I suppose it struck us late on the evening of Friday 18 March. Mark Jones and I were right at the back of the AXA bus to Mzuzu, and possibly to Karonga. We were sharing the back seat with three road bikes wrapped in bulky cardboard. Hans Lang was in the next row in front. One of the many standing passengers for our twelve-hour trip was carefully positioned between Mark’s legs. We were all several metres behind what seemed to be a rigid rear axle, so every bump in the road was amplified considerably. Mark’s seat kept coming adrift and mine seemed to have no padding. The intermittent internal fluorescent lighting made us look like corpses. The driver was overtaking everything in sight, and we didn’t dare look at the road.
‘Whose idea was this?’, I grunted to Mark as we hit another takeoff ramp in preparation for the next bend. ‘Yours’, he replied tersely, and then his head slammed yet again into the nearest bike box...
Before it all went wrong. Waiting in the rain for our luxury coach at the AXA bus depot at Chichiri,
Blantyre, on Friday afternoon. It was an hour late, but that wasn’t the worst bit.