Ride Far | Mark Hammond

Would You Like Sand with Your Whopper?

Nouadhibou, Mauritania * October 17, 2008

It was to be a big day. Finally, after more than two weeks in Morocco and Morocco-controlled Western Sahara, we would enter another country – Mauritania. Nearly the size of Texas and California combined, half buried in and sand, Mauritania is a vast and underdeveloped desert republic with one of the lowest population densities in the world.

It would be an early milestone on the long journey south, to Cape Town, South Africa. We made a late and leisurely start from the peninsula city of Dakhla in Western Sahara. Our destination, Nouadhibou, with 80,000 residents the country’s second largest city, was 200 miles south along the Atlantic coast.

We stopped halfway for coffee and a bite at a fuel stop. We got to talking about Nouadhibou and prospective accommodations. Peter Cullen had stopped in Nouadhibou several years ago, and had a place in mind. I mentioned I’d seen some promising listings in my Rough Guide to West Africa.

“Oh, and there’s a Burger King in Nouadhibou,” I said.

Geoff’s ears perked up. Burger King is his favorite fast food. Then he thought twice about it. “Yeah, right,” he said. “Right next to the Wendy’s.” An inside joke. Back in Tiznit, I’d asked him if he’d spotted any eateries other than the ordinary Moroccan tajine and couscous joints, and he told me there was a Burger King downtown – right next to the Wendy’s.

Geoff had been yanking my chain a bit lately, so I decided to yank back.

“No really, it’s right downtown, around the corner from the place I had in mind, Camping Baie du something,” I said with a straight face. He gave me a skeptical look.

“They’re even open until midnight,” I said, embroidering the tale with plausible detail. “Open at 7 a.m., close at midnight. You wanna see the listing in the book?”

Yes he did. But just then, Peter Cullen piped up.

“Oh no, I’ve seen the Burger King,” Peter offered. “It’s a fine-looking restaurant, right downtown.”

Peter is the senior member of the group. He’s a young 68 years old, knowledgeable and articulate and gentlemanly and credible, with a dulcet British accent. It seemed a bit out of character for Peter to play along with a gag, and I had to suppress my smirk when he volunteered his corroboration.

“Really?” Geoff said. “Huh. Well, Burger King it is!”

***
After months of motorcycling through foreign countries, one begins to long for certain comforts of home. Empanadas and tajine and couscous and poisson et riz and poulet avec frites are all well and good, but they can become tiresome. The motorcyclist finds himself susceptible to food fantasies … gustatory longings that he knows will not be sated.

The fantasies may begin to torment him. On a long day’s ride, with nothing but the white noise inside his helmet, he may be tortured by visions of a Whopper or a Quarter Pounder with Cheese or a Big Mac or an ice-cold beer and spicy chicken wings and a seat at an Applebee’s, right in front of a good old American baseball game on a big flat-screen TV.

He can see it … taste it … feel the heft and warmth of that big juicy Whopper with Cheese in his greedy hands … but in fact there is nothing ahead but 150 miles to a ramshackle town named Bobo or Chinguetti or Timbuktu and the inevitable dubious meat, soggy rice, and maybe some wilted vegetables.

I’m not a huge fan of American fast food. I’ll find myself in a Wendy’s or a Burger King or a McDonald’s maybe eight or 10 times a year. But riding South America, somewhere in Peru, the idea of a Whopper with Cheese fastened itself upside my head with the ferocity of a junkyard dog. I was nearly four months into what would be an eight-month, 30,000-mile motorbike journey.

By chance, browsing ahead to Bolivia in my Lonely Planet guide, I spotted a listing that set my salivation glands into overdrive. My God, you must be kidding! I thought. There’s a Burger King in La Paz?!

Indeed there was. It was several blocks from my hotel in the Bolivian capital. Fellow San Francisco adventure rider Joe Ortega and I hied ourselves to that fine establishment and I sat quite ceremoniously for the most delicious Whopper with Cheese I have ever had.

I had told Geoff that story back in Casablanca, and he empathized. He’d done years of military and bodyguard service in Iraq, and is accustomed to being deprived of the palliative comforts of his native England. And back in Casablanca, we were still licking our chops from the McDonald’s we’d found in Rabat.

I tore across the Sahara en route to Nouadhibou and chuckled at the thought of Geoff dreaming about a Whopper with Cheese for his supper. The ride seemed longer than its 200 miles. The motorbike droned on at 72, 75 mph – watch the odometer click up towards the Mauritanian border. The desert in this southern section of Western Sahara seemed to grow even flatter and more barren.

Road signs warned of the danger of mines in the vicinity, planted during a conflict over Western Sahara. People had built hundreds of cairns along sections of the road, artistically stacked slabs of rock that I was told were meant to signify the presence of mines in the desert. In other words, don’t go wandering off, jackass.

We stayed straight, and reached the border of Western Sahara and what is officially called the Islamic Republic of Mauritania a little after 3:30 p.m.

***
Entering a new country can take an hour or two, even more, by the time you clear immigration (to have your passport stamped) and then customs (for authorization to enter the country with your motorbike). Leaving a country is usually faster and simpler. Passport stamped, customs cleared, and done. Thanks for your money, now good riddance. Half an hour tops.

Not so for leaving Morocco-controlled Western Sahara. The process proved agonizingly slow. We turned our passports in and waited. And waited. And waited. Hurry up and wait. We milled about in the hot sun and made small talk. Drank water, snacked on dates, smoked, and looked hopefully into the building in which Moroccan officials held our passports. A few dozen others, mostly Mauritanians and Moroccans and some Senegalese, were in the same listing boat.

I sighed deeply. “Well, this is gonna make that Whopper with Cheese allllllll the better,” I said, sure to be within earshot of Geoff.

“Fucking A,” Geoff said. “If they’re open until midnight, I’ll be heading back for seconds.”

Our minds wandered. Geoff got to thinking about Migo’s Austrian-built KTM 950 Adventure. “What does KTM stand for, anyhow?” he wondered.

No one knew. “Maybe it’s German,” Geoff said, “for Krap Touring Motorcycle.” And we all laughed. KTMs are not renowned for reliability, and we have our fingers crossed that Migo’s will keep running strong.

A Mauritanian boy about 14 years old in line with me spoke splendid English, and asked many questions about America, which he hoped to someday visit. It helped to pass the time, and it was heartening to encounter such a bright young man. We greeted and marveled at a mute, sun-broiled Dutchman. His face was the color of ketchup. He was evidently walking around Africa, with only the shirt on his back and his sign language.

After an hour and a half of standing around admiring my riding boots, I said, “This has got to be the longest wait I’ve ever had to get out of a country.” Migo and Peter agreed. I looked at my watch. It was pushing past 5 p m. The Mauritania border was said to close at 6. If we got out of Western Sahara but not into Mauritania, we’d be camping for the night into the no-man’s land between the two countries. Enough people are forced to do exactly that that Rough Guide noted the option its West Africa guide.

Finally, a bit after 5:30, a flurry of action. The Moroccan officials returned all passports to the three or four dozen people milling about. I had to wonder if they’d intentionally delayed just to make life difficult for their Mauritanian counterparts, who by 5:45 p.m. would be watching the clock and thinking about a Whopper with Cheese at the Burger King at Nouadhibou.

With passports in hand, it was on to customs, and a final, seemingly redundant, check of documentation by a Moroccan military officer in a tiny hut beneath a low palm tree. It was nearly 6 p.m. by the time we set off to run the nearly 5 miles of unpaved piste (dirt/sand track) to the Mauritania border crossing.

***
Later, I would find this note in the Rough Guide to West Africa:

“The tarmac comes to an end as you enter no-man’s land, the road degenerating into 8 km of rough bitumen interspersed with soft sand, surrounded by mines. Make sure you keep to the well-marked tracks as the mines are still live; many travelers choose to hire a guide, though it’s far from essential.”

The tracks were not well-marked, and we didn’t keep to them. Peter was in the lead, having traversed this no-man’s land a few years earlier. I was the last of the four. As we took off on the piste, a couple of men hopped in a white van in pursuit.

The van pulled up alongside me and a man hollered in English, “Bad road … you need guide!”

Geoff was just ahead of me. A few decades ago, the track might have been bitumen, but now it was rocky and rutted with pockets of deep sand. Geoff hit a rut full of soft stuff and went down. I stopped behind to take the obligatory fallen-bike photo, but he was already hoisting his XT.

“Hold on, we need a photo!” I hollered. He flipped me off.

Ahead, I could see Peter was in trouble. The rear tire on his big 650 BMW Dakar was shooting up rooster tails of sand and he was moving at maybe 5 mph. He started padding along with his feet and inching ahead until finally the sand became too deep and soft and he found himself royally stuck. Then Migo was stuck, too. Then I was stuck, and Geoff behind me.

Four big off-road adventure bikes, trapped in the sand in no-man’s land. I had to laugh.

One of the men from van hopped out and ran over to Peter’s bike, pushing him from behind. The other guy came over to me.

“I get you out for 50 dirham, oui?” That’s about $6 USD. He wore a white turban and a predatory look. Sure bud, I said, let’s go. We struggled ahead for about 30 yards through deep sand, until the track was solid enough to ride unaided. I removed my helmet for a breather and got out 50 dirham. The other guy came trotting over.

“My friend, he has family, you help him, too, oui?” the turban dude said.

“Oh c’mon,” I said. “You boys have had a good day’s pay already. You saw us coming and thought, ‘Those clowns are bound to get stuck, let’s go make some money off them.’”

“My friend, he is poor, he has family,” the guy implored. All right, I said, 20 dirham more, and I take your photo. OK.

It was about 6:30 p.m. by the time we reached the Mauritania border crossing. Remarkably, it had remained open past closing time. The immigration and customs office was a single weather-beaten, cockeyed wooden shack in the wilderness. Our information was painstakingly recorded by hand in a ledger. It seemed hardly befitting as one of the country’s main border crossings, but Mauritania is an impoverished country. The average per capita monthly income is $77 USD, by UN calculations.

“One thing’s for sure,” Geoff said. “That bike is too damn heavy.”

“Mine too,” I said. “That road would have been tough any way you cut it. Even at speed, it would be a bitch to ride sand that deep with this load. I’ve gotta ship stuff back to the states.”

In smaller wooden shacks, men changed money and sold insurance. There was nothing else here, just shacks and some broken-down vehicles and the forbidding desert. We traded in our Moroccan dirham for Mauritania ougiya – oogy-boogy for short. The sun fell and set, rouging this primitive outpost in crimson and purple. In darkness, we took off for Nouadhibou at 7:15 p.m. The entire crossing had taken 3½ hours.

A few years ago, the road from the border to Nouadhibou had been 30 miles of sandy track. It had recently been paved, and that made possible a nighttime ride. We kept speeds at 55 and 60 mph … too fast for conditions, perhaps, but then again, we had a dinner date in Nouadhibou.

***

The outskirts, and then the center, of Nouadhibou were strikingly poorer than we had seen in Morocco and Western Sahara. Even in the dark, there was a wild and desperate and edgy feel to this city of 80,000. The narrow streets were lined with sand. Hundreds and hundreds of pedestrians ambled about the sandy lanes.

Women in colorful dress with baskets atop their heads and little children in their arms. Men wearing full-length gowns and houli, headscarves that wrapped around their faces, leaving only a slit for their eyes and protecting against wind and sand and sun. Other men, black Africans, from Senegal and elsewhere, their skin darker than dark.

The occasional streetlight cast a sickly glow; otherwise the only illumination was from naked lightbulbs at streetside shacks cooking up dinner in open-air pots or selling meat or fruit or vegetables or phone cards, or from the vehicles trundling along, many of them broken-down and beeping like insects and spewing black exhaust.

In their headlights, I could see sand and dust swirling. A car was pumping out music at high volume. Donkeys and goats wandered along the streets. There was a beat to the place, a rhythm, something raw and primal and unbridled. Suddenly, it felt as if we had arrived in the real Africa.

We turned down a side street in search of our auberge, and dozens of children leapt and jumped and yelled and hooted and waved and ran alongside – the largest group of Welcome Wagon youngsters I had seen yet. Careful, don’t smack one of these little kids, I told myself. Unlike the others, I hadn’t bothered taking out insurance at the border, figuring it would be worth little more than the paper it was printed on.

Camping Baie du Levrier was smack downtown, such as downtown was – a sprawl of darkened, dusty, sandy streets and crumbling concrete lined by small, shabby shops and shuttered doors and clusters of men on street corners. Trash was strewn liberally about. For $6 USD a man, the manager, Ali, had a large Berber-style tent with about eight dirty old mattresses atop a carpet, atop the sand. It was perfect.

We sprawled about the mattresses to relax and relive the eventful day. Ali entered the tent with a pot of tea, a customary gesture in Islamic countries. We sipped the hot tea and chatted and kicked off our sweat-soaked riding boots, and in due time Geoff brought up what had been on his mind all afternoon.

“Anybody see that Burger King when we came in?” he asked.

“What, you didn’t see it?” I asked. “It’s back there, from the way we came in. Two blocks down I think, or three, on the left – right next to the Wendy’s.”

Just a moment of pregnant pause. “Oooooooooooh, MOTHERFUCKER!” he exclaimed and leapt on me and beat me and tweaked me and tickled me and poked me and cursed me until he was satisfied that I had been appropriately punished. Tears were streaming down my cheeks, I was laughing so hard.

“Damn it! I was thinking about a Whopper all afternoon!” he said. “Then riding in, I kept looking around and thinking, ‘No way – no way there can be a Burger King in this place.’ Thanks, bud – you ruined my frigging day!”

Migo took a break from laughing to say, “I think you left a trail of drool on your way in.”

“You,” Geoff said, wagging a finger at Peter. “What you said, there’s a Burger King, I wouldn’t have believed it otherwise.”

“Peter, you sealed the deal,” I said. “I couldn’t believe you came out with that!” Peter smiled impishly.

We did, however, find a Chinese restaurant called Hong Kong run by a friendly Chinese family. They took a break from watching a Chinese soap opera at ridiculously high volume on their TV to serve us supper.

The chicken fried rice and fried noodles with shrimp and vegetable soup were a welcome departure from the usual fare, and to our satisfaction Hong Kong flouted the law (alcohol is prohibited in the Islamic Republic of Mauritania) and offered cans of cold beer, Budweiser even, if at the rather usurious price of $6 USD.

Next best thing to Burger King.

A Blossom in the Desert

Boujdour, Western Sahara * October 16, 2008

It was perhaps the longest, straightest, flattest and most desolate road I have ridden in my 120,000 miles of motorcycling. The lone route south from Tan Tan Plage to Boujdour, from Morocco into Western Sahara, lay unceremoniously atop the Sahara, a manmade ribbon of asphalt across a harsh and unforgiving wilderness.

Once in a while, the road edged west and afforded a view of the Atlantic and its waves crashing against the rocky coast. Along the sea, fishermen lived in small huts of concrete or mud block and fabric tents. Ten or 20 of these dwellings might be assembled in a given location, and as I passed them I grew more and more curious about the people inside. Finally, I stopped.

The wind was still. The silence was utter. It was as if the great emptiness has crushed all the sound out of things. The Sahara sprawled to the east, vast and rocky and barren and peppered by scrub-brush plants hardy enough to survive these punishing conditions. A man was eyeing me from outside his mud hut. Slowly he approached.

He extended his hand and we shook. He eyes were such an inky black that it seemed to me they had been burned by the sun. Equally as black were his eyebrows, his mustache, and his turban. His teeth were white and his smile was large. He called himself Zahib.

I am reminded in these situations how dismal my ear for French is. I can express myself adequately, but understanding what others say eludes me. My ear is so poor, in fact, that I have difficulty distinguishing whether I am being addressed in French or Arabic or Esperanto.

I ask that they speak more slowly. Sil vous plait parle mais lentement. I explain my French is poor. It rarely helps.

He was, of course, a fisherman. Bon poisson? I asked, rather like an idiot. Good fish? He nodded enthusiastically. I asked if he had children. He appeared to be in his mid-30s. He did – five youngsters, he said, proudly. They were nowhere to be seen, however, and I was left to wonder whether they were fishing. There was no town within many dozens of miles; I couldn’t imagine that they were in school.

I tried to learn how he and his family procured fresh water, but it ended in comical confusion of botched words and ribaldly bad pronunciation. Finally, I offered him a cigarette and we stood and smoked in silence, looking out at the sea.

***
I have been sick for two days. I blame the spaghetti Bolognese from a five-star hotel called Hotel Idou Tiznit. It was an outrageously fancy place with a grand staircase and marble floors and a lovely outdoor swimming pool with reclining chairs. It had a proper bar with actual beer (rare in Islamic countries) and free wireless Internet and was one block away from the municipal campsite in Tiznit, where we tented for $4 USD a night.

Appearance is half the battle. I strode into the Hotel Idou Tiznit around 9 a.m. with my IBM ThinkPad x40 in my tankbag and settled down. I was on the Internet in five minutes and, because I had strategically selected a seat in the corner of the bar, which wouldn’t open until afternoon, I was barely noticed. When a hotel manager finally did approach me, it was to inquire whether I would like a coffee or a juice.

Café noir et gran, sil vous plait, I said.

Back at the campsite, Geoff and Migo wrenched on their motorbikes. Geoff cleaned his chain and Migo troubleshot a coolant leak and they both changed oil. I returned in midday to scrub clean my laundry in the hot shower with the detergent and scrub brush I carry and repaired to the Hotel Idou Tiznit around 5 p.m.

The restaurant prices were surprisingly affordable. The spaghetti Bolognese, $4 USD, was quite good. But it (or perhaps the salade nicoise, in all fairness to the spaghetti) also awoke me in my tent at 4 a.m. with vomit squirming in the back of my throat and my sphincter clenched in urgency.

I puked I immediately, and managed to slip on my running shoes and hie myself without incident to the stand-up squatter, where with my shorts around my ankles (the urgency was such that I could not properly remove them) I most skillfully eliminated from three orifices simultaneously without soiling myself in the least.

It went downhill from there. From Tiznit I vomited, crapped and labored through the day. I perspired heavily and blew my nose a couple dozen times. My body was trying to rid itself of whatever poison I had ingested. I was running a low fever, and droning on at 72 mph through the desert in the midday sun, dreamed of a nap. In Tan Tan Plage, on the Atlantic coast, we met according to plan Peter Cullen, the same Irishman of Britain that Geoff and I had encountered at the Ceuta border crossing.

My hotel room was large and clean with a television with one English language station, and I was fast sleep by 5:30 p.m.

***
The vomiting persisted through the next day, as did the exhaustion. I kept my chin up as we took an 1½ hour in midday to change Migo’s rear tire at a gas station; his rear was growing dangerously bare. When the job was done, Geoff found two pieces of loose steel wire in the old tire, sheared evidently from the belt. It was to Migo’s good luck that they had not caused a flat, perhaps at speed.

We crossed the border from Morocco into Western Sahara without a hiccup; Western Sahara retains its name but is governed by Morocco. Police checkpoints, frequent here because of the Al Qaeda terrorist presence in Mauritania and Algeria, were a blessing and a curse. I could relax for 10 minutes and drink water, yet those were 10 minutes in which I was not where I belonged, which was in bed.

“Pain in the arse, they are,” Geoff said of these frequent checkpoints. At each, we have to show our passports and explain our occupations and where we have been and where we are going. “But it’s good for us, all these police means the roads are safer from the bad guys.”

What was perhaps the longest, straightest, flattest and most desolate road I had ever ridden helped to ease my discomfort. I sat back on autopilot and enjoyed the Sahara scenery. Some camels stood about here. The wind had sculpted a huge and majestic dune there. Don’t push, I told myself. Let the bike do the work. Some 300 miles south from Tan Tan Plage was a town named Boujdour.

The tiny typeface used for the city on my Michelin map suggested that Boujdour was a dusty and primitive outpost.

The farther south we proceed, the fewer vehicles we see. I can ride 10 or 15 minutes without being passed in the opposite direction. The great emptiness fosters communality. People wave to each other out here, as if to express -- we’re here together. Men in vehicles wave as they pass us. Trucks flash their lights in greeting. Any person alongside the road is more likely than not to wave, or offer a thumbs-up.

I recalled having witnessed the same phenomenon while riding the long and lonely stretches of Ruta 40 in Patagonia. Virtually everyone waved to me, and, I assume, to each other.

Yet once I arrived in a town, or traffic densified, the waving diminished.

Late in the day, we rode nearly straight into the setting sun. My helmet faceshield and sunglasses were dirty and dusty and generated a surreal glare in the harsh sunlight – a sort of phosphorescent yellow that resembled, I imagined, the aftermath of a nuclear detonation. The effect was almost surreal, and with the blinding glare and my own fatigue I had to concentrate to keep my eyes focused on the road.

Running off the road in the Sahara, son, I told myself, is no way to end the day.

***
I felt suddenly better in Boujdour. At first glance, it resembled a Wild West town, missing the bar and the brothel. Donkey-led carts click-clacked down the dusty streets. The long, broad main boulevard was lined with colorful cafes and teleboutiques and clothing shops and Internet joints and a couple of pool parlors, most advertised in Arabic.

I stood by my motorbike with Geoff waiting as Peter and Migo hunted for suitable accommodation. As I looked around, it struck me: My God! Look how happy these people are!

Nowhere on the ride had I seen so many smiling faces. Men walked down the streets holding hands, an expression of friendship in Islamic culture. People laughed amongst each other, not just a couple people, but most everyone.

The phenomenon seemed to be contagious. Everywhere I looked, people were smiling and laughing. It almost felt like an episode from the Twilight Zone.

Geoff had spotted a sign down the street. “PUB,” it said, promisingly, and beneath it hung another sign for a sort of German beer. I checked it out, and found two young men roasting chickens on a rotisserie at a little restaurant. They laughed and smiled and invited me to sit for dinner. They laughed even harder in telling me that, contrary to the signs, they did not have beer. No one did in Boujdour, they said, and that seemed cause for even more laughter.

I walked away chuckling myself, despite being misled by something of a desert mirage.

Boujdour was not the primitive, dusty backwater town that Mister Michelin had led me to expect. It was full of mirth and animation. Neon signs advertised a café and a teleboutique, which I used to phone my parents for about $5 USD. I don’t believe I’d seen a neon sign outside of the largest Moroccan cities. Too, Boujdour had streetlights, another characteristic unusual to a mid-sized Moroccan town.

An old man walked by with a goat on a leash. He was short and hunched over and attired in a traditional Islamic robe and turban. His face was pinched and dour and seemingly humorless. The goat went, “Mah-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha.”

I went, “Mah-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha.”

The old man looked at me and went, “Mah-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha.” It was as hilarious as it was improbable, and I laughed and laughed.

For the first time on the trip, women in veils said something to me. A group of three came by, asked something in I believe Arabic, pointed back and forth around the bike, and laughed and laughed. Stumped for a reply, I said, “So ladies, who do you like in the World Series? The Rays are up on the Red Sox in the ALCS. I’m rooting for them – the underdog.” They laughed even harder.

Hotel Taiba had clean rooms with TVs for $15 USD. The owner helped me carry my luggage up and did not linger for a tip. “This home is your home,” he said, genuinely, it seemed. Then the hotel switched its satellite to capture BBC for its English-language guests, and I was delighted to learn that one poll showed Obama with a lead of 14 percentage points over McCain, and that the Tampa Bay Rays were up 3 to 1 on Red Sox.

Things were looking up.

***
I awoke at 6:30 a.m. feeling terrific. My affliction had passed. I showered and was downstairs before 7 a.m., eager for a cup of coffee.

The same veiled, dark-eyed young lady who had tended the desk last night was still there. The café is right around the corner, she said. It’s open? I asked. This early? Of course.

We had parked our motorbikes on the sidewalk in front of the hotel. An old man was tasked to be their guardian. He was seated on a blue plastic chair, as he had been when I retired the night before. ”Guardian!” I greeted him. He leapt up and extended his hand. His grip was strong. Come on, I said, I’ll buy you a cup of coffee.

His name was Salah. He was in his late 60s, if not early 70s, and wore a soiled navy blue robe. Beneath his bristly mustache was a toothless smile, which flashed irrepressibly. Salah refused a coffee. Nor would he sit for a juice or a croissant. The one gift he would like (besides the dirham I had paid the night before) was a cigarette.

I watched Boujdour come to life. Happy and nicely attired children with backpacks walked past on their way to school. An impossibly cute girl with big black eyes and a ponytail smiled at me. A young boy of about 10 named Mohammed, who along with a friend, also named Mohammed, had tagged along with me for 20 minutes the night before, spotted me at the café. He stopped and greeted me and shook my hand with the confidence of an adult and declared, buoyantly, “L’ecole!” School!

Sitting there, I reflected that it was in this very area that a U.S. merchant vessel had shipwrecked in the late 1800s. The crew had been taken hostage by desert nomads and enslaved. I had read about it in a book called Skeletons on the Zahara. The men barely survived (I had thought about their grueling ordeal, too, in contrast to my own pissant little bout of illness). It was one of dozens of such incidents in that era.

Boujdour had been rebuilt not long ago, it seemed. The broad main boulevard and newish facades suggested that the old town had been ripped up and replaced. I asked the café waiter what economy sustained this little blossom in the desert. What’s the main industry? How do people make money?

I had seen nothing that would account for such apparent prosperity – no large banks, no visible industry, just the ordinary, if relatively upscale, collection of cafes and shops we had seen in far poorer, broken-down Moroccan towns. The waiter told me fishing was the principal industry.

Fishing, I thought to myself, cannot by itself generate such relative wealth.

Peter Cullen joined me for a coffee. Peter is a smart and articulate man. He understood that the Moroccan government subsidizes these distant southern outposts under a program called the “Green March” to fortify Morocco’s foothold in its nethermost regions. That made sense, as I couldn’t imagine that many people would otherwise choose to live here. The girl clerk at the hotel confirmed Peter’s understanding.

“The government pays people to live here,” she told me. “It is OK. But people stay in their houses all day or sit at cafes. They want to work a job, but there are no jobs. They sit and do nothing. They are bored.”

Boujdour was indeed a Twilight Zone of sorts, one propped up by the government. I remained confounded. How could bored people seem so happy?

Then again, my ride through the desert that day, 300-plus miles to Dahkla, might have been considered boring. And yet I was as happy as I had ever been.

The Things They Carried

Foum Zguid, Morocco * October 12, 2008

Migo brought a copy of a book called the Tao Te Ching. It’s a slim volume of 107 pages written in the sixth century B.C. by a Chinese philosopher named Lao Tsu and is fully of pithy and tantalizingly cryptic verses and koans on wisdom, the nature the universe, and the path to enlightenment.

We stopped for a delicious couscous lunch in the small Moroccan town of Agdz in the Anti-Atlas Mountains and Migo retrieved the book from the hard Hepco-Becker Gobi panniers on his KTM 950 Adventure. We flipped through the pages, and I read the following, feeling my face flush crimson in embarrassment at the neon-bright ancient words.

According to followers of the Tao, “These are extra food and unnecessary luggage.”

They do not bring happiness.

Therefore followers of the Tao avoid them.

I had brought unnecessary luggage.

The bike was too heavy, especially for riding a sandy or even a dirt road. The damndest thing was, I knew better. Light makes right, I had told myself. Lighter is righter. It was almost a mantra for this Africa ride. Yet the motorcycle was almost comically overburdened with gear that would come in handy now and then … but was it essential?

Did it bring happiness?

***

Packing for a long motorbike adventure means making tough choices. Details are magnified on the road. The smallest piece of gear can pay off inordinately in convenience and gratification. In Rabat, for instance, I had found a small leather purse that I cable-tied to my tank bag and use to store my earplugs when not riding. I use it at least a dozen times a day. The earplugs are secure and clean.

On the other hand, an unattended detail can come back to haunt you. For instance, I found that I had neglected to photocopy the various routes to Timbuktu from Chris Scott’s book, Sahara Overland. Now I may need to spend an hour or more in an Internet café analyzing the routes for difficulty (i.e., deep sand), water and fuel availability, and so forth. (Carrying the full, hardcover book would be too much; I photocopied only the information I wanted … or thought I had).

View my Africa packing list ...

In retrospect, I knew dispassionately that I had set off with too much stuff. I rationalized, though, that gear could be disposed of along the way, or shipped back to the U.S. I rationalized, too, that my choice of the Suzuki DR650 had out of the gate saved me more than 30 pounds vs. the motorbike I had ridden through South America, the heavier Kawasaki KLR 650. (I know that's not what the specs say, but some independent testers have come to the conclusion the difference between the DR and pre-'08 KLR is 30 to 40 pounds).

I had opted for soft panniers from Wolfman Luggage, saving probably 25 pounds over the Happy Trail aluminum panniers and steel rack required to mount them that I had run on the KLR. And I had stripped off everything I could from the DR, or replaced stock parts with lighter aftermarket equipment.

Gone were the rear passenger pegs. Stock cable routing equipment I replaced with zip ties. Heavy front and rear turn signals I replaced with small LED lights. The boat anchor of a stock muffler was replaced with a light FMF Q2 pipe. I removed the taillight portion of the rear fender and replaced it with a smaller, lighter DR350 taillight, and fabricated a license plate mount from light aluminum bar.

My aftermarket seat from Renazco Racing was perhaps half the weight of the stock Suzuki seat, and it was so comfortable that I decided to leave my trusty Airhawk seat pad at home, saving more weight and volume. I had removed both kickstand and clutch safety switches, saving a couple of pounds and eliminating potential points of failure.

In a mad scientist mood one night in my garage, I stripped out the heavy steel stock battery box from the DR and fabricated a replacement from aluminum bar. I weighed the difference – 1 pound, 4 ounces. I was feeling pretty happy with myself.

I put the excess equipment into a box. It must have weighed 50 pounds. Six ounces here, eight ounces there, it all added up. Without luggage, the DR felt like a 350cc dirt bike.

Yet there I sat in at a plastic table at the café in Agdz, meditatively poking at my couscous and contemplating my excess of gear and the gear of my riding companions. The Things They Carried, I thought, (with apologies to Tim O'Brien, author of a splendid story of the same name about American soldiers in the Vietnam War).

***
On our first nite outside Lisbon, Geoff and I went out for beers and dinner. We got to talking about packing, and he shared a bit of wisdom he had picked up: “Carry half the stuff and twice the money. You can always buy stuff on the way.”

He meant, of course, things like socks and shirts and soap. Parts for a large cylinder motorcycle are extremely difficult to find in Africa, simply because, outside of South Africa, few large cylinder motorcycles exist. Therefore, you need to carry spare parts, and all the tools required for a field repair. Geoff is nearly fully equipped, save for a chain breaker.

Like me, Geoff has engineered into his ride certain gear he envisions as being useful. He carries a hammer. I never carry a hammer; usually a rock or ratchet or vise grip can be pressed into service if needed. Yet at campsites on rocky ground, struggling to get my tent stakes into the brittle and unyielding earth, I say, “Yo bub, can I borrow that hammer?”

He has an umbrella bungeed up to the rack that supports his Touratech rear panniers. It’s not a little umbrella, but a big tri-color umbrella of blue and white and turquoise with a wooden handle. I spotted the thing the first night we camped out after teaming up in Lisbon.

“Um, dude, why do you have an umbrella?” I chuckled. “You’re expecting rain in the Sahara?” An umbrella seemed like a wholly vestigial piece of equipment for an adventure ride.

Whoa Sunshine, Geoff said. Sure, an umbrella would be handy if it happened to rain, but more importantly, it would provide shade if a flat tire needed to be repaired in the desert. I saw his point. After years of military and bodyguard service in Iraq, the dude knows his deserts.

Later, he would tell Migo and I, “There will come a time, my friends, when you are thankful you’re traveling with an Englishman and his umbrella. How do you think we conquered a third of the world? With guns and umbrellas.”

To the front of a Touratech pannier, Geoff has a little fire extinguisher fastened up. “Bub, a fire extinguisher?” I asked. Never had I heard of an adventure motorcyclist toting a fire extinguisher. Migo noticed the thing as well, and deadpanned, “What do you plan to extinguish with that?”

Once, Geoff had a motorbike start on fire because of some spilled fuel. The next time, he would be prepared.

Geoff has a stuffed desert rat cable-tied to his front fender, owing to his years in Iraq, and has great fun scaring little kids with it. Squirreled away at the bottom of a pannier is a can of stew he bought in Portugal. The stew is barely edible, he reported, having tried a first can at a campsite. It’s his emergency food ration. Only in the most desperate of circumstances would he have the stomach to actually open the thing. If he does have to open it, he has a large bottle of ketchup to smother the foul taste.

“A bottle of ketchup?” I asked.

He regarded me with a smirk. “It transforms a meal, mate,” he said.

Soldiers, British and otherwise, take pride in finely polished boots, so naturally, Geoff is packing a tin of boot polish. It’s important to protect your boots, he says, because boots are what protect your feet. He hasn’t used it much yet, though, opting instead for a cheap shoeshine in larger cities by men who approach us at cafes.

I like my boots dirty. The accumulated grit and sand and mud tells a story of the ride.

***
We roared through the Anti-Atlas Mountains towards the small town of Foum Zguid. The day was a perfect 82 degrees F. The tarmac road was smooth and sure and the sweepers wide. Able to see what was around the corner, I slalomed fast and hard and fell into a rhythm with the percussive thumping of the big 650cc single. Rugged, reddish mountains limned the horizon, and I marinated myself in the lovely vistas and even lovelier day.

I stopped to enjoy the view at one mountain pass, and a man tried to sell me a lizard.

“Where am I going to put him?” I said in English, laughing. “On top of my tires? In my helmet? What in the world would a motorcycle traveler do with a lizard? I already have too much stuff!”

Farther along, we hit a set of steep mountains with hairpin turns. The road was little used and in disrepair. As in the vicinity of Ouarzazate, the road was littered with sand and gravel patches. The corners were tight. I feathered off the throttle – expect the unexpected -- and found Geoff and Migo waiting for me at an intersection 30 miles down the road.

I had opted not to fuel up in Agdz, while the others had. My glance at the Michelin map showed a sizable enough town called Tazenakht about 60 miles away. I could fuel up there. Except I had misread the map slightly – Tazenakht was in fact 12 miles out of our way.

If I rode straight to Foum Zguid, it would be nearly 330 miles since my last fuel stop. I should have enough fuel with my oversized 8-gallon fuel tank, I figured. If not, Geoff was carrying a siphon and pump that we could use to cannibalize fuel from one of their bikes.

For the South America ride, I had carried a fuel jerrican. I built a cage from aluminum bar and fastened up a Swiss-made Sigg aluminum bottle to the rear pannier. It held just 2 liters, but it saved me three times when I had run out of fuel. For Africa, in the sprit of light makes right, I decided against a jerrican. And here now was an occasion in which it might have proven useful.

I was in the lead in case I did run out. I spotted a group of motorcyclists parked along the road. I stopped to check them out. They were from Holland and doing some offroad adventures with enduro bikes. Their luggage was enviably minimalist. They had just come from Foum Zguid.

One of the Dutchmen told me, “We wanted to get fuel there, but the fuel station was closed. I’m not sure if there’s fuel there or not. There might at a store on the left about 500 meters past the gas station selling fuel in bottles, but we decided to press on.”

If there was no fuel in Foum Zguid, we’d have a problem. The next town, Tata, was nearly 90 miles to the west.

We percolated into Foum Zguid and a small crowd formed around us. It was a small, poor, ordinary town with one main intersection and no stop signs. I asked about fuel. From the Dutchman’s report, I expected to buy bottles, but in fact there was a hand-operated fuel pump mounted a bit curiously atop a sidewalk in the center of town.

We fueled up (at a reasonable enough black-market markup) and consorted with the locals and debated whether to press on to Tata. It was getting late. We were hot and tired. Tata would be nearly two hours away, ensuring a twilight if not later arrival.

No beer was sold in Foum Zguid, but neither could it be found in Tata, according to a carpet salesman who spoke improbably good English. That sealed it. Foum Zguid it was. A campsite and auberge, or inn, was just down the road.

The accommodations were splendid. The owner, a polite and diminutive fellow named Abdelhamid, offered Berber-style huts with a few straw-mattress beds in each for $6 USD. Palm trees grew in the sandy courtyard. And there was a plastic table with chairs, which delighted me immensely.

Not since Portugal have I camped with the benefit of a proper picnic table, forced instead to grovel about like a lesser beast with my gear atop the ground and the dirt. It’s wholly uncivilized camping, if you ask me, and I made light of the absence of a picnic table at nearly every campsite.

“You and your picnic tables,” Geoff needled me. “What we ought to do is get you a picnic table and a little trailer and you can tow it along behind you.”

Ha! Like I need to be toting more gear.

With its aesthetically delightful Berber-style huts, the auberge was like pulling up to an American motel with the doors fronting to the parking lot. Perfect for motorcycle travel. Humping your heavy, unnecessary gear up a flight or two of stairs is one of the most disagreeable aspects of adventure motorcycling. As we unloaded, and Geoff summoned Migo and I over to his bike.

“Gentlemen,” he announced. “Now here is one trick piece of kit.” He extracted from a rear pannier a clear bag with something colorful inside. “I’ve never learned how to do this, and I’ve always wanted to. Someday, somewhere down the road, I’m going to teach myself how.”

He held up the bag for our inspection. I said, “A juggling kit?!”

“Fucking A, dude!” Geoff replied. “This one piece of kit can provide endless hours of entertainment.”

“It might even get you laid,” I said.

He considered this. A smile crossed his lips. “You’ve got a point, Sunshine,” he said.

We continued unpacking and chatting with a group of German motorcyclists camped in tents on the same property. Migo had apples in his tankbag and offered us some. Later, Geoff complained, ”Arg, I’ve got a piece of apple stuck between my teeth.” His mouth contorted as he tried to dislodge the thing. “Bloody hell, this is going to bug the fuck out of me.”

“Now here,” I said, “is a truly essential piece of adventure motorcycling gear.” I retrieved a small container from my tankbag. “Toothpick?”

“You’ve got toothpicks? Dude! And in a little Jack Daniels bottle, nice touch.”

***

Geoff and Migo strolled into town. I remained at the campsite, admiring the romantic setting of palm trees and Berber huts and watching the nearly full moon grow brighter in the desert sky. Abdelhamid had made tea. I sat at the plastic table and sipped the hot and sweet and minty beverage and took inventory of my gear.

The "Bike Krutch" would stay. I bought this piece of equipment from Aerostich to serve in lieu of a center stand, saving me maybe 13 pounds. It's made by some joker in Florida who takes little pride in his work, evidently, because it more or less fell apart after several uses. I fortified it with a new brace and lengthened it and it serves well to prop up either front or rear wheel.

The camp stove and its fuel bottle, they would have to go. I had brought the stove principally to boil water for coffee, as it’s downright dangerous for me to operate a motor vehicle at high speed without being adequately caffeinated. In desperate straits, I could do as I had in the past – put some instant coffee in a water bottle, shake vigorously, hold nose, and drink.

Without the stove, I would have little use for the two packages of freeze-dried Mountain House chicken teriyaki I had bought at REI in a bout of irrational shopping exuberance. Now what about my PacSafe? It’s a lockable steel mesh bag used to secure one’s possessions, and it’s freaking heavy. It expected it to come in handy in a cheap and sketchy hotel, to lock up my tankbag and its essential contents to a plumbing fixture, or something. Does its value outweigh its weight? To be determined.

I had extra bungee cords. Motorcycling around the U.S., I had always believed that one can never have too many bungees. Geoff felt the same. But sure enough, I had too many bungees. I had a pair of external speakers to use with my iPod. They would go. So right, I had an iPod. In fact, I had bought it expressly for this ride.

An iPod! On one hand I had counseled myself that light makes right, and on the other I went out and willfully acquired a completely unnecessary piece of equipment. It could go back to the U.S.; my head was full of songs that I could play if I liked, or even if I didn’t like. (Certain songs will manifest themselves unbidden, to my great consternation. Why o why o why am I cursed with the virtually eidetic memory of Karen Carpenter signing Top of World?)

On some other ride, up to Wyoming let’s say, the iPod and the external speakers can lullaby me with some Willie Nelson or Lynyrd Skynyrd around a campfire at a proper picnic table. Also gone would be my small Grundig shortwave radio; it works well, but English-language shortwave broadcasts are fast disappearing in favor of Internet radio. On most occasions I cannot tune in an English-language shortwave broadcast. It’s virtually useless.

I had a spare camera, that would stay … what would Africa be without photographs? I had a set of tiedowns; they too would stay. Tiedowns are the quintessential bit of adventure motorcycling gear. They had been an immense help three times in South America, once securing motorbikes in the front of a bucket loader to cross the overflown Rio Grande south of Uyuni, Bolivia.

My tiedowns for Africa were new and custom-made and lighter than those available at an auto parts shop. I bought at REI industrial-strength carabiners with serrated edges that can grab a strap as fiercely as junkyard dog. I hacksawed then in certain places so they would fit on parts of the bike, used the straps from conventional (heavy) tiedowns, and voila – I had saved about three pounds.

I have a pair of Wrangler jeans with belt. Those will go to charity; I can get by with my convertible (into shorts) NorthFace pants and the pair of olive-green shorts I’d bought in Brazil that bear the amusing name Jingler. Some packing choices, I realized, were just plain dumb. Why did I bring two pairs of cold-weather motorcycling gloves, and a pair of woolen winter socks? For the mountains in Morocco and South Africa, I had reasoned, but in retrospect their weight and volume far outweighed their prospective utility.

Certain things I could not, or would not, do without. For instance, my international electricity converter and my mosquito net and see-through mesh mosquito suit, which rather preposterously resembles ladies’ lingerie. The mosquito net is a protection against malaria, as are the medications Doxycycline and Malarone, which themselves weigh something and consume precious space, but which I dare not do without.

When I do dispose of or ship gear, I realized, I could also lose the backpack in which I carried the overflow. Soon enough I will be down to my lockable SW Motech Trax top box, SealLine dry bag, and my Wolfman panniers and tank bag.

I had a French phrasebook along with my French dictionary. I could live without the French phrasebook, as well as my Moroccan Arabic phrasebook, a perfect waste of $6.50. Those I discarded at the Foum Zguid auberge, along with a Chapstick, some extra Rolaids, a broken carabiner, documentation from my flight to Lisbon, and various other flotsam and jetsam.

I left them on the plastic table and as we rode off the next day, and I wondered if the hospitable Abdelhamid would wonder if I had forgotten them.

***
Migo’s kit is impressively spare, especially for a first-time adventure tourer. Before leaving, he arrayed all his gear in orderly fashiun and made some of the tough choices that I did not -- he has no camp stove, for instance.

Besides Tao Te Ching, he’s carrying Ted Simon’s Dreaming of Jupiter, a sequel to the seminal Jupiter’s Travels, about the author’s around-the-world ride on a Triumph in the early 1970s. (I took some solace in that Simon’s photos of both his 1970s Triumph and the BMW he rode around the world in the early 2000s at age 70. Admittedly, he too had overpacked. “I never learn,” he wrote).

I’ve got Shadow of the Sun, a collection of dispatches from Africa by the late Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski. Geoff has The Three Rings of War, a Japanese military book written in the 14th century. When the time comes, we can trade.

We can all live without books, of course. Yet it is wonderful to have a good book to read while traveling, especially for an extended time and at a campsite or cheap hotel without TV. In South America, I had saved Che Guevara’s Motorcycle Diaries until I truly needed it, on a six-day boat ride down the Amazon River, from Belem to Manaus. The book saved me from endless hours of crushing boredom.

One thing we cannot live without is tires. We are all carrying spare knobbies, as it is nearly impossible to find tires for a large-cylinder motorbike in Africa. Instead, we lug the things along like rubber balls and chains, cursing their weight and inconvenience every day.

Riding Morocco, it struck me as ironic that it could be nearly impossible to find a particular rubber product on a continent that King Leopold of Belgium had raped for its rubber, in the Congo in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Hundreds of thousands of Congolese had died in service to the King of the Belgians, virtually enslaved to harvest rubber from vines, among other toil, as the Industrial Age got into full swing and Henry Goodyear invented the pneumatic tire.

Another irony is that the weight of the spare tires makes it impractical to do much offroad riding. On a sandy road in particular, you want the bike as light as possible. The only way to ride sand without a spill is at speed. The bike’s front tire dances unnervingly atop the sand, but the bike usually stays upright with adequate throttle. Our rubber balls and chains, along with excess gear, relegates us to the tarmac for now.

The flip side to the things they carried is the things they didn’t. One reason that Migo’s kit is impressively spare is that he opted against certain spare parts. He entered Africa without an extra front inner tube, and later would order one to be shipped via DHL to the Senegalese capital, Dakar, along with an extra set of tires. Unlike Geoff and I, Migo did not bring spare clutch or brake or shift levers. If his shift lever happens to break in a fall, we may need to improvise by putting my vise grip into emergency service.

Migo is a software developer, writing Web applications in the open source Ruby language, but he didn’t carry a laptop, which surprised me somewhat. Nor did he carry anti-malaria medication, which could come back to haunt him – the three of us, actually, if we need to tend to a stricken German. He’d had a bad experience in Central America with Larium (it often induces nightmares) and decided against any sort of malarial prophylactic.

You make your choices. You choose your devil. The packing never ends.

***

I’ve been dreaming of high school. This weekend, my school, Mohawk Central School in upstate New York, is holding a so-called mega-reunion. Anyone who ever attended or worked there is welcome. Many hundreds from many decades were expected.

The event triggered flurries of emails among classmates who had not been in contact for years. A girl I’d had a crush on in elementary school had phoned my parents’ home, looking for me. When my father told she had called, I felt a little schoolboy crush flicker for an instant in my heart, and chuckled at the silliness of it. It would have been wonderful to attend, as I had had a marvelous time in high school.

I had been voted second place as both class clown and class wiseguy, second to a guy who would earn a living as a singer in a local hard-rock band called Alpha Centauri. Ah, the memories. In the Sahara night, with the stars twinkling above, they were as clear and hard as a diamond, and came to me in dreams.

Instead of consorting with long-lost classmates at the reunion, I was in Foum Zguid, Morocco, with Geoff Shingleton. Geoff and I made our way to a shabby restaurant and ordered a chicken dinner. The restaurant had no chicken, or any sort of meat, on hand. The owner trotted down the street to a butcher shop and returned with a slab of meat, which he claimed to be from a cow. Fine, go ahead, cook it up, we said.

About 10 cats gathered around, mewling in hunger, as the meat sizzled on a sidewalk barbecue. The owner tried to shoo them away. It’s fine, I said, leave them be. I fed them and fed myself and sipped a glass of red wine we’d managed to procure from a shop next door.

I thought of my friends and classmates from Mohawk High School, Class of 1979, at that very hour also eating and drinking and laughing and reminiscing, in a place far, far away.

The No-Good Dancing Donkey

Ouarzazate, Morocco * October 11, 2008

I was up before 7 a.m., with the peacocks. The early morning was bright and warm, the thin cirrus clouds above a preternatural pink from the rising sun. The sunlight seems different here in Africa, with an almost otherworldly luminescence. I had noticed it before, and now at dawn the phenomenon was on full display. I rubbed my eyes and looked about. The colorful birds pecked about the Marrakesh campsite, looking for breakfast.

At the tent next to mine, an older French woman was making tea and feeding bread to the peacocks. I greeted her, and she smiled and offered me a cup of tea. Her young Moroccan male friend emerged from their tent.

“Tu ronfle!” she told me, laughing. She was in her 60s, a faded beauty with short grey hair and big silver earrings and a purple smock. They were camped here because their car had broken down and was being repaired in Marrakesh. The young Moroccan man laughed as well. I stood there perplexed.

“Beaucoup ronflement!” the woman declared, and they both laughed. My confused look told them I had no idea what they were talking about. I sipped the warm and sweet tea.

“Honnnnnk-honnnnnk-honnnnnk,” the French woman mimicked, inhaling and exhaling, and it was clear – they’d heard me snoring in the night. I apologized and she waved it off, and despite my nocturnal racket, gave me her business card and invited us to camp a night outside their home in Zagora, in the Atlas Mountains.

I thanked her and put her card in my wallet. We were heading that way, into the mountains, towards Ouarzazate. I was looking forward to some mountain riding and scenery, because only in Morocco and South Africa would we cross terrain of any appreciable altitude. Otherwise, Africa would be mostly, and somewhat dishearteningly, flat. We were caffeinated, fed and on the road at 9 a.m., each of us with handsome camel stickers for our motorbikes that Geoff had found at the campsite store.

The road towards Ouarzazate climbed gradually. We passed through broken-down small towns full of donkeys and men and boys who greeted us with waves or a thumbs-up. After a gradual ascent, the road corkscrewed dramatically up steep inclines and down into
foliated valleys, to rise again towards plateaus that obliged a stop for the marvelous views. The rugged multicolored canyons and flat-topped mesas were straight off a southern Utah postcard.

At these plateau pull-offs, men sold rocks full of colorful crystals, pink and blue and purple and green, a geological novelty in these parts. I tried to explain I could not afford to carry the weight of their very nice crystal rocks, but it was fruitless. They shoved the rocks in my chest, imploring a purchase, and only when I offered a few dirham for a photo did they leave me in peace.

Road conditions deteriorated as we climbed. The pavement narrowed. Tarmac was broken. Patches of sand and gravel awaited across many corners. In a hairpin turn, I would expect to encounter a bus or a car half in my lane, and indeed, numerous vehicles cornered recklessly over the center, quite rudely onto my turf.

I maneuvered the motorbike in the right one-third of my lane, eased off the throttle and kept a couple of fingers poised over the front brake lever. I recalled the mantra from my near head-on collision with a school bus around a corner on a dirt road in Honduras in 2004: Here comes the school bus. Here comes the school bus.

And I recalled the name of a story my mother used to read to me when I was a little boy -- "The No-Good Dancing Donkey." Donkeys don't ordinarily dance, but if I encountered one around a cornerand it was dancing, it would be decidedly no good. Expect the unexpected.

Ahead of me, Geoff hit the gas and took the corners hard. He would extend a foot in preparation for what’s called a power slide – the bike hits a patch of sand, and you right it by force of your heavily armored foot. In theory. It’s a technique used in off-road riding; in a tarmac corner at 65 mph, I suspect its efficacy would be considerably diminished.

I watched him with a mixture of amusement and alarm. I wondered, Why was he riding so aggressively? Was he showing off, or did he mean to power-slide his way around the world? Within minutes, he had torn past a slow-moving car and was out of sight.

Migo percolated behind me, closely. I could see him nudged up in my left-side rear view mirror. He’s not gonna … nah. From our correspondence, I had developed an idea that he would be a deliberate, even cautious rider. Yet as I took a corner, Migo ripped past, over a white line, passing both me and the truck ahead me. Imprudently …. even recklessly, I thought. I felt a flash of shock, so abrupt and unexpected was Migo’s pass.

I could not see what lurked around the corner past the truck … could Migo? In minutes, he too was out of sight.

***
On the long straightaways or rolling sweepers from Casablanca south, our riding styles were similar. We three proceeded at 70 or 75 mph … I would have happily gone faster, 80+ mph, except the motorbike’s top end with its 14-tooth sprocket is effectively 75 mph. In dense urban traffic, too, we largely rode the same aggressive pace and stuck together. In modest traffic, they would lose me, as I saw no point in weaving sportively through light traffic to gain a few minutes.

Now in these rough Moroccan mountains, I found myself considerably behind my riding partners. I began to question myself. Was I riding too slowly? Was I a chicken-shit? I watched my speedometer in the corners …. 35, 40, 45, 50, 55, 60, 65 mph, depending on the severity of the curve and how far ahead I could see. No, I told myself, I’m not riding too slowly. I’m riding solidly.

It’s different in the U.S. In Montana or Tennessee or Arizona or any mountainous terrain, you can be fairly confident that clean, unobstructed tarmac awaits you around a corner. Over the years, you cultivate a sense of speed and risk and reward. The risk is nominal, and the reward from swooping into a sharp uphill turn, carving a canyon, leaning the bike low and fast and hard into a turn, eliciting a broad grin from the thrill of it all … well, that’s a lot of what motorcycling is about.

Still, even in the U.S., you have to expect the unexpected. I was riding in Montana, north to Glacier National Park, two-up with my girlfriend on pillion and loaded with touring gear. The road was rural and the day was rainy. I leaned my big 1100cc V65 Honda Sabre into a downhill turn at probably 45 mph, and voowhooooomp! -- the front tire lost purchase, skidded frighteningly, then grabbed the road. Then the rear tire did the same thing, except by then I had corrected the bike from the first slip, counter to the slip that would follow.

Voowhooooomp! The rear tire regained its traction, and I just about soiled my Levis keeping the big bike upright and out of the ditch. Left, too much, back right, too much, argh! We careered wildly across both lanes, skirted the left side ditch, and I brought the bike under control -- it was done.

I stopped, heart pounding, suddenly damp with sweat, and walked back to assess the unexpected thing that had nearly caused a nasty crash. It had seen it, but there was nothing I could do at speed. It was a metal cow catcher, lain at the bottom of a hilly corner by a road-builder oblivious to the peril it would pose to a motorcyclist on a damp and rainy day.

In Morocco and throughout Africa, hazards would be far more abundant. Chances were good the hazard would be something wholly unexpected. Back in San Francisco, my driveway exited onto a sometimes-busy sidewalk. The exit was narrow, and only by creeping judiciously ahead could you be certain you wouldn’t hit someone.

“Gotta watch out for the old Asian lady on a skateboard,” I would tell my girlfriend. “I mean, something completely unexpected.”

It’s them, I concluded, Geoff and Migo, they’re riding too fast. Worse, perhaps they’ve begun some sort of contest, each daring the other to corner harder and faster. I worked out the acronym in my head. S.T.F.F.C. – Speed Too Fast for Conditions.

And I was forced to recall a rule drilled into the head of junior motorcyclists – ride at your own pace, not your partners’.

***
Riding at a workmanlike pace, too, I could better enjoy the splendid scenery of the Atlas Mountains. The altimeter on my GPS climbed to over 6,000 feet and the air grew cool. The tankbag thermometer read 60 F. I turned on the heated grips and ascended further. The road crested atop a plateau with that top of the world feeling that I had always found so bewitching. It was like Tibet, or the Bolivian altiplano, or the Top of the World Highway in Canada’s Yukon Territory.

A large stream ran fast and hard on the rock-strewn terrain to the left, at the base of a steep and bare mountainside of exposed rock. A hundred or more sheep grazed on the ample grass. I pulled over to don my winter riding gloves and a long-sleeve shirt beneath my riding jacket. A shepherd was walking down the other side of the road and came over to greet me. We shook hands and I asked his name. Mohammed, he said. Everyone here is named Mohammed.

He wore a maroon ski cap and a striped brown robe of coarse fabric. His tanned face was cradled in a clean white fabric. Les moutons, I said, pointing to the sheep and pleased to have remembered the word from my French study with the Rosetta Stone software. He nodded and looked at me as if to say, “Is that all this joker to say for himself – ‘the sheep?’”

I apologized for my bad French and offered him a cigarette. We watched the sheep amble past, baaahing in concert. We listened to the stream babble. I asked the distance to Ouarzazate. He shrugged. The GPS showed about 50 miles in a straight line, and I bid Mohammed farewell and found Geoff and Migo waiting for me down the road.

We set up camp at a site on the edge of town and made our way to a pizza restaurant in the center for dinner. As I sat perusing the menu, I spotted Geoff 30 yards away next to a set of motorcycles, two BMWs and an Italian Aprilia, chatting with one of their riders.

“Remember these guys?” Geoff said. “From Portugal?” Ah yes -- we’d run into four British riders bound for Morocco back at a fuel stop in Portugal. But now I saw only three motorcycles. “Where’s your fourth?” I asked the Brit.

“Ah, Jonathan,” he said. “Too bad, that. He hit a scooter guy back in Tinehir. Jonathan was OK, but the scooter guy went head over heels. An ambulance was there, the police – it shook him up pretty bad. He should be back in England … well, right about now.” Jonathan had paid 50 Euro on the spot to get out of the mess without further ado.

I remembered Jonathan. He was a short fellow with a video camera and had interviewed Geoff and I about our travels for some sort of documentary. I recalled, too, that at that travel stop in Portugal at which we’d met the Brits, Geoff told me that I’d very nearly been struck by a car.

I’d made a pass on a four-lane road. I had checked behind, and seeing a white car in the far distance, judged it safe to pass. But according to Geoff, “That boy was moving. Maybe 180, 190 kilometers an hour.” That’s almost 120 mph. “He came right up your backside. I thought he was going to slam the brakes and spin it. You almost spent your day in the hospital, mate.”

I had ridden away from that fuel stop chastened and counting my good fortune. My mirrors didn’t extend far enough for a full view of what was behind me, and I would have to take that doubly into account. I didn’t expect a car to be running 120 mph behind me. It was unexpected, improbable. From there on, I would expect it. I wasn’t in Kansas anymore.

***
The next morning, we returned the same downtown strip in Ouarzazate for breakfast. I made fast friends with a shop merchant, and purchased from him a handsome silver bracelet. I’d been in the market for one, and it was a beauty, even if it was $25 USD. The merchant’s father arrived at the little shop on a weathered old scooter. The bike had a couple of stickers on it, and I retrieved an Obama ’08 sticker from my tankbag to give to him.

“Obama,” I said. “Le president suivant du Etats Unis!” Father and son nodded enthusiastically, expressed contempt for George Bush, and we ceremoniously affixed the sticker on the old man’s bike.

As we buttoned up and prepared to ride off, I decided to mention riding styles to Geoff and Migo. I liked them both, they were great and fun riding partners, and was concerned over their hellbent pace in these subpar conditions. At least I would feel better for getting it off my chest.

“You know,” I said, “I think you’re both riding too fast. Speed too fast for conditions. Out here, who knows what’s around the corner. A sand patch, a truck half in your lane, or a two-peckered billy goat. Me, I try to expect the unexpected. A cowpie, a billy goat …”

“A two-peckered one,” Geoff said.

“Exactly,” I said. “It can be something unusual, even bizarre. Migo, yesterday you passed me over a white line in corner. Frankly, I was a little pissed. Riding South America, five of my friends – count ‘em, five – went down. Most in corners. I don’t want to have to be scraping one of you guys up.”

Migo thought for a second. “I’ve been doing a lot of racing in the Alps,” he said.

I asked, “Anybody have any close calls yesterday?” In fact, they had. Geoff ended at the precipice of a cliff after his gearing stuttered while passing a truck. It was only 10 feet down, he said, but 10 feet is a long way on a bike. Migo found himself in uncomfortable proximity to a car at speed.

And that was that. I had said what I wanted to say; now it was time to ride. But regardless of what anyone had to say, the cardinal rule would ultimately prevail – ride at your own pace, be it fast, solid, or slow.

It's All About the Ride

Marrakesh, Morocco * October 9, 2008

TK, a few pix for now.

Geoff showed me a trick of how he could stand on my head without falling off.

These boys at the main Marrakesh square can hawk tourists and sizzle up supper with equal skill.

A great feed, and no one got sick.

The guidebook said to look for snakecharmers in Marrakesh, but the only snakes we encountered were the touts and merchants.

Moon over Marrakesh.

The Tarantella

Casablanca, Morocco * October 8, 2008
I had installed a 14-tooth front sprocket on the Suzuki enduro for better low-end torque on the dirt and mud and sand roads of Africa. It turns out that the potent little punch the 14-tooth sprocket delivers in second and third gears is useful as well in the crazed traffic of a large Moroccan city.

The traffic is thick and fast and reckless and rude. Horns honk, vehicles dart, and a blast of black smoke from a bus or truck can leave your face soiled with soot. Drivers vie for the slightest advantage, the risk of a dented fender or a broken pedestrian foot be damned. Little scooters and mopeds whine along the right side, then buzz into traffic at will. Pedestrians walk, trot, run and sprint from one side to the other. Stop signs and red lights may or may not be obeyed.

Yet there’s a rhythm to the thing. There’s an order in the chaos. It’s as if the traffic is an organism unto itself, each of its constituents flowing with an inexplicable grace. Accidents do happen, but the near-flawless fluidity with which the traffic flows is quite arresting, when you stop and watch it – or insert yourself into it, on a heavily loaded adventure motorbike.

It’s not unlike a dance in which the principal objective is for the dancers to come close, but never touch one another. The tarantella, I call it.

***

I have two styles of urban riding in foreign cities. In modest traffic, I ride defensively. I see little advantage in tearing around a stopped car to gain 30 seconds on my destination, while a pedestrian or a chicken decides whether or not to cross the road. It’s all about risk and reward. The reward is nominal, if not negligible. The risk of smacking, or getting smacked, increases exponentially with speed.

Geoff is the opposite. He rides hard and fast in modest traffic, be it on the outskirts of a large city or in the middle of a medium-sized one.

But in heavy urban traffic, riding aggressively pays off. Hesitation or indecision can invite disaster. You have to participate in the dance. You have to do the tarantella. Pump the horn and flash the high beams and signal your intentions with your left hand.

All your senses are on full. Sight, sound, intuition. Hit the throttle and accelerate hard, because traffic, like nature, abhors a vacuum. That’s where the punchy 14-tooth sprocket, along with the rejetted carburetor and cut airbox on my Suzuki, pays dividends. Keep your right hand and foot poised over the brakes, because you will inevitably need them in a hurry.

The mad rush hour traffic of Casablanca challenged me to recall the urban riding skills I had cultivated in large South American cities. As we approached Casablanca from the north, darkness fell and traffic thickened as it funneled toward the city center. Ahead of me, Geoff weaved through the obstacle course, standing tall on his Yamaha XT’s pegs.

He wears a Zune MP3 player while riding and dances along to the beat in heavy urban traffic. His head bobs and weaves and his shoulders dip and his hips gyrate. He’s a regular comic spectacle, a reject from TV’s Dancing with the Stars reality show. I’ve had to train myself to not watch him, his histrionics can be so distracting. According to Geoff, there’s a method to his madness.

“It’s good exercise. My arms, my shoulders, my ass get stiff, and dancing looses them up,” he told me. “And it’s partly about safety, mate. People see me and slow down to watch. I saw one lady take out her cell phone and shoot pictures of me.”

We parked in front of the Hyatt in downtown Casablanca to take a break from the white-knuckle urban riding and find our location on the Lonely Planet map. The GPS is useful only for its compass in foreign cities; the Garmin WorldMap supplies no street-level detail. The Hyatt was probably $200 or $300 USD a night. Our destination was a side street hotel in the Lonely Planet guide for one-tenth the price, but to get there we’d have to make all the right turns through a maze of streets in the dwindling light, with no visible street signs.

“Pretty crazy riding,” I said. “Back in South America, I had the misunderstanding there was a Latin dance called the tarantella in which the objective was for the partners to come close but never touch each other. Turned out that was wrong, in the tarantella the dancers do touch, but I love that name for riding this sort of traffic. It’s like a dance. The tarantella.”

Geoff nodded in appreciation. He inhaled sharply, as if of his own adrenaline. “I love riding these cities,” he said. “Freaking love it.”

We watched the traffic dance. A bearded man with a turban for a helmet buzzed past on a rusted old moped. Little red taxis squirted like grapefruit seeds into roundabouts. Pedestrians slowed to eye the uncommon sight of two large adventure motorbikes parked at the curb. I watched one jaywalker progress across the street, stopping, hopping across one lane, then another, then another, as if in a video game.

“Ready, dude?” Geoff said. We geared up for our final assault on the hotel destination.

It was fruitless. We had counted the number of blocks on the Lonely Planet map and turned as planned, but no hotel was in sight. We pulled over once again, this time in a
darkened neighborhood. I trotted across the street to check a street name sign. When I returned, Geoff was talking with a cab driver who had spotted the bikes and pulled over.

“Sunshine here says he’ll take us to the hotel for 20 dirham,” Geoff said, jerking a thumb at the guy. That’s about $2 USD, and well worth it to me. Except, according to the cab driver, the hotel we had in mind had no parking garage. But he knew one that did.

Hotel Volubilis was about 10 blocks away, on a zigzag course that we would have been hard-pressed to find ourselves on the motorbikes, in traffic, in the dark, without the benefit of street signs. In front, a solicitous young bellhop named Nahib in a long maroon robe and sequined red fez welcomed us with jaunty cheer. We stood about and relaxed, unpacking and relishing the day’s adventures, while men from the hotel and the neighborhood came by to look.

I’m an American. He’s English. We’re riding to Cape Town, South Africa. The bike is a 650cc Suzuki. It cost $5400 USD brand new. Time and again we answer the same questions, and with a bit of practice I can say it all in French.

We shared a room for about $45 USD, pricier than we like, but a lesser evil that an aggravating and treacherous snipe hunt for a suitable hotel through the darkened streets of Casablanca.

***

I turned 47 years old in Casablanca. I must be getting old, because I’d forgotten how old I was. A week earlier, I had told Geoff I was 47. Bah, I was only 46. They say the memory is the first thing to go. Birthday dinner consisted of a tasty rotisserie chicken at a cheap outdoor café and a few beers at a bar broadcasting African wildlife programs on its flat screen TVs, not the bar, I regret to report, that Humphrey Bogart had made famous.

Sipping a beer, I got to thinking about Geoff having been pissed on by a cow and fell into a hilarious laughing fit, which he abided with good humor for a while until he said, “All right, for fuck’s sake!”

The next afternoon, we took a cab to the Hassan II Mosque. It’s the third largest mosque in the world and can accommodate up to 100,000 worshippers. It was built in the 1980s and 1990s and has a retractable roof and incredibly ornate tiling.

We walked back through Casablanca. A German rider was to meet us that evening. His name is Migo. He’s a software programmer. Migo and I had written back and forth for months about riding from Morocco to Cape Town after getting in touch via Horizons Unlimited.

Geoff and I returned to Hotel Volubilis by 5:30 p.m. and there was a big KTM 950 Adventure parked out front. Migo had arrived, and, I noted with great amusement, he wore virtually the same black and tan Hein Gericke riding suit as Geoff.

“You two ladies should really consult each other before you show up in the same dress to the same dinner party,” I said.

Pigeon Shit and Cow Piss | Lost in the Kasbah

Rabat, Morocco * October 6, 2008

Traffic intensified as we approached Rabat, the 1.7-million pop. capital of Morocco. It was mid-afternoon, and we could expect an early arrival and a cheap hotel in the middle of town. I sped along a four-lane road. The spectacle in front of me obliged me to ease off the throttle.

Atop a mid-size truck puttering along at 40 mph were a half-dozen or so cattle. Someone had built a cage on top of the truck’s cab, and the cattle were swaying back and forth like trance dancers eight or 10 feet above me. I chuckled at the ingenuity of the thing, and began a pass on the left.

A splatter of liquid hit my helmet faceshield, and I looked up. For Pete’s sake! I thought, a cow is taking a piss! From the corner of my right eye, I could see a heavy stream of urine as I accelerated past, the piss virtually horizontal in the wind.

A few minutes later, I stopped at a red light. Geoff pulled up alongside me. He was apoplectic. ”Did you see those cows on top of that truck, mate?” he hollered through his helmet. I did, I said, and started to say I’d caught a little piss from one of them. He beat me to it.

“One of the fuckers pissed all over me!” he exclaimed. “For fuck’s sake, all over my helmet, down my face, all over my jacket!” He spat in disgust and patted the front of his Hein Gericke Tuareg riding jacket. “I’m all wet!” Poor bloke, his helmet doesn’t have a faceshield. His bare face took the brunt of the bovine insult.

I couldn’t help but howl with laughter. “He got me just a little bit,” I said. “I didn’t even think he might have got you.”

“Bloody hell!” Geoff yelled.

The day before, I’d had my own, less traumatic, welcome from Morocco wildlife. Geoff and I had crossed the Ceuta border into Morocco with four Brit motorcyclists, including Peter Cullen, a 68-year-old retired probation officer from Britain on a BMW 650 Dakar with whom I had corresponded via Horizons Unlimited. Peter was in the lead, and as we approached the border he heeded a little guy in a striped grey robe who motioned us emphatically to the side.

The guy’s name was Ahmed. He had a chubby face and a whisper of a mustache. Ahmed made money helping foreign motorists negotiate immigration and customs procedures, and Peter more or less signed the bunch of us on with the guy.

I enjoy playing along with guys like Ahmed. A smile, a laugh, a friendly hand on the shoulder, and mon ami – my friend – is both entertaining and effective, in my experience. Sure, he may try to swindle you out of a few Moroccan dirham, but if you’re careful, you’ll pay $1 or $2 USD for a helpful service, and can gather some useful intel because guys like Ahmed usually speak English, French, and a few other languages.

By the time all six of foreign riders had cleared immigration and customs, I had a good rapport with Ahmed (except he would not allow a photo). As I buttoned up the bike and prepared to officially enter Africa, I gave him a grave look. “I have a complaint,” I told him with mock seriousness. He looked mildly alarmed.

“You told us to park here, beneath this overpass,” I said. “And look here.” I pointed up. A pigeon was perched above. “Now look here.” I pointed to the $300 custom-built Renazco seat on my motorbike. “That pigeon shat on my moto!”

Before he knew how to reply, I laughed and grabbed his shoulder. Then he laughed and drew a packet of tissues from a pocket and quite daintily cleaned the mess, apologizing profusely for the pigeon’s indiscretion.

“Welcome to Morocco, oui Ahmed?”

***

Geoff and I negotiated our way through adrenaline-spiked traffic to the center of Rabat, at the crossroads of the new world and the old. To the south was the new town, with modernist palm tree-lined boulevards and civilized traffic circles and grand administrative edifices and sidewalks lined with sleek cafes and bookstores and cell phone shops and even a McDonald’s.

To the north was the old medina and its kasbah, a sprawling maze of streets and alleys and cul de sacs. A towering fortress wall separated these two worlds, and our hotel, the Hotel du Centre, was smack in the middle. My room was small but clean and cost $12 USD. A hot shower in the shared bathroom was another $1. We humped our considerable luggage, and our spare tires, down an alley, past a politely solicitous beggar lady, up two flights of stairs, and down a long hall.

It took three trips. One guy watches the bikes while the other labors upstairs, cursing the toil. We sweated profusely from the exertion. My tankbag thermometer read 94 F. The pedestrian-only street was lined with cafes. Swarthy, dark-faced men sat implacably at tables, chain-smoking and sipping coffee or tea, the national pastime, it seems, of Morocco.

A police station was just doors away. I had asked a police officer if there was a parking garage nearby at which we could lodge our motorbikes for the night. Instead of telling me a garage was two blocks down on the left, the helpful officer abandoned his post and led me on the two-block walk, chatting in French that I could barely understand, and pointed to the garage. Such Moroccan hospitality would play out time and again over the coming days.

We cleaned up and headed into the medina. It was far larger and more exotic than the small medina in Asilah. Here there were goat’s heads for sale. Or simply goat brains, if you preferred. And almonds and dates and fish and balloons and scarves and herbs and fezes and reading glasses and DVD players. A young man sizzled up sandwiches of hearts and tripe, and I tried half of one. Eh. The other half I gave to a beggar lady and her child.

The medina compels you onward. Its dizzying array of sights and sounds and smells was a Pied Piper that obliged us investigate what was down the next alley, then the next, then the next, until we were hopelessly lost. In the crazy quilt of passages, one’s sense of direction is summarily rendered useless.

For a half hour we wandered about in search of an exit. We seemed to proceed only deeper into the maze. Finally we stopped and sat on a wall to relax. I said, half-kidding, “Dude, we should have brought the GPS.”

It triggered an idea. In fact, Geoff had a little compass fastened up on his watch. And I had a map of the medina in my Lonely Planet book. With compass and map and a few faded signs of street names on the walls, we finally found out way out of the maze. I was beat. “That frigging medina kicked my ass,” I said.

***

We sat on the second floor of a gin joint called Bar du France, which we had happened upon during an evening’s wander through the modern side of Rabat. The smoke was thicker than a Los Angeles smog. Alcohol is outlawed in most municipalities in Morocco, and frowned upon in all, at least by traditionalists. Given the scarcity of bars in Rabat and the city’s secular appetites, Bar du France was packed. Each table was full of people and empty beer bottles. A man next to me asked where I was from and if I spoke French.

“Je suis Americain,” I told him. “Pardon, moi Francais es tres mauvais.”

It didn’t matter that my French sucks. He spoke a little English, and some Spanish, and his friends joined in, and Geoff and I spent well over a half-hour in animated banter with our new buddies. They were in their early 40s, and having a blast. One was a police officer. Another was a pilot in the Morocco military. The third was a businessman. The pilot began talking to me, clasping my hand for a good minute, an affirmation of friendship in Islamic society. He looked me squarely, earnestly in the eye.

“From my heart,” he said, thumping his chest a few times. “From my heart … welcome to Maroc!”

Indeed, the welcome has been warm. I had read of rock-throwing children and hostility towards Westerners, but the only unfriendly gestures I have observed have been a youngster who raised a stick at us from a bridge overpass, and a man who flicked a cigarette rather rudely in Geoff’s direction in front of Rabat’s Hotel du Centre. Instead, we are approached by friendly kids and men (but not women) who inquire about our ride. Sure, some are looking for a handout. Many are not.

Friends had inquired whether I was worried about traveling through Islamic countries in Africa and the threat of kidnapping. The threat is there, I am sure. The famous Paris-Dakar race, through Morocco and Mauritania to Senegal, was canceled in 2008 because of terrorist threats from Al Qaeda; the 2009 race will run through Argentina and Chile.

In Bar du France, the police officer seated himself next to me. He motioned to the two 20-something girls at his table, and towards the large number of women at tables throughout the bar. These women are available, he said in Spanish.

“Por dinero!” I replied with a laugh. For money. He smiled and shrugged his shoulders. No thank you, my friend. Mi novia es mi moto. It wasn’t immediately obvious, but after five or 10 minutes in the bar it became clear that it was an establishment in which ladies of the night plied their trade.

Then Geoff asked if we could take a photo. The idea was evidently appalling – a police officer and a military pilot in a bar full of hookers! – and the gentleman in short order excused themselves for the evening.

Near midnight, I looked out the window of my second-floor hotel room to the pedestrian plaza below. It was quiet. A streetlight cast a jaundiced yellow glow. A feral cat mewled plaintively. A horn beeped in the distance. The day’s trash had been swept into a large, tidy pile directly across the plaza from my room. The trash pile sat there, a punctuation mark on the day.

There was a story in that trash, I thought. A story of the day and the people who had lived it here, of its tumults and surprises and disappointments and cheer. It had been a day much like any other, I imagined. The trash was an ordinary pile of trash. Yet each day and each trash pile was unique, like a snowflake, or a cloud, or a game or chess or a match of golf, I thought.

I recalled the exquisitely understated title to a book I had read on the mid-1970s Angola civil war by a Polish journalist named Ryszard Kapuscinski. The book’s title fit the moment perfectly.

Another Day of Life. I gazed and gazed at the pile of trash, the punctuation mark to another day, and went to sleep.

Pictures of the Wind

Rabat, Morocco * October 5, 2008

The wind along the Mediterranean and Atlantic coasts of Morocco can be hellacious. Riding through the rocky foothills west of Ceuta and south towards the first town of consequence past Tangiers, the 30,000-pop. Asilah, challenged my wind riding skills.

I love riding in a fierce wind. It’s great and exhilarating fun to tackle it aggressively. I liken wind riding to jujitsu, in which each of the competitor’s limbs is available for use as a weapon. That approach is particularly useful when riding through wind-blown mountain stretches with strong buffeting.

Tearing through the gusty sweepers south of Ceuta, I propped my arse up just slightly on the waterproof SealLine bag full of gear bungeed up behind me. I stood just so on the pegs, not tall, but enough to be able to use my feet as maneuvering tools. I spread my hands to the ends of the handlebars, again to improve my control of the motorbike.

The wind punches you, you punch back. If you’re slammed by a gust from the right, your right hand counterpunches with an abrupt countersteer – in other words, you push fairly hard on the right-side handlebars. Simultaneously, you jam your right foot on the peg, towards the ground. The foot is used as a steering tool, in the same manner as when riding a dirt road. At the same time, you’re poised for a sudden, buffeting blast from the left and to repeat the sequence on the opposite side.

On a gusty straightaway, speed is my friend. I’m not sure I could explain the physics of it, but the faster you go (up to 80 or 85 or 90 mph, anyhow), the more stable the bike is. South from Ceuta, the Moroccan terrain flattened and we tore into a strong headwind with liberal buffeting. Hit the throttle, assault the wind head-on, prepare to counterpunch.

I was pushing 75 and 80 mph, the top end for my DR650 with its low-gear front sprocket, and wishing I had some more grunt on the top end. Along the road, wind socks stood at horizontal attention. I guessed the wind to be 35 or 40 mph or so; it is always difficult to tell. The presence of wind socks told me that strong wind is a regular phenomenon here.

The knee is another jujitsu-like weapon available in a strong wind. I tend to reserve it for emergency situations. For instance, if in strong wind I’m motoring past hills and enter a plain, I can expect to get slammed fairly hard from one side or the other. Sometimes, the force can be enough to shove the motorbike over even a full lane, if you’re not ready for it. I keep my knee at the ready, prepared to counterpunch with knee into fuel tank, in concert with hand and foot.

I don’t believe I’ve ever met a rider who enjoys wind. One guy told me he turned around in California’s Sierra Nevada Mountains because the wind was too problematic and unnerving. I rode through a fierce Sierra wind west of Reno in September 2007, with my ex on the back of my big 1100cc 1984 Honda v65 Sabre. We were on the final day of an 18-day cross-country tour. For the first time on that trip, in that wind, Elaine was terrified.

We stopped for lunch in Truckee, and I told her there was little to worry about. But hours later, there was something to worry about … the wind very nearly caused us to go down.

The reason was speed – or lack thereof. The wind that day on the Bay Bridge from Oakland to San Francisco was epically strong. Rush hour traffic was snotted up, and I could proceed no faster than 10 or 15 or 20 mph. At that low speed, keeping the bike upright is more about muscle than finesse. Several times the wind shoved us quite rudely to the right or left, perilously close to cars and trucks. I screamed once inside my helmet, straining with all my strength to keep the bike in my lane: “ARRRRRGGGH!” A lady in the car next to me regarded me with alarm.

Riding wind on a dirt road is another matter entirely. No place on the planet is more notorious for wind than Patagonia, the vast and virtually empty plain in the south of Argentina. When I passed through there in 2005, the lone road south, the fabled Ruta 40, was unpaved. (Paving was in progress then and may be complete by now; alas, another end to high adventure).

Most of Ruta 40 was a fairly thick gravel. Cars and trucks had carved grooves through the gravel that extended straight for many miles, to the horizon and beyond. To ride Ruta 40, you want to stay in a groove, because just inches to the left and right is thick and squirrelly gravel that can put a big bike down like a lightning bolt.

But on a dirt road like Ruta 40 in a strong wind, you can’t go 70 mph (unless you’re a bit of lunatic or a skilled motocross racer, which I decidedly am not) and use speed as a weapon against the wind. I’ll rarely exceed 50 mph on a dirt road; 30 to 40 mph is generally my comfort zone, depending on conditions.

I made the length of Ruta 40 with one spill, owing to clay that was as slippery as a congressman. The combination of wind and gravel and keeping my front tire in the groove was, frankly, some of the most challenging riding I have ever done. Still, I was fortunate. The wind during my ride was never as bad as it might have been.

A couple of times during a roadside break, it lifted my helmet from the right-side mirror and hurled it 20 feet. Numerous times, I strained and fought to keep the tire in the groove against the wind. Had the wind been much stronger, I would have been picking gravel out of my kneepads.

I had read a report by an American journalist on a large tour bus who had watched in horror as the Patagonia wind picked up a small truck and sent it tumbling across the road. A friend a week or so ahead of me on Ruta 40 to Ushuaia had teamed up with a Brazilian rider. He reported in an email: “The wind put the Brazilian down. He is in the hospital. His bike is totaled. His ride is over.”

I recalled that email and the winds of Patagonia as I rode south from Ceuta. It was so long and so many miles ago, it seemed. More than three years, another time and place, and yet the same. The road in front of me, the scenery to my sides, the white noise of the wind inside my helmet, in a foreign country, bound for places unknown.

In all the excitement, I took just one photo on the road to Asilah. No photo, it occurred to me, could capture the depth of experience on this first day on the vast African continent, in all its riotous novelty. It would be like taking pictures of the wind.

***

We stopped at a gas station just north of Asilah for a beverage break. Geoff didn’t relish the wind as I did; one gust, he said, shoved him uncomfortably close to a passing vehicle. “I hate it,” he would say later of the wind. We were both tired. Wind
riding is hard work, both mentally and physically. It was after 4 p.m. The 1.7 million-pop. Moroccan capital of Rabat was said to be 3½ hours to the south.

Asilah was noted in my Lonely Planet guide to Africa. It is a seaside town of 30,000 people, “a firm favorite on the traveler’s trail,” the book said. We found Hotel Sahara and took rooms for $8 USD a night and wandered down into town. A screeching noise perked up our ears. It sounded like a dirt bike racing through its gears. I looked quizzically at Geoff. He had thought the same thing.

“Ha!,” he said. “That’s the mosque.” I listened closely, and could make out two of the words. It was the time of the evening prayer. The prayer was broadcast over loudspeakers, as it is in most towns of the Islamic world. “Allah akbar,” the reader intoned. God is great.

We had dinner at an outdoor cafe. After 8 p.m., the small city came alive. Its few streets were packed with people. Geoff sat for a shave with a Moroccan barber. I wandered about alone and digested what were to me exotic sights and sounds and smells, a pleasant assault on my American senses. Men strode about in full-length smocks with pointy hoods, looking to me like aliens in an old Star Trek episode. Women wore veils and walked in groups.

I entered the medina, the walled fortress central to most Moroccan cities and site of the main kasbah, or market. Amid its dimly lit warren of streets vendors hawked purses
and carpets and olives and bootlegged DVDs and sunglasses advertised as Prada and Gucci and Ray Ban. I bought a little leather purse for my tankbag in which I could keep my earplugs when not riding.

I tried a cornmeal-like bread topped with grilled goat cheese for 50 cents. On the ground, two ancient women implored me for some dirham. One’s face was wizened and jowly and swaddled in a soiled white veil. Her chubby and wrinkled hand was extended.

I smiled and raised my eyebrows, and she giggled like a little girl and elbowed the other and pointed at me because she realized I had given her some dirham 20 minutes earlier.

Remembrance of Rides Past

Asilah, Morocco * October 3, 2008
The rocky foothills of the African coast along the Strait of Gibraltar vaulted skyward. I gunned the DR650 into the corner and leaned hard, relishing the throaty roar from the FMF Q2 exhaust. A mottle of gunmetal grey clouds lingered above. The aroma of this place was rich and smoky and musky and faintly unpleasant, like a barbecue gone bad.

The air grew cool as we ascended long sweepers. The perspiration that had dampened my riding pants and jacket as we negotiated the tedious hour-long process of crossing the Morocco border in the 92-degree heat dried in the strong wind and comfortable chill. The sensation of instant cooling was bracing and delicious.

Broad patches of sand and gravel had accumulated on the road. Spots of the tarmac were broken, as if by small artillery. I’d pick a clean line and roar through, past loaded donkey-led carts and smoke-belching pickups and a white Land Rover piloted by a French couple who’d taken the same ferry from the Spanish port town of Algeciras to Ceuta, a Spanish enclave in Morocco.

Along the road, men in traditional Islamic robes and fezes or pointy hoods and women in black or white veils turned to watch the two adventure motorbikes rip past. One youngster in a Nike T-shirt gave me a broad smile and a thumbs up. Far below, waves crashed spectacularly against the African coast. Traffic was light and the sights exotic, at least to my American eye. I was in Morocco – motorcycling in Morocco!

Suddenly, I remembered why I had come. Few things are more exhilarating than motorcycling through foreign lands, to unknown places and towards certain adventure. For months, I had assiduously assembled all the pieces of the adventure motorcycling puzzle -– the bike, the documentation, the electronics, the gear, the whole dizzying lot of it. I knew in an abstract sense why I had invested so much time and money, but capturing the feeling of the ride -– why I was going -- had proven elusive. Until now.

I recalled the ecstasy I had experienced in early 2005, riding South America and ascending to the barren altiplano of Bolivia on dirt roads and a heavily fortified Kawasaki KLR 650. I had shed a tear of joy upon reaching that magical place and would later write, “Only a motorcycle could elicit such profound gratification.”

Now here it was again – that intoxicating blend of exuberance and awe that left my eyes damp and my throttle hand eager. The quality of a man’s life, I thought, percolating along on my motorbike, is defined in its richness of moments. What could be richer than this? Up the low mountains I tore.

***

Behind me on a Yamaha XT600 was Geoff Shingleton, a Brit mostly lately of Edinburgh, Scotland. He’s a well-traveled 35-year-old British military veteran, a trained medic, and a freelance bodyguard for Americans in Iraq. He’s begun an around-the-world motorbike ride, through Africa, South and Central America, north through Mexico and the U.S. and Canada to the Arctic Circle, and then into Korea and across Russia and Europe to the U.K.

Geoff is a formidable and very funny man with a pronounced military bearing. From the shoulders up, he resembles the prototypical American Marine jarhead –- strong jaw and close-cropped hair. He is well-built and more than 6 feet tall, with a colorful riot of tattoos covering much of his upper right arm and upper back. In a bar in a Rabat, Morocco, a guy at the table next to ours teased that he must be Arnold Schwarzenegger. We laughed and laughed, Geoff most of all, and toasted our Especiale beers.

Geoff and I had met via the Horizons Unlimited Web site, and agreed to meet in Lisbon, Portugal. Meeting a fellow rider with whom you may spend several months of your life and some of its greatest adventures is not unlike going a blind date, except the stakes are far higher. You have little idea of what the guy is really like. Is he a freak? Is he competent? Can I spend three or four months with this dude? Will we argue like old ladies?

Outside the Lisbon airport, I opened a sheaf of documentation. Geoff spotted a collection of small Obama ’08 stickers I had brought to give away as gifts to people along the way. Gifts are always appreciated; for children, I carry a bag of colorful balloons. Given the contempt with which most of the world regards George W. Bush, I reasoned that an Obama sticker would generate goodwill and lubricate my passage in certain situations.

“Obama!?” Geoff declared, laughing out loud. He chortled away that Obama could not win – when it came down to brass tacks, the American people would not elect a black man president, he believes. Sadly, I suspect that he may be correct – the next month will tell. From these foreign shores I watch the American election from Internet cafes and take heart that I arranged for an absentee ballot for Obama and in favor of a quite brilliant proposition on the San Francisco ballot, to rename the municipal wastewater treatment facility the George W. Bush Sewage Plant.

“Well bub,” I told Geoff, “someday soon you’ll come out of your tent in the morning, take a look at your bike and ha! – there’s an Obama sticker on it!” We had a good laugh. Our politics may differ, but we share a ball-busting sense of humor and, of course, a common passion for adventure motorcycling.

A Warning to All Dumb and Ignorant Foreign Motorcyclists Riding in Portugal Quem Não Falam o Português.

Ohlao, Portugal * October 1, 2008

We fueled up just outside of Faro, Portugal, on the Mediterranean coast, bound for the Spanish port city of Algeciras and a ferry to Morocco. It was late morning. The day was cloudless and warm. The road would be fast. We should make the 300 km in less than three hours, and enter Africa the next morning.

Geoff tore away on his Yamaha XT600. I hit the throttle to catch up. The motorbike made a horrific clatter. WTF?! I thought. It sounded like a loose bashplate. I slowed, and hit the throttle again. CLAT-A-TAT-TAT-TAT! the bike protested. I rattled along just fast enough to catch Geoff and hollered through my helmet as we waited at a traffic circle that the motorbike was making an awful sound.

Geoff looked at the bike and saw what I could not -- a sinister plume of smoke puffing from the exhaust. He motioned me to pull over.

In a dirt parking lot in front of a little eatery called Cafe Lagarto we analyzed the situation. We restarted the bike, only to have it begrudgingly sputter, rattle and quit. The smoke from the rear signalled a major problem. Geoff's first analysis zeroed in on oil. Did the bike have enough? I had checked the level a couple of hours ago. Did it have too much? I didn't think so. Yes, the level was above the indicator line. I typically fill a bike slighly more than capacity, as oil will inevitably burn off. Not so fast, sunshine, Geoff said.

A few years ago, he'd caused himself a problem on a Yamaha XT by overfilling the crankcase, resulting in oil overpressurization. If uncorrected, the situation could have blown the XT's valve seals. And that, he announced grimly, was what he suspected may have stricken my Suzuki DR650.

I stripped the side panels, seat, and 8-gallon Aqualine Safari tank from the motorbike for a look at the airbox. An airbox filled with oil would support Geoff's hypothesis. But the airbox was dry.

Our imaginations ran free. It could be blown valve seals. Maybe a busted piston ring. I'd been punishing the bike with high RPMs for the past 500 or 600 miles, since installing a 14-tooth front sprocket (vs. the stock 15-tooth) for better low-end torque off road. A busted piston ring meant a scored cylinder and a long wait for parts and reboring the cylinder in a Portuguese metal shop -- nasty, nightmarish stuff.

I stepped away and thought. What could it be? I had a nagging hunch that I was missing something -- something painfully obvious, maybe. Occam's Razor, I thought -- the simplest answer is usually the right one. But I returned to the naked bike and Geoff in a grim mood, my brainstorming fruitless.

We fiddled around some more, drained a pint of oil from the crankcase, checked and changed the spark plugs, all to no avail. The bike would no longer even start, though we drained the battery trying. It would need to go into a shop. With the proper facility, we could strip the cylinder head off tomorrow for a look at the motor.

A Portuguese man from the cafe stood nearby. He was in his late 30s and slightly built and finally approached us with an English greeting. His name was Claudio and he worked at the cafe. He spoke good enough English for us to communicate. He would be happy to help us. Obrigado, I told him ... thank you.

There was a Suzuki dealer in Faro. Claudio rang him up on his cell phone, but the news was bad. The dealer didn't want to get involved, Claudio said. Bah, I thought to myself, if a couple of adventure motorcyclists show up at his door with a stricken moto, of course he will help us. That's what riders do for one another. We help each other.

Claudio called a flatbed tow truck. I order three Sagres beers for Claudio, Geoff and I, but Claudio refused the payment. I insisted. He insisted more. Obrigado, I told him, again.

I pushed the bike up the truck ramp and we buttoned it down with tie downs and bid a ceremonial farewell to Claudio and several motorcyclists who had joined to help riddle over the problem. I rode in the truck. Geoff followed behind, and at the Faro Suzuki dealer we unloaded the bike. The manager or owner -- I'm not sure what his role was -- came out. He was a short and well dressed little dude with a scowl and an abrupt Napoleonic manner. He said nothing to me, virtually, but barked in Portuguese at our friendly flatbed driver and shop personnel. Then he stormed away.

The driver looked at me apologetically. He will not help us, he said; He said we have to leave. Yeah bub, I got that part. (I never did speak with the prick, but if somehow he ever runs across this post
-- screw you bub, pragas em você e em seu negócio você nenhum bom).

Another Suzuki dealer was 24 km away in Ohlao. He would help us. Our flatbed inched through Faro's heavy downtown traffic. Motorists eyeballed the heavily farkled American moto fastened up conspicuously on the flatbed's rear.

It was after 5 p.m. by the time the motorbike was unloaded and in the shop, called Moto Pires. It was a big, clean outfit with an array of motorbike gear and an impressive shop in the rear. The owner, Bruno, told me in fine English they would not be able to begin work until 3 p.m. tomorrow, and that, yes, I could be there in the shop. (That's a great thing about motorcycling abroad. Many shops will let you do your own work on their premises. Valve seals and piston rings are at the outer edge of my abilities, but I wanted to be there for the inspection).

I told Geoff I'd cover his hotel room; I had told him earlier it would be fine with me if he wanted to motor on down to Algeciras. I could sort things out myself, and we'd catch up in due time. He scoffed, as I knew he would.

Hours later, we wandered down to the Ohlao waterfront for dinner. The evening was starlit and bamy. Ohlao is a small, pleasant town that sees few tourists; hence a room at Hotel Residecial Armonq was a reasonable enough $30 USD. Geoff bought me a consolatory seafood dinner and needled me about Yamaha being superior to Suzuki and we drank Sagres and chatted with a New Zealander and after dinner repaired to a lively British pub, where I had just enough Sagres to make me forget my woes, the bad start to the big adventure.

§§§

I got to Moto Pires at 3 p.m. the next day. Bruno wasn't around, but his father, Joaquin, the chief mechanic, had my bike stripped of its oversized tank. He had a square tin of fuel suspended from a pole. A clear tube fed down to the carburetor fuel intake valve. He launched into rat-a-tat-tat Portuguese and stopped only when I protested that I couldn't understand him.

He pursed his lips and shook his head, chuckling, it seemed. A shank of thick salt and pepper hair tumbled across his brown. ''Gasoleo!'' he declared. pointing at the bike and at the large tank that sat now on the floor. ''Gasoleo!'' He started the bike and twisted the throttle. VROOM! VROOM!

I was mystified. How could a bike crippled yesterday be roaring now like a raped ape? I asked, The moto is OK?

''Sim, sim,'' Joaquin said. ''Gasoleo!''

I stood there looking perplexed. Another mechanic had been watching Joaquin and I try to communicate. He came over, pointed at my fuel tank, and said, ''Gasoleo ... DIESEL.''

The realization hit me with concussive force. I had filled the fuel tank with diesel fuel!

§§§

Geoff showed up 20 minutes later. Naturally I had to yank his chain. ''What's the verdict?'' he asked. I pursed my lips and nodded him out to the open yard behind the shop. ''Let's have a smoke,'' I said.

''Remember how you said maybe it could be something else -- not valve seals, not a piston ring, but something else entirely?''

''Yeah ... ?'' he said.

I drew it out, puffing meditatively on my smoke. ''Well,'' I said, ''it was something else.''

His eyebrows were arched, his eyes wide.

''Diesel, dude! I filled the tank with diesel!''

His mouth gaped slightly as he digested the news. The bike, I told him, would be fine. Then we high-fived and he gave me an exuberant shoulder hug and we laughed and laughed. Rarely had a royal fuck-up been the cause of such celebration.

The friendly and knowledgeable folks of Moto Pires enjoyed the occasion as well. They laughed and ribbed me while I freely admitted my stupidity. A woman came out and gave me two Moto Pires T-shirts and stickers, free, and my bill amounted to about $100 USD, including an oil change.

In the post mortem analysis, I riddled over how I and Geoff both could have missed the root cause. Perhaps it should have been fairly obvious. I had filled up, problem began. In the U.S., diesel fuel is usually available on an island all its own, and marked green. And how could I have motorcycled through Portuguese-speaking Brazil for a month in 2005 and not have encountered the same issue? I was at a loss to explain it.

On my next visit to a gas station, sure enough, there it was -- gasoleo, its pump just inches away from the gasolina pump, which, incidentally, was not marked as such, gasolina. Not that it would have mattered -- being dumb and ignorant, how could I have discerned the difference between gasoleo and gasolina?

And such is my warning to all dumb, ignorant motorcyclists riding in Portugal who do not speak nor understand Portuguese, that devilishly difficult language. Gasoleo means DIESEL!