The utter nothingness, the battle between mind and matter as aching limbs and mortal bodies began to increasingly tire amid the endless plodding of weary feet. And then the ceaseless kilometer upon kilometer of tarmac as the A1cut a steady course into the hazy distance.
Three days of determined walking had begun to take their toll as Neo Nkele, Sharon Munyoro, Khumoyame Gaobolelelwe and Acirfa Mothoosile arrived in Topisi on the fourth day of the Lavender Walk.
“Now I’m just walking wounded…about 2kms left,” Gaobolelelwe wrote of the pain and anguish in one of her several accounts of the journey. At this point she had plodded 10km with blisters on her feet.
“Walking into Topisi was a highly emotional event,” wrote Munyoro. “For the first time on this trip people came and met us on the A1 and went back with us to the village singing the whole way. It made the swollen feet so worth it.”
Her ankles historically dodgy, Munyoro was walking with exceeding difficulty now. Nkele, walking stick now heavily in use, was likewise suffering from the sheer exertion of trudging the long distances, feet now swelling badly, blisters forming. Of the four, Mothoosile seemed to be taking the sheer, endless distances better.
“By this time Sharon’s ankles have given up, tears streaming down her face,” says Gaobolelelwe. “They welcomed us, singing every single song they knew. It was hugely emotional.”
There were many hugs at the A1 from the residents of Topisi and this seemed to give Nkele renewed energy, and she livened up, the pain and ordeal momentarily forgotten.
“Francistown to Gaborone is some 456 kilometres but we ended up walking a total of about 592 kilometres,” says Nkele.
For several of the villages, the kgotla was placed in the centre, forcing the four walkers to troll an extra 10 km to go for the cancer presentation.
The three women recall vividly that for the most part, accommodation on this walk was what Gaobolelelwe drily refers to as “touch and go”. Both Nkele and Munyoro are asthmatic. Neither brought an inhaler, ‘a death wish tendency’, Gaobolelelwe says tongue in cheek. The two asthmatic women had difficulty in breathing.
At Topisi, they were accommodated in a newly built VDC house that had just been plastered, a fine film of dust swirling from the floor as they walked on it. The house had no running water. “Later I had ticks on my body because of some of the places we slept,” Nkele recalls.
There was a bitter-sweet departure as three of the women from Topisi walked with the four as they set off from village, accompanying them for a 10 km stretch along the A1. The four walkers steeled their weary, rebelling bodies to face the walk to Palapye. At this point, Gaobolelewe insisted on rubbing Munyoro’s aching limbs with Deep Heat and met stiff resistance.
“Thing is you could see from her face that she was in pain and walking with great difficulty,” Gaobolelelwe recalls. “But she would not have it.”
“At that point I didn’t want to stop,” Munyoro chimed in as the two laughed at the memory. “I knew if I stopped and sat, I wouldn’t be able to get up.”
It was the fifth day of walking as they approached Palapye ÔÇô June 27, Acirfa Mothoosile’s birthday. Mothoosile’s first name, Acirfa, is Africa spelt backward. On this day, they walked for 15 hours. Their limbs were on fire. “That’s when we started timing every kilometer we walked because at this point everyone’s in pain,” says Munyoro.
The sun was heading for the horizon as they neared Palapye. As the sun finally sunk below the horizon and darkness closed in they stopped to rest, all four hitting the ground, completely worn out. One of the four complained that they were too tired to even mind, let alone fear the dark.
“One of the policemen said this place is safe, you don’t get troubled by thieves,” recalls Gaobolelelwe. “Then he said, ‘but we do have a problem with snakes’.”
None of the four walkers twitched a muscle. At that point, they were too worn out to be even moved by that comment. In the still of the night, they were past caring, past worry ÔÇô even of snakes. This was around 8pm, Nkele recalls. “That was a classic,” she says laugher in her voice.
Accomodation had been arranged for the four at Cresta Botsalo and Gaobolelelwe wobbled there ahead of the other three, walked dazedly into the reception, the exhaustion causing her to sink like a rag doll into a chair. A sight for sore eyes, she attracted some curious glances. It was close to 11pm.
An amusing interchange between Munyoro and Gaoboloelwe ensues as they vividly recall the pain of walking in Palapye the following morning.
“When you are that tired and walking you just want the ground to be as flat as possible,” she says. You can picture her walking unsteadily, somewhat like one who’s drunk.
“There was this man who passed me as I walking and he laughed at me and I thought ‘that’s so cold: how do you laugh at a person who’s in pain?’”.
She adds: “At this point, things like stones on the ground are painful.”
Munyoro chips in amid peals of laughter: “No stones whatsoever. When I see a stone, I still go round it. That’s how bad it is.”
After five days of walking, the first leg of the journey was done. The four created quite some stir among people in Palapye when they said they had walked from Francistown.
June 28 was a rest day, and Sharon Munyoro’s birthday. “I was telling anyone who asked me what I wanted as a birthday present that I wanted a new pair feet,” she says.
They walked to the shops, feet swollen, walking painfully and attracting some puzzled glances. Imagine a group of people with swollen feet, waddling about with difficulty, pretty much like drunken ducks, and you get the idea.
Shortly after this, they ran out of fuel. They had left Gaborone with just P1,000 after the disappointment of sponsors pulling out. “So it was essentially self-financing for most of the journey,” says Nkele.
The seventh day was the walk to Radisele. They were accompanied by two women police officers from Palapye police “who weren’t very friendly”. Gaobolelelwe limped most of the way to Radisele, the blister on one foot now acute, causing her to put pressure on the other foot. Some 10 km before Radisele, Gaobolelelwe finally had to give up, unable to continue walking without pain.
She narrates an amusing incident that occurred shortly before she gave up. They were walking through the village between a narrow passage when they encountered some people who had slaughtered a cow. This caused a comical moment as both Nkele and Munyoro, who are terrified of cows, fled.
“It was the first time I saw Neo run during the entire journey,” she says a she and Munyoro peal of into laughter, eyes twinkling with the merriment of the memory.
Then it was on to Mahalapye the following day, the walkers making good time and arriving there at 5pm.
“We went to Cresta Sharon as we have dubbed Cresta Mahalapye,” says Gaobolelelwe, both she and Munyoro laughing again. “Thing is it’s the only Cresta hotel without a name.”
It was after Mahalapye that Nkele experienced her breakdown. Her feet were now in bad shape, swollen and blistered. So they had to plaster the one foot that was really suffering, forcing her to walk with a flip-flop on that foot and a sneaker on the other. “It was getting ridiculous,” Gaobolelelwe comments drily.
Every 200 metres, they had to stop and change the plastering. “At this point you are both physically and emotionally worn out and you just want to go home,” says Nkele. “But you think to yourself, ‘I’ve come so far so there’s no point in quitting.”
They were three hours behind schedule heading into Parlaroad (Dinokwe). At Parlaroad, they experienced another hitch: they ran out of food and hunger pangs hit.
“We had this bag of oranges that had gone sour and everyone had up to then been avoiding it,” says Nkele. “You should have seen us eat those oranges as if they were the sweetest thing in the world.”
After Dibete, they were stranded at the Tropic of Capricorn. There the jurisdiction of the police from Mahalapye ends and after three hours the police who came to escort the team were unfriendly. Tempers were flared at this point. Nkele says a spate of yelling ensued as the tired walkers berated the cops.
And so it was on to Artesia, then Pilane, on Saturday, the final day of the very last leg of the walk to Gaborone. At this point, family and friends had joined in and the walkers, haggard and worn, were nevertheless in a buoyant mood as they made for Gaborone’s Main Mall.
“It was an emotional arrival,” says Nkele. “We felt like we had been gone for two years.
Some 50 people had joined the walked at Pilane, but by the time they arrived in the main mall, the crowd had thinned to about 10.
“It shows you how people underestimate just how much it takes to walk a long distance,” adds Nkele. “You think that as you go on your body will adapt. But it doesn’t get any easier.”
Nkele admits with hindsight that although they planned the trip thoroughly enough, there were some things that could have been planned better to make it less of an ordeal for the walkers.
The sponsors’ pull out was a huge letdown. And the support team could have been larger. “A two-man support team is insufficient. When you do this kind of walk, you need people to cook for you, and others to help pump your mattresses when you are too worn out to do it,” she says.
There were times when Acirfa Mothoosile, being the sole male among them, had to fetch water for all of them. She says that was a big ask for him because he too faced the arduous journey.
Would they do it again?
“No I wouldn’t walk that distance again,” says Goabolelelwe. But Munyoro says come same time next year, she will be doing the Lavender Walk again.
