Ride Far | Mark Hammond

Timbuktu

Timbuktu, Mali * November 21, 2008

The name is synonymous with remoteness and mystery and enigma and the ends of the earth. It looms large in the human imagination as the most distant point on the planet, though many Westerners could not tell you exactly where Timbuktu is supposed to be … or even whether it actually exists.

My mother didn’t believe that Timbuktu was real. “Oh, there’s no such place,” she told me as I prepared to set off on my motorbike journey through Africa. A childhood friend, too, thought that Timbuktu was only a myth – a faraway Shangri La that you heard about back in elementary school.

Timbuktu is a real place. It’s a poor, dusty, unremarkable town of mud-brick buildings and wooden shacks and about 32,000 people in central Mali, near the large and sustaining Niger River. It was settled in the 11th century by Tuareg nomads and is said to derive its lyrical name from an old woman called Tomboutou, “the woman with the large belly button,” or so I read in my Rough Guide to West Africa.

In subsequent centuries, Timbuktu (or Tombouctou, to use the proper spelling) grew to be a fabulously wealthy city for trading gold and other commodities, where salt caravans from the desert north met merchants from sub-Saharan Africa to the south. It wasn’t until the 19th century that European explorers reached the fabled city.

Now it was our turn. No motorbike adventure on the western side of Africa would be complete without a ride to Timbuktu. For months, the name had captivated my imagination – perhaps the name that most singularly defined this Africa ride.

Geoff was similarly amped. He had already been to Kathmandu, in Nepal, and soon he would be able to say that he had been to Timbuktu and Kathmandu. The names alone, both a rhythmic three syllables and the most famously exotic on earth, were compelling in and of themselves.

We packed up the bikes for an 8:30 a.m. departure from Douentza, a small outpost 140 miles south of Timbuktu. A day earlier in Sevare, I had swapped out my tires, replacing the worn Avon Gripsters I’d installed about 7000 miles earlier with knobby Continental TKC 80s that I had lugged along like balls and chain since Toronto. We aired our tires down to about 15 psi for better purchase on soft sand.

Chains and clutch cables were lubed and ready to roll. We each packed four 1.5 liter bottles of water and bread and fruit for what we figured to be at least a five-hour ride on a challenging piste. Geoff took a break from his packing and came over to me with a big winning smile and pumped my hand.

“Dude,” he said, “we’re going to Timbuktu!”

***

Video: Sandy Piste to Timbuktu
I have some fishtailing fun on the sandy piste to Timbuktu.

The allure of Timbuktu is enhanced by its inaccessibility. To get here, the adventure rider has a choice of four routes – through Lere from the southwest (with four ferry crossings and rumors of banditry), from Gao to the east or through Nema in Mauritania (both long and sandy and little traveled tracks), or from Douentza. Our research told us Douentza would be the easiest route – but easy is a relative term.

A pair of older Belgian women at Auberge Gouma in Douentza had traveled by 4x4 from Timbuktu a day earlier. They watched with a mixture of admiration and concern as we packed up the motorbikes for our ride north. “Good luck,” one of the women told me. “You’ll need it -- the road is very difficult.”

Other travelers and locals had corroborated that. The evening before our departure, over beers at Auberge Gouma, a 64-year-old South African named Peter Short told us what we could expect. A consultant for the GPS mapping firm TeleAtlas, Peter is also an accomplished adventure rider.

In fact, Peter told me, he nearly succeeded in becoming the first man in the world to complete a ride of more than 1,000 miles in 24 hours on dirt roads for the Iron Butt Association of endurance riders (foiled at the end by a bad starter on his BMW 650 Dakar). I took what he had to say seriously.

The road would be heavily corrugated with plenty of sand, Peter said. And roadwork was under way north of the halfway point to smooth out corrugations, he reported. The material of choice to improve this sandy and corrugated road was – sand. “That might be tough for you guys,” Peter told me. “They don’t exactly have motorbike riders in mind in working on that road.”

The scenery at the beginning of this long piste was dramatic. Douentza is nestled beneath towering rock spires and plateaued mesas of the Gandamia Massif. The natural sight was stunning. Tuareg nomads dressed in headscarves and colorful, conical hats made of thatch parted their herds of cattle and goats for the passing adventure bikes

The morning was perfect. The temperature was a moderate 84 F and the African sun was lasciviously bright. For the first time, I wore a pair of goggles that I had bought almost as an afterthought at Wal-Mart a few days before I left, to replace a pair of Scott motorbike goggles that I had never liked and which were falling apart. The amber lenses on these new goggles rendered everything in an otherworldly golden hue. The fit inside my full-face helmet was ideal.

The first 20 miles of so of the piste was easy. Care was required over small bridges, as 90-degree concrete edges of the irregular construction could at speed puncture our inner tubes, particularly with our tires aired down to about 15 psi. Otherwise, I ran at 45 and 50 mph in third gear, standing on the pegs and choosing lines and dodging rocks and steering with my feet and happily hitting the throttle.

Starting out to Timbuktu, I recalled riding a canyon outside of Creel, Mexico, in 2004 as part of a Horizons Unlimited gathering of adventure riders. There I was startled to be passed by a pair of guys on KTMs. They stood tall and forward on their pegs like Superman in flight and tore past me at 50 mph, while I pottered along on my heavily loaded Kawasaki KLR. I thought, a bit disheartened, I’ll never be able to ride like that.

Now I was standing tall and forward on the pegs and tearing along at 50 mph. I had learned from others and taught myself. An offroad ride in May 2008 through the Black Rock Desert in northwestern Nevada with a group of northern California riders who call themselves the MotoLosers had taught me some valuable lessons about riding sandy and challenging terrain.

I felt good about my steadily improving offroad riding skills. Even though I’d gotten my first motorcycle at age 16, I’d not begun riding dirt until 2004, when I set off through Mexico for South America. I was 43 at the time, and, as with language, offroad riding is more difficult to learn in later years than it is in childhood and adolescence.

The DR650 ran lean and mean, at least compared to my old Kawasaki KLR, and I delighted in nailing the throttle and feeling the punch from the rejetted carburetor and 14-tooth sprocket and hoped that I sprayed Geoff with some rocks and sand, just for the fun of it. And now another piece of motorbike equipment I’d installed came into play – a steering damper.

I hadn’t planned on outfitting the Suzuki with a steering damper until I met an ex-Marine named John in Wyoming. I was on my way to Toronto and my flight to Lisbon, and John was riding the Continental Divide on a KTM 640. The first thing he pointed out to me about his bike was the steering damper.

“I’ll never ride offroad without one again,” he told me. ”This thing is awesome – feel it.”

Installed around the steering mechanism, this hydraulic device dampens the tendency of the front tire to move left or right, instead making it difficult to turn. On John’s bike, I had to exert slightly to even move his handlebars. Intrigued, I called up Jeff of ProCycle, a parts distributor in Oregon. He sells a damper for the DR650 made by a company called W.E.R., and I bought one.

Fitting a W.E.R. damper to a DR650 is not easy. It’s not made expressly for the DR650, despite what W.E.R. says, but it can be fitted. I had it welded to the frame with the assistance of Terry Fox, the affable and helpful owner of Fox Power Sports in Herkimer, N.Y. Then I needed to build my own bracket to elevate the headlight and cowl about an inch to accommodate the damper, as well as cut out part of the cowl.

And I found that unlike John’s damper, the W.E.R. device does not dampen immediately. Even on full, you could swivel the handlebars back and forth effortlessly. Thinking I might have a lemon, I called up W.E.R. and was told that their model is impact-activated. That makes it difficult to assess how effective it is, but for you DR geeks, I’ll say this – it definitely seemed to help, and it definitely can’t hurt.

***

The soft and heavy sand began about 25 miles north of Douentza. The sand exists in large pockets, or ponds. You could run the hard pack and corrugated piste and spot the sand pond ahead by maybe 50 yards, just as Peter Short had reported. “For the most part, you’ll be able to see the sand,” he told me.

You slow and gear down to third or second and choose a line that that appears to have the shallowest sand. You keep your weight as far back as possible to mitigate the tendency of the front tire to bury itself in the soft stuff and dump the bike. Hit the sand at about 30 to 33 mph and gun on through. The front tire skitters back and forth, and if you gun the bike the rear will reward you with a little fishtail.

It was all great fun, and I found myself relishing the sand, eager to hit the next pond.

The sand in the second quarter of the ride was occasional. The corrugation was constant. Thump-thump-thump-thump-thump! As with sand, the throttle is your friend when riding corrugation. At somewhere around 40 or 45 mph, the bike begins to skim over the top of the ridges and minimizes the constant pounding. The farther north we rode, however, the deeper and more frequent the sand ponds became, and that presented a small dilemma.

I’d found my sweet spot for nailing a sand pond in a high second gear at about 33 mph. Several times, running the corrugation in third at 40 or 45 mph, I’d hit a large sand pond at that speed. Ahem. All of a sudden the bike would do something crazy, the front end career to one side or another in the softness while the back end fishtailed.

The only way through is more throttle and more nerve, so that upon exit you’d be up to 50 mph or so. At that speed, my control of the bike felt diminished.

The terrain was slightly undulant, and we soon discovered that when cresting a hill, a large pocket of deep sand would often await on the other, downhill side. I realized that I had never before run a sandy descent, but there would be no opportunity to stop and analyze the physics of the situation. Trying to stop, or even slow, in soft sand means a dumped bike.

The throttle is your friend. All offroad riders know that, and now I recalled the mantra being repeated in an email I’d received a few weeks earlier from my friend Martin Clarkson of San Francisco, a Brit who’d ridden Africa a few years earlier and helped me out with some valuable tips and intel.

I decided to endure the corrugations and keep the bike in a high second gear. That gearing delivered better throttle response than a low third gear. Peter Short and I had discussed exactly this technique the night before. He told me, “I’ve seen too many guys go down hitting a soft patch at 40 or 45 mph.” If you hit a soft patch at that speed and need to accelerate further, then it could become speed too fast for conditions, at least for my skill.

I recalled, too, a concept I came up with riding offroad in Bolivia. I call it the Collarbone Quotient. It’s sort of an offroad motorcycling equation that boils down to speed vs. conditions divided by rider skill multiplied by fatigue divided by two-thirds of the weight of your gear equals the likelihood of a broken collarbone.

Then multiply again by the square root of how badly it would suck to bust a collarbone in a Third World country like Mali in the middle of a six-month ride to South Africa.

Geoff rode more aggressively through the double-whammy of corrugation and sand ponds. He does everything aggressively. He even eats aggressively. I had watched incredulously back in Ouarzazate, Morocco, as he devoured a breakfast omelette in approximately four bites and 30 seconds.

With him in front and out of sight, I stopped several times for a rest, photos, water, and to enjoy the scenery that I could scarcely see while riding, what with one’s laser focus on the 50 yards of piste ahead. The quiet was sublime. The landscape had changed by turns, a yellow and then orange sand and sparse acacia trees and low bushes and pale green foliation across the land, like peach fuzz on a teenager’s face, and the low and gently rolling hills sprawled out on all sides.

And the road. I picked up handfuls of its fine, soft sand and studied the grains and let it flow, sun-baked and warm, through my fingers. I looked north to the horizon, at the road snaking artistically across this marvelous terrain. I felt like an extremely fortunate man and I gave my thanks.

And I slapped myself to be sure that I was indeed on this challenging piste, on this unforgettable day -- the road to Timbuktu.

***

I found Geoff waiting for me in the shade of an acacia tree at 12:30 p.m. We were a little beyond the halfway point, several miles north of the only settlement of consequence on the road, a tiny village called Bambara Maoundé. My GPS showed about 60 miles left to Timbuktu.

I said, “Damn, that is hard work!” It was. The concentration required is ceaseless. The mental energy and focus and physical exertion required to ride a sandy and corrugated piste like this is considerable.

Geoff was feeling it, too. “What I could really use is a nap,” he said.

I had been standing on the pegs for most of the 70 miles here, and now my knees felt as if they had nails in them from the sides. I found that the pressure of my knees against the fuel tank had torn away large sections of the tough, protective plastic adhesive I’d affixed to the tank. My wrists, arms, shoulders, back, and legs were all tingly and numb from the exertion. My brain was running on one cylinder.

I sat down in the shade with a bottle of water and a tasty baguette and relished a half-hour break. Soon enough, we were back on the road and encountered the construction crews that Peter Short had reported. And indeed, sand was the material of choice. Huge, deep pockets of the soft stuff, adjacent to piles of harder dirt that the men had deposited.

Later, the sand and dirt would be smoothed out by a grader, and more evenly distributed by virtue of four-wheeled traffic. But now, the huge sand pockets sat cruelly in front of my passage to Timbuktu. These ponds were far deeper and much longer than the natural sand pockets I had ridden in the first half of the day, and they stretched dispiritingly ahead as far as I could see.

I realized that I was awfully tired. The lunch break had not rejuvenated me at all, but left sleepy and exhausted. The sun beat down, broiling me inside my black First Gear riding jacket, over my motocross armor. I was damp with perspiration from head to toe.

I found myself cursing this roadwork as I dialed up the energy to hit a long, deep stretch at 33 mph or so. Riding these man-made piles was now far more taxing than natural sand, and I stopped a few times almost in a hope that the roadwork would just go away.

From a truck ahead, construction workers watched as I lingered on the side of the road, and when I later passed them they cheered and gave me thumbs up, as if I was on the world’s greatest joyride.

In some sections, it was instead a hellride. Argh! This sand SUCKS! My exhaustion was now extreme. From his seat in a 4x4, Peter Short had underestimated the difficulty that these man-laid sand ponds would present to a fatigued rider. He had noted the construction work almost as an afterthought, when in fact in my enervated state it was by far the most difficult stretch of the ride.

Finally, it occurred to me that paddling through some of these deep and massive ponds at 5 mph would be a much more enjoyable way to spend the latter part of the afternoon, and a few times I did exactly that. The DR no longer felt lean and mean. I no longer felt strong. The DR felt like an overloaded mule, and I felt humbled and dog-tired and older than my 47 years and a long way from Timbuktu.

In these challenging conditions, the GPS and odometer are your friends. They tell you how far it is to your destination. You watch them hopefully, lovingly, and celebrate the progress of another two miles, another two miles, another two miles … and the milestones of 45 miles to go, 40 miles to go, 35 miles to go, 30 miles to go. Push on. Progress is being made.

Finally, after some 20 miles of the roadwork, I entered sections in which a grader had smoothed out the sand. The sand, mixed with dirt, lay two or three inches deep across the road. Soon enough, I became convinced that I would no longer encounter deep and massive man-laid sand piles, and dialed up my speed to 40 or so mph.

The bike danced back and forth, loose and squirrelly, but so long as I could be sure no huge sand ponds lay ahead, I could relax a bit and let it ride. Now I was more tired than ever, bitterly exhausted even, but told myself to just bang it on and rip ahead. I thought of a twist to the most famous line in the film Dr. Strangelove: Learn to stop worrying and love the sand.

And I did. The day and the sand turned fun, or at least tolerable, once more.

The GPS clicked down. And then I saw water … the southerly section of the Niger River Delta, an amazingly massive artery that courses through this southern lip of the Sahara. I was getting close to the ferry that would take us across the Niger.

And here the road had progressively less sand. It was more of a hard pack, even with sections of ancient bitumen. I got back to the 50 mph speed I had run in the morning and let my concentration relax. I even sat down on the bike, which felt completely bizarre after hours of standing on the pegs, as if I was sitting on the ground.

Geoff was waiting for me at the ferry. He said, “I was wondering if you were all right – it’s been a while.” I just looked at him.

***

Later, we sat for drinks at Hotel Colombe in Timbuktu and a post-mortem analysis on the ride. Geoff told me he had run the full 60-mile stretch from our lunch break to the ferry with just one stop. I had stopped, what – five or six times? Seven times?

“I was running at 50 mph or so, a lot of it,” he said. “I knew it was reckless and even dangerous, but …wow.” His smile was as big and bright as Hollywood.

“I had a couple of heart-thumpers,” he went on. “Once I ran the bike ran off the road and hit a bush, another time one pocket was deeper and longer than I figured. The back-end went into a big-time fishtail. I was probably going too fast but I didn’t really have a choice – just hit it harder. I said, Well, if I do crash it’s going to be quite spectacular.”

I told him the first part of the ride had left me deeply fatigued, but most of it I had run in a high second gear at 35 mph, except for paddling through a few huge ponds of construction sand late in the day. I brought up Peter Short’s observation that hitting deep sand at 45 mph was a spill waiting to happen. Yeah, Geoff said. He saw the wisdom in it, but wisdom is not necessarily as much fun as the hellbent-for-leather approach he had chosen.

I said, “It’s like I told Migo when we got into Casablanca. I told him when I’m riding in urban traffic like this it’s damn fun, white-knuckle adrenaline, and I love it,” I told Geoff. “But if you asked me if I’d like to go out and ride some heavy urban Third World traffic, I’d say, naaaaah.

“Same thing with sand,” I went on. “When I’m doing it, I love it … well, except for that construction shit, being as tired as I was. But you ask me if I want to go ride some sand on a big loaded bike, I’d say, naaaah.”

***
I wandered about Timbuktu. It’s an unremarkable place, with few vestiges of its grand past evident. All of its streets are sand, except for a main paved circular thoroughfare. Lizards skittered about the mud-brick walls throughout town. Dozens of kids and would-be tour guides approached me and every other tourist walking about; no Timbuktu stickers for our motorbikes were to be found. At a restaurant called Amanar, we made the acquaintance of a 52-year-old Scottish postman named Mick, who, like Geoff, could now say he had been to both Timbuktu and Kathmandu.

We awoke the morning after our ride here, both sore and tired and achy. I felt as if I had played in an NFL game. We lingered another day, recuperating and passing the time, and set off at a little after 8 a.m. By 9:15, we had crossed the Niger on the $2 USD ferry and hit the 130-mile piste back to Douentza.

I felt fresh and strong once more. The DR felt lean and mean. Riding sand is far, far more enjoyable in the morning, and I attacked the deep ponds with gusto. My difficulties on road here late in the day, I realized, were strictly due to fatigue.

Now I found myself aiming for the deepest sections of the sand ponds, just for the fun of it. The bike danced and fishtailed and I hit the throttle with a huge grin on my face, feeling like a cowboy on a bucking bronco. My speed was up a few miles an hour from two days earlier. Never once did I feel like a crash was imminent.

Knowing what lay ahead helped, too. I kept my pace even and strong and by the time I reached Douentza, my satisfaction far outweighed my nominal fatigue.

As for Geoff, he attacked the road as a race. He had a lot on his mind with some issues involving a woman. He was wound tight and needed to blow off some steam and frustrations. I found him waiting for me on the street in Douentza at 1:45 p.m., chewing on chunks of greasy mutton from a street vendor with a wicked grin.

“Three hours and 20 minutes!” he declared. (My own passage took 4 hours, 30 minutes, including five stops). “Dude, I was hauling ass. I passed that truck of French tourists doing like 75 miles an hour. I was having a freaking hoot!”

And, he got around to saying, he’d taken a spill. He was hammering through a long stretch of deep sand a bit off the main track and eased off the throttle too soon, only 20 yards maybe from the end. The bike plowed to a halt and Geoff catapulted into mid-air, landing in a thorn bush. A tour bus was not far behind, and it stopped and the tourists took photos of him and inquired whether he was all right.

He was. His knee would be a little gimpy for a couple of days, and his Yamaha XT’s shifter was a bit of whack, but no major problems. “I actually felt better after that crash,” he said, referring to his girlfriend frustrations. “I knew I was going to hit it hard today. Something was going down, me or the bike, and it ended up being both.”

***

I had seen the end of adventure in Bolivia and in Argentina. I had ridden the World’s Most Dangerous Highway in Bolivia (most of it in the back of a pickup thanks to a stricken motorbike), northeast of the capital of La Paz, not long before a new paved road opened and the old dirt track, carved audaciously into the sides of vertiginous cliffs, closed.

And on the legendary Ruta 40 in Argentina, I had ridden ruefully past construction crews that were paving this notoriously rutted and gravelly route to Ushuaia. It was sad to see, from the perspective of adventure motorcycling. I believe I’ve heard that now almost all of Ruta 40 is dull tarmac, virtually devoid of two-wheeled adventure.

Surely they will never pave the roads to Timbuktu. Then it would no longer be Timbuktu.

Moving Days

Sevare, Mali * November 16, 2008

TK

Time and Space

Nossombougou, Mali * November 10, 2008

Everything takes longer than you expect. Complications abound. Progress is slow. Road conditions are often poor. Attractions and distractions are legion. You spend 1½ hour in a thatch hut enjoying lunch with a Malian family, or a half-hour with children in some impoverished settlement, or 20 minutes in a wonderland of baobabs, marveling at the massive trunks of these bewitching trees regarded as sacred in many African religions.

Before you know it, you have two hours of daylight left and 100 miles to ride. The race is on.

Time is your enemy. Space – the space between A and B -- is your battlefield. In Africa, there’s no romance to riding off into the setting sun. There’s only the high-voltage concentration that it takes to get through the dark to your destination, somewhere in blackness ahead.

It’s a constant battle against the clock. It’s a perpetual balancing act between the enjoyment of exploring and engaging with people and the imperative of burning miles and getting to B. And it’s almost a law for motorcycling abroad – don’t ride at night.

The hazards multiply ten-fold. At dark, donkey carts and potholes that you can readily spot in the daylight aren’t evident until they’re right in front of you. Signs, if they even exist, can be impossible to spot. And the insects!

The insects come out at night here in West Africa, and in 20 minutes your faceshield is covered in insect goo, further compromising your night-riding visibility. And then the omnipresent dust attaches to the insect goo, and it’s like riding with cellophane over your head.

At meetings of the Horizons Unlimited adventure motorcycling organization, Grant Johnson, the group’s founder, shows a compelling photograph of why it’s unwise to ride foreign counties at night. The photo is of a bridge in Ethiopia. Except it’s only half a bridge. It extends partially a river, then stops in mid-air. It’s been that way for years.

At night, there would be to way to know that bridge ends in mid-air. At 40 mph in the dark, you’d be sailing off into space.

***

I had lodged at a former hunting lodge called Hotel Hobbe in Kolda, Senegal, the first night of what would be an 800-mile solo ride from Ziguinchor to Bamako, the Malian capital. Hotel Hobbe was a commodious place, set off from the hubbub of downtown. I had my own hut, and the restaurant opened at the improbably early hour of 6 a.m. I was awake myself at 6, and had a coffee and a pair of bizarre looking birds in front of me by 6:15.

I was popular among the staff, as I’d distributed Obama stickers to the men the night before. “Where today you go?” one of the staffers asked me in broken English.

I had in mind to run dirt roads towards the Niokolo Koba National Park, where with luck I might be able to spot a hippo or an elephant, one of the few remaining in Senegal. I got five miles down a dirt track, into the disorienting glare of the morning sun, and stopped.

I hated to admit it, but it was true – I was sick. I’d been dogged by a cold, it seemed, for the past three days. My nose was running and I sneezed a lot and I felt as rundown as the poor little towns I’d been motoring through.

Dirt road or not? I was undecided. I was sick of pavement and eager for piste. Then again, dirt roads are usually more fun with fellow riders. Help is about if someone spills or otherwise gets in trouble or the group is faced with a large water crossing. I got toilet paper out from my tankbag and blew my nose again.

My physical condition decided it. There’s no sense in running dirt if you’re ill and not at strength. An hour later, feeling dizzy and weak and increasingly concerned, I would pull over and get out my Rough Guide and Lonely Planet books and check the symptoms for malaria. Again I blew my nose. A runny nose is not one of the symptoms of malaria, which was heartening.

My condition improved somewhat in late morning and early afternoon. I stopped to inspect a towering termite mound outside a small town. Within five minutes, I was surrounded by every child and young man from the village. I spent more than 20 minutes with these 15 or so youngsters. They tugged on my luggage and my motocross armor and the older ones asked where I was from. I took photos and let them use my camera, which delighted them immensely. They squealed at the sight of themselves on the camera’s LCD screen.

When it was time to go, every boy and girl wanted to shake my hand. I gave Obama stickers to the two oldest and balloons to the others. They were incredibly polite and welcoming and the oldest of the bunch thanked me for having stopped. Thank you, I told him, for having me. An hour or so later, the scene repeated itself in another small village. I was having a ball. My time with the youngsters amounted to about 50 minutes.

Later I stopped again. Striding down the road towards me were four herdsmen. They were dressed in outrageously colorful long robes and twirled headscarves and crossed the road to greet me, sizing up me and motorbike simultaneously. One coughed heavily. He looked at me and pointed to his chest and throat. He was sick with something.

He stuck out his tongue and pointed to it as a way of asking whether the rich motorcyclist had medication to share. Maybe ibuprofen would help him, I figured. It couldn’t hurt. I unfastened my spare tires to access my top box and got out my toiletry bag and gave him six ibuprofen. Two now, I told him, and two before sleep, and two tomorrow morning.

He looked closely at the pills in the palm of his hand, and his friends gathered around him to look, too. Then they stuck out their tongues and pointed. Are you guys all sick? I asked in bad French. Like their friend, they coughed. I gave them four ibuprofen each, and realized that with my own illness, I might benefit from some ibuprofen as well.

I got out my water bottle and passed it around and on the side of the road the four swarthy herdsmen and I quite ceremoniously medicated ourselves with ibuprofen. Another 20 minutes – memorable and well spent, but docked against daylight.

I rode. I watched the landscape change, from the lush greenlands of coastal and central Senegal to the sparsely foliated, orange-tinted savannah of the Sahel. I rode through Bagdadji and Mantiankani and Medina Cherif and Kounkane and Koumbadiouma and Sintien Koudara and Gouloumbou and Sare Koli Sal and Velingara and Kotiari and Nauode and Bada and Goudiri and Sintiou Fissa, to the ramshackle town of Kidira at the Senegal-Mali border.

In each town, I’d need to slow to 20 or 25 mph. The ordeal that Peter and Geoff endured near Ziguinchor after a child ran into Peter’s motorbike was reason enough. Dock that slower speed against daylight.

It was nearly 5 p.m. Entering Kidira, I’d spotted a promising sign for Hotel Bountoun, and indeed, a hotel was downtown. But so were hundreds upon hundreds of tractor trailers, packed like a cinder block wall in every available square foot of real estate. Kidira was a border town, which typically are dirty, sketchy places with little appeal. Kidira was no exception.

With those hundreds of trucks, Hotel Bountoun was full. Well, I told myself, if the border crossing goes smoothly, I might just make the only town of size within reach, Kayes, Mali, 60 miles away, before dark. And it did go relatively smoothly, at least compared to the tortuous Senegal-Gambia crossing.

But always there are complications, and when pushing the envelope of daylight, every five minutes counts.

I pulled up to the Senegalese immigration and customs and presented my passport. The officer flipped quickly through it and told me I needed a stamp from the police. In another office, on the other side of town. It took 10 minutes and several inquiries to locate the police station, down a garbage-strewn dirt track, full of enormous potholes, past dozens of wooden shacks and stalls and open fires, nearly a mile from the border.

I presented my documentation and looked around. The police station was a behind a concrete wall. Someone had built a crude pavilion. Around back a white goat was tied up and chewing about a pile of trash. It would make a suitable campsite. The sun was sinking on the horizon. I looked at my watch – 5:30 p.m.

“You have a watch for me?” a police officer asked. He pointed to my Casio. “Very nice watch!”

I don’t, I told him. I just have this one, and I need it to tell me how far behind schedule I always am. He looked at me quizzically. If he wanted a $30 watch for a routine passport stamp, how much would he want for a night of camping – an IBM x40 ThinkPad?

Passport stamped, I returned to the immigration and customs office. I started to present my documentation, but the officer just waved me through. He and a half-dozen others were captivated by a soccer match on a portable TV, situated precariously on a crate.

Customs? I asked him. I knew I would need to have the motorbike stamped out of Senegal to enter Mali. He motioned me away dismissively and insisted all was in order and turned his attention to the TV. If I could get away without a stamp, I might save at least 10 minutes, if not more. I hustled back to my bike and rode a bridge over the Niger River and was in Mali.

More trucks! As in Kidira, hundreds of parked tractor trailers lined the narrow road, leaving open a passage large enough only for a single vehicle. If one vehicle approached one way, another would have to stop and wait … or someone would have to back up. Drivers lay on blankets on the pavement in front of their trucks, waiting for something, it appeared … but what?

An oncoming truck forced me to wedge the motorbike between two semis and wait. I asked a pair of drivers if there was a problem. Why were all these trucks parked here? Is the border closed? I couldn’t discern their answer, and asked instead where customs was. They pointed to the right.

Between the pair of trucks, I could see a sliver of the customs building. It was to my good luck that I’d been forced to stop here, as there was no way otherwise to tell where customs was in this dense alley of semis. I backtracked and presented my documentation. The Mali officer’s brow furrowed as he flipped through my pages. You don’t have a stamp out of Senegal, he said.

I just looked at him. He stabbed his finger into my documentation, in the place where the stamp should be.

I said, in Senegal they told me I didn’t need a stamp. I gave him my best hang-dog look and told him I was trying to get to Kayes and it will be dark soon and dangerous to ride. If I had to return to Senegal, it would cost me 30 minutes at least. He pursed his lips and emphatically stamped my documentation. Merci beaucoup, I told him. Merci beaucoup.

One final and fast passport stamp and I was on my way. It was 6:20 p.m. Sunset was 15 minutes away.

***

I had read in Ryzsard Kapuscinski superb book about Africa, The Shadow of the Sun:

“Everything that in Europe is called dusk and evening here [in Africa] lasts only a few minutes, if it exists at all. It is daytime, and then night, as if someone has turned off the sun’s generator with one flip of the switch. All at once, it is black.”

It was true. I found myself suddenly immersed in darkness, with 40 miles to ride to Kayes. I dropped my speed to 40 and 45 mph, resisting the temptation to throttle up. You could not trust this road. It might be clean for 10 or 15 miles, but then you would encounter a colossal disruption in the road surface. These were not mere potholes, but virtually tectonic disturbances, resembling calderas with lava flows of sand. I had seen them throughout the day. In the dark, I had to be mindful of hitting one at speed.

The headlight on the Suzuki is strong. It is most effective on low beam. It is nowhere near as strong as a car’s headlights, but it is all you have. It’s important to protect the headlight. Over it, I have an adhesive Lexan shield specific from Dual-Star specific to the DR650. I used a similar product on my Kawasaki KLR while riding South America, and it’s very effective.

A truck on a dirt road in Brazil spat up a rock that shattered the glass, but the Lexan shield held the broken glass intact. Without it, chances are good the rock would have broken the bulb. And I carry one spare bulb, securely in a stout plastic container to protect it from damage.

I settled in for the nocturnal ride. Part of my problem, I recognized, is that I’m not a morning person. I like to relax in the morning and enjoy a few cups of coffee and take stock of the day, sort through some gear, or study some maps and travel guides. If I’m on the road by 9 a.m., that’s good.

My riding partners move faster in the morning. Geoff likes to say that he can be showered, packed, fed and on the road within an hour. He operates with a brisk military efficiency, except if hungover, whereas I am a mere and slovenly civilian, as he likes to remind me. I too can be on the road within an hour of waking, but I enjoy it not at all. Peter often awakes before 6 a.m., and likes to be motoring by 8 a.m. or earlier. I’m on my second cup of coffee at 8 a.m.

Another problem is that I enjoy stopping too much. Even 10 minutes on the side of the road is a little crucible of time in which to take stock of the day and my surroundings and appreciate where I am. And I enjoy communing with the locals, who are almost unfailingly pleasant and welcoming and curious and delighted to entertain a foreign motorcyclist.

I watched the GPS click down to my destination. It shows distance to a destination in a straight line, which is of course always less than reality. Thirty-five miles may be 40 or 45 miles, depending on curvature of the road. A few times I could slow and make out a small concrete sign on the shoulder of the road: Kayes 48 kilometers.

I do the calculations again. It is a routine. Forty-eight kilometers divided by two equals 24 miles, plus one-tenth of 48, say five, round up a bit, about 30 miles.

Your physical and mental state amp up while riding up at night. You are totally plugged in, regardless of whether you may be fatigued from a day of riding. All your senses are on full alert. Concentration is intense. You can see only the 30 or 40 yards in front of you, and not much to the sides. The darkness outside the tunnel of the headlight beam is complete. Several times, I hit my brakes at the sight of what turned out to be a lizard racing across the road.

The bugs splattered my faceshield, and slowly visibility was degraded. I spat on my riding glove and tried to wipe the goo away. I tried riding with the faceshield up, but the bugs hit my eyes. I thought of Geoff, who smartly carried a pair of clear-lens glasses for exactly this sort of situation, at least until he lost them.

I passed through several small villages, slowing to 10 or 15 mph. Little kids ran around in the dark, and goats and guys on their scooters. People gathered around dimly lit shacks and kerosene lamps and open fires. Check the odometer – when it hits 290, I’ll be in Kayes. Twenty more miles to go.

The only hotel I’d seen all day was the full Hotel Bountoun in Kidira. But now, on the left, at the edge of small town about three miles from Kayes, was a large illuminated sign, a rarity in these parts. I slowed to see what it said – Motel Maida. The sight was as shocking as it was welcome.

The owner, a chubby and jovial fellow named Moussa, had a room for $15 USD. Did he have a restaurant? Beer? Of course, he said, we have everything! I was the only guest.

I began to unpack. Mind and body were fully wired, a tingling and electric buzz from the intensity of night-riding. I let myself unwind and doffed my sweat-damp riding pants and showered and sat for a dinner of tough chicken and French fries and a Castel beer, while Moussa chortled on about Barack Obama and the promise of a better world. He was delighted with my gift of an Obama sticker.

I added up the mileage for the day on my IGN map of Senegal. Good God, I realized, that was only 270 miles! True, it had included a border crossing, but the asphalt was in relatively good condition. Traffic was light. The hundreds of trucks I’d seen at the Senegal-Mali border left me baffled, as I had seen perhaps two or three trucks all day.

Too, I had saved time by neglecting to stop for any police checkpoints. Unless an officer is squarely in the road and decisively motioning for me to stop, I’ve always been able to get away with waving and motoring on through. Never, in well over a hundred instances in Latin America and now Africa, has an officer ever given chase, nor fired a shot towards my back.

Then again, I had taken a wrong turn thanks to slight inaccuracy in the GPS unit, down a dirt road in Tambacounda, and that cost me 15 minutes. My time with the children and the herdsmen had set me back, too. Complications and diversions. They all added up.

And perhaps most importantly, I was on Africa time. Here, the answer to the question, What time will you get there? is ... when I arrive.
***

Sunrise is at 6:15 a.m. I was on the road at 8 a.m. The road from Kayes to the Malian capital of Bamako would be even longer, 360 miles. But now in the morning light, with the day sprawled out luxuriously in front of me, I found myself captivated by the splendor of spare groves of baobab trees that lined the open road. They looked fantastical with their elephantine trunks and crazy-crooked limbs, like something out of Grimm’s Fairy Tales or the Wizard of Oz. I rode off onto the dirt to be among these giants.

Ah, it’s still morning, I told myself. You got an early start. You have all day to ride. I lingered and wandered among the trees and shot photos and selected from the ground a piece of baobab wood for a souvenir. Once in a while, a car or a scooter would pass, beeping and waving. A half-hour later, I was back on the road.

I was hungry, and in the tiny settlement of Lakamane I stopped at noon for a break. A handful of people sat about a thatch hut. A woman was stirring something in a wok-like vessel. A tall, older man came out to greet me with his hand extended. His nose was big and his nostrils broad, flared as if to snort. On his cap was a skull surrounded by flames. He introduced himself as Kambal.

Is this a restaurant? I asked. No sign advertised it as such. Yes, yes, yes, come in! he exclaimed.

I sat inside the thatch hut on a tiny chair, almost on the ground, and was presented with a plastic bag full of cold, sweet juice. Kambal asked where I was from, and when I told him, he declared, in French, America – the best democratic republic in the world!

Kambal stood about 6 foot 2 inches and his voice was deep and vibrant, like a baritone, and he told me that he was a radio announcer. Just down the road I’d seen a trailer and a sign for a radio station. From here in the Malian wilderness Kambal broadcasted the news, such as it was. On his next broadcast, he told me, he would announce that he had entertained an American motorcyclist.

There’s no electricity in the towns between Kayes and Bamako, except that from diesel generators or large car batteries, which Kambal used to power his Chinese-made Sonica shortwave radio. With it he could capture broadcasts from around the world. On the night of the American election, he had remained awake, listening and hoping for an Obama victory, until the results were in – about 4 a.m. here.

I told him I had a shortwave radio, too, and now he got up and fastened the cables of his Sonica to the car battery and tuned in a French language station. He looked at me with satisfaction as the cheap radio screeched, and his wife entered the hut and placed in front of me bowls of meat and couscous.

I ate. The meat was tough, as nearly all meat in Africa has been. Kambal told me the meat was of a cow. The couscous, with a greasy red sauce, was delicious. Four children watched me and giggled, and I teased them and asked their names. Kambal’s son watched me, too. He wore a heavy winter jacket. It was more than 90 degrees F. Two other young men entered the hut for lunch, and they too were attired in heavy winter jackets.

Um, I said in bad French, why are you guys wearing winter jackets? It’s hot today. In fact, it was stifling inside the hut.

No, they told me, it’s cold. I would see this throughout Mali – men wearing heavy jackets in the middle of the day. Based on my inquiries, I had to conclude that Malians have a different metabolic tolerance for heat and cold than Westerners. In evenings, with the temperature at 70 F and me attired in shorts and a T-shirt, I would be asked whether I was cold.

A young woman entered the hut with a snot-nosed infant. This was the wife of Kambal’s son. She wore a colorful headscarf and a black T-shirt, which she lifted to suckle her child. She chortled and suggested I take a picture of her breastfeeding, which I did.

I picked at the tough meat and examined the interior of the hut. I had wondered what exactly was inside these many huts that I had seen, and now here I was. The frame and ceiling were made of timber; thatch sufficed as ceiling and walls. In one rear corner was a bedroom of sorts, a single wall of thatch. Next to it was the infant’s crib, also made of wood and thatch. A couple of wooden tables and low benches and improvisational shelving and that was it.

They people had barely anything. We sat and smiled. I had seen thousands upon thousands of Africans sitting outside huts and shacks, inertly, and it baffled my Western mind what they possibly could be doing. Nothing, it seemed …but maybe there was something. Time passes differently here, I thought. It unfolds, slowly, a soap opera at half-speed.

Someone stops in to chatter and leaves. Then it is quiet. Then someone says something, and someone responds, and again it is quiet. Kambal looked out towards the road, listening to time, watching the world. His expression was beneficent and patient and Zen-like. There was nothing to do except to be, it seemed, and that was plenty in and of itself.

I got up and excused myself to leave, and Kambal bolted from his little chair. No, he exclaimed, you must sit for tea! I had just snuck a glance at my watch. It was 12:50 p.m. I had been in the hut for nearly an hour. It was time to move and burn some miles, but Kambal was so insistent that we share tea that I did not want to offend him.

How long can a cup of tea take? I thought. It took a half-hour! Two boys started a charcoal fire in the hut, but without a high flame, it was 20 minutes before the water boiled. Tea and sugar were then added to the pot. One boy didn’t add sufficient sugar for Kambal’s liking, and he scolded them. Time crawled by. The final step was to pass the tea between two pots to better steep it, and then pour in back and forth between glasses and a pot.

This tedious delay was killing me. I watched in agony and agitation as the boys labored through the tea-making, and finally snatched a cup before they had a chance to repour it into the pot. Kambal was alarmed. It’s not ready! he exclaimed in French.

It’s fine for me, I said. I have to get to Bamako and I don’t want to ride at night. It’s dangerous.

***

I have the face of a cheap plastic watch Velcroed to the front brake master cylinder atop my right-side handlebar. I bought it in La Paz, Bolivia, and it bears the Bolivian flag. I enjoy its sentimental value, and I curse the inexorable circling of its hour and minute hands.

I rode and the hands twirled. From Lakamane to Bamako would be about 300 miles. I had five hours before sunset – less actually, because darkness always fall earlier the farther east in a time zone one rides. I was riding east. To make Bamako before nightfall would require an average speed of 60 mph. The road was in relatively decent shape. Maybe I could do it. Sit back, watch the miles click down.

I stopped for fuel at a station in Diema. The young attendant and his friend stood and admired my motorbike and asked where I was going. To Timbuktu, I said. The attendant’s friend said, I have a motorcycle! I go with you!

Ha! It was all too much fun. I spent 20 minutes with these young men, inspecting the kid’s “Power K” scooter and explaining that its fuel tank was too small to make the distances we would need to travel. He would need to jerricans of fuel and luggage and gear. No problem! he said. I want to go!

I had to admire his enthusiasm, and if he had an appropriate bike, perhaps he could accompany us. He was maybe 18 years old. I remembered when I was 18, and how exciting it would have been to take off on a grand and impromptu adventure. As it was, all I could do was give him an Obama sticker for his bike and ride away.

The landscape rolled by. So did the hours. I rode and kept one eye on the Bolivian watch and the other my GPS mileage indicator and ran the arithmetic through my head time and again. I watched the sun descend in the vast African sky. It was alarmingly low by 4:30 p.m. Already my shadow had begun to extend across the road.

Along most of the long and paved highway to Bamako, dirt pistes run parallel. They are used by cattle and goats and their herdsmen. The herdsmen are wealthy men, by standards. Livestock is wealth here. Every half-hour or so, I would pass a herd of cattle or goats and the slender, swarthy men herding them. The men wear scarves and stride with an elegant gait, and the sight is arresting.

I ran off onto the piste a quarter mile past a herd of goats and parked the bike and lay in the shade of a bush and watched the spectacle pass me and captured it on video. The control the herdsmen exercise over their goats is remarkable. The goats seemed skittish passing between my motorbike and me, and the men, with some seemingly magical command, brought the herd of several hundred goats to a halt in an instant, then set them off again.

I set off, too. Once again I had been confronted with the balancing act between enjoying a unique experience and making time. Now the arithmetic was shot all to hell. I would need to average more than 65 miles an hour to make Bamako before nightfall. And unlike the small town of Kayes, Bamako is a capital city of several million people and jammed with “hostile traffic,” as my guidebook put it.

Still you rationalize. Ah well, I’ve ridden at night before. Even after the sun falls beneath the horizon, you’ll have a bit of light. For a little while. Seven p.m. wouldn’t be awful. I pushed on, irrationally imagining circumstances that would enable entry into Bamako with some visible light.

But now my Bolivian watch showed 6 p.m. I had 40 miles left to go. The orange ball of the sun was at the cusp of the horizon. I slowed to make my way through another small town, this one called Nossobougou, and spotted a sight that I had not seen the entire day – a sign for an auberge.

Auberge Le Beledougou had decent rooms and a restaurant and a bar. The owner, named Ban, was standing out front to welcome me. He was a big, tall, jovial character, a little full of himself but endearing in his own inimitable way. I was the only guest. As at Motel Maida the night before, a room would be $15 USD.

I sat at an outdoor patio for a fine meal of carp and fried potatoes and peas and a few Castels. Frogs hopped about, and I watched them hunt their insect prey. Ban bounced around, chattering in French and broken English and bidding me to inspect his lovely garden and beautifully maintained Peugeot 505, to which he most happily affixed an Obama sticker. He played a CD by some female English-language singer on a boombox and declared, over its ridiculously high volume, “THIS IS FOR YOU!”

Ban was a computer technician in Bamako and a man of some means. This auberge in tiny Nossobougou was something of a retreat for him, and would occasionally generate some income from … well, motorcyclists vexed once again by the dynamics of time and space and darkness.

I told Ban I had meant to make Bamako and would have ridden in at night if I hadn’t spotted his auberge. He frowned and shook his head. Traffic is very, very bad, he said. Big city. Very dangerous. This is nice place, no?

Later, I studied a map of Africa in my Lonely Planet book. My God, I thought, this continent is huge! My position in central Mali was depressingly distant from South Africa. Ban hovered over my shoulder. I traced for him my route south to Cape Town.

He stepped back a foot and whistled: Wheeeeewwww! Long way! When do you get there?

I told him, When I arrive.

The High Tide of Hope

Kolda, Senegal * November 8, 2008

Migo and I sat for lunch at the riverside patio of the Le Perroquet auberge in Ziguinchor. It’s an exceptionally pleasant and affordable place in the tropics of southwestern Senegal, with the fascinating spectacle of dozens of pink pelicans roosting and squawking in trees above, and a large, leafy courtyard in which our motorbikes were securely parked.

We watched colorful fishing pirogues ply the Casamance River. Once in a while, a cool and soothing zephyr would drift across the river and spirit away some of the stifling noontime heat. I picked at my fish brochette and rice and brooded.

I was just back from a brief solo venture to Cap Skirring, a resort town on the Atlantic Coast where I splurged on a five-star seaside hotel with English-language CNN on satellite TV to watch the results from the American election. Migo had made it to Ziguinchor from Kafountine, a smaller Senegalese coastal town to the north – barely.

His 2004 KTM 950 Adventure was failing. The engine was making a horrific rattle, its power was compromised and the oil light was on constantly. We had planned to meet here at Le Perroquet for lunch, and ride east for the remainder of the afternoon.

But upon arrival, Migo said, “I’m afraid I’m not going anywhere for a while.”

The bike problem was grave. We analyzed and discussed and swapped ideas and watched the fishing boats come and go. It could be valves or the oil pump or a piston ring, or perhaps related to the persistent and mysterious coolant loss the KTM had suffered since leaving Germany six weeks earlier.

“The problem is we don’t know what the problem is,” I said.

“That is a problem,” Migo deadpanned.

***
Unfortunately, Geoff’s words were proving prophetic. Back in Western Sahara, in an idle moment during the border crossing into Mauritania, he had speculated that KTM was a German acronym for Krap Touring Motorcycling.

It was funny at the time, but now the irony was bitter. Migo was royally stuck, and this unwelcome development would test his ingenuity, resourcefulness, tenacity and patience. An adventure motorbike ride usually does, some way or another.

Austrian-made KTMs are notoriously complex, and Migo’s mechanical skills were decidedly limited. I had more mechanical experience, but the guts of a KTM motor are far beyond my knowledge and capabilities. But I did have an IBM x40 ThinkPad laptop. Le Perroquet had wireless Internet, accessible from its fine riverside patio. Migo’s cell phone was working and he could call Europe.

First, one of the helpful staffers from Le Perroquet told us there was a capable bike mechanic in Ziguinchor. The guy had lived in Canada and had experience with large cylinder motorbikes. Migo paid him a visit, hoping to find a well equipped shop. What he found instead was a dumpy little shack. The guy did his work on the street.

The mechanic stopped by Le Perroquet to inspect Migo’s bike. A bad oil pump was his first diagnosis. He was accompanied for three or four kids, and immediately they began pushing Migo’s motorbike towards the shack down the street.

“Whoa, are you sure you want to do this?” I asked Migo. “Once he starts, he’s not going to stop until he’s got your bike in a squillion pieces.” Migo agreed. Research and deliberation was required. Another rule for motorcycling abroad is never, ever let someone else work on your bike, unless absolutely necessary.

Mechanics in Latin America, Africa, and elsewhere can be dangerous men. Given license, they will rip and strip and cut and grind your bike until it’s a jigsaw puzzle of parts. Then they’ll to reassemble it, and hope for the best. I have watched in horror and amusement as mechanics (acting as something of my helper) tried to fit a radiator on backwards, forgot spacers to a front tire, and misrouted fuel hoses, among other missteps large and small.

I’ll say it again for the benefit of would-be adventure riders – they are dangerous men. They are invariably well intentioned, but they can destroy your ride, and your paddle out of shit creek. You need to know as much as possible about your own motorbike and how to fix it.

Even though Migo’s problem was bound to be complex and he’s no mechanic, his chances of identifying and correcting the issue with the help of the Internet and how-to manuals and phone inquiries would be much greater than a sidewalk mechanic in Ziguinchor.

We got to work. Migo downloaded the KTM service manual from the Web to my ThinkPad and printed out its 300-plus pages. He posted an inquiry at a German-language KTM message forum describing the symptoms and soliciting ideas. He reached by phone a knowledgeable and helpful KTM mechanic in Germany, who offered several valuable ideas as to the root cause.

And, stepping out from Le Perroquet onto the street, I spotted, right in front of me, a most welcome sight – a DHL truck. Ziguinchor is a city of 200,000-some people, big enough for DHL to do business here. With DHL, parts could readily be shipped from Europe. Another cause for hope.

By the evening, research and deliberation was paying dividends. A clogged oil filter seemed to be a likely culprit, and tomorrow Migo would make an inspection. We hopefully toasted a pair of Gazelle beers and relaxed over dinner and watched the frogs hunt insects on the riverside patio and Migo received a text on his cell phone.

It was from Geoff. He and Peter, riding off together from Ziguinchor towards Mali a day earlier, had been arrested and handcuffed and held on suspicion of striking and killing a young girl with a motorcycle. No further details were forthcoming, except they were free and had survived what Geoff called a surreal ordeal.

It sounded incredible. “Do you think he’s kidding?” I asked Migo.

He studied the text on his phone and shook his head. “No,” he said.

***
I felt bad for Migo. I could relate to his anxiety, as I had experienced a smaller dose of it myself after accidentally filling the tank with diesel fuel back in Portugal and then suspecting something horrific like blown valve seals.

Migo’s bad luck was an unwelcome turn to my day, which had begun on a stratospheric note. I had awoken at 4:15 a.m. in my $150-a-night hut at the five-star La Paillote in Cap Skirring to find John McCain giving his concession speech on the 27-inch LG flat screen TV, which I had left on. Then Obama came on, and I watched the president-elect and the tearful celebrants until I fell back to sleep.

From Election Day 2004: Day of the Dread, Tonala, Mexico

I bounded from my room at 7:30. I wanted to hug someone, so elated and relieved was I over Obama’s victory, but La Paillote was a Republican country club sort of place. Serious-looking older French men sat with their coffee and laptops on the patio overlooking the Atlantic, and when I smiled at one and declared “Obama!” he gave me a look of disdain.

I had liked Obama from the start. He struck me as a man of remarkable character and commitment, and I appreciated his cerebral cool. I was impressed to learn that after graduating law school, he went into low-paying social work in Chicago, rather than lucrative employment on Wall Street.

Perhaps more importantly, I knew that the world outside of the U.S. would embrace Obama, particularly with his multiethnic background. The American president, in my view, helps to set the tone for all nations and the well being of mankind. If the American president is strong and well liked, it helps to lift the spirits of people around the globe, from politicians to the indigent. It inspires hope.

Conversely, a small-minded, venal and cynical politician like George W. Bush depresses and diminishes the world and its collective spirit. The effect is insidious. None of this is a direct cause and effect, I don’t think. It is instead subtle and very much in concert with humanity’s psychological tendency to triangulate power, authority and leadership.

After breakfast coffee, I trotted down to the long, lovely beach and stripped to my shorts and waded out into the Atlantic. The tide was high. The waves were tall and powerful and I let them crash over me. It was suddenly a new world, I thought, one buoyed on a high tide of hope.

At least some people at La Paillote were as jubilant over Obama’s victory as I was. The staff members, all black Africans, greeted me joyfully throughout the morning. I had met many of them when I arrived the day before, and they knew I was an American and here to watch the election results.

“Obama le vainquer! Le vainquer!” one staffer exclaimed to me. I later looked up the word in my French dictionary -- the winner! He pumped my hand and hugged me and thanked me – thanked me! – for Barack Obama, as if I had something to do with it.

Well, maybe I did, sort of, along with the millions of other Americans who had believed in this man and donated to his campaign over the Web. (I had voted via absentee ballot, both for Obama and a mischievous proposition on the San Francisco ballot to rename the wastewater treatment facility the George W. Bush Sewage Plant, which, to my disappointment, my fellow San Franciscans voted down 69 percent to 31 percent).

Throughout my Africa travels, I had been struck by how personally vested Africans seemed in Obama’s candidacy. His name was invoked to me by dozens upon dozens of people when they learned I was an American. It was usually the first thing they would say. And when I presented them with an Obama sticker …well, it’s difficult to describe how incredibly, even shockingly, delighted many of them were.

A half-dozen staffers gathered in my hut to watch CNN and highlights from Obama’s acceptance speech. I had invited them in. I stood in the back and watched these men. No doubt they earned but a pittance for their menial work. They were janitors and cooks and gardeners and wore cheap, hotel-issued uniforms of orange and green.

They couldn’t understand English and didn’t know what Obama was saying, but they watched the TV, rapt and jubilant, and the stunning sight of a half-black man, of African lineage, Kenya in particular, accepting the presidency of the United States.

One man pursed his lips to suppress his smile and shook his head back and forth and wiped tears from his eyes.

They could not believe what they were seeing. Neither could I.

***

In the morning, Migo removed the oil filter from his KTM. It was badly clogged with a clumpy sort of paste, and according to his research, it could not be cleaned and reused. He had not carried spare filters, something he now realized was a brain-dead oversight.

A moment of truth was upon us. He buttoned up the bike, sans filter, and gingerly pressed the starter button. VROOM! The KTM roared to life. We listened for that horrific clatter to manifest in the engine, but it did not. Migo then leapt up and down and flailed his arms in the air while a local kid, who had been watching, beamed happily.

So the problem was a bad oil filter, at least partially. But what had caused the oil filter to become so snotted up with that clumpy paste in the first place? All signs pointed to the mysterious coolant loss Migo’s KTM had suffered for weeks.

According to the KTM mechanic in Germany, it made sense: Coolant was leaking into the motor, mixing unnaturally with the oil, and voila – a ruined filter, retarded oil flow, and a stricken bike.

For Migo, now would come a waiting game. It would take at least five days for a new water pump and replacement oil filters to be shipped via DHL from Germany. It could be more – two weeks, worst case scenario, we figured.

It was pointless for me to remain for all that time. Migo appreciated my staying around for two unplanned days, my moral support and mechanical brainstorming, and especially the use of my ThinkPad on the Le Perroque patio, which spared him humping down to an Internet café and struggling with French keyboards. We both knew it was time for me to go.

The next morning I would, towards Mali, in pursuit of Geoff and Peter. We would learn subsequently that upon leaving Ziguinchor, only hours before Migo and I met there on the day after the American election, a young girl about 3 years old had run across the road and smacked into the Hepco-Becker aluminum pannier on the left side of Peter’s BMW Dakar.

Peter was oblivious to what had happened, and Geoff, riding behind Peter at some distance, hadn’t seen it either.

But a few minutes later, a white pickup roared up behind Geoff and rammed him from the rear. He spilled, and was immediately confronted by hostile men – in particular, a tall Senegalese in a white T-shirt.

Not seeing Geoff in his rear-view view, Peter later turned around to find Geoff’s bike on the ground and a dangerous confrontation in full swing. Geoff’s first thought was that he was being robbed, and, being a soldier and bodyguard trained in hand-to-hand combat, he was prepared to go down fighting.

It became clear, though, that the men had given chase because a child had been struck by, or had struck, one of the motorcycles. The girl and her family were located down the street, and the crowd made its way to the hospital for the girl to be examined.

She was all right, thank God, except for a chipped tooth, and a baby tooth at that. A pair of English-speaking nuns helped to mediate the situation among the hospital staff and the tall man in the white T-shirt, who according to Peter and Geoff continued to behave belligerently and irrationally. As far as they could tell, he was no relation to the injured girl.

Peter paid the hospital bill, and all parties were satisfied, except for the hostile man. Peter and Geoff motored away from Ziguinchor, aiming for Kolda. They got a few dozen miles down the road when they were stopped at a police checkpoint, told to dismount, directed inside a police vehicle, handcuffed together, and returned to the police station in Ziguinchor.

The charge: Suspicion of having run over and killed a child. For a full account of the ordeal, see Peter Cullen’s blog entry.

***
With Migo’s course of action set in motion, I spent my final afternoon in Ziguinchor exploring. I wandered up the main street, a small and narrow dirt thoroughfare. This street had never been tarred, and now huge undulations had been carved in its dusty surface. It was lined by hardware and food and stationary stores and little restaurants and shacks at which people sold vegetables and peppers and screwdrivers and padlocks and pens – a poor, almost decrepit place, but one still better off than other Senegalese cities I had traveled through.

The people here are so warm and friendly and welcoming and helpful, I thought. They have been throughout Senegal, I realized, all of Africa really. I almost hated to leave for Mali, I was enjoying myself so much. Ziguinchor, and especially the sanctuary of Le Perroquet, with its friendly and helpful staff and lovely surroundings and restaurant and bar, was the perfect place for Migo to confront the devils in his KTM.

I wanted to buy a jubilee clip to replace one that I had given Migo for an oil hose, and made one inquiry. Within minutes, more than a half-dozen people had gathered, discussing who might have a jubilee clip and then leading me to one store, then another, until finally a third had what I was looking for.

Ladies sat on the sidewalk with baskets of bananas and onions and peppers for sale. I bought two bananas and sat with them. They laughed and teased me whether I had a wife or a girlfriend, and when I said I did not, one woman volunteered her daughter. They squealed and slapped their knees and chortled away, and I could only shake my head at their hilarity and love for life.

Maybe 50 yards away was a unique-looking domed building inside a walled enclave. It appeared empty. A man told me it had been built by the Portuguese more than a century ago, in the era of European colonialism. Ziguinchor had been a major slave-trading port, and now this reminder to that dark past stood imperiously on Ziguinchor’s main street. No one seemed to care.

At the end of the street, I spotted an Africa Twin motorcycle. It’s a large 750cc bike and a rare sight in these parts. I stopped to admire it. Three men were sitting on a bench, and one said something in French. I spent the next 15 minutes with these ordinary men, chatting and laughing and marveling at their joie de vivre.

I learned that they were construction workers and had just ended their day. Now they relaxing with little plastic cups of hot coffee, even though it was nearly 100 F and humid. Across the street, they had been excavating and laying new concrete block walls. What’s going in there? I asked. They didn’t know. It had yet to be determined. The structure would be built and a tenant found.

One of the construction workers said he hoped it would be something good.

***
I was packed and ready to roll before 10 a.m. the next morning. I hated to say goodbye to Migo, and revisited my decision to leave him here and motor on. No, I told myself, this is the way it has to be. It’s better for me, and more importantly, in a different way, it would be better for him.

Always you need to be fully self-sufficient on an adventure ride. This was Migo’s time. He would be alone with himself. He would confront this challenge and learn things. My time probably would come down the road.

I left with him an English-language book I had bought in Dakar, about a Zulu king named Chakra. It would help him pass his long hours while waiting for the DHL shipment. He was nervous about the prospect of ripping out and replacing his water pump. He had never done such work before, and the instructions he had found seemed intimidating.

I told him he could do it. He would want to closely the analyze the instructions a few times and keep all parts separate and distinct, labeled on pieces of paper if need be. Take his time. Understand the dynamics of the thing. Be patient. Think twice. Be methodical – he’s a German, after all! He could do it.

We could only hope that would prove true.

Shadow of a Stranger

Ziguinchor, Senegal * November 2, 2008

Once in a while, the reality of it smacks you upside the helmet with concussive force. It’s as if your stream of consciousness had detoured down some cerebral cul de sac, and had forgotten where it was. You’re lost in some foggy mental meandering, neither here not there, almost a suspended animation to your ordinary thought processes.

Suddenly, you remember. It’s not unlike waking abruptly from a dream. My God, you think, I’m in Africa … motorcycling through Africa! The effect can be as stunning as a strong déjà vu, except it’s sort of a bass-ackwards déjà vu.

For an instant, all the exotic sights and sounds and smells of Africa are new once more. Even the name, Africa, is again as big and faraway and mysterious as it was months earlier, when planning the ride and contemplating what Africa would be like.

I’ve been having a few of these pleasantly epiphanous moments lately, and had another on the road to Ziguinchor in southeastern Senegal, in a conflicted region called the Casamance. The terrain had changed to a lush littoral lowland. The landscape was Jurassic. Towering palm trees sprouted from low swamps, blankets of reeds were an electric green, and you could half expect to spot a Brontosaurus stomping about in the distance.

The air was humid in the withering tropical heat. Colorful birds of turquoise and orange and yellow dive-bombed the road, and cruised above the grassy and placid water for prey. Up ahead I could see a small village.

As I approached, I saw thatch and clay huts and men sitting idly on wooden benches. Women with baskets on their heads walked along the road, their long dresses a rainbow of bold colors. A group of barefoot children leapt up and waved and hollered, their smiles as bright as the mid-afternoon sun. A kid goat skittered out into the road, heard my motorcycle, and made a hasty retreat. A bus, as colorful as it was dilapidated, was packed with passengers, some hanging out the back and several on the roof.

Geoff was stopped in the middle of the village, and asked if I was all right. In fact, I’d stopped because a bee had gotten into my faceshield and stung me on the temple. Then Peter Cullen pulled up behind. To our left, a wedding celebration was in full swing on the dirt just off the pavement. Someone had a boombox and people were dancing and laughing and swaying and clapping beneath a tattered and torn fabric awning, motioning for the motorcyclists to join them.

I marveled for a while at this community celebration and we pulled away. Ziguinchor, a city of more than 200,000 on the Casamance River and our destination for the evening, was 30 miles to the southwest. The road was narrow and an unpopulated and lined by foliage, indistinguishable from a rural road in Kentucky or upstate New York.

I fell into a rhythm with the road and the motorbike. I managed to forget where I was, who I was, and what I was doing, as if hypnotized.

Then I spotted a military vehicle approaching me full of armed soldiers in camouflage uniforms. A large machine gun was mounted quite menacingly atop the cab. A soldier snapped off a salute. I awoke from my fugue to realize … Africa! Sonofabitch, I am -- I’m riding a motorcycle through Africa!

It was all so beautiful and glorious and bracing and amazing it could break your heart.

Video: Dance Fever
A lively wedding celebration was under way in a tiny town in southwestern Senegal. Geoff and Peter bob to the beat before we motor ahead.

***
Perhaps one’s mind goes blank for a respite from ceaseless adventure. The last several days have been jam-packed with a white-knuckle escape from Dakar, spine-rattling rough roads, border and water and ferry crossings, and jungle heat of up to 110 F that left me perspiring constantly and heavily for hours on end. It’s all more fun than mortal man deserves, and yet it invites reflection, re-engineering one’s perspective, and coming to grips with a world far unlike the West.

The escape from Dakar was unexpected. I’d spent the morning at a café called La Palmarie with wireless Internet, and returned to Calypso shortly after noon to find Geoff’s motorbike packed on the street and ready to roll. We going somewhere? I asked. I’d figured on spending a third night in Dakar while Migo sorted through his tire problems with DHL.

“Migo got his tire,” Geoff said. “So we thought we’d run out to Lac Rose. Dude, I’ve been here seven days. It’s enough.”

“Huh,” I said. “Not what I was planning on, fellas.” I looked at Migo. When debating what to do, three riders can always take a vote. Consensus prevails. “You wanna take off?”

“Yeah,” he said. “I hate big cities. And the tire is all squared away. After all that time wasted yesterday when they thought they didn’t have it, it was there all the time. I showed up, they punched something in the computer, and a guy comes around the corner with it.”

I briefly considered letting them take off and catching up with them after a third night in Dakar, but why? It was a great big insane city that would no doubt keep me highly entertained, but a night at Lac Rose, the terminus of the Paris-Dakar race about 30 miles northeast of the Dakar city center, was equally appealing.

Plus, Geoff understood that Paris-Dakar stickers for our motorbikes could be found at Lac Rose. That sealed it. “All right, I’ll run out to Lac Rose,” I said. “But first I need to get insurance.”

I’d been lucky a few days earlier when an unwitting police officer accepted as legitimate my American insurance card, worthless in Senegal. The next time, a sharper-eyed officer might wrench up my ride with a 50 Euro fine and a demand that I procure insurance before I could proceed down the road.

Jean-Hugue, the owner of Calypso, was chatting with Geoff on the sidewalk. I asked if he knew a place nearby where I could buy liability insurance. Just a few blocks away, the Frenchman replied, at the Place du Independence, you’ll find AXA Insurance. He thought for a minute. C’mon, he said, I’ll take you.

He retreated into Calypso and returned with his motorbike helmet and I thought, Oh no … not on his bike!

I hate riding on the back of someone else’s bike. In fact, I’ve only done it once, and that was enough. At the moment, my own helmet was in my hotel room. I was wearing shorts, sneakers, and a T-shirt.

Then again, I told myself, Jean-Hugue has run the Paris-Dakar race four times. The guy can obviously RIDE. What the hell, I’ll go as I am – Africa style. Jean-Hugue had a brand new Yamaha Tenere. He just got it the other day. Off we went, accelerating fast, squirting between the smallest openings in the dense traffic, braking hard, Jean-Hugue honking his horn and waving to people who recognized him.

Then, with the large AXA Insurance building in sight, Jean-Hugue was looking to his left and somehow missed the motorist on the right who slammed on his brakes to avoid hitting us. The car’s tires barked on the hot macadam. Jean-Hugue hit his brakes, too, jamming me into his back, and he and the motorist exchanged dirty looks. Ah, right. This is why I don’t like riding on the back.

At AXA, I bought a month of insurance for Senegal, The Gambia, Mali, Burkina Faso and some other countries for just 6300 CFA, or about $13.50 USD. Jean-Hugue insures his businesses with AXA, and secured for me a discount. I thanked him for his assistance, and rode back Africa-style, more of out of politeness than haste to start packing.

Geoff and Migo were seated for lunch next door to Calypso. ”Well boys, I got insurance, and you won’t believe what I paid,” I said. Migo had paid more than $40 USD, and Geoff was forced to fork over nearly $90 USD in the den of thieves that is Rosso for a month of liability. “Just 6300 CFA …about $13! Jean-Hugue got me a discount.”

“Bloody hell!” Geoff groaned. “They got me for 70 Euro in Rosso! That freaking hellhole cost me a ton of money.”

Video: Escape from Dakar
Negotiating a large African city like Dakar requires dodging vendors wandering through the snotted-up traffic.

An hour later, we made our escape from Dakar. Traffic, as during our entry, was lunatic and thick as African flies. Just one block from the hotel, I nearly collided head-on with a scooter dude who imprudently took a corner, aiming straight at me. We missed each other by inches.

In a twisted way, I enjoy riding aggressively in dense urban traffic at the end of the day, when my motorcycling instincts are functioning at high RPM. Starting out cold is more difficult. Migo, however, seems untroubled by starting out cold. He tore off through Dakar’s traffic, with Geoff in pursuit. After my near head-on crash, I let them go.

Later, Geoff would tell me, “Migo says it’s like a sport. We get into it with each other. He goes through one side of the traffic and gets ahead and looks back at me with this big grin. Then I’ll get through the other side and look back at him, ‘Ha, got you motherfucker!’” Geoff is sanguine about the prospect of a crash. “I’ll probably crack it at some point,” he said.

To reach Lac Rose, we detoured off the main road towards the northern coast of the Cap Verte Peninsula. The towns were poor and broken and the road in places had deteriorated into a piste with patches of soft sand. The lake itself, a colorful pink due to its high salt and mineral content, was encircled by a three-mile piste with several campsites. We rode off to explore.

Geoff took his fifth spill of the ride, trying to turn around on a berm after choosing a line that ended at a barbed wire fence. Migo and I went instantly for our cameras as Geoff stood about cursing. “I heard Migo yell ‘Wait!’ and I thought he was going to come over to help me,” Geoff said later. “Instead he pulls out his camera … bastard!” My own picture of the spill shows Migo helpfully taking a photograph while Geoff hoists his fallen bike by himself.

At the far end of the piste was a tiny place called Bonaba Café, where we stopped to relieve the man of his last three, and warm, beers. To get to Bonaba and out required a modest water crossing, which is always great fun on a dual-sport bike. It was also the first water crossing we had done. Migo went first, slowly, barely kicking up water. I went second and harder, spraying a large V and taking a mouthful of salt water and soaking my boots and riding pants.

Video: Not Quite Paris-Dakar...
...but we did have some fun with a modest water fording at Lac Rose, Senegal, terminus of the fabled Paris-Dakar race.

My lower half was still soaking wet by the time we made it back to the tiny center of Lac Rose, anchored by a campsite on one side and a dozens of souvenir sellers on the other. Immediately, we were surrounded by the merchants. “My friend, my friend! Where you from? Come visit my shop!”

Thanks bucko, but I’m not in the market for an African mask to fasten up to my fender. What we did want were stickers for the Paris-Dakar race, or Dakar city, or Lac Rose. “Autocollant,” we would say, pointing to the stickers already on our bikes. “Pour Paris-Dakar.” No stickers were available at the souvenir stands, but a few of the men promised to return with Paris-Dakar stickers tomorrow morning.

The evening was beautiful and relaxing. I took a bungalow for about $16 USD, happily unloading my bike right in front of the door, while Geoff and Migo opted for their tents. The pesky merchants left us in peace. At the campsite bar and restaurant, a bright and friendly staffer asked me about the American election and Barack Obama. Like virtually everyone in Africa – if not every native African, period – he is rooting for Obama.

“I have a cadeaux for you … just a minute,” I said. I went to my bungalow and returned with an Obama sticker, and the man’s face lit up like the Macy’s Christmas tree. He was absolutely, perhaps inordinately, delighted, and I told Geoff later the Obama stickers were turning out to be one of the best things I brought on the ride. He scoffed. He thinks McCain will prevail.

Will Obama win? the man, named Satah, wanted to know. “Inshallah,” I replied. God willing. But don’t take it for granted, I said. Yes, Obama leads in the polls, but the American people are prone to do stupid things, like elect a risk-taking Republican with the monumentally poor judgment to select as his running mate a hockey mom wholly unqualified to assume the most powerful and important job in the world.

We had a chicken dinner. Toads hopped around the open-air restaurant patio. Mosquitos buzzed about, but the Ultrathon repellent I’ve been using seems to be effective. (Migo, on the other hand, was bitten heavily, troubling as he opted against taking a malarial prophylactic). Five cats paid a visit to our table, looking for a handout; one boldly perched himself at the edge of our table and snatched a large piece of my chicken as deftly as a Rosso thief. Migo retired early, and so did the bartender, unplugging and taking with him for security the small, cheap TV atop the outdoor bar.

Geoff and I remained, talking motorbikes and adventures and sipping the last of our Flag beers. The refrigerator, we knew, had more beer. But it was locked in two places. But the bartender had left the keys hanging in a padlock, I discovered upon close inspection. We helped ourselves to a few more Flags, and Geoff left a 5000 CFA bill inside, and when the aged campsite guardian wandered through, Geoff unlocked the fridge, explained our transaction, and we all had a good laugh.

The next morning before 9 a.m., sure enough, one merchant was back with stickers for us to buy … three old, weathered B.F. Goodrich tire stickers that he seemed to have peeled from a window or wall. Thanks bub, but I’d rather have the Africa mask.

Stickerless, we motored away and an hour later found Peter Cullen at a place called Hotel Rex in Thies, a smallish, leafy city about 40 miles from Dakar center. Peter had stayed in Thies before, and I could see why he was so fond of this charming place. As Peter wrote in his blog: http://travelblog.co.uk/2008/?p=0&bid=peter.cullen

“The streets are alive. Western music blares from the tiny stalls and shops … everybody is jostling along the street. Everybody is talking, loudly. Bikes and mopeds head against the flow of traffic in the one-way system. It's great. I am nearly the only white face in town. After the sophistication of St. Louis, I feel I am finally in West Africa.”

Migo decided to stay in Thies. He had in mind to visit a small village outside Thies on behalf of the charity he’s supporting, www.betterplace.org. I offer to accompany him, but Migo says the organizer of the project was not keen, for some unknown reason, on Westerners on adventure motorbikes paying a visit. He will go alone. He’ll catch up with Peter, Geoff and me down the road.

***

I gave the DR a good beating. Not because it deserved it, but because this rough and potholed and corrugated and slightly sandy road, from the alarmingly dumpy Senegalese city of Kaolack south to The Gambia, is what the DR was built for. This road was why I had fortified the DR with stiff aftermarket Eibach front and rear springs and a SuperBrace fork brace.

I bought the Eibach springs from Jesse Kientz, owner a small part distributorship in Oregon who specializes in the Suzuki DR. Jesse is highly regarded in the DR community for his knowledge and helpfulness. Months earlier on the phone, I’d told Jesse that I’d be riding punishing roads in Africa, running an eight-gallon Aqualine Safari fuel tank (heavy when full of gasoline) and toting a lot of gear.

“Well,” Jesse told me in his laconic drawl, “the stiffest front springs are what we sell for our 300-pound riders.” I said, “I’ll take ‘em.”

Now the springs were being put to the test. The road was at one time paved, but now it was basically dirt, with patches of bitumen that only roughened the ride. Allegedly it was under repair, but no work was evident.

I rode the DR hard, mostly third gear around 40 mph, up to 50 mph, slaloming between concave depressions, a few times bottoming out the front forks in deep potholes, and skimming at speed atop corrugations to minimize the feedback. Vwooom! Vwooom! Vwooom! The bike bounced back and forth and up and down, and when I wanted more throttle, the rejetted carburetor, FMF Q2 pipe, and 14-tooth sprocket were more than happy to oblige.

Traffic was fairly light, but any passing vehicle would kick up a cloud of dust. I’d have to slow for a while until visibility of the terrain ahead was restored. Light or not, African traffic would as always pose a hazard.

I approached a corner that bent to the left. In the middle on the left side was parked a van. I couldn’t see what was around that leftwards bend. The road was fairly narrow. Some intuition told me to hit the brakes and sidle over to the right. I remembered the mantra from my near-crash on a corner on a dirt road in Honduras: Here comes the school bus.

A pick-up truck ripped around the corner at speed, oblivious to whether or not another motorist might be cornering in the opposite direction. It was a head-on collision waiting to happen. I could see the face of the driver with surreal clarity – barely above the steering wheel, pineapple-shaped head, protuberant ears, and almond-shaped eyes in a catatonic, straight-ahead gaze. The cloud of dust he left in his wake was large. The margin between us, even with me far to the right, was a matter of feet.

I didn’t realize it at the time, but Geoff wasn’t far behind me. He would say later, “I saw your brake lights go on and thought, ‘What’s this old fucker braking for?’” The school bus, my friend.

The harder I ran, the more I appreciated the DR. “Damn,” I thought to myself. “This bike is sooooooo much better off-road than the KLR!” The Suzuki DR easily bested the Kawasaki 650 I’d ridden through South America by every measure – maneuverability, stability, thrust, and lighter weight. And still I was running Avon Gripster road tires I had installed back in Wyoming, toting my knobby (and heavy) Continental TKC 80s on the back.

My grin was large. By far, it was the most riding fun that I had had so far in Africa. It occurred to me a few times that I was running at S.T.F.F.C., speed too fast for conditions, especially without knobbies, but I felt strong and so did the bike and it was all … well, it was all just too much fun.

Then it ended. Geoff was ahead, off his bike on a clean tarmac road. He was jumping up and down, thrusting both arms in the air in celebratory manner. He was glad to be back on pavement … after all, his around-the-world ride is long. No bike could take this degree of punishment across five continents.

Me, I was sorry to see it end. But it didn’t end for long. We ran a few miles of tarmac, and the road was dirt once more. But it was a different dirt, with deeper and denser potholes that could not be run at appreciable speed. You’d have to pick your way through, standing on the pegs, eyes scanning the terrain for the flattest and least disruptive passage, a plateau between the canyons, and still once in a while you would slam an Alaska-sized pothole at speed.

A few enterprising men and boys were on the road, shoveling and sand and dirt into the potholes. I’d seen the same cottage industry in Brazil, north of Fortaleza, where the potholes were even deeper and denser than here – where the road, in fact, was a mutant thing that shaped the personality of towns along it and could be negotiated at no more than 5 mph by four-wheeled vehicles. Now I stopped and gave some of these Senegalese volunteers a few coins for their efforts.

Peter was in the lead, and Geoff and I both saw it – a roundish piece of metal fall from his BMW 650 Dakar, rolling across the road into a ditch. Geoff and I stopped, while Peter, oblivious, pottered ahead. We pulled over. I motioned for Geoff to catch Peter, in case it was something important to the safe operation of his motorbike.

I poked around in the ditch. It was like looking for a golf ball in the rough or out of bonds, something which I, unfortunately, have extensive experience doing. My golf training paid off, however, as I found what turned out to be the broad metal footprint to Peter’s sidestand, a non-essential part.

In Ziguinchor, we checked our bikes for loose bolts. I found one, an allen head fastener to my ProMoto Billet rear rack. Both Peter and Geoff tightened up several loose bolts. On terrain this rough, Loctite is your best friend.

Geoff lost something this day, too – 20 Euro. His 10-day clearance to ride through Senegal had expired, and a cop nailed him at a police checkpoint. What with being robbed of 140 Euro at gunpoint by the cop in Rosso and overpaying $90 USD for insurance and now this, Geoff was doing his part to support the local economy.

We poked along the badly potholed dirt road to the Senegal-Gambia border, only to be stymied in a 2½ hour standstill.

***

Later, Peter would say, only half tongue in cheek: “It would probably be a good idea to not start any border crossing any later than 11 a.m.” The chase-your-tail tedium we endured to cross into The Gambia from Senegal was arguably the worst so far, perhaps because of the sweltering heat.

My tankbag thermometer read as high as 110 F in mid-afternoon, and at 5 p.m. the heat had barely diminished. I was perspiring profusely. Sweat poured into my eyes, stinging as acutely as the bee that had gotten me earlier in the day. I was nearly out of water and could feel the dizziness and irritability of dehydration taking effect.

We labored through the process of immigration and customs on the Senegal side, then headed into The Gambia. Promptly a Gambian official directed us to return to Senegal to procure an additional piece of paper from the local Senegalese Chamber of Commerce. In triplicate, we filled out this evidently useless waste of wood products with the sort of goods we were carrying (dirty socks), our country of origin, name, name of employer, number of passengers, and number of pieces of luggage.

Yet this piece of paper proved critical to our passage through the sliver of land that is The Gambia, only 15 miles or so wide on our route through its center. By the time we were through The Gambia and back into Senegal, it had been stamped five times.

Back at Gambia customs, the young officers seemed to take a dim view of us adventure motorcyclists. They deliberated and made a phone call on whether they should stamp our passports, as we would be in the country just one day, though it seemed to me that was a routine question addressed many times a day. Perhaps there was an ulterior motive to that phone call, like, Hey boss, is it OK with you if we fleece these clowns?

The Gambia is an English-speaking country, one of the few in Africa, but this was both a blessing and a curse. We could communicate perfectly … and that seemed to make the officers all the more demanding. Our bikes were parked in front of the customs office, with ample space all around. Yet we were directed to move them behind the building, concealed from public view.

It seemed sketchy. It was getting dark. The men wanted to inspect our luggage – the first time I’ve ever encountered such a demand, except for once in Mexico. “Please, you must understand,” an un-uniformed man told us. “We need to be sure you are not carrying drugs or guns, and if you have anything of value to declare.” Geoff laughed, and asked the guy who, exactly, this un-uniformed guy was. I suggested to Geoff he keep it in check. Um, remember Rosso?

They went through some of Geoff’s bags, then mine, then Peter’s … but only the bags easily accessible. In my case, that meant they took a close look at a plastic bag full of dirty laundry and a sleeping bag and my sneakers from my soft panniers. They only pointed to my lockable top box beneath my spare tires, which would have taken five minutes to access, and asked what was inside.

I carry my IBM ThinkPad in there. Would I have to declare it, did it have sufficient value? I told them the box held a toiletries bag and clothing and that was it. Throughout this, they were condescending and patronizing.

The putative inspection took more than a half an hour. Next our passports were to be stamped. Peter’s and Geoff’s were approved, and it was my turn. The officer looked through my passport, looked at me, looked again through the passport, and said the dreaded words, ”You need a visa.”

Did I? In all the excitement, I hadn’t looked too closely into the matter. Back in Dakar, Geoff had stopped into The Gambia embassy and inquired whether he would need a visa. Brits did not. Now, the officer told me, I as an American did.

He was a short, squat, ill-mannered and venal young man, looking for an argument and an excuse for extortion. I lied that I had stopped at the Gambian embassy in Dakar and was told no visa was required. He twisted my words around to suggest that I was being argumentative, which I was not. As always at borders and with officials, I kept my tone of voice even and my demeanor patient and accommodating.

“You tell me I am wrong?” the man demanded to know. “I tell you this, and you tell me it is not so?”

I stood in silence, letting him make the next move. But he did not. Finally, I said, “So what do we need to do?” It was nearly 7 p.m. and dark. I was exhausted, thirsty and soaked with sweat. Thoughts of camping out behind the customs building occurred to me.

He might have been willing to help me, he said, but I was being uncooperative. A visa would cost 40 Euro. But this is too much, he said, and offered me a visa for 20 Euro --- contradicting himself on whether he would help me. The 20 Euro bill, as far as I could tell, went straight into his pocket. I didn’t bother asking for a receipt, a ploy Geoff has been using with success to derail extortion attempt. I just wanted to be away from this disagreeable choad.

Later, I would read in the Rough Guide: “If you’re simply traversing [The Gambia], from northern to southern Senegal or vice versa, visas aren’t required of any nationality.” Bribe No. 1, paid in full.

***
Our border passages were smoother the next morning from Farafenni, though the dirt road was even worse with potholes in The Gambia, noticeably poorer than its neighbor Senegal.

Video: Give ME Money!

In Farafenni, The Gambia, Geoff has a colorful encounter with a gentleman who would like us to give him some money.

Farafenni itself was a small and poor yet animated town of a few thousand people. They lined the dirt streets, women selling peanuts and couscous and men idling about tiny shacks and shops. The best restaurant in town was called Sunn Yai. The eatery was hot and stuffy with no outdoor seating, but the fried chicken and French fries plate was amazingly delicious. Two nights later, Peter would say, “I’m still thinking about that chicken in Farafenni. It was absolutely brilliant!”

By the next morning, we were rested, showered, and nourished by a breakfast of omelette sandwiches in Soma, served on old newspaper advertising inserts. We enjoyed a 10-minute ferry ride across the Gambia River with our motorbikes. Passports and motorbike documentation were efficiently and graciously stamped, with good wishes for our travels and no outrageous demands for money.

Geoff squashed one lame attempt by a Gambian official to secure a small yet illegitimate payment by demanding a receipt. “See that?” he chortled. “This asking for a receipt thing is working pretty well.”

I waited with the bikes for security as Geoff and Peter and Peter headed into Senegal customs, nearly the final step in the hour-long process. A man in his early 30s approached me. He was a teacher at the local Gambian elementary school. His teeth were white and clean, a rarity in these parts, and his personality warm and intelligent. It was Sunday and school was closed, but a dozen or so children kept close to their teacher.

“If you could, I would like you and your friends to come to my school and speak with our children,” the man told me. “But it is Sunday. You are going to Senegal.”

“Yes, to Ziguinchor,” I said. “I’m afraid we can’t stay here until Monday.” He understood.

I enjoyed speaking with him. His name was Babacar Sallah Hamat. We spoke about motorcycling, his school, America, and Barack Obama – the closer the American election draws, the more people raise the topic of Obama with me. The children were poor and in need of a bath and begged me for coins, but I had already distributed all my coins to youngsters a half-hour earlier. The kids appeared relatively well nourished, but still this area is dirt-poor. We saw nothing resembling a modern building in our brief passage through The Gambia.

This man had asked me for nothing, unlike so many on this ride. I offered him 20 Euro to put towards the school. He gratefully accepted, and the children were appreciative, too. By now the group surrounding me had swollen to nearly 20 youngsters and adults. (Babacar gave me his address: Babacar Sallah Hamat | Missera Village | Missera Lower Basic School | Jarra West District | Lower River Region | The Gambia | West Africa).

There was a hopeful joy in the children, yet a sadness, too, a sort of resignation that faces so young should not reflect. You can see it in the photo. I had looked closely into their longing brown eyes after my small gift, and after I bid the group adieu and walked off for a final documentation check, I was choking back tears.

Africa was having its effect. Immersion in the Third World changes your perspective and your priorities, as does the 24/7 concentration required to successfully execute a Third World motorbike adventure. You start out as one person and end up another.

On my first night back in the U.S. after eight months of motorcycling Latin America, I sat at a Bennigan’s in Miami. In front of me were the cold draft beer and spicy chicken wings and good old American baseball game on TV that I had dreamed of for months. I felt like throwing up.

Around me, nicely attired Americans were chattering away among themselves or on cell phones. I felt as if I had nothing in common with them. I felt nauseated by the excesses of the United States. Everything was shockingly bright and shiny and ostentatious, at least in comparison to the earthy places I had been. I had grown accustomed to journeying through areas in which privation was not the exception, but the rule.

I wrote that night in my journal, “I found myself a stranger – not just a stranger in my own country, but a stranger to the self I used to be.”

It will be the same, I know, when this Africa ride ends. The shadow of a stranger had appeared.

Rider Reunions

Dakar, Senegal * October 30, 2008
One of the greatest joys of adventure motorcycling is reuniting with your riding buddies after a few days, weeks, or even months apart. Someone will always rip ahead or stay behind to pursue an individual interest or get his head screwed on straight, and in due time you reconvene down the road.

It’s always a cause for celebration. Your riding buddies have become your family, even though you'd met them only a month or two earlier via the Horizons Unlimited Web site. The intensity of the adventure motorcycling experience bonds you quickly. No one else understands you or why you’re riding a motorbike through Africa. Your riding buddies understand, because they suffer from the same mental disease or defect as do you.

No one else can appreciate the tall tales of your misadventures, or commiserate on some misfortune, or debate technical points of motorbike maintenance and gear in excruciating detail. Adventure riders tend to be individualists, and yet we have this strong bond in common, and it renders almost irrelevant or at least subdues any differences in personality or background that may exist.

After time apart, you miss your riding buddies, and look forward to the reunion like a kid looks forward to Christmas morning. The majority of us are beer drinkers with a motorcycling problem, as we say, so naturally we relish discussing our affliction over a few cold ones. It’s like therapy, as essential as fuel in the motorbike tank.

Geoff had taken off solo from Nouakchott, Mauritania, for Senegal, and now a week later Migo and I were catching up, pushing into the lunatic traffic and frenetic cacophony of Dakar center, where Geoff was lodged in a happening part of town.

Dakar is an amphetamine-spiked monster of a city on an Atlantic peninsula, throbbing and pulsing and fabulously wealthy and wretchedly poor. The contradictions are stark. Manicured businessmen in Italian suits stride by legless lepers begging for change on garbage-strewn dirt sidewalks. Armed security guards man the entrances to banks, finer stores, and even coffee shops. The name itself -- Dakar – sounds raw and wild and dangerous, at least to my onomastically sensitive ear.

Even our entrance to Dakar was paradoxical knot. On the outskirts, Migo and I negotiated miles of intense, smoke-belching urban traffic, complicated by road construction and vendors of newspapers and peanuts and fruit wandering through the snotted-up vehicles. It’s exhilarating and nerve-wracking in equal measure to ride such a giant Third World city. Several times, we got stuck behind large trucks spewing black fumes.

Flip down your helmet faceshield, hold your breath, and get around as quickly as possible, be it on a rutted shoulder or between the vehicles on some improvisational pinball-machine path and a prayer. Finally, we turned on a modern, eight-lane red carpet boulevard with improbably light and civilized traffic. I cruised along with one hand, admiring the view of Dakar’s skyscrapers in the distance – Dakar center.

To reach the nucleus, we again entered a maze of dense, horn-blasting traffic. We darted around larger vehicles while small scooters darted around us, until we located the central Place du Independence near Geoff’s hotel with some help from Migo’s GPS and its Tracks4Africa map. We stopped to get our bearings. Migo said, “That was the worst. Just the worst. The smoke – it was horrible!”

I exhaled deeply. I was perspiring heavily. “You know, there’s something thrilling about riding in a big African city. So much adrenaline … it’s white-knuckle riding and when I’m doing it, I absolutely love it. But if you asked me someday, ‘Wanna go ride some urban traffic?’ I’d say naaah.”

Geoff’s hotel was just a few blocks away. The place was called Calypso, and Geoff had found it by the good fortune of being hailed by its owner, a Frenchman on a motorcycle named Jean-Hugue, as he made his way into Dakar. It turned out the Jean-Hugue was a motorcycle racer and had ridden the Paris-Dakar four times.

The place was squarely downtown, and Geoff got a room at the motorcycle-only discount price of 22 Euro. Better still for him, Calypso had a bar, a nightclub, and a restaurant, while the handsomely signed Texas Saloon was across the street and the ex pat hangout Le Viking around the corner. Secure on-premise parking was available. He’d reported in an email: “I had Lady Luck on my side running into the Frenchman and finding this place.”

And now we saw him, his tan T-shirt grimy with motorbike oil and grease and sweat, out in front of Calypso with his motorbike stripped, wrenching away on upgrades and maintenance. I beeped and Geoff looked up and broke into the world’s largest grin. He hugged me and pounded me on the back and did the same to Migo. The reunion was under way.

***

Naturally, we needed the details on Geoff’s having been robbed of 140 Euro at gunpoint by a cop at the Rosso border crossing between Mauritania and Senegal. We knew the tale would be rich.

Geoff is a natural storyteller – he has dozens and dozens of yarns, from riding an Enfield moto to the base of Mount Everest to a gag lawsuit against a neighbor whose boy cat had gotten Geoff’s girl cat pregnant. Down the road, he’ll be telling people he meets how he was robbed by a cop in Rosso.

He’d tried to find the unmarked dirt road to Diama and the Senegal border, but had no luck. As usual, the locals misdirect you either wittingly or unwittingly. Geoff had heard from Peter about how Rosso is a den of thieves to be avoided like at every expense. The town is infamous among travelers, motorcycle and otherwise, as a stain on the Michelin map.

“I decided to take the hit and head into Rosso, thinking it can't be that bad,” Geoff said. It was.

Geoff approached the border and was immediately latched on to by a man in a uniform, whether official or not, he could not tell. The man demanded Geoff’s carnet (a sort of bond document required to enter certain countries) and bang – the guy leapt into a car and bid Geoff to follow on his bike. He had no choice – the guy had a critical document.

Riding at breakneck speed to keep up and dodging hustlers and kids and other characters, Geoff found himself in a fenced compound, and the fence closed behind him. He parked the bike, and cops on the make and con men and kids closed in on him.

“Once the cops had pushed off the hagglers and kids, it was time to get down to business and hit me up for money, pens, cadeaux, even the bloody spare tires from the bike!” as he explained it in his Horizons Unlimited blog. “I eventually gave in and gave them their cadeaux just to get rid of them, all the time thinking Peter was perfectly right, this place is a nightmare!”

Finally, enough was enough. The next money-grubbing scrote who approached him would be summarily told to piss off, as Geoff put it. Inevitably, another cop approached looking for a piece of the Geoffrey Shingleton International Bank, Trust and Charitable Foundation, LLC.

PISS OFF! was what the cop got, more than a few times. Vintage Geoff. (The photo is not with the actual cop who robbed him, but a Senegalese who fined him 20 Euro for an expired motorcycle permit).

The copy took umbrage. Big time. He pulled his gun. He didn’t point it at Geoff, but kept it menacingly at his side. Give me the bike, the cop said. I want the bike.

The irony is that Geoff is trained killer – a former British solider, most lately a bodyguard for Americans in Iraq. I believe him when he says he could have had that Barney One-Bullet in a pretzel with the pistol up his butt in 10 seconds flat.

But if he did, there would be no escape. “I would have spent the next 10 years in jail, being bummed by every African con in the continent,” he reasoned. Instead, he slowly motioned to withdraw his wallet. He opened it. Inside was 140 Euro and some leftover Mauritanian ougiya. The cop snatched the lot of it. Geoff spent the next couple of hours hanging around feeling foolish, until finally his paperwork was complete and he was on a ferry across the Senegal River, the cops chuckling all the while.

Around 7 p.m. on reunion night, we repaired to the Calypso bar to catch up further and got to talking again about the robbery. I said, “It sounds like your own combative nature got you in trouble.”

“Oh, no doubt about it,” Geoff acknowledged. “That and going off on my own. It was my own fault.”

We ordered pizzas. The young girl bartenders were more than friendly, and I was teased that I should marry the attractive Brenda, or at least put her on the back of my motorbike and spirit her away to South Africa. Migo showed up after some Internet time.

Tomorrow, Migo would head to the DHL office at the airport to pick up a new rear tire shipped from Germany. Geoff arranged for Migo to be accompanied by a guy named Coffee, a friendly and bilingual English/French-speaking neighborhood dude who had helped Geoff extract from DHL and customs an oil cooler for his hot-running Yamaha XT.

Geoff installed the oil cooler at curbside in front of the Calypso, on a narrow, busy street. It’s a high-stakes, complex job, complicated by some clown who claimed to be a mechanic and took apart some piece, causing four bushings to drop out. Another reminder to never, unless absolutely necessary, let someone abroad work on your motorbike.

Geoff kept busy with that job, and hanging around with members of the Senegalese champion boules team, boules being a sort of lawn bowling game popular in France that I’d never heard of. “Still I was getting bored,” Geoff said. “I couldn’t wait for you guys to get here. Then when you showed up I was like, ‘YES!’”

One other item was prominent on Geoff’s to-do list – procure from somewhere, someone, somehow, stickers for Dakar and/or Senegal. Some guy down the street had a line on some stickers, he said. We would see.

***
In Spanish, the word is calcamonia. When I rode Latin America in 2004-05, I was crazy for calcamonias. By the time I was back in the U.S., after a plane flight for moto and me from Venezuela to Miami, my Kawasaki KLR 650 was a work of sticker art. Stickers from Mexico, Bolivia, Uruguay, Brazil, Venezuela …I’d managed to find, with considerable effort, stickers for each country and many of the cities and attractions in them.

It’s much more difficult to find stickers in Africa. We passed through Mauritania without finding any, and in the tourist city of Saint Louis, Senegal, my sticker search was similarly fruitless.

I set off from Calypso from mid-afternoon in a hunt for stickers – autocollants, in the French. As a former newspaper reporter, I pride myself on ability to hunt something down. If stickers were to be had in Dakar, I meant to find them.

I started at one of the city’s largest bookstores, where I did find and buy maps for Senegal and Gabon, but no stickers. The lady at the counter and some other staffers didn’t know where they could be found. I made my way to the central market, teeming with vendors of carved giraffes and peanuts and, hmmm … Senegal T-shirts. That looked promising.

Slow for a moment and cast the slightest gaze at merchandise and a vendor is all over you. I told the guy I didn’t want a T-shirt, I wanted stickers. Autocollants. He didn’t have any stickers, but here! Nice T-shirt! He held it up to my chest.

Within minutes I was surrounded by about six other vendors, who had come over from their own stands. I told the group of them I was looking for autocollants of Senegal and Dakar, and excused myself to sit 20 feet away and let nature take its course. A lady who was selling a sort of coffee called kuba. I bought a little plastic cup for about 25 cents. It was strong and uniquely bitter.

The vendors spoke animatedly among themselves. One trotted off and returned 10 minutes later with stickers from some 2001 French-Senegal soccer match. Eh. They were OK and might do in a pinch. How much? I asked.

He said, 10000 CFA and I laughed out loud. That’s more than $20 USD! We bargained and bargained and bargained for 10 minutes and finally he accepted 3000 CFA. About $6 USD total – supply and demand in action. All the while, I was getting from the eye from a tall guy with sunglasses. He sidled in and tapped me on the shoulder. He even spoke a little English.

“Only one man sell sticker in Dakar, at taxi garage,” the man told me. “Come! I take you!”

How far is it? I asked. Not far, he said. Come! Follow me!

So I did. We walked and walked, exiting the market and heading down a broad and busy boulevard. He was tall and limber and strode briskly ahead, while I poked along and stumbled a few times on the broken pavement. He laughed and urged me on. He called himself Damba.

“Americain, en moto, ici?” he asked. He was in his late 20s, with a mustache and high cheekbones and a bon vivance that could either be genuine, or a hustle. It was impossible to tell.

Right, I said, I’ve ridden from San Francisco and got to Portugal and have ridden south here. He whistled, Wheeeeeeeeeeew, and we strode on, him looking back frequently to be sure his tourist was still on the leash. Twenty minutes along the sidewalk-less street, through people and scooters and vendors and donkeys carts and buses and an cars and sooty exhaust, and I asked again, How far is this place?

The neighborhood had thinned out a bit and become more industrial. I was conscious of the possibility that this dude meant to lead me down an alley and rob me at knifepoint. Damba seemed like a decent guy and would expect some CFA for this service, but you can never tell.

Right down here, he said, the taxi garage! We turned a corner and sure enough, hundreds of taxis were scattered about a large open parking area. In the center was a man who called himself Nimmy. He was in his early 30s and attired in a red T-shirt and red running pants and sat on a plastic chair next to a sandwich board full of, just as Damba promised, pretty decent stickers.

They conferred in French while I poked through the stickers. There a couple for Senegal, and then a real prize – a big, large autocollant de Afrique, the whole continent. How much for this one? I would ask, and Nimmy brushed my questions away. Why, he wanted to know, would I ask such an unseemly question? You are my good friend!

I picked out nine stickers in three sets. When riding with partners who are also collecting stickers, you’re more of less obliged to purchase for them, too, if you happen across a motherlode. No reimbursement is expected. Geoff had thought to pick me up a Portugal sticker when we started out a month ago, a nice touch.

How much for these? I asked again. Nimmy and Damba conferred, and Nimmy approached me, as if to tell a secret, or disclose the price of a 20-carat diamond. Leaning close, his voice barely a whisper, he said … 20,000 CFA.

Twenty thousand CFA! I exclaimed. For God’s sake, that was nearly $45! Nimmy, I said, I thought I was your good friend!

And so began a tedious 45-minute bargaining process. I walked away, they dragged me back, I lowballed, they highballed. Nimmy insisted that stickers are expensive, this one cost him that and that one cost him this, and he had a family to feed. His zeal to nail a good profit was remarkable.

All the while, I recognized that I had probably expressed too much enthusiasm for stickers to Damba, who passed it along to Nimmy. If I had just walked up on my own, I probably would have $1 for a sticker. And it occurred to me that only in Africa could the simple process of buying a piece of paper devolve into such a comical ordeal. Around us three had gathered a small crowd of eight or 10 people, enjoying the entertainment.

Ultimately, they wore me down. I’d been sticker shopping for going on three hours. I shoved the money in their hands – 10,000 CFA for Nimmy, and 2000 for Damba. Twenty-six dollars, about $3 a sticker! And it was done, save for the obligatory photo and a long walk back to Calypso, during which I managed to get myself lost in the dimly-lit nocturnal jungle of Dakar.

***
I caught up with Geoff and Migo later that night at the Calypso bar. The news from Migo was bad. He and Coffee had spent more than eight hours at the DHL office at the airport, but the new rear TKC 80 tire was nowhere to be found. The DHL officials seemed mystified as to its fate.

“Tomorrow, I try again,” Migo said gamely.

Worst case scenario, it could be a week or more before Migo had a tire. Suppose a new one had to be ordered? He offered that Geoff and I could ride off to the Casamance region in southwestern Senegal if we liked. We were scheduled to reconvene any day now with Peter Cullen; Peter is not a fan of big cities and opted to stay out of Dakar, but he too was bound for Casamance.

Maybe we would. Geoff was itching to get back on the road. Plus, it would mean another rider reunion to look forward to. We would think about it, and maybe leave the day after tomorrow.

In an attempt to cheer us up, I said, “Oh, and I got you guys a present today.”

I held the secret the next day, when I waited for an appropriate moment to give my riding partners their spiffy new Senegal and Africa stickers. Geoff’s lead on stickers had fizzled out, he acknowledged glumly. Their eyes lit up and smiles broke out, particularly at the large and handsome autocollant de Afrique.

“Dude, where did you find THAT?” Geoff exclaimed.

Traffic Jams and Thieves

Saint Louis, Senegal * October 28, 2008

For nearly a month, I’d been tearing across tarmac roads through the Sahara. Suddenly, I was running across 60 miles of dirt piste along the Atlantic coast and the Senegal River delta, heading into Senegal. The landscape was lush and green. Tall reeds grew thick in the low water, and fishermen plied pirogues to catch catfish and other fare.

I percolated along, delighted to be on a piste for a change. I rode through small fishing settlements, full of thatch huts and wooden boats bobbing in the cappuccino-colored river. Women in colorful dresses and headscarves sizzled up lunch in wok-like vessels. Men and boys waved and smiled at me.

Fish-catching birds pirouetted above, soaring and swooping and the floating like gliders on the gentle breeze. For the first time in my Africa travels, I saw large, glorious, leafy trees. The peace was luxurious, the world bathed in golden sunlight.

I stopped to chat with a few fishermen. The day was hot and lightly humid, and one fisherman seemed puzzled why I would be wearing a thick black jacket in this heat. He was in his late 40s with a thick salt and pepper beard and a large growth on his forehead. He was kneeling on the earth and cutting the heads off the bunch of big whiskered catfish he had caught.

He chattered away in the native Wolof language, and I could tell he found my motorcycle attire amusing. He pointed at my jacket and his own shirtless torso and smiled and laughed, showing rotten stumps for teeth.

“Pour moto, pour tombe,” I told him in French. In case I fall on the bike. This seemed to amuse him even more, and then a kid stopped by and pulled my jacket back to reveal part of the Rock Gardn motocross armor I wear, and the guy laughed even harder.

The dirt road was modestly rutted with some patches of sand, but easily enough negotiated. On this piste, one thing I would not have to concern myself with was maniacal African traffic. A car or truck might pass in the opposite direction every 15 minutes, and that was it.

That’s four-wheeled traffic, of course. What I didn’t count on was four-hooved traffic.

I slowed at the spectacle in front of me. I could see Peter Cullen stopped ahead. The road was jam-packed with several hundred cattle, as thick as Casablanca traffic, being herded along by a pair of men. We stopped and watched, snapped some photos and drank some water, and deliberated what to do.

The barefoot herdsmen motioned us on. We could pass straight through the cattle, they indicated. Peter took off, gingerly maneuvering his big BMW 650 Dakar through the bovine phalanx. I pulled up at the rear of the pack. These cattle were large. The mature male steers sported long horns.

I edged up to the rear, waiting for the pack to part. It did not. The cattle loped ahead, oblivious to the Suzuki DR650 idling behind them. They mooed and swished flies with their tails and one gave me a backwards glance with a rheumy eye.

Were they agitated? The aftermarket FMF exhaust on my Suzuki is loud – louder than the pipe on Peter’s BMW. Up close, I could feel the size and strength of these beasts. Though famously docile, they are powerful creatures. If one got spooked, he could head-butt me over and stick a horn in my gut in a flash. Or maybe one spooked cattle would start a stampede, and I would be one thoroughly trampled adventure motorcyclist.

Finally, enough of an opening emerged that I could enter the pack. Young cattle moved skittishly, not sure whether they should trot along to my left, my right, or smack in front of me. Patiently, I picked my way through, careful not to brush a beast with a tire or bark buster, until at last the piste was clear again.

Video: Southern Mauritania Traffic Jam
I pick my way through a cattle traffic jam on the piste from Rosso to Diama and the Mauritania-Senegal border.

***
Though the cattle were not hostile, some punk little kids were. Ironically, throughout the morning en route from Nouakchott to Rosso, I had been contemplating the many greetings we receive from people alongside the road, outside of shops or their hut-homes. Youngsters in particular come running from their homes at the sight and sound of the large adventure motorbikes, hollering and waving and grinning from ear to ear.

If we stopped, they would be sure to tug our jackets for a cadeaux, or a gift. Sometimes, I can hear them yelling the word: Cadeaux! Cadeaux! Though we can’t stop for these packs of kids, they seem content enough if we beep or wave or return their thumbs up. It’s some excitement in their day, perhaps. It seemed that the poorer the town or settlement, the more exuberant the greetings.

The landscape had changed, from the beige, sere earth north of Nouakchott. Here the sand was a lively orange, and canopied thorn trees adorned the undulating terrain. It was considerably more populated. Every few miles, I would ride through a primitive collection of huts and shacks of wood and maybe a sheet-metal roof. The goat vs. human populations appeared roughly equal.

Down the road on the left was a group of a dozen or so boys, maybe 10 or 12 years old. Another bunch of kids to greet … except I saw one bend over and pick up a rock from alongside the road, and hurl it at me. And another. And a third, the last one of the pack, had in his hand a rock as big as a baseball. I could see the thing coming at me, right towards my helmet. I ducked.

I slammed on the brakes. The rear tire squealed and went briefly into a spin. The little kids ran up a small hill. I could see a few of them hiding behind trees, and when I began to teach them some colorful new English words, they ran from view. I stood there and fumed. Gendarmie! Je suis gendarmie! I yelled, unsure of whether or not they heard me. I’m the police!

Should I follow them up the hill? Leave my bike sitting in the middle of the road? Run the bike up a dirt road to whatever little burg lay up the hill? Finally, I rode off, cursing inside my helmet and somehow chastened. It’s a mistake, I reasoned, to take kindness for granted. Trust nothing and no one, not even yourself.

The authorities, in fact, were just 8 km down the road. Peter and Migo were waiting for me at a police checkpoint. I dismounted and complained to the officers some kids had just thrown rocks at me, and one threw a big rock. The officers took a surprisingly keen interest and suggested we go back and find them. I considered it, and finally nodded no.

The episode was unnerving, and suddenly my mood was black. I’m not sure what would have happened if I was struck by a large rock while riding at 40 or 45 mph, but it wouldn’t have been pleasant. A bird had struck me in the chest once in Oklahoma at speed, and it was like slammed by a sledgehammer.

“It’s the exception to the rule,” Migo said. “Don’t let it bother you.” He was right, but still I slowed and looked for objects in the hands of children for the rest of the day. They just waved and hooted and thrust their thumbs in the air.

***
The Rosso border between Mauritania and Senegal is said to be among Africa’s worst for pickpockets, hustlers, con men, and outright thieves. “The town,” reported my Rough Guide to West Africa, “has something of an ominous feel to it, with unscrupulous characters poised to swindle.” All along we had planned to avoid Rosso in favor of 60 miles of dirt to Diama on the Atlantic coast, but if there was any doubt, an email from Geoff sealed the deal:

“I tried to find the road for Diama but failed so thought to take the hit and go into Rosso. BIG MISTAKE. I got robbed BY A COP at gunpoint. He took me for 140 Euros after initially wanting the bike, so AVOID Rosso at all costs.” We would have to wait until Dakar to hear the details from the victim.

Even on its outskirts, I could sense a danger in Rosso. Peter and Migo stopped to fuel up, and instantly we were surrounded by men. Their questions were benign – where are you from? You cross at Rosso? Welcome to my country – but their demeanors were malignant. Chilling, even. One man took a particular interest in me. Behind his sheeplike questions, I sensed a wolf. His slitted, dagger eyes were implacable, hostile, predatory, contemptuous; his cheekbones high and polished like 8-balls.

For the first time ever, I didn’t feel comfortable removing my helmet. Ordinarily I enjoy chatting with the locals during a fuel break, but not these vermin. Sweating profusely in the hot sun, I remained seated on my motorbike and protested that I could speak no French, and that I could not understand what the man said. He regarded me with a look of even graver contempt.

Migo and Peter sensed the same, and they too had not removed their helmets. We motored from that fuel stop as quickly as possible.

Sixty miles of piste later, we encountered officially sanctioned thievery at what turned out to be an expensive crossing from Mauritania into Senegal. First, we paid 20 Euros (about $26 USD) a man to have both our passports and our motorcycle documentation stamped out of Mauritania. Then it was on to the Senegal border, where an ordinary-looking, un-uniformed man stood at a gate at the other end of a bridge. We were obliged to stop, and the guy approached Peter, who was in the lead.

He wanted 10 Euros each to raise the gate for our passage. Peter negotiated him down to 20 Euros for the three, which in itself told us this dude wasn’t working on behalf of the good people of Senegal. Border officials never negotiate down on official fees – up, yes, but never down. Too, he made no record of any vehicles he allowed to cross – just put the money in his pocket.

Probably he was in the employ of a Senegalese Tony Soprano and had would share the gravy from this extortionist gig with friends in high places, and maybe the border crossing officials, just 100 yards from the gate, who laboriously recorded our information in ink in their tattered and oversized ledger books.

The paper slaves, I call these guys. In Latin America and now in Africa, I’d been struck by the incongruity of these virile, macho, gun-toting dudes reduced to the secretarial tedium of recording travelers’ information with pen and paper. Rarely does one see a computer in use – only in the better-developed Argentina and Chile do I recall my information being recorded on a PC.

Even then, those PCs evidently were not networked together, because when leaving those countries all my information had to be rekeyed in, rather than summoned up over an internal or external network.

As we hung around Mauritania border waiting, I noticed a collection of stickers that travelers had fastened up on the office windows and doors. I got out an Obama ’08 sticker from my tankbag and asked a pair of border guys if I could affix it to the window.

One uniformed official took the sticker from me and gave it a scrutinizing look, and it suddenly dawned on him what he was looking at. “OBAMA!” he declared, and shook my hand enthusiastically. “Barack Obama!”

“Boosh non bon, homme mauvais,” I said, kicking into the air as one would kick an ass. The laughed and agreed and one guy asked me for a second sticker, for his car windshield.

Then it was on to the Senegal crossing, and another 20 Euro a man. All told, including a nominal 500 ougiya “community tax” to leave Mauritania, the border crossing lightened our wallets by about $60 USD. (We had earlier avoided another expense, when Peter successfully derailed demands by two Mauritanian officers that we pay a few dollars to pass through the Parc Nacional du Diawling en route to Diama).

And then there was vehicle insurance. It’s obligatory in Senegal. Peter told of meeting a pair of European riders in Senegal several years ago who had passed on insurance, and then were fined 50 Euro at a police checkpoint and obliged to secure insurance before they could proceed.

A woman in a wooden shack offered a month of insurance for about 32 Euro. Peter and Migo and signed up. I had emptied my wallet of Euro, and rather than stripping the bike to extricate it from my super-secret hiding place or prevailing on my European friends for a loan, I asked the lady the cost in American dollars, which I had in my wallet.

She conferred with her boss, punched some numbers into a calculator, and told me $65. Sixty-five dollars! I protested. On the global markets, the 32 Euros Peter had paid amounts to about 41 USD. I’m sorry, she said, but the U.S. dollar is a poor value in Senegal.

I decided to take my chances without insurance, partly because we suddenly had a problem to tend to. (Down the road, I would be stopped by the police and asked for insurance. I showed my U.S. Progressive insurance card and was allowed to proceed by the unwitting officer, though it is useless outside of North America).

Peter’s rear tire was flat. The sun was just above the horizon and sinking fast. We got to work. A four-inch nail was the culprit. Peter extracted it with a pair of pliers. A crowd of a half-dozen men gathered around, trying to help and hoping for a reward when the work was done, which it was an hour later.

Peter gave the leader of the pack a 5 Euro bill. Then they guy came over to me. He was tall and angular and the spitting image of the NBA’s Kevin Garnett. The whites of his eyes had somehow turned orange by disease, and the visual effect was unsettling. You didn’t want to stare, but you had to, because they were his eyes.

I protested I had no money, which was effectively true. I had a little Mauritanian ougiya, which no one in Senegal wants, and some $50 USD bills, but no Senegalese CFA. He was nonplussed and bore in. What had been a jovial smile changed to a hostile and demanding leer. It was me, he noted, who had asked him for a carpet on which we could work on Peter’s tire. Several of his friends gathered around me while Peter buttoned up and Migo waited on his KTM, idling up on the road.

I began to feel slightly uncomfortable. Darkness had fallen completely. The men now surrounded me tightly, chattering in Wolof and French that I could not understand, tugging at my shoulder and watching with disdain as I went through my routine of inserting earplugs and donning my helmet and gloves.

This rich white man, and not a cent for us poor. I mounted the bike, hit the starter, and rode away into the night.

***

I wandered about the streets of French-Colonial Saint Louis, enchanted by its faded charm. The city is a long, narrow island, its streets dusty and broken. Buildings and homes are quite delightfully painted in all manner of pastel hues – orange and pink and blue and green. Nearly all of the buildings are old, and many had fallen into grave disrepair, which to my tourist’s eye enhanced the city’s aesthetic appeal. The atmosphere was languid and laid back, like the French Quarter of New Orleans on a sunny Sunday morning.

We lodged at a pricey place ($70 USD split among three) called La Louisane at the northern tip of the island. Peter had stayed here in the past, and it’s his favorite auberge in West Africa. The courtyard had been built around several old trees, a touch that I, as a tree-lover, found particularly attractive.

At night, we took a 10-minute wander into downtown for supper. I had the yassa crevette, a sort of indigenous shrimp stew with a generous serving of rice. Migo adventurously tried something called mafe, which to his disappointment turned out to a bone in a brackish sauce. After that, a beer was in order.

Migo and I found ourselves seated at a colorful bar while Peter excused himself for a phone call and a return to the hotel. In short order, we were joined by two young men. They called themselves Malik and Paco. Malik spoke good English. Paco had a simmering gaze and outrageously long dreadlocks.

I had sensed a change in the cultural personality from our days in northern and central Mauritania. People here were more demanding of tourists. The hustle was both faster and more insidious, the requests for money or cadeaux forceful and overt. My antennae were on alert, and I lied to Malik and Paco that we would be in town for several days.

But Malik and Paco seemed fairly laid back. Malik owned an art shop, which naturally we were invited to visit, but his was not a hard sell. I began to enjoy our conversation with them and took the opportunity to ask Malik if people in Saint Louis were happy.

“People here are very happy,” he told me. “Maybe they do not have a lot of money and they struggle, but look around – people laugh, there is community. It’s not like the United States, is it? You have so much but you are not happy and you do not have the same sort of community.” His observation was spot-on, I thought.

I liked the kid. He was 26 years old and well-traveled across northwestern Africa. Towards the end of the evening, Malik suggested that us four get together tomorrow. We could go to the beach and have a fish cookout, and he noted the availability of marijuana and loose women. Ultimately, of course, we would be expected to finance the expedition and purchase some art, but still, the offer seemed at least partially sincere. We were noncommittal, but indicated that indeed we would talk again tomorrow.

The next day, Migo and I motored through downtown Saint Louis, looking for the road to Dakar. (Peter would remain in Saint Louis, and our group of four would be restored a few days down the road). A man yelled Hey! Hey! and waved. I waved back and kept moving. I thought, That’s not Malik … is it? I told myself it wasn’t.

In fact, Migo told me later that night, it was. “It was him,” Migo said. “I was wondering what you were going to do … pull over and talk to him again?”

“Ahhhhh, shit,” I said. “I thought maybe it was him, but I couldn’t tell. Dammit.” I would be troubled by a mild guilt for the rest of the night, wishing I had stopped if only to say we had to get on to Dakar and bid him farewell. Now who was the hustler – him or me?

Greetings from Nouakchott

Nouakchott, Mauritania * October 25, 2008

“Man is alone with himself; I defy him to be happy. And yet this is how travel enlightens him.”

-- Albert Camus, Lyrical and Critical Essays

I decided to be alone with myself. Peter and Migo motored up to Atar and Chinguetti, ancient towns in a plateaued region a day’s ride from Nouakchott with lovely mesas and gorges and sand dunes and ancient mosques and Tuareg nomads who will take you for a camel ride in the desert.

Geoff gunned off for Senegal and its French-colonial jewel of a city, Saint Louis. He’s been itching to get to sub-Saharan Africa, in part because in the Islamic countries of Morocco and Mauritania it’s been difficult to readily obtain at reasonable cost the fuel and lubricant crucial to an adventure motorbike ride – beer.

“Mate, I need to get drunk and get in a fight,” he said just before fleeing Nouakchott. “Give me a choice of five years hard labor in a British prison or 15 years in an Islamic country, I’ll take the British prison.”

I elected to remain in Nouakchott and immerse myself in the earthy animation of this ordinary African city, the capital of the Islamic Republic of Mauritania. An estimated 1.6 million people live here, 3 miles from the Atlantic ocean, by far the greatest concentration of Mauritanians anywhere in this vast desert country.

It is a hot and dirty and broken and dusty and crumbling place. This is part of its charm. The people are sweet and friendly and welcoming. On my strolls about town, I am greeted warmly – by the gap-toothed café manager down the street from my shabby yet expensive hotel ($28 USD, and where I was attacked by a goat), by the kid at the Internet café who would later send me emails titled “friendchip,” by an English-speaking schoolteacher who, contrary to my expectations, did not want to sell me something, and even by a jewelry tout who knew after my first day that I was not in the market for any of his merchandise.

Personal safety is of little concern here. I can walk about even late at night, unmolested except for the indefatigable and overzealous touts. There is a politeness here, a sort of gentility among people struggling to get by, to put food on the table, and to enjoy their lives. It wasn’t obvious on my first day in Noaukchott.

After a few days, I could see the beauty that lay beneath the city’s crumbling exterior, behind the prodigious, stinking piles of garbage that had accumulated at the inaptly named Grand Market, and along certain of Nouakchott’s downtown streets. I still had in my tankbag map window a page that Migo had given me from his Tao Te Ching book.

The verse said, in part, “Under heaven, all can see beauty as beauty only because there is ugliness.” There was a physical ugliness here, but a beauty of community that transcended it.

In the morning and evening, outdoor cafes are packed with men sipping coffee and smoking. Some are playing chess. They talk animatedly among themselves; many will give me a friendly nod or greeting as I sit writing in my notebook, studying my French, or reading the copy of the English-language The Economist that I managed to find in the lone bookstore downtown.

The main streets in the center are lined with sand while smaller streets are unpaved, no more than sandy tracks. Donkey-led carts mingle with vehicles that are for the most part old and beaten and spew black smoke. One needs to walk carefully, as gaping maws along the sides of the road can snap your ankle like a wishbone, if you step into one wrong.

Dust is everywhere. It is as fine as talcum powder. At night, you can see it swirling in the headlights. In the afternoon, it sticks to the perspiration inevitable in the 100 F heat. Soon enough, your face and arms are coated in a dirty, greasy patina.

Flies are everywhere, too. They are small flies. What they lack in size, they make up for in population. I cannot sit at a café with a coffee or a tea without being pestered by flies. It does no good to curse at them, but I do so nonetheless. I watch how the locals abide the flies, but they have no tricks that I can borrow. They brush and swat and appear every bit as agitated as I.

This area was at one time heavily forested, but only a few large trees survive. Most, it seems, were chopped down when Nouakchott was constructed in the late 1950s. Now some enterprising civil servants have planted small trees on traffic medians downtown, and beneath that hundreds of people take cover from the afternoon sun, lolling and languishing and sleeping.

When a wind comes, even a slight zephyr, they arch their faces to capture the breeze. The word Nouakchott is from the Hassaniya Arabic, “place of the winds,” yet the wind seems to stir chiefly at night, so that as dawn breaks the sky is grey with dust and sand.

The city is a melting pot of north Africans, from Morocco and Western Sahara and Mauritania, and sub-Saharan Africans. These two groups are distinguished by their skin color and clothing. The northerners are fair-skinned, though swarthy, and many wear breezy djebellah robes and houli head scarves, concealing all but their eyes against the sun and wind and sand. The sub-Saharans are far darker and wear either Western-style T-shirts and trousers or the colorful garb of their native countries (the women particularly).

An uneasy tension seems to exist between the two groups. Economically, the northerners are far better off. The tension owes in large part, I suspect, to Mauritania’s on history of slavery and the historical servitude of sub-Saharan blacks. Slavery was outlawed only in 1980, and its residue still stains this culture.

I stayed for 10 days.

The Friends
A tourist cannot wander about Nouakchott and not be molested by touts, hawkers, vendors of jewelry and clothing and phone cards and sunglasses and knife-sharpening sets, or the dozens upon dozens of moneychangers who linger about the central market and its outskirts. It occurred to me it might make sense to invest in a djebellah robe and houli headscarf so as to stroll about Nouakchott undisturbed.

A tourist is immediately recognizable by his fair complexion and Western attire, his multi-pocketed NorthFace shorts and white Wal-Mart sneakers, and stands in bas relief contrast to the typical Nouakchottian. The touts are as gregarious as they are predatory, and it can be great fun to play along with them and angle for the upper hand.

Entering the city on our conspicuous motorbikes, the four of us pulled over downtown to check a map for the auberge we had in mind for lodging. I knew it was on a side street a few blocks away, but the absence of street signs made it virtually impossible to locate on a first attempt.

Within seconds, we were surrounded by three or four touts. “My friend! My friend! What you look for? Welcome to my country! Where are you from, my friend?” The leader of this particular pack was a Senegalese, 6’ 2” and built like a linebacker.

After the unavoidable handshakes and greetings, we are in a spirit of brotherhood invited to step across the street and inspect the fine wares at the gentleman’s nice shop. Thanks pal, we’re just trying to find Auberge Menata.

“Ah, Menata, yes, come, I take you!” the guy says. Needless to say, he will expect some ougiya for this service.

“Um, can you just tell me where it is?” I asked him.

“Come my friend, I take you!” He starts tugging on my elbow. “Come look at my shop!”

It’s virtually impossible to ignore them. The words no, please, and thank you are wholly ineffectual and swatted away like flies. To get rid of one of these clowns, another tack is required.

“Am I sorry, we cannot,” I told the guy. “My friend, he is sick.” I pointed at Migo, who looked at me quizzically. “Bad food.” I patted my own stomach, and squatted just so in the attitude of a bowel movement. “BBBBLLLLLLPPPPPP,” I went. Migo choked back a laugh.

“Ahhhhhhh, OK, OK,” the man said. He seemed genuinely sympathetic. “OK, later, you come visit my shop, yes?” In fact, Peter and I did – we almost had to – though we managed to escape with our ougiya intact.

Two days later, I ran a gauntlet of bracelet and necklace shops and braved entry into several of them. I didn’t buy anything, but up and down the street all the merchants had smelled blood. If I left one shop, another merchant would be waiting outside, ready to greet his new good friend.

I had just about gotten away when I heard the dreaded, “Mon ami! Mon ami!” a few feet behind me. In an instant, he was at my side. The introductory question is nearly always the same. He must have heard me earlier speaking English, because that’s the language he used, broken though it was.

Him: “Greetings my friend! Where you come from, Francais, oui?”

Me: “No.”

Him: “Ingleterre? Alemaigne?”

Me: “No.”

Him: “Espana?”

Me: “I am from Turkmenistan!” I say this with a certain virile verve and thrust my chest out just so, as I imagine a real Turkmeni would.

This throws him off a beat. Chances are good he has no idea where Turkmenistan is, but he’s probably heard the savage-sounding name at some point. But soon enough, he’s back on his game.

Him: “Ah, very good country, very nice people. Your first time in Mauritania?”

Me: “No, I’ve been here many times.”

Him: “You live here, my friend?”

Me: “Yes, I have lived here for a year.”

Again, this throws him off a beat, because other than a handful of UN and consulate workers, few Westerners live in Nouakchott. But no matter.

Him: “You come to my shop, my friend, I show you nice things!”

Me: “But my friend, remember, I was in your shop six months ago.”

Him: “…nice shirt, nice dresses…”

Me: “Don’t you remember me, my friend? I was in your shop six months ago, and I bought a nice shirt. Very nice shirt!”

This really knocks him for a loop. Evidently it would be a grave faux pas to not remember a good friend who has already made a purchase, and suddenly I’ve got him in checkmate.

Him: “Ah yes, of course I remember you, my friend! OK! Thank you! Good night!”

The Poor
I knew I would see poverty in Africa. I knew the emotional reaction it would trigger within me. And yet coming face to face again with it was like happening upon an accident. It is disturbing, occasionally shocking, regardless of whether I had expected it or not.

The best restaurant in Nouakchott is called Le Prince. It’s a fast food joint in the center of downtown. I sat at its outside patio for a large plate of chicken and fried eggs and lamb and rice and French fries and a salad of tomato and lettuce and onions. Young boys of eight and 10 and 12 years watched me from the other side of the patio fencing.

I said, “Hey fellas,” and they smiled shyly and looked away, giggling. They were barefoot and wore grimy T-shirts and carried large tin cans. One had cleverly fastened a rope to his can, so that it could be slung over his shoulder.

When I had eaten enough, I called the boys over. I gave them my plate. Their hands were dirty and greasy. They shoveled my food into their tin cans with their hands.

The boys went around the corner, sat on a stoop, and ate. Others joined them. They shared freely among themselves. This repeated itself virtually every day, because Le Prince was, with one regrettable exception, the only place I ate.

They boys got to know me. The Le Prince manager got to know me, too. The first time I sat for lunch at Le Prince and the boys approached, politely, after I had finished, the manager hustled out and yelled and slapped one kid across the side of the head. They ran. In the hubbub, one boy left his tin can on my table.

“Senor!” I exclaimed, unwittingly reverting to the Spanish that I know far better than French. Then English: “Leave them alone! It is OK with me.” He apologized and greeted me warmly every day after that. The young boy slunk back to retrieve his can, which I held out for him.

It wasn’t just the young boys. Poverty was everywhere you looked. The greatest concentration is on the south side of the city, in a shantytown known as Cinquieme. Nouakchott was designed for 50,000 people, but droughts in the 1970s and 1980s triggered a massive influx of immigrants from the Sahel region to the east, and now hundreds of thousands live without electricity or running water.

On the outskirts of the central market, a man sold meat. On a weatherbeaten wooden board, parts of some beast – a goat, a cow, a camel, it was impossible to tell – were arrayed in the hot sun. They were almost completely covered by flies.

The man was a dark sub-Saharan African and his eyes were a deep and jaundiced yellow. I found myself looking at him, so alarmingly diseased were his eyes. He spotted me, and immediately began brushing the flies from the meat, looking apologetic and ashamed.

Yet it was me who felt apologetic and ashamed, in a twisted way. I had arrived on a $5400 motorcycle and carry an embarrassment of expensive gear – an IBM ThinkPad computer, two Canon cameras, an iPod – while the man with the badly jaundiced eyes shoos flies from meat unfit for human consumption.

For me, it’s the most disturbing aspect of motorcycling through the Third World. I find myself particularly sensitive to the pain of others, human and animal (the loss of bird life from a fall 2007 oil spill in San Francisco Bay disturbed me so deeply that I could not bear to read the news reports), and that only exacerbates my twisted shame.

My decision to remain here in Nouakchott was perhaps a concession to that aspect of my psyche, a way to pay alms, in a sense, to feed the children, such as it were, to pass out some ougiya, pointless though it may be.

I know, too, that in the course of my Africa travels I will become inured to these spectacles of poverty. They will no longer elicit the sense of shock that I experienced as I explored Nouakchott. Poverty is pervasive throughout Africa. The novelty will be gone for me, though the pain for them will persist.

My riding partner Migo affiliated himself with a charity called betterplace (www.betterplace.org), and at his encouragement I signed up, too. This organization targets areas in Africa and elsewhere for specific, member-supported projects, and we have in mind to visit several locations in Africa.

Learn more and make a donation to a project of your choice at www.betterplace.org.

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.