GO BOOK:The first big journey that our columnist Manchán Magantook was a trip from England to Kenya, as he describes in his new book
I WOKE SUDDENLY with a crick in my neck. I was in the back of a truck - an old troop transporter - on my way to Africa, in late 1990. There were 18 people crammed around me, all of them jumbled together trying to sleep. The girl on whose shoulder I had been resting sensed my fright and opened her eyes, looking around her blearily. "You okay?" she muttered. "Fine," I managed.
We were going to Africa. Going to spend six months driving across the continent - through the Sahara, through west Africa and right across the centre to Kenya. There was no real reason for the trip: we were going because we needed to be somewhere, we needed to get away.
I had only met the others that afternoon and I knew little about them. But we all had that vague lost expression - the shifty, hollow look you see in the faces of army recruits staring out from the back of a wagon-roof truck.
We were a bit like that, life's also-rans. If there was a war on we'd probably be over there instead. As it was, our generation was robbed of that opportunity. We had no easy avenue to glory or adventure. We had to make our own.
It was freezing cold - mid- November. It never occurred to me that to reach Africa in winter I'd have to cross sub- zero stretches of Europe.
I suppose I hadn't thought about it all that much. I had been diligently stacking shelves in a hypermarket in Germany when suddenly I realised I had £1,000 saved and no idea what to do with it. I was barely 20 years of age. My dad had just died a few months before and I felt I had to get away - things couldn't be so bad anywhere else.
When the group first met at 4pm that afternoon in Ramsgate, in the south of England, we had all been too nervous to talk very much. This worried me more than any other fear my family or friends had tried to instil in me about the trip.
We were heading into the complete unknown; all that was certain was that we would be tested to the limit - no one makes it through the heart of Africa without experiencing real difficulty. I knew that much. And so I felt it would probably be good if we got to know each other's names soon at least. But I kept this to myself. I was hoping to attract as little attention as possible.
I could already feel the dynamics of the group asserting themselves. The jockeying for position in the pack began before we had even uttered a word.Just the way we were eyeing each other up, smiling at some, ignoring others, sniffing around like animals. We were in danger of falling back on our basest instincts, retreating to the laws of the pack, and in any such hierarchy I was bound to find myself near the bottom. I had always been an outsider. I did things in my own way and in my own time. In a more sophisticated community it might have made me a leader, but here I sensed I was as likely to end up the runt. My plan was to keep my head as low as possible for as long as possible.
A more hopeful voice inside me tried to explain away their frigidity as mere shyness. We were all simply overwhelmed by what lay ahead and in the morning everything would look brighter. Their exuberance and bonhomie would shine through. These defeated cast-offs of the modern world would expand into wise, compassionate human beings who would take me under their wing and teach me all I needed to know about the world. Unfortunately, all the evidence so far was stacked against it. The only real conversation we had had was over tea on the ferry to northern France. One of the nurses had mentioned something about disease and everyone had suddenly perked up, pitching in their own gruesome details about killer illnesses we were likely to encounter - malaria, river blindness, dengue fever, bilharzia. They competed with each other on the goriness of ailments and the comprehensiveness of the first-aid kits they had brought to combat them: who had the best antihistamines, antibiotics, syringes, suppositories and IV drips. All I had was a box of paracetamol and some malaria tablets.
One of the group, a locksmith whose lips were crusty with chap, started telling stories about the rusty scalpels they used in African hospitals and how people routinely had their kidneys ripped out in hotel rooms after being slipped a laced drink in the bar. Between each sentence he'd run his tongue around his lips in a bid to keep them moist, to stop the scales from falling off. I wondered why he didn't use lip balm - unmanly, I supposed.
Eventually, their pessimism got the better of me and I couldn't help myself blurting out: "Look . . . Sorry, excuse me . . ." They all looked over, but I didn't go on. I was afraid my voice would let me down. A quiver had entered it and I feared I might actually end up in tears. I inhaled deeply and, after a moment, pasted a nonchalant smile across my face and continued. "Yeah, look, we've just left it all behind, right?" I said, trying to sound jocular. "We don't know what's ahead, but it's got to be more than dirty needles, yeah?"
They didn't say anything, just stared. "It's just good to be prepared," one of the nurses said testily. They all agreed and nodded heartily. I couldn't think of anything clever to say so got up and walked away. I had alienated the whole group in one go, everyone I would be spending the next half-year with. I bolted to the sanctuary of the lavatory and berated myself eye to eye in the stainless-steel mirror. The place smelled of vomit and felt strangely reassuring. What had I let myself in for?
We drove on through the night, and in the morning our leader, Suzi, came around from the cab and told us she had 10 army-issue tents between the 19 of us. We were to divide them up, choosing our partners with great care, because we would be sleeping with that person for the next six months. A sort of panic took hold of us on hearing this. We eyed each other suspiciously, trying to work out who among us might be the most insufferable. It was as if she had told us that someone on board was a psychopath and we had to find out who was least likely to murder us in our sleep, or molest us, or poison us. Who could we possibly manage to share our lives with for half a year without ending up hating?
• This is an edited extract fromTruck Fever: A Journey Through Africa , published by Brandon, €14.99