1959 Douglas VB1

In 1958, a young man named Colin bought this Vespa VB1, in the UK. It was known as the "Clubman" in the UK when sold under the Douglas banner. He packed his suitcase on the back of his Clubman and decided to ride it across Europe, made a few shortcuts through the Middle East and across Asia. He finally took a ship to Australia and travelled down the coast.

After 17801 miles The scooter unexpectedly locked up near Tamworth and Colin decided to buy a farm nearby. The Clubman sat for almost 40 years in a shed, half dismantled collecting red desert dirt and wasps nests, until Colin decided he wanted to ride her one more time. Kitted with a Pinasco tuning cylinder, crank, and ignition, a Polini 23 mm carb and Bollag touring exhaust… this will be some ride for Colin.

VESPA SCOOTER TRIP THROUGH CENTRAL AFRICA, BY COLIN JAMES MALCOLM, IN 1959, CAMPING MOST OF THE WAY, AND I MAY BE THE ONLY PERSON WHO HAS EVER DONE IT…

This is just a story about a trip through Africa by COLIN JAMES MALCOLM actually sixty years ago which I made on my 150 cc Vespa scooter.  Vespas were built in or around Turin in those days and may still be. My scooter was being sold to me as an export so I had to collect it in Genoa. I was by myself in Africa and mainly camped out on the trip but did try to camp near other people to avoid contact with animals riding through Africa. Before the trip I rode through Italy, Austria, Germany, France, Holland, Belgium, UK, Scotland, and Ireland and used it for working in the UK. I had never ridden a bike with a motor on it before so the first day in Genoa was very precarious, I did slip over in London in wet conditions in Oxford Street with no damage to me or the Vespa, months later.  

In December 1958 I travelled on the Canarvon Castle from Southampton in England to Cape Town in South Africa with the Vespa as luggage, I picked it up on the wharf and rode around Cape Town for a few days then started my trip heading east along the southern highway, branching off north to Oudtshoorn to see Ostriches, the branch road was a bit weaker and dirt which I slipped over on but made no damage. It took me  a couple of days and I was very lucky to talk to some people and stayed with them in a house on a beach before we arrived at Port Elizabeth where I visited a first cousin Anne who had just had her first baby. She was twin to Elizabeth whose wedding I went to at Kidd’s Beach, where I stayed with my aunt Barbara who was my mother’s elder sister, the twins had two older sisters, Jennifer and Alwyn. 

I stayed in this house for a few weeks then got a job in a paint factory just south of East London which burnt down later that year because I think both blacks and whites smoked Daker [ no idea how you spelled the drugs name]. 

I decided to take the Vespa with backpack, small drums for petrol and oil, tools and what I could carry,  a lot of other stuff which I had brought out on the ship I sent on to Australia by sea.

Now after sixty years my uncles, aunts and first cousins in Africa have all gone their children and other cousins are mostly still around and one second cousin from Rhodesia, Tim Hughes who I only met and worked with in Australia on our rice farm still lives in Queensland.

Before starting up and going north my aunt gave me a hand gun with ammunition, we went to see the police but they wouldn’t give me a permit but I still took it with me. Aunty told me that one day when she was out having tea with other women friends one of the women pulled out a gun and so they all found that they had a gun in their purses for protection. The first night when I camped just north of East London two African men stood over me and then or soon after I realized that it would only cause a lot of trouble with either people or animals to use the gun so I put a ring of cans or whatever I had around me when I camped at night and when I arrived at South Africa‘s capital Pretoria I put it all in the post and send it back to my aunt at Kidds Beach.

The main roads which I was on where I was in those days were very small compared to sixty years later. I was heading to Durban and it took a few days, there I stayed with my eldest cousin Alwyn her husband was a doctor, English, who mainly looked after Africans so didn’t make much money. She was 28 years younger than he and had a couple of little children. My mother’s younger sister, also an Alwyn strangely, also married a man 28 years older than she was, he developed the Poole Pottery in the UK and actually built the main War Memorial in Durban which still stands today. Communications  in those days were not the same as today, I’d been away from Australia for nearly three years working in Canada, California, the UK and South Africa with no phone call from home but my father called me in Durban to try to stop me going further north and get me to come home!

After a couple of days in  Durban I went towards Johannesburg which took a few days,  then to Pretoria, the first night in Pretoria I started to camp in the  open but a car pulled up and said don’t’ camp here it is too dangerous come and stay with us. I was a bit lucky but this was the last time that this happened to me.

The roads through Africa were very poor for my scooter but I used to do 80 miles a day (on some days as a good day), Southern Rhodesia had quite a few sections with parallel strips of bitumen much of which was broken which made me very careful. From Pretoria I went almost due north to the border check to get into Southern Rhodesia [now Zimbabwe] I camped out and the first morning an African dressed in white service clothing arrived with a cup of tea for me. He came from a house nearby, lived in by a man who worked on the roads and this is something which never happened to me again. Next stop was the Zimbabwe Ruins a place which I don’t think is known or talked about today, it was first setup by the first Europeans who visited this area who came down from the north and found I think mainly gold.  

From the Zimbabwe ruins the normal route would be to go north through the capital Harare which used to be called Salisbury. I wanted to go to Bulawayo and then on to Livingstone to see the Victoria Falls. On the way to Bulawayo I noticed good farming country which was being used and I did stay in accommodation there and visited a memorial to Cecil Rhodes just south of the town. Rhodes of course did develop a great deal of money from his gold finds and still is financing the Rhodes Scholarships which still go today. I visited where he was buried then went on to an animal reserve which they wouldn’t let me through on the scooter but they did take me through themselves, as this wasn’t when visitors where normally there as it was quite hot and dry and of course that was when I was there because of my transport. I didn’t see any elephants until I left the reserve then I came onto a large herd. On the way to Livingstone I had my shade hat stolen and did get the Vespa bogged in a sandy creek, which was lucky as I took a photo of it, which was rare, it also had an African woman in the picture. I stayed in a visitors little shed for a day or two in Northern Rhodesia [ now called Zambia] and went on a little boat with an outboard motor on it to get a close look at the Victoria Falls - the motor broke down and as we were at the top of the Falls we started to be swept towards it quite fast but I can remember quite clearly trying to grab passing trees which of course we accomplished but it was exciting for a while and if we hadn’t I wouldn’t be writing this story.

In those days, as I previously said, I can remember seeing good farming country which I doubt would be there today and it was reasonably flat with water wheels like the ones in the Murrumbidgee Irrigation Area at home. Livingstone was quite a nice little village which I didn’t spend much time in so I started off to the north. 

I remember talking to a white farmer in the next few days who wanted me to stay with him but I really didn’t have much time so kept going. There was a dam being built nearby which I didn’t get close to, I camped out of course and could always hear animals especially Hyenas which looked like a large dog and made a terrifying growl as they had a reputation of jumping into camp huts etc. and grabbing a human  arm.

 I had decided to go on being by myself with just the little scooter as far as Kenya and visit two lots of Mum’s cousins who lived with farms on the slopes of Mr Kilimanjaro in northern Tanganyika. Before I reached the Tanganyika border I went about 100 km west on a sandy road to a large lake (Lake Tanganyika?)and met two girls who had got there by some means, I have no knowledge how, and I stupidly gave them my map which I got in East London in South Africa which would be marvellous for me now but I was just reducing my load and didn’t think that I was going to write this story .They and a fellow who was working there had a little boat to check fish in the lake. They were the only people there, I spent a day taking the Vespa engine down and cleaning the carbon off, as I had taken tools with me for the job, before heading back up the difficult sandy road.

I did pass a memorial of an early explorer probably Livingstone which will still be there today I suppose which was too far for me to get to so I missed it.  After Leaving The Victoria Falls I rode north for a few days I think a little east of Broken Hill and stayed near a small accommodation building, the women in charge thought that I would stay with them but I only bought a cup of tea or coffee, she told me that she had heard of somebody coming down from the north on a scooter .I didn’t think of it at the time but it may have been me as when I was in the UK I tried to get a permit and some money to do that but I could not do it.

Travelling through a small portion of the Congo then travelled via a stream with the vespa and Africans which I have a photo of then  on a small and sandy track down to the lake called Lake Tanganyka , rocks are bad enough but sand is very difficult for the little scooter. 

These two girls and I was on the little boat so I have photo of them and the bloke but I have no idea of their names.

I went into Tanganyika and after a few days, I called into a small shop spoke to a women and discovered after talking to her that she knew a fellow called Backhouse who was a C of priest who used to be my maths teacher at Shore in Sydney. She tried to get me to go and see him as he was staying not far away but I thought that he would only think that I was after accommodation. We probably all do stupid things at some time during our lives so I didn’t, and I often think about it. I arrived at Arusha which is one of two small villages just south of Mt Kilimanjaro, the other is Moshi.    A fellow Brian Freyburg married my mother’s cousin Joan who lived on a small farm on the slope of the mountain had a small plane and happened to be in the village so I went with him to the farm for a few days. Her brother John Millard lived on another farm, he was prominent in East Africa had worked for the Allies during the second war in north Africa then was in charge of two south African states at different times before taking charge of about eight farming blocks on the southern side of Mt Kilimanjaro . I stayed With Brian & Joan for a few days then back to the Vespa scooter via the mailman then camped out on the way  to Nairobi then down to the coast and left the Vespa and other stuff to go by ship from Mombasa to Sydney, and I caught a ship to India on the way home to Australia. Prior to that I had camped through Kenya which was a little exciting at times with the animals being so plentiful. One night, after Nairobi, I was about to camp near a water hole and an African said bwana don’t camp here this is where the lions come down to drink so I camped near a railway station. I slept very well but the next morning the station master told me that a leopard had eaten a dog about a hundred yards away, leopards like eating dogs he told me.

Camped in a concrete hut which smelt very bad one night, then after a few days arrived at  Mombasa I stayed there for a few days near a bloke a little older than me who tried to put me onto some girls(African). While I was working in the paint factory in East London South Africa one morning a young fellow who had been working on ships came in a terrible state as he had been chased by a group of women while he was on his push bike, and this also happened to me going up a steep hill on the Vespa between East London and Durban. This was a very up and down road. The road through Tanganyika went along a ridge which kept going up into the Middle East but mainly it was flat.

I have a photo of a young bloke about the same age as me who sent my scooter and other things by ship back to Sydney Australia after I left on another ship to India 

I would like to thank SANDY SYMEONIDES for fixing my Vespa scooter which had been out of action for most of its life in Australia being seized up and has been looked after in their shop for a number of years.