Whyteleafe, Surrey UK to Cape Town

Well, we were pretty well immersed in musical interludes in Khartoum, resulting in daughter Caroline, and Beau, deciding to live and work there.
Here's a selection of Youtubes. Including a clip I uncovered featuring the two of them.

'Meroe' sung by Rasha Sheikh Eldin. Featuring the pyramids at Meroe.

Friday afternoon prayers at the Hamed el Nil mosque in Omdurman (across the river from Khartoum).

Some Sudanese hip hop at Papa Costa restaurant in Khartoum, where Beau and Huila played to a full house.

There's an old motorbike tradition called the Dragon Rally. Held each year, middle weekend of February, on the slopes of Snowdon in North Wales.
You go with the thickest riding jacket you can find and a cheap sleeping bag - on account of not being able to afford an expensive one back in those days.
1967 that is.

There's an amazing variety of music to hear in Ethiopia - so many colourful styles. All, as far as I can see, unique. And not widely known outside the country.
We were lucky enough to be in Addis Ababa when the Goethe Institute arranged a big open-air concert to celebrate a hundred years since the first recordings of Ethiopian music.
There are dozens of great youtubes of popular artists. You may like these few.

Continuing on this musical journey we reach Kenya.
As I've trawled through lots of East African music on my MP3 player, and assembled these clips together from Youtube, they've triggered a huge number of memories of the trip. Especially some of these following tracks.
But before the music we'll start off with this video. It's filmed at Jungle Junction in Nairobi, the overland travellers' popular stopping place and 'Home from Home'.
And it must have been shot shortly after Caroline and Beau had returned to England but before I departed for the west and Uganda.

Three were riding Honda C90s.
And these three, just four weeks later, arrived on their C90s at Bansang Hospital in The Gambia. (Yesterday as I write this).
After an epic ride from London, across the Sahara and halfway down West Africa.
You can read about it here.
And donate here to the project if you wish.
And read Belle's Blog here.
Now back to Bodmin Moor, and the beasts and ghosts.

For the four weeks or so I was in Uganda, the World Cup was on every TV. No one was tuned to music channels. But you could still hear a bit in the urban streets and cafes.
Which reminds me of an incident that shows how Africans always seem to look after each other and everyone else.
(I'm pleased to see there's an Australia-to-Germany trip report on this forum saying the same thing).
This incident happened in the crowded bar of the camp site in Kampala.

I only stayed in one place in Rwanda - Solace Ministries Guest House in Kigali.
I thought I'd only stay 2 days, enough to find a cash machine if one existed, but on the second day I decided that wasn't enough and stayed about a week.
There's something about the place that took hold of me and kept me there. It's a support and refuge centre for those traumatised by the Genocide. So it's set up to be very welcoming and accepting of anyone who arrives.

Have been on a journey to the Arctic Circle. It had been temporarily moved right down to Stoke-on-Trent, and my first destination was Northwich. Which is sufficiently further north to almost qualify as the North Pole. I took clothes for May.....
I put my little Yamaha on display at the Thundersprint Saturday Bike Show, here.

I had always fancied visiting the annual Thundersprint. And as it was on the way to a Horizons Unlimited camping weekend on Loch Ness the following weekend, then this was the year to do it.

Yesterday was the Transit of Venus, earlier today was the Transit of East Surrey.
The Transit of East Surrey occurs every six months.
The Transit of Venus occurs every 110 years or so. In pairs, about 8 years apart.
It's when the planet Venus passes directly between the Earth and the sun, making it visible as a silhouette against the face of the sun.

Most of the music that I heard in the streets and the bars and cafes of Tanzania, I was told, is Congolese in origin.
And some Kenyan as well.
So I'll try to stick to Tanzanian stuff here.

Well, I didn't go to Zanzibar - so here's what I missed:

(Although the skyscraper scenes are Nairobi. For contrast I suppose.....)

Some Tanzanian jazz - the Jamhuri Jazz Band.

After entering Tanzania, I took the long dirt road to Kigoma on Lake Tanganyika.
You can get a train there as well. The Central Line, but not as I know it, (the one where I grew up).

A few events over the past few weeks. Starting with a brilliant Horizons Unlimited get-together in Hampshire.
Small and perfectly formed, about eighteen of us there.

Wide open spaces. Some sun at last.

We were at a Hampshire golf club, but well away from the fairways and greens.

Steve arranged a green-lane ride out for the Saturday morning. Not a high demand for that, just Steve and me.

It's a well-established bit of advice. The best exercise to minimise any after-effects of prostate treatment - radiotherapy or surgery - is walking.
So I do quite a bit now.
Which takes up a lot of time, so other things have to take second place.
A while ago I happened upon a map of local footpaths and bridleways and made an interesting discovery.
I can walk all the way from home to one of the best pubs around almost entirely on footpaths, and almost in a straight line. Making it a much shorter distance than going by road.

The final part of the test was to park the 40-tonner as close to the pedestrian as possible without touching him. Or without him even realising I was there in the huge articulated lorry.
This test checks that you're able to use the front-view mirror to see if anyone is loitering on the crossing in the blind-spot right in front of the bumper, and to manouvre right up close. Without this mirror the pedestrian is completely hidden from the driver's view - that is - my view. So I have to show I can use it properly and keep out-of-sight pedestrians safe.

- to the past week.
It's not far from Manchester to a huge jolly tourist attraction in the Pennines.
Just across the border in West Yorkshire.
No passport or photo ID required.
So I'm now in a bustling real-life filmset full of eager visitors.
Brought about by a simple little TV programme that just happened to wander along aimlessly, ambling around for nearly forty years, with an anarchic cast of bus pass holders who knew how to live life properly!
And for good measure I journeyed here on my own bus pass. So there!

Some photos -

Back in the 1960s, having left school and started out in the world, one of the first discoveries that I made was about Art, and going to college for it.
I went to a modern College of Art and Technology in East London. These were fashionable in those days and could eventually lead to a degree in Engineering or Art, if you'd otherwise opted out of 'A' levels as I had. The 'art' at these colleges was slanted very much towards the commercial end of the subject, art for design, advertising, theatre and so on.

When the Student is ready, the Teacher will appear.
One of the most fundamental proverbs of human existence.
I first saw this in a book by the 'notorious' Indian guru, Osho. (Notorious because he died rich and famous, having gained a place in the Guinness Book of Records for owning the greatest number of Rolls Royce cars of anyone living).

My visit to Ireland is a four-handed affair.
The first was the family history bit in County Mayo, over the past few days.
Much work on this has already been done over many years by relatives, which led me to the Culnacleha Crossroads.
Here

One hundred years ago this week, an Irish American, Carl Stearns Clancy, set off from Philadelphia with his riding companion Walter Storey, on a pair of 4-cylinder Henderson motorcycles, with a map that would guide them right round the world.
Clancy's friend pulled out in Paris, but Clancy himself completed the journey and is now considered to be the first motorcyclist to ever ride around the world.

It seems a little incongruous to be taking wine with the President of Ireland. Surely it should be Guinness?
He is a poet and writer after all.

But the wine was good, and the good President got the event off to an excellent Irish start in the small town of Athy.

The last time I was here in Annascaul, I didn't quite find the house where Tom Crean was born. I found what I thought was the location, but the track was impassable with churned-up mud. My single pair of shoes had to last me the rest of the visit and RyanAir back to Gatwick.
Substantial wellington boots were needed.
On this visit I still had no boots, but Mike was with me.
He's been here before, and navigated us to the same spot that I closed in on last year.
The path was OK and we found the house.