry. It's a bumpy, rutted road that you're sitting very high up. You're hanging on to dear life for hours and days on end and with a load of other people. It's just full of people at the top. We got to this little village. It was a Dinka village. So we're now in what is now South Sudan. It wasn't South Sudan then, but it's now in South Sudan. And the Dinka are the biggest indigenous people. I think tribe is not the right word. There are people and they're very tall and they're very proud, and they're not that used to Westerners.

We got to this little village where the truck driver, who used to do the journey back and forward every week, one week down, one week up. So he was used to stopping there for lunch, and they would have a lunch prepared and he would pay them for that. And we would all pay a little bit, so it was part of their economy. It was feeding people on the lorries. So anyway, they were very interested in me and they asked me what I was doing.

I explained I was travelling and the lorry driver translated, which was great, and I had to draw a little map of what I, where I was going on the, on the dirt and all of that, and it was great. And then the lorry driver said, 'They want to give you a special offering or special gift.' And I have a horrible feeling this is not going to be good. Sure enough, it wasn't, but I managed to do it. It's one of the few times in my life I've ate well since as an adult, I've ate meat and it was extremely difficult. I had to really almost not look at it. I managed to get it. I mean, it's a sheep farm sheep for a while. So. I kind of know about sheep now. So it was only about a centimetre and a half, but it was pretty grim. I don't know how I managed to get it down, but I don't know how I didn't vomit it back up. I really don't know how.

Peter Yes, that really wouldn't have gone down very well if you'd vomit it back up, would it?

Patrick I think it would have been as seen as disrespectful. Yes, they were very pleased that I ate it. There was no laughing. And I don't think it was a test. I think it was just a genuine offering of something that to them was perhaps of value. I never really got to the bottom of it, but it felt like that, and it was good that it happened early on in the trip, because I think as things go, as the trip went on and I spent a lot of time staying with and eating with people along the way who lived there, I learned at an early stage that it's really important to be respectful for whatever you're offered.

Peter Yes, sure.

Patrick Even if it's a sheep. Actually, I didn't have to eat a sheep's eye again, so that was good.

Felice What were some of the worst things that happened apart from eating the sheep's eye? I know you had malaria twice, didn't you?

Patrick I had malaria a couple of times. The first time I just got to Nairobi in Kenya, and I just came down. I had a headache and a fever, and I checked in to a hostel that morning and staggered down from the room, and I was in a shared room with four other people, and I staggered down to the guy running it, and I said, 'These are the symptoms I've got.' And he said, 'You've probably got malaria. There's a malaria clinic at the hospital. I can get you a taxi, but because of the traffic, it's going to take you a long time. It's probably quicker for you to walk.'

So I walked to the hospital and it was pretty hot. But I managed to get there and the hospital was, I think, one of the most modern hospitals I'd ever been to at that point. It was actually a really good hospital, and I waited in the queue for triage and they said, 'Yes, off you go to the malaria clinic.' And they took me in straight away. They had a look at me, and they gave me injections and looked at the pills I had and said, 'Yes, they're probably the best you're going to get,' and sent me back. I just spent, I think, three or four days hanging out.

And when I got back to the hostel, the guy had got me a room on my own with a fan and was just so attentive. He really looked after me well, so that was great. So I had a malaria experience, but it was thankfully pretty mild and I got the injection.

Peter I think if you don't get the injection it's a lot more serious. It's my understanding of malaria. So do you want to tell me about the second time?

Felice Yes, well, I saw the second time it was much worse.

Patrick Much worse.

Felice The mosquitoes got under or into your net?

Patrick Yes. So I was travelling with this guy Rob, who I met initially in Juba in South Sudan, but then he went off somewhere and I met him again in Lamu in Kenya, which is...I don't know if you've been to Lamu?

Felice I've been to Kenya, but not Lamu.

Patrick If you can ever get to Lamu, it's an amazing place. I recently told the First Minister of Wales, who's a friend and lives near us, that before she was First Minister, she said, 'I'm going to see my brother.' I said, 'Go to Lamu.' And she did. She came back and said, 'Oh my God, it's the most...' So it's really I've got up to date information. It's still an amazing place.

Felice I love Kenya. I've been to a lot of the other places you described in Kenya, but not Lamu. I went to Mombasa and Nairobi.

Patrick Swahili cultures in Mombasa; I was very taken with the Swahili culture. So anyway, back on the thing. So we were then meeting this guy, Rob, who travelled from Lamu. In a way, the heart of the journey for me was in what's now DRC was then Zaire, and about halfway through that trip we got to Kisangani, which is where the river you get coming from the east is where you hit the river, the Congo River.

Hundreds of Mosquitos

Patrick I don't know if you've been there? We'd been warned off going on the ferry because there was apparently a lot of thieving, because we met a guy who was from the American Peace Corps who actually helped me out with a medical issue, and he said, don't use it. So we managed to hitch a ride with this kind of crazy, quite alcoholic Israeli boat captain. It was great. It was a tug with three barges, and he was going empty back to Kinshasa to bring stuff up to Kisangani. That's what he did. He said, 'Sure, I can drop you off where you're going to.' He was very nice, and he bought us whisky to drink and all that sort of thing. On the second night, well, second afternoon, we're out on the river. He hits the sandbank and they have to carry a pilot because the sandbanks shift around all the time. So he hits a sandbank. No problem. We'll reverse off or do what we do. Couldn't get off the sandbank, so we're stuck on a sandbank at night.

I had a mosquito net. We both, Rob and I, had nets. We hung them up. We were basically in a little cabin that was part of one of the barges. It was normally full of goods and we'd hung our nets up. We went off to sleep. I woke up in the middle of the night and there were thousands, thousands, probably more than thousands of mosquitoes in this fairly tiny space. They'd broken my net. They hadn't broken Rob's net, but they'd broken my net, which I think in hindsight, wasn't the best quality mosquito net, but had worked hitherto and I was just completely covered in bites, head to toe, everywhere. Malaria normally takes about two to three weeks, as as I understand it.

So the bites went down. It was pretty pretty awful for a couple of days. But when you're traveling, you just got to get on with it. So the bites receded and I carried on travelling, and about three weeks to the day later, I was by now in Central African Republic travelling on my own, and I just collapsed by the side of the road. I woke up with a bit of a headache. I thought, 'Hmm, I wonder why that is? Because I wasn't drinking alcohol. I wasn't doing anything really like that, only very occasionally. So I woke up with a world class hangover really, and just collapsed by the side of the road at some point. I have no idea how long.

I heard a car. There was talking. I remember being dragged into the car. I remember putting my arm out and trying to feel my bag, so I must have had some kind of compos mentis, but that's about it. We got to the town of Bois, which is in the northwest, quite near to the Cameroon border. My visa was about to run out the next day and in Zaire in the car, and they threw me out of the car or, you know, politely and said, 'Go and find somewhere to stay.' I think they were terrified that I would die on their watch, which I think is fair enough.

So I staggered around for a while, in a bit of a daze and going up to houses, and people would just slam the doors and were terrified. Eventually I walked up to this bigger house. This man came out and he took one look at me and said, you're very ill. Come and stay with me. His name was Michael. He turned out he was the country rep for Unicef in Central Africa Republic, which is probably a fairly tough job, I would imagine, particularly now. I think they're still out there. I don't know about him, but anyway, so he took me in and the next day he took me down to the pharmacy. He took me down three days in a row for three different three injections a day, one a day, two a day, three, because the doctor who I saw there said, 'You know, this is quite serious. It's not serious because it's you. It's serious because anyone who gets it in this part of the world, it's serious.'

So I don't really remember it. I can remember feeling injections, but I don't really have any imagery of it because I was just very, very out of it and mostly having hallucinations and nightmares and things like that. So I had about four days, of which on each day I was taken for an injection, and other than that, I just slept and didn't really eat much. On the fifth day or the fourth day, maybe, Michael took one look at me and says, 'You have to eat.' I think I must have really shrivelled up, and I was a fairly skinny person then anyway.

They gave me a bath. They they filled a cauldron. It was quite sweet, actually. They filled the cauldron outside the house and put a fire under it and warmed up the water. Then his wife came out with a big piece of cloth, which was basically a towel. The whole family, literally in unison, turned around with their back to me so I could undress and go into the service. Then when they heard me splashing, they all turned round and the children started talking to me and it was so moving. I stayed with them a week.

Peter I think it saved your life.

Patrick I think there's a reasonable chance of that, yes. I think there was a reasonable chance, but you don't know for sure, do you? I think I could have stayed by the side of the road for a long time, days, and that might have been that. So yes, I was very, very, very lucky.

An Inch-Long Parasite

Felice Then you had something in your foot at one stage.

Patrick Yes, another horrific one.

Felice An inch-long parasite in your foot?

Patrick Yes, so this was in the first part. So I have to talk about Zaire to really get that story. So Zaire was a really special country for me, and I have a really deep, strong feelings about it. I think more than anywhere, I think partly because I think in some ways it had enormous impact on my life later on. But anyway, I was travelling with this guy, Rob. His French was better than me, which was great. I scraped to pass the 'O' level for French, so it wasn't my strongest suit, but it got better.

We we both spent too much money on the first half of the trip, so we were a bit meager. We decided we were just going to walk and hitchhike and that was it. And we did. When we got down, we then went up the Virunga mountains, which was just on the eastern border of Uganda, further down. We hitchhiked from Uganda, across into Zaire, down to Goma. Then we hitchhiked up there, climbed the big volcano, which was fantastic, and went further up. Then we cut down and into the rainforest proper. And the rainforest is a beautiful place to walk because it's flat and it's shaded from the trees, massive tall trees either side of a pretty narrow one-lane dirt track.

I don't know if there's a tarmac road now. There wasn't any tarmac to be seen when I was there and and lots of people walked on the road. It was that was the road was probably more people travelled on foot on the road than they did in vehicles. And you'd get the odd three or four lorries a day, sort of thing. There was no bus network or anything like that. Anyway, on a couple of occasions, but one in particular, we saw some indigenous people who we used to call pygmies and they said, 'Come, come, come.' So we walked into the forest with them, which I was a bit cautious about: walking into the forest, because would you ever get out again? I mean, find your way out. Anyway, they took us to a little encampment or village, I'm not quite sure what you'd call it, of huts. They sat us down and we were presented with something to drink, which I have no idea what it was. But it was palatable. Then they took us on a little hunting trip. I think they just wanted to show us stuff. They were really interested in us and we were really interested in them.

All the communication was done with hand signals and drawing things in the dirt. And it was that kind of communication which I suspect you might be familiar with. It was really beautiful. Then eventually the sun was starting to go down, and the sun when it goes down there, it goes down very quickly. So one of them said, 'Come on, come, we've got to take you back to the road.' So we went back to the road and as usual, there's always rain during the day. At one point I was wearing a pair of sandals and my foot went right into the mud. In about a day later, I had this enormous pain in the sole of my foot. I said, 'Rob, you've got to look at what's going on here.' He looked. He said, 'Well, there's something in there.' I had no idea what it was. It was a stone or whatever; I didn't really think it's a parasite. I sort of hobbled along and we met these guys. You always met people walking on the road.  We explained the situation and they said, 'There's an American doctor about a day away.' So one of them very sweetly went and got me a stick to walk with.

So I hobbled with a stick, sort of trying not to use the foot that, but obviously having to sometime to keep my balance. And eventually we got to this little village, and it was an American Peace Corps medic who was out doing I remember what he was doing. He was doing some assessments or something. I think he might have been doing inoculations.  He took one look at it and said, 'Right, I'm not a proper doctor. I've never done this before, I haven't got any anaesthetic. But I do have a bottle of whisky. Do would you mind if I'm going to have to cut it out with a knife?'

I'm going. 'Yes, yes.' So I had a couple of drams of whisky. Rob held me down and he cut it out. He cut it out really quickly. It was like a one action cut. It was excruciatingly painful, despite the whisky. Then literally, when I'd stopped howling, he said, 'Right, we're all going to have a whisky now.' So we all had a whisky and that was it. He stayed the night, and he bandaged it up and wrapped it up, and said, 'You'll be fine,' and I was. It was about it's probably about an inch long.

Felice That's that's horrible.

Peter That's quite large.

Patrick It is. He showed me it. I was like, 'Oh, I don't really want to see it.'

Felice But once you got rid of it, you had no more problems from it. No infection?

Patrick No, no, he gave me a tiny bit of cream to rub on it. He was brilliant. I'd never heard of the Peace Corps until then. I've always been a bit of a fan. If I've ever met a Peace Corps, I always thank them and they say, 'Why are you thanking me?'  I'd tell them the story.

Behind Bars

Felice I'm not surprised. Oh, and going back to another thing that happened to you, which is sort of linked to the malaria. The malaria tablets ended up with you going to prison.

Patrick Yes. So I made it up from Central African Republic eventually to Cameroon, Nigeria. I travelled pretty quickly through those. I was still under par. I'd got through the worst of the era.  I was on my own and, to be honest, my mood was probably quite low at that point. I got to Niger and I thought, 'Oh great, I can go to Niger, get through this quickly, get up to Algeria,' where I had a feeling Algeria would be more sort of, I don't know, a sort of more relaxing place, which it was.

I got to Tunisia, got to the town of Zandi, had absolutely no local currency. So there's a big market square, little stalls all the way around, buses and lorries in the middle. Standard thing. I saw a money changer. So I went up there, pulled out my bag that had the little bags underneath the shirt that had the passport, the money. So I'd have some money there and the rest around the belt, so that if people saw money, they wouldn't see all of it. I had my malaria pills in there because I didn't want to lose them either. And I pulled the thing out and foolishly, the pills all came out and some of them tumbled onto the ground. This guy just went, 'Drugs! Drugs!' in French really loudly.

This crowd of people, just men, surged around me, started shouting at me, and then eventually hitting me. It was really scary. I'm crying by now. Then I hear a siren, which on the one hand felt like a good thing because they were going to rescue me and see sense. But on the other hand, I was terrified of that. Sure enough, they threw me in the back of the van. They took me only ten minutes to the local police station, which was basically a prison, and took me up in front of one of the officers there who and I thought, 'I'm just going to play it straight, explain what's happening.'

My French was pretty good by now, and the police generally spoke pretty good French. So I spoke in French and I said, 'Here are the pills. This is what's happened. It's a terrible mistake. I'm sure it'll be fine.' He took one look at them and went, 'Drugs,' as well. So that wasn't what I was expecting. I tried to reason with him, but he just said no. I said, 'Well, what will you do?' He says, 'I have to call the inspector.' So while I'm in the room, he calls the inspector; I have no idea where the inspector is, and he's talking in the local language, so I can't really understand.

But it goes on for half an hour and eventually he says, 'Right,' and these two guys take me away and throw me in a cell. And I sat there. So it was late afternoon. By now, I sat there, just utter despair, really. Trying not to catastrophise too much, but it was really, really scary. And they bought me some food, but it was literally it was just a room with a bucket which already had some faeces in it, so it was pretty grim. It's sort of bizarre how you adapt to it, actually. But anyway, I didn't really sleep. I had a very fitful night. It was very uncomfortable. But also, I didn't have my mosquito net, and they were mozzies in the room. So I was a bit scared about that. I just had lots of horrible nightmares.

The next morning they came and bought a cup of sugary tea, which was a blessing. I said to the young officer who came, 'What's going to happen?' He said, 'The inspector will come.' I said, 'When is the inspector coming?' 'He will come,' is what they all said. So late morning, I could hear this very heated conversation going on in part French, part a form of Arabic, I think. I don't really remember, actually. It was all a bit of a blur, but I heard this conversation going on and I guessed correctly that the inspector had arrived, so I felt quite uplifted.

Sure enough, about half an hour later they came and got me and it was all smiles. 'I know it's a terrible mistake.' And you could see these officers who I'd seen yesterday were a bit chastened obviously, with a 'What on earth are you doing, you idiots? You know, this could be an international incident,' sort of thing. I was really lucky. I stank to high hell. I was just so grateful to get out and my thought was, 'It was a really bad night.' I don't think I've had a worse night in my life. It was very, very scary and I felt very alone. It's not like you can pick up the phone to the Consulate; there clearly wasn't an option. I don't think a lawyer had ever been in the place. It was a police state. Now, of course, there was a coup while I was writing the book. Actually, there was another coup in there, and the French all got kicked out, and the Russians are in there. It's not a happy country.

Peter It's always been a very volatile part of the world.

Patrick A very volatile part of the world.

How the Book got its Title

Peter So tell us about your experience, which finally led to the title of your book, which is Shots Across the Water: Tales of a Journey Through Africa. Explain to us what that was all about.

Patrick So this guy Rob, I travelled with, and I were travelling. We got to the end of Zaire, we got to the border with Central African Republic. Now the context is quite important. Central African Republic, insofar as Central African Republic had been under the Emperor Bokassa, you remember him, and that eventually the French, who were the colonial power and were still quite involved and who were still quite involved in that part of Africa, had flown in the parachuters and got him out. We knew that. I'm not sure we'd have gone otherwise. I'm not sure quite how we'd have travelled, but we'd have found a way around.

So we thought, 'It's going to be fine, yes.' So we got to the border, which is a river border, and we were expecting a town and it was just a collection of huts and tents. So it was really just a border outpost and one or two little huts. I guess people lived in and we thought, 'We're fine, we're in date on the visas, the passport. We've got all the right stamps and everything.' So we got there. We'd got to have an exit stamp in order to get an entry stamp in the next place. So we did all that. That was fine. Then we walked down to the riverside where the customs post was. Next to the customs post were a bunch of rocks, which are like the wooden hollowed out tree canoes that was clearly the only available transport across the Ubangi River, which was not as wide as the Congo, but it was still pretty wide.

So we took all that in. But we thought, 'This is fine.' We have to have a currency declaration form from a bank where you've changed your money. So we had that. We'd done that in Goma at the beginning and we got our forms out, and the official sort of started looking glum and says, 'Well, these aren't okay, you haven't spent enough.' And we're going, 'What do you mean we haven't spent enough?' 'You haven't spent enough money in our country. We need the money.' And we said, 'Well, we've travelled very light. We're backpackers. You can see we do not have much equipment.'

Nut he wasn't having it. And he said, 'No, you need to pay more. You cannot leave the country without paying more'. And we're we're going, 'Well, we haven't really got very much.' He gave us a number and it was pretty much everything the two of us had. And we went, 'Well, there's a bribe going on here. This is a bribe.' But we couldn't say that. So we said, 'Well, this is very difficult. We can't do this.' He said, 'Right, wait here,' which is his mistake. 'I have to go back and talk to the immigration.' So he went back so many yards back to the immigration. Rob, to his credit, went, 'Let's just get in this canoe.' We literally just ran down. We had our passports. We had our exit stamps. We just ran down and got in the canoe and Rob said, 'Let's go.' So we did.

One guy, just one guy in charge. There wasn't anyone else there. There weren't any guns in sight. There were up at the immigration. There were men with guns. But down at the customs there weren't, interestingly. So you sometimes you make....I've been in business for forty years...you have to make very, very quick judgment calls about people, about situations, about the context. So he made that decision and I just went with him. There was no, 'Shall we discuss this?' There wasn't any time.

So we literally ran the few yards. It was the guy in the boat. I was surprised at the time, but didn't question it, that the guy was happy to row off with us. But it all happened so fast that there's no time to process it. So anyway, we got the got the crew. Off he went. He's probably about halfway across the river, so it's a fair way. We could suddenly see all this activity going on that side and shouts and waving and then a shot was fired, and it was probably about three foot off the back of the pirogue. The guy rowing, he really picked up the pace and there were a few more bullets, but they hit the water and you could tell by the way we were getting further away from the point, the point of impact on the water, so to speak.

We figured out we're probably okay. This all happened very quickly and in no time at all, he's beached it onto the shores on the bank side, Bangui, the capital of C.A.R. This French paratrooper with again, an enormous gun come down. He's feels about nine foot tall to me, this paratrooper, he's probably not. But he was very tall and very bronzed and chiselled. And he came down and he had a grin on his face and we were like, 'We just got shot at.' And he went, 'No, don't worry. It happens all the time.' I said, 'What do you mean?' He said, 'They're trying to get money out of you, and they're trying to scare you to turn around and go back so they can get the money out of you. Honestly it's a regular occurrence, don't worry about it.' We said, 'Well, what about the guy?' He said, 'Don't worry, it's fine. Don't worry about it. He'll be fine.' So that was that.

Felice Amazing.

Patrick So I thought, when I titled the book, I thought I'd tell the first part the story. So when the first shot fired and then wait for halfway through the book before people got the rest of it.

Felice How long was your journey altogether?

Patrick So I left, I think, the week after Christmas. So like the first week in January and I actually arrived in France on my birthday, which is October 1st, and by the time I got home, I worked for two weeks and they got me pretty much a week to get home. So it was probably about the third week of October that I got home, so it was about ten months altogether.

Felice What's your advice for other people who might want to do something like you've done, something very adventurous and exciting?

Patrick Well, I'd encourage you to do something adventurous, exciting. I'm not convinced.I'd encourage you to do it in the most of the countries I travelled in. But if you if you look at the government's Foreign Office advice, it's pretty much red all the way through the Sahel, which, as you know, is the area Sudan, parts of Congo, Chad, Central African Republic. The Central African Republic is run by what we used to call the Wagner Group and a lot of...particularly eastern Congo, Goma, the Virungas, Ituri, all that area is. I'm sure people do travel in it. But if any of my three children suggested they were going there, I'd do everything in my power, which is a parent of older children, isn't very much, to stop them going. It's a very difficult journey. But there are plenty of places you can do adventurous stuff, and I think I'm a bit old to travel that way. Since I've stopped working, I've travelled a lot more, but we travel in a bit more luxuriously.

Peter Well, Patrick, thank you very much indeed for talking to us. It's a remarkable story, a remarkable book. Where can we get the book?

Patrick You can get it on Amazon. Of course you can get it directly from Bradt on their website; that's Bradt Guides. And if you go to Bradt Guides and look up Journey Books, which is their imprint, you can get a copy of the book from them. Or you can buy it from Amazon. There's a Kindle version and obviously there's the paperback version.

Felice Can you give us a title again?

Patrick The title is Shots Across the Water: Tales of a Journey Through Africa, and my name is Patrick Nash.

Felice Do you have a website?

Patrick I do, yes, it's Patrick Nash.co.uk - Thank you. You can also get information about my first book called Creating Social Enterprise: My Story and What I Learned, which is also available on Amazon or where you buy your books.

Felice Well, thank you very much for talking to us today. It's been fascinating.

Patrick Thank you. I'm really I really appreciate you inviting me to come on your podcast. Thank you so much.

Peter We wish you the best of luck with all your future travels, wherever they may be.

Felice That's all for now. If you've enjoyed the show, please share this episode with at least one other person! Do also subscribe on Spotify, i-Tunes or any of the many podcast providers – where you can give us a rating. You can also find us on Facebook and Instagram. We'd love you to sign up for our regular emails. By the way, we're no 7 in the Top 20 Midlife Travel Podcasts.

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