Zambezi Bound

By Steve Charlie FitzGerald

Traveling overland through South and East Africa, I had to cross the Zambezi River three times in 1972. Starting in Sioux City, Iowa, it takes two and a half years traveling through fourteen countries on three continents. What will become my plan to travel to California begins in Ely, Nevada. Wanting to be original, I will head east. My circuitous route will take me rafting the Colorado River, betting all my savings on one spin of the roulette wheel in the Caribbean, and a van and Mediterranean villa in Europe, including a shuttle service between Paris and Amsterdam. In the Caribbean again, I restore and create a private nightclub in Historic Old San Juan, Puerto Rico. Next, it's on to traveling and bartending in South Africa. From there, I travel overland through East Africa toward the coast to catch a ship to India. This requires crossing the monsoon swollen Zambezi River multiple times. I have to survive: military convoys, armed guerillas, mined roads, landslides, dead ends, cave-ins, crocodiles, mosquitoes, and a train wreck; and experience Eden along the way. My voyage begins on the moon.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Page Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Apr 19, 2018
• ISBN: 9781640826267

Book preview

One small step for man . . . one giant leap for mankind, crackles from my TV speaker as I sit on the floor watching history unfold. I continue to pack my canvas Boy Scout backpack with all my remaining possessions. I’ve sold everything from my one-room apartment in Sioux City, Iowa, to an individual for $800; they’ve also given me my $400 apartment deposit because they were going to use it for ten days. I’ve been going to school and working three jobs as a manager of a travel agent and part-time bartender at two places. This is July 20, 1969. I am twenty-four years old. I have been saving and planning for this trip for over a year, figuring if I can’t be an astronaut, at least I can see as much of this planet as I can.

Having sold my 1961 Corvair for $60, I’ve been driven to the airport to catch an Ozark flight to Chicago, where I have lived for more than twenty years. The plan is to spend a few days there visiting and staying with friends before continuing to Europe. Freewill is the mantra of the 1960s, and one of its more colorful practitioners is a friend who is a hooker whom I end up staying with. We party and play all day and night. She, Crazy Carol (like a fox), does as she pleases. She’s nobody’s fool and is using an apartment on Michigan Boulevard, across from Grant Park with fantastic views of Lake Michigan, the Chicago Yacht Club, the Chicago Art Institute, and Buckingham Fountain. Our bedroom is empty except for sheets on the carpet and two stacks of pillows. She’s convinced me to get a drive-away car to Colorado to visit my brother, whom she knows, Gary, in Aspen. He has a camp at a state park called Difficult, at ten thousand feet. Carol and I have found a 1968 Thunderbird drive-away, and it is fun and games all the way. In Aspen, we connect with Gary, and the three of us return the car to Denver, where a friend, Roy, has a big old silver boom mansion one house away from the governor’s residence. While walking up the steps of Roy’s house one day, someone calls out, Steve! (Gary and Roy call me Charlie.) Being new to town, I don’t think it’s directed at me. But it turns out to be the individual who bought all my furniture. He is a Mayflower mover, moving the family across the street. Small world. After ten days of Roy’s hospitality and pub-and-dive tour, he drives us all back to our Aspen campsite.On our visits to the town of Aspen, we sneak into the back of the Jerome Hotel and stay in rooms that are under renovation. I am saving all my money for Europe. We also bring our own beers into the Red Onion bar to save money. Beads and fur coats are worn by both men and woman patrons. Weeks later, Carol connects with some guys who are on their way to Los Angeles, so she split. (She meets a songwriter in Hollywood and moves to England, having a daughter, Melody Smith.) A neighborhood friend from Hollywood, Illinois, Jim Morrissey, is also living in Aspen in his 1957 Oldsmobile station wagon. Jim and Gary stretch out in the back, while I curl up in the front seat to sleep at night. Gas is nineteen point nine cents a gallon in Sioux City, but in Aspen, it was forty-five cents. We drive into the town of Basalt to get cheaper gas. We really appreciate the accommodations on these cold, high-altitude nights

Gary has purchased a four-man raft for $2 that have neither bottom nor air valves. We pack that up and hitchhike to Moab, Utah. Our last ride into Moab, late at night, is at ninety miles per hour, with two drunken cowboys passing a bottle of Jack Daniel’s between themselves. The next day, it is my job to find two air valves that would fit the raft. After trying a dozen places, I find the valves at the last raft rental shop in town. I have worn blisters on my feet from walking in my new tennis shoes. When I get back to our new campsite, Gary has laced about one hundred feet of nylon cord back and forth and across like a web, along the bottom of the raft, and secured a cheap plastic poncho across that. The plan is to flip the raft over and ride on top of the raft instead of in the raft. The head hole in the poncho acts as a drain for any collected water. It works great.

So it is off on the Colorado River for a week. We also have a small two-person raft we use for an ice cooler and other supplies. Our traverse and camping along the river include experimenting with peyote; we feel like real Indians. Our beer and ice are gone in about four or five days. Water runs out on day six. On our last day, we have to moisten our dry and cracking lips and mouth with silty river water. When we get off the river from our solitary journey in Moab, we head to the nearest pub and order two pitchers of beer. There we hear about a concert on the east coast with five hundred thousand attendees, Woodstock, called the Aquarius Festival. What a contrast to the solitude we’re experiencing.

While on the river, Gary voices an interest in joining me on my trip to Europe. So we plan to go to Chicago to try and make enough money for Gary to come along. From Moab, we contact a drive-away service that has a car going from Ely, Nevada, to Denver. We try to hitchhike to Ely but no luck; we wind up taking a bus.

In Denver we stay with Roy a week or two before getting another drive-away car to Chicago. That car is a newer Olds Starfire, a red convertible, 442 horsepower, four speeds on the floor. With a four-barrel carburetor, it takes so much gas we could have taken a bus for less, but needless to say, it is a wild ride. In Chicago, we are to stay with friends and get jobs to make fast money. (Our parents have sold the house in Hollywood, Illinois—which is the origin for the name Hollywood, California—and moved to Puerto Rico the year before.) Ninety days before my dad becomes eligible for his pension from Union Carbide, they give him sixty days’ notice.

After seventy-two hours in Chicago, we have had enough of the urban craziness. We decide to go to Puerto Rico and try to find work there. We have some of our belongings in storage here, most notable, an LP record collection and a record player. Again we look for a drive-away car to Miami so we can take our belongings and get passage on a cruise ship one way to San Juan. Getting to Miami, we go directly to the sea-port to book passage, but one-way trips are not permitted from U.S. ports. Flying is our only option. The cost of overweight luggage cuts into my savings.

By this time, it is early October and a good time to be in the Caribbean. This is our tenth trip to the area since 1961. (For the first ten years, 1944–1954, our family lived in a second-floor apartment on the north side of Chicago. My dad didn’t buy his first car until I was five years old. When my dad was forty-one years old, he almost died from ulcers. After that, life was convertibles and Caribbean vacations.) Our folks have a twenty-second floor, three-bedroom penthouse with a fantastic view of the sea. In the building elevator, we meet a guy who has a used-car business who says we could go to work for him detailing cars. But the job never materializes. So what to do? Puerto Rico has casinos for the tourists, and I have taken a statistics course at Morningside College in Sioux City, Iowa, a few months before. I’m thinking I can take lessons learned and put them to work. I figure in roulette, playing the 50/50 chance, black or red (excluding the two green 0 and 00), that all I need to do is win one in ten spins of the wheel and I will have a low chance of losing. The system requires I double my bet every time I lose. I will start with one; if I lose, I would then bet two. If I lose again, I’d bet four (the geometric progression being 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512 being the tenth loss). Every time I’d win, I’d win only $1, regardless of the size of the bet. I need my brother’s help to bet when I reach the table maximum, at the eighth bet (128).

The casinos in Puerto Rico require jacket and tie for men and no pantsuits for women. No alcohol is served. The Carib Hilton, close to Old San Juan, has the classiest casino. The hotel is 1940s art deco with extensive use of plants and murals of foliage on the few walls because most of the ground floor is open to the outside. The patrons are well tanned, well tailored, with gold and glitter, but their roulette-wheel spins at a rate of once every 90 seconds. The casino in the El San Juan Hotel, in Isla Verde, is the most opulent. The hotel boasts a colossal crystal chandelier, the Caribbean’s largest. Here the locals dress at their best. It’s the casual tourists that detract from the lavish surroundings, and here the wheel spins once every 100 to 110 seconds. The Sheridan Hotel Casino, in Condado, is the plainest—red walls and carpet, with black vinyl and Formica—but their wheel spins once every 60 seconds. Cost-effective. After a couple of successful weeks, I have a session where I lose nine times in a row. Having all my money invested, I will have to win this tenth spin. I have to sign and cash $1,000 worth of additional traveler’s checks and place an intricate bet requiring my brother and me to put the maximum amount on red and each of the eighteen red numbers, all in about sixty seconds. We have collected a crowd of four or five deep around our table, all anticipating the outcome of a spinning ball, which will decide our fate. Unsure of what my eyes have seen, the instantaneous roar of the crowd assures me we have won. I am numb, I can’t hear anything, and I can’t feel anything. I am led into an office and am required to take part of my winnings in the traveler’s checks I have cashed just prior to the last spin. The signatures are unrecognizable. I am told that I will be put on a list distributed to all the casinos and be labeled as a systems player. The enormous stress of this situation ends my gambling career. We have made enough for my brother to join me on my trip to Europe.

Reservations and tickets are next. Our mom works with a tour operator, so that is done with ease. Our plan is to take off in three or four days. But in the mail comes a request from the Selective Service to show up for my physical at El Morro Castle, a 450-year-old fort with twenty-foot thick walls at the entrance to San Juan Bay. The Selective Service has been trying to catch up with me for years. Fortunately, it is scheduled in eight days, so we stick around (going to beaches and the rain forest) for my appointment. But we make reservations for the following day.

Out of 120 Puerto Ricans at the exam, I am the only one who doesn’t speak Spanish. I am immediately pulled out of the auditorium and quickly given instructions on how to fill out the paperwork then ushered through most of the medical stations in just a short time. Meanwhile in the auditorium, the rest of the guys are still working on What is your last name? (It is the local tradition to take the mother’s surname as a last name.) I find myself unaccompanied and roaming around in the caverns of the giant historic old fortress. I have hours to wait for the rest so I can take the hearing test. The end results are I have to get proof of asthma and hay fever. We delay our flight another three days so I can see a doctor and get a letter indicating my past history. Not caring about what the outcome may be, Gary and I are off the next day. Finally!

Our route from San Juan to New York is by jet; our New York–Iceland–Luxemburg flight is by propeller aircraft. From the hot and humid tropics, we find ourselves in the North Sea cold of October in central Europe. In Luxemburg, we find our way to the train station and on to Bremerhaven, Germany, where a college friend is stationed in the military. Trains in Europe are efficient and a pleasure to experience. From the station in Bremerhaven, we go by bus to the base, whose purpose is vehicle processing—shipping vehicles to the U.S. for military personal. We meet with our friend Doug Smith, who is stationed there as photographer for the military newspaper, Stars and Stripes. Good to meet with a familiar face. He and his buddies take us out to show us the town, especially the old German pubs. Gary and I are able to stay in rooms in the barracks, and his buddies will bring us trays of food from the mess. Thanks, Uncle Sam.

Within forty-eight hours, we’re out looking in used car lots for a van. We