We have talked about riding through the African landscape encountering roadside markets, wildlife, colorfully dressed women carrying their burdens on their heads and men on bikes. However, by far the best encounters were the Coke Stops.
Coke Stop was the name given to our rest stops. Before cellphones and the internet, it was the internationally recognizable Coca-Cola logo that identified many of these locations. Now, most were pre-identified from previous tours and marked on our GPS coordinates as locations that could be relied upon to provide a little shade and some cold drinks and snacks along the road.
A few resembled post-apocalyptic, dystopian stores with even the cheapest and most common goods kept behind bars and barbed wire. Fortunately, however, that was somewhat rare.
Also relatively rare, but by far the best of the best, were the occasional pop-ups selling hot from the oven baked goods. Here, in Tanzania, an entrepreneurial family prepares rice cakes for their open fire cookers. We ate them by the dozens while providing entertainment for the village children watching us.
Further down the road a man was preparing “square donuts” from a corn based recipe. We might have called it corn bread but what ever the name they were mouth-watering, energy giving and most importantly, spirit lifting when you knew you still had 100 km to ride.
More often than not we would find some type of entertainment was available at these coke stops. People watching was the most popular and it went both ways, we drew a crowd where ever we went. Above, men are playing an ancient African game called Mancola. In Arabic, Mancola means “to move”, and while this explains the kind of game it is, the game has as many names and variations as places it is played, and some form of this game it is played worldwide. It is also one of mankind’s most ancient games. Ancient Egyptians are known to have played it and game boards carved into the floors of Stone Age caves have been dated back to nearly 6,000 years B.C.
In Malawi fresh baked buns were available roadside. I’m not sure if they were the buns used for their famous Lake Malawi Lake Fly Bugburgers but they were delicious just the same.
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