Speed

Kokrobite, Ghana * December 7, 2008

Long sections of the road south from the feverish trading city of Kumasi in central Ghana were fast and freshly paved and unblemished. This highway was even embroidered with white lines down its center and shoulders, a nicety seldom seen in sub-Saharan Africa.

Traffic was light. The foliage to my right and left was thin, scenically spiked by towering coconut and palm trees. I had a panoramic view of animals and other potential hazards off the road. I saw none. This was open road, snaking sensuously over verdant low hills and small banana farms and funneling into long straightaways. I opened the throttle on the DR650 and watched with satisfaction as the speedometer crested above 80 mph.

Speed! I was going fast – as fast as possible, at least, with the 14-tooth front sprocket I had installed on the motorbike. The sensation was delicious. Not since the open roads of the Sahara in Morocco and Western Sahara and Mauritania had I enjoyed the opportunity to open the throttle for a sustained period on a quality stretch of pavement.

I had been running dirt roads for the past few weeks, in Mali and Burkina Faso and now Ghana. And when I was on pavement, it was generally in poor condition or under construction. Rarely would I exceed 65 mph. Now in front of me was a U.S-caliber road and I was salivating. I had a greed for speed. I missed speed. I craved the purity of it.

I relished the potent thrust of the big 650 single. Eighty, then 82 and 84 mph – the Suzuki shivered at high RPMs approaching the red line. Ahead would be a long sweeper, and I would ease off the throttle and swoop through at 70 mph. When the curve straightened, I would jam the throttle to the max once again and crest above 80 mph.

There is nothing else like it. Speed on a motorbike is a crucible. It is like heat. It anneals man and machine into a virtually hermetic entity, shot down the road as if out of a cannon. Awareness is heightened. Moments are magnified. The motorbike is umbilically sensitive to everything its rider does, and vice versa.

You feel the road. You feel the tires grip, hot and sticky on the hard tar. You feel the accelerative thrust of your beautiful machine – the big piston and the gearbox and the drive chain and the steering shaft, all working in brilliantly engineered concert -- a Japanese jolt of excitement between your legs.

Most of all, you feel the sensation of speed. It is a rarefied realm. It is bracing. It caresses you and tantalizes you. It seduces you. It is precious, because you cannot go truly fast for very long. You have entered another dimension – the dimension of speed.

***

My riding partners will scoff, but I love riding a motorcycle fast. I am usually the slowest of us three, and this has been the cause of more than a little jest. Back in Tiznit, Morocco, as we checked into a campsite, I pointed out to my friends a large map of Africa on the office wall.

“Lookit where we are,” I said. “We haven’t gotten very far.”

“Yeah, and we won’t get much farther the way you ride!” Geoff cracked sarcastically.

Not accounting for the exceptions when speed is too tempting to pass up, in Africa I shave five to 10 mph off what I would otherwise run in the U.S. The hazards here are too many. I nearly smacked a sheep in Morocco that decided at the last minute it wanted to follow its flock across the road. A skittish goat nearly got itself branded by TKC 80 tire tracks in Burkina Faso. I was riding too fast for conditions. I reminded myself to ease up.

The fastest I ever went on a motorcycle was 135 mph. It was in southern Utah. I was eastbound on the third of 13 cross-country rides across the U.S. It was a quiet, two-lane road with good pavement and gentle downhill slope and a clear view of open, rugged desert terrain on the sides. I was astride my 1984 Honda V65 Sabre, an 1100cc naked bike that could launch from a standstill to 50 mph in a blistering 2.31 seconds, or so Honda claimed.

The Sabre’s unique V4 motor was shared with a sister bike, the low-slung V65 Magna, which in the mid-80s held the Guiness Book record as the world’s fastest production motorcycle, with a top speed clocked at 176 mph. Something over 130 mph was enough for me.

Tearing through central Ghana on my DR650, I thought wistfully of that 135 mph run in southern Utah. I remembered how the force of the wind inside my full-face helmet felt as if it was pulling my eyelids back ... how the air felt like a wall of pliant Jello against my chest and groin and legs. I recalled deliberating whether I should press on to 140 mph.

Suddenly stricken by testicular atrophy, I decided that 135 mph was enough. I eased off the throttle and thought of fellow riders who have pushed up to 150 mph, 160 mph and more on open roads (versus a track or dragstrip). I still wonder what that feels like. Probably I will never find out. (Update: In fact, I did find out, reaching more than 150 mph (242 kph) on a Yamaha FZ1 in summer 2011 on a highway in North Carolina).

I certainly wouldn’t find out in central Ghana. Motoring along, I rued my decision to leave at home the stock 15-tooth front sprocket for the DR. With it, I could have ponied the Suzuki up over 100 mph. Now I was left to only fantasize about those higher speeds. I chuckled over the seven speeding tickets I had accrued in the U.S. and Canada on my big Honda, including an unfortunate three on one three-week Western states tour, and how I had persuaded nearly all of the ticketing officers to stand for a photo.

I fell into a vivid reverie on speed. I daydreamed of riding the open roads of Montana or Wyoming or Utah on a new and very fast motorcycle. My V65 Sabre is 24 years old and Honda, distressingly, has discontinued production of key parts. I imagined how sweet the speed would be, so clearly that it felt like I was indeed highballing through the Rockies at 95 mph.

The Yamaha FZ1 looks appealing. As a naked bike zealot, I could strip off the small but offending fairing that surrounds the FZ1’s headlight and customize a replacement. It’s a small bike, but could be outfitted for touring. At 485 pounds wet, the FZ1 is 100+ pounds lighter than my V65 Sabre. And its six-speed transmission means that I could crawl up behind a car at 65 mph in fifth gear and – bang! nail the throttle and then jam into sixth, hitting 100 mph in seconds.

For sheer sex appeal, I like the looks of the new Harley-Davidson XR 1200. I learned about this bike in a post at Motorcycle Misadventures, an eclectic and entertaining blog by my friend and fellow writer Carla King of the San Francisco Bay Area. I’ve never owned a Harley, but if I did, it would be the XR 1200. It wouldn’t be as fast as the Yamaha FZ1, but it might be enough. (By the way, if you haven’t read Carla’s excellent book, “American Borders,” about her travels around the U.S. on a cranky Russian Ural motorbike, what are you waiting for – winter?)

My reverie was interrupted by a speed limit sign for 50 kph, or 30 mph. I was approaching a town. Most towns in Ghana post speed limit signs, though I would never see police enforcing those limits. No matter. I slowed to 25 mph or so. I tend to go slowly through these settlements. I try to respect the community, and at a low speed I can better see speed bumps and chickens and children, and take in the spectacle of life in an ordinary African village.

People turned to look as I approached. After 10,000 miles of use, the FMF Q2 exhaust on my Suzuki has grown considerably louder. They hear the motorbike coming, and so do animals, and that’s good. Villagers waved at me.

On the southern edge of this settlement, two men walking along the road broke into huge grins at the sight of me. One thrust his thumb in the air. The other pumped his fist. I smiled and waved.

The road ahead was wide open. I knew the men were watching me, listening to my loud motorbike, and now I opened the throttle. The Suzuki barked as I tore through second gear. I shifted decisively into third and hit the throttle to the max, and repeated the sequence through fourth and fifth until I was at 80 mph once again.

I wondered how I looked to the men, a big motorbike accelerating far faster than the small Chinese-made 125cc bikes so prevalent here. I wondered how the bike sounded to them. A motorbike being shifted at the max through its gears towards its top speed generates an almost musical set of stanzas. The rhythm is lovely to the motorcyclist’s ear. You know the sound.

Nnnnnnuuuuuuuuuurrrrrrrrrhhhhhhhhhhhhhhmmmmm!

Nnnnnnuuuuuuuuuurrrrrrrrrhhhhhhhhhhhhhhmmmmm!

Nnnnnnuuuuuuuuuurrrrrrrrrhhhhhhhhhhhhhhmmmmm!

I hoped that I entertained the men. I hoped that I wasn’t rude.

***

For the foreign adventure rider, another sort of sign in Ghana towns serves the same purpose as a speed limit sign. It’s the business sign. Here, expressing one’s Christian faith is a prerequisite of doing business. It’s religion repurposed for commerce. Remarkably inventive with language and often graced with comically bad hand-painted artwork, the signs compel you to slow and look.

God Provides Everything I Need Beauty Salon

Beloved Fertilizer Depot

Jesus Never Fails Chop House

Holy Spirit Full of Grace Drinking Spot

The backs of minibuses and taxis and trucks were similarly, if more succinctly, adorned with religious sentiment, some of it deliciously cryptic.

Even Jesus

Good Father

For God’s Sake

And I spotted this amusing malapropism on the back of a minibus in Obuasi:

Except the Lord

In the same small town, a sign for the Pee Gorgious Beauty Salon prompted me to hit the brakes. I circled back to snap a photo of this mystifying sign, and a woman outside the shop eyed me curiously before trotting across the street to see what was the matter.

“I had to stop for a photo of your shop – it’s hilarious!” I told her. I didn’t bother explaining why. My friends were ahead of me, and I needed to do some speed to catch up.

Even at that brief stop, I found myself enveloped by oppressive heat and beginning to perspire. It’s hot here, and extremely humid. It makes the 90 F temperatures of Burkina Faso and northern Ghana seem pleasant and balmy. Now my tankbag thermometer regularly registered well over 100 F.

By the end of the day, I would be soaked with sweat from head to toe. I had to remind myself to drink copious quantities of water to avoid dehydration. Riding pavement, I keep my First Gear Kenya riding jacket bungeed up atop my top box and wear my mesh motocross armor flak jacket over a T-shirt.

After a steamy 10- or 15-minute roadside break in Ghana, the sensation of cooling wind on hot sweat from speed on the motorbike is exquisite. It inspires you to go faster, to heighten the illusion of chill.

***

Speed is not sustainable in sub-Saharan Africa. Something always puts an end to the fun. Forty miles north of Cape Coast, a former trading colony on the Gulf of Guinea and our destination for the evening, that something was rain.

I had been tearing along at a good clip on a two-lane road. I was in an unusually spirited riding mood. My throttle hand was heavy. I would crawl up behind vehicles at 55 mph and pass in a corner, experience having shown that even in a worst case scenario, say a truck barreling around that corner at speed, I could (probably) shoot through the gap between the vehicles with room to spare.

My motorbike is ideal for such aggressive riding. I do it infrequently, but when I do, my riding partners take note. “Once in a while, Mark will go just go off,” Migo told Geoff.

Geoff said, “Like that time in traffic … I was just sitting there and he pulls up and says, ‘What are you guys waiting for?’ and tears off. I was like, who is this guy?”

My Suzuki likes to be ridden fast and hard. A rejetted carburetor and the 14-tooth front sprocket give it a terrific punch through second and third and fourth gears. Geoff and I had swapped bikes back in Mali, and he was impressed.

“Your bike freaking moves, man,” he said. “That is some pretty huge torque.”

“Mostly it’s the rejet job and the cut-out airbox,” I told him. “I did the rejet with the guy back in San Francisco who backed out of riding Africa. He finished his job first and took a test ride and came back with this huge grin on his face and said, ‘It’s like a new bike!’”

“That 14-tooth sprocket has got to make a difference, too,” Geoff said. “Well, I’ve got you on the top end.” It was true. His un-rejetted Yamaha XT didn’t have nearly the low and mid-range torque as my Suzuki, but he could cruise effortlessly at 85 and 90 mph and higher.

But now all three of our bikes were parked along the side of the road in a pissant Ghana burg called Assin Achiase. A rainstorm was under way. It was approaching 4 p.m.

It had rained every afternoon or early evening since our night in the tiny Ghana village of Bodom, when a storm prompted us to seek improvisational lodging. This is supposed to be the dry season in central Ghana, but now I found myself in taking shelter from the storm beneath the overhang of the aged and tilting Ebenezer Methodist Church, circa 1922, the yellow paint on its exterior cracked and faded and crumbling.

Cattle strolled about the churchyard. Eight or 10 young boys played soccer with a small, deflated ball in the rain, and when the showers intensified, they joined me beneath the overhang. One boy held out the ball and told me, shyly, they would like a new one. They were either barefoot or wore rubber sandals. I played along with the boys for a while and took photos.

The rain eased and I prepared to leave and gave the oldest boy the equivalent of $10 USD. It was the smallest bill I had. I made him hold it up so all the boys could see how much it was, and they screamed with delight and went racing off through the mud into the village, yelling and hollering and leaping with joy and forgetting all about their benefactor.

But the storm intensified again. Thunder cracked through the low, cottony clouds. Geoff and Migo and I took shelter in a small, open-air concrete building with 20 villagers of this poor roadside settlement, across the road from the Ebenezer Methodist Church. The sky to the south was dark. Rivulets of rainwater coursed down sloping red earth, turning it to mud. Migo looked forlornly through the building at the sheets of rain.

“I thought you said it didn’t rain here,” I told Migo. He gave me a withering smile.

Forty-five minutes passed. The storm showed no signs of easing. I enjoy riding in the rain. Even if my friends wanted to wait out the storm, I figured I would take off. It would be only 40 miles to Cape Coast. We were all eager to get there. It would be a small milestone – our first return to the Atlantic Ocean since Senegal.

I had a rain jacket and a raincover for my tank bag squirreled away in my luggage. To retrieve them, I would need to brave the storm and make my way to my motorbike across the road. I looked at Geoff.

He had with him his trademark umbrella, the same one I had mocked two months earlier. “The time has come, my friend,” I told him ceremoniously, mimicking his phrase from back in Morocco, “when I am happy to be traveling with an Englishman and his umbrella. Can I borrow that thing for a minute?”

He howled with glee and snapped photos of me with his umbrella to document his vindication. Fifteen minutes later, the storm eased and the southern sky cleared and we took off in a moderate rain. By the time we reached Cape Coast an hour later, the sky was clear.

But now the road through Cape Coast was virtually impassable. It was jammed with thousands and thousands and thousands of people.

***

It’s election season in Ghana. In a week, this country of 21 million people would elect a new president. Signs of political activity are all over – the numerous and impressive billboards for the presidential candidates, front-page coverage in the newspapers, and dialogue with the locals.

We stopped for a break south of Kumasi, and a small crowd gathered. A man eyed me curiously and expressed surprise that I was an American. “Are you here for the election?” he wanted to know. Others had asked us the same question.

No, I would say, but the election is interesting. In America, we have just elected a new president, too. As always, a mention of Barack Obama triggered an outpouring of goodwill.

It was heartening to see a mature political process in action. Africa is notorious for political corruption, invariably to the detriment of the poor and working class, but Ghana is regarded by many observers as one of the best examples of an open and democratic republic in Africa. The dividends of the process are seen in the national economy, which, though hobbled by poverty and inequality, was clearly more developed and robust than those of Mali or Burkina Faso.

Road construction was another indication of the political season. Long stretches of highway from Bole to Kumasi to Cape Coast were being rebuilt, the timing of the work probably not coincidental with the election season. These ongoing projects tempered my speed considerably.

Instead of tearing at speed across fast tarmac, I was relegated to pottering along a potholed and dusty piste. Traffic was relatively heavy, and the massive dust clouds generated by trucks and buses and cars made it hazardous to pass, as you could scarcely see approaching vehicles. I was reminded of what I had read in my Rough Guide to West Africa: “Speedy travel and terrific delays are possible on the same route.”

A political motorcade through another town gave us a moment’s pause. I stopped to watch the procession and admire the Honda ST1300 motorbikes ridden by a pair of police officers. These were the first large, late-model motorbikes I had seen in Africa, and I imagined being astride one of them, pushing it above 100 mph on a long western states straightaway.

We reached Cape Coast in late afternoon. We had in mind to stay at an oceanside auberge on the coast called Oasis Beach Resort. As we negotiated our way through the center of town, traffic thickened. People were everywhere. Speed was slowed to a few feet at a time. A major political rally was under way, and it was centered at a plaza adjacent to the Oasis Beach Resort.

Thousands and thousands of noisy supporters of the New Patriotic Party and its presidential candidate, John Atta Mills, filled the streets and jammed into the plaza. We parked our motorbikes and took in the spectacle. Migo elbowed his way through the crowd to the Oasis Beach Resort and returned with the unsurprising news that it was full for the evening.

“Too bad,” Migo said. “It looks like a beautiful place.”

John Atta Mills, a Cape Coast native, prepared to address the rally. The crowd roared and chanted and danced. There’s a certain playfulness to the collective Ghana personality, and it’s reflected in each political party having its own signature dance. Geoff stood precariously atop the seat of his parked Yamaha and danced along with the crowd, but our ballerina was quickly chided by NPP supporters.

“Ha!” Geoff would exclaim later. “They were shaking their fingers and yelling at me – I guess I was dancing the wrong dance, the one for the other party!”

We found alternative lodging less than a mile away in a homely but friendly placed called Amkred Guesthouse, perched atop a rough dirt hill. We showered and headed out for dinner to the best restaurant in town, at the Oasis Beach Resort. We expected it to be jam-packed with rally participants, but it was virtually empty. A few white tourists sat around, sipping beer and enjoying the sound of the surf crashing on the beach. The rally crowd had simply vanished.

Three hours later, we began our 10-minute hike back to the guesthouse. It was nearly 11 p.m. The poor streetside shacks selling meat sticks and grilled fish and warm beer and candy and cheap batteries had shut down for the night. The occasional streetlight cast a jaundiced yellow glow.

The proprietors and their families slept on the earth outside their shacks. This was their home. The nearby beach was their bathroom. The massive breasts of a bare-chested woman sleeping on her side, a pair of children nestled nearby, folded over onto each other.

***
Geoff and Migo set off the next morning to visit Cape Coast Castle, the former British slave fort, and proceed east to a beach town called Kokrobite. I lingered over a 40 cent USD coffee and omelette breakfast in a little streetside eatery down the hill from Amkred Guesthouse with the idea to leave later, visit the castle, ride solo and fast, and meet them in Kokrobite.

On my way to the castle, I decided to stop at Oasis Beach Resort. It was late Monday morning. A young man led me through a large and colorful gate. Yes, he said, we have a room. He showed me a bungalow. It was nudged up against a seawall, just 50 yards from the pounding surf. I could park my motorbike right in front of the bungalow. It was perfect.

I rode up a quarter-mile to Cape Coast Castle and left a note on Geoff’s Yamaha that I would catch up with them in a day or two.

It was time for a bit of solitude. I had writing to catch up on, and my laundry was badly overdue for a thorough washing. It would be good to be alone, luxuriously alone, if only for a day or two. I started unpacking my bike in front of the bungalow, and thought that I might get started on the thankless chore of doing my own laundry.

A young woman approached me. She wore a bandana and a big cheerful grin and said, “Hi! I’m Essie! I’m your laundry girl!”

These little moments of serendipity are always delightful. I needed a laundry girl, badly, and now here was Essie. Her tan T-shirt was stained with sweat and grime. “Be Proud,” it said. She was husky and big-breasted and strong. She looked proud. She looked up to the task that I had in mind.

“OK, young lady,” I said. I pointed to my riding pants. “I have these to wash. They’re very tough and very dirty. You can wash them? I’ll pay you double. Look. They’re filthy. They haven’t been washed in two months.” I was a little embarrassed to admit this to Essie, but she appeared to be a trained professional. She could handle it.

“No problem!” she chortled. She could have my riding pants and my grimy T-shirts and my science-experiment socks all clean by the evening. Deal. My spirits were high.

I finished unpacking and did some writing and enjoyed a delicious cheeseburger and French fries lunch at the open-air Oasis Beach restaurant and watched the crashing surf and wandered around Cape Coast. I returned to find a band of dancers and drummers performing on a patio.

I sat and marveled at these energetic and sinewy young men and the pounding beat of the music they made. The sky darkened, the wind stirred, and Essie found me on the patio. “I have your laundry,” she said. “It’s not dry, but it’s going to rain. Come back to your room, hurry!”

Rain began to fall. Essie helped me hang my T-shirts around the room. My riding pants were folded at the bottom of her bag.

“And these?” I asked her with a smirk.

“Oh, very dirty!” she exclaimed. “I had to have my sister help with me with them!”

“That’s why I said I would pay you double for them,” I told her.

The rain fell harder. It fell for hours. A torrential storm buffeted the Ghana coast deep into the night. I sat beneath the veranda of my bungalow and admired my motorbike and watched the rain fall over it. The rain washed days of grime from the machine. The rain was so loud I could barely hear the pounding ocean a stone’s throw away.

***
Man’s inhumanity to man has always fascinated me. For weeks, I had been looking forward to visiting the notorious Cape Coast Castle, one of more than a dozen colonial installations along the so-called Gold Coast of Ghana. I had read in my Rough Guide that more than one million slaves were transported from the Gold Coast to the Americas from 1600 to the mid-nineteenth century. Hundreds of thousands died at the forts or during the long trans-Atlantic voyage.

The castle is a chilling place. Its granite-block walls are silent and implacable. Long black cannons are perched atop the wall, pointing to Gulf of Guinea. I joined a group for the 3 p.m. tour. Our guide led us to a male slave dungeon. In these smallish quarters, the size of an ordinary McDonald’s seating area, up to 250 slaves lay jammed and shackled in wretched conditions.

“They lay in their own feces and urine and vomit and blood,” our guide said, “with that one small window for light, and for ventilation.”

Our guide us to the Door of No Return. Through this imposing wooden passageway, thousands of slaves were herded into the lower decks of sailing ships for transport abroad, never to see Africa again. We visited what was called simply The Cell. Here, miscreants were sequestered. The small room had no window. The incarcerated received neither food nor water.

Many died in The Cell. Gouge marks clawed by desperate, dying fingers could still be seen on the walls and the floor.

Above the slave dungeon was a church at which the British slavemasters and their families worshipped. Carved through the ground outside the church door was a spyhole through which captives in the dungeon below could be observed.

***

I lingered at Oasis Beach Resort until noon, and motored through town. Despite its distinction as an educational center, Cape Coast is a poor and ramshackle and improvisational city. The lovely beaches are littered with garbage, and the sidewalks lined by open, trash-filled sewers that both stink and present a pedestrian peril.

I had taught myself to overlook such things; it would be otherwise impossible to enjoy Africa. Ghana had smiled on me. I smiled back, and ignored its warts.

I bought a bottle of water and enjoyed the company of the Cape Coast people. They are remarkably friendly and welcoming, arguably the most hospitable culture we had encountered yet. The bon vivance is infectious. A Rastafarian young man offered my ganja and prostitutes and when I declined, begged me politely for money. An old man practically fell over himself in his zeal to assist me with directions.

The ride to Kokrobite and another beach resort, called Big Milly’s, was just two hours. The pavement along the coast was good. I rode fast and wove hard through moderate traffic on a two-lane road. Again my speed hit 80 mph and above.

Kokrobite would be our last stop in Ghana. I had imagined a scenic beach town, but Kokrobite proper was a dump. Great volumes of litter had accumulated on, even embedded into, its earthen streets. Nudged up against the Atlantic, Big Milly’s was a lovely enclave, insulated from the unappealing town. But it had a dark side.

Only a month earlier, we learned, masked gunmen had broken into the compound in the middle of the night. The bandits broke into bungalows and shoved shotguns against the throats of Western tourists and made off with a bounty of jewelry and cash and cameras and computers. They were not apprehended.

“This is Africa, remember,” a middle-aged Englishman named Don told me over beers at the Big Milly’s bar. “It’s always dangerous. It’s never safe. You never know what is going to happen.”

That was a beauty of it. Adrenaline flowed in Ghana. We had all loved the country, warts and all. Ghana is Africa for beginners, as my Lonely Planet guide put it. Ironically, we had nearly passed it up. Ghana was slightly off our route. Back in Ouagadougou, though, we had happened to walk by the Ghana consulate.

We had the idea that visas for Nigeria could be best secured in the Ghana capital, Accra. (That turned out to be untrue; Nigerian visas were readily available in Lome, Togo, at the steep price of about $120 USD). So we decided to secure Ghana visas and head into the country. The people would speak English, after all, and that was bonus.

My friend Martin Clarkson of San Francisco, who had ridden Africa a few years earlier, recommended Ghana strongly. He said it was one of the highlights of his trip. And Ghana was for us, as well.

Perhaps Ghana is anathema to speed. This was a country to be relished.

Comments

[fasthair]

Mr. Mark: Been wondering about you. Glad to hear all is great and that things are still going well.

Since it is still winter here in the Midwest USA I haven’t got to ride much. But I did get out the past couple of weekends for a few short rides. The first one brought many miles of speed. It felt so good to feel and hear the big V-Twin booming as it came on the big cams letting the high performance heads and pipe thrust me past empty snow covered corn fields. And when I too came up on slower traffic, just pinned the throttle and roared by knowing how sweet the sound was.

Who knows maybe I was hearing your DR thundering along at the same time?

fasthair

[Mark Hammond]

Yo fasthair, thanks for note. Hope you have heated grips on that V-twin! I'm in Windhoek, Namibia and will be posting to the blog before the final run to Cape Town. We're back in civilization now and already miss the "old" Africa ... man, what adventures! :)

[Vance and Hines Motorcycle Exhaust]

If you drive that bike with a lot of bags and packages you don't need a speedy motorcycle instead you need the bike that can handle the weight both driver and bags, a bike for cruising is the best for this time.... Ride Safe!