Ride Far | Mark Hammond

Adventure Motorcycling thru Africa & Latin America.

Mud Puddles and Malaria

Kibangou, Congo * January 13, 2009

CongoMudRunThe term mud puddle doesn’t do it justice. A mud puddle is a small pool of water that a little boy in yellow rubber galoshes jumps into on his way home from school on a rainy April afternoon, for the thrill of the splash.

These were not mere puddles – they were ponds, swamps even, some as long and wide as a Greyhound bus and a good three feet deep. It rained regularly here in northwestern Congo, even in the so-called dry season of mid-January. These ponds were ecosystems unto themselves, with tiny organisms skittering atop the surface and, in at least one, even newts.

I have always enjoyed water fordings, and after we crossed from Gabon into the Congo, at a tiny border settlement called Nyanga, I would have more than my share of fun. I propped my arse up slightly on the waterproof duffel bag lashed up on pillion, steered with my feet, locked my elbows straight on the handlebars, and plowed on through these gigantic ponds.

Great V-shapes of brown water sprayed into the air. The water was warm and fetid and soaked my torso and legs and boots and tank bag and painted an ear-to-ear grin on my dripping wet face. I kept the motorbike in a mid-first gear, ready to gently administer additional throttle if necessary. In the middle, the water could be nearly seat-high and the surface below snotty and thick.

Or bumpy … at the bottom, there would potholes within potholes, or logs or rocks. No one was about to do any deep-pond diving to find out. All of a sudden, in the middle of a crossing, I’d hit some obstacle and vroom! The motorbike would heave, the front wheel would lurch … keep those bars straight and the throttle steady.

P1010562I was loving these mud ponds. The early afternoon was bright and warm, with cirrus clouds appointing a pastel blue sky. The piste was lined with elephant grass so tall that parts of the route resembled a tunnel. I hit the mud ponds with enthusiasm, and when I had a moment to think about something other than the next quarter-mile of this piste, I thought: Man … this is adventure riding at its finest, in the freaking Congo!

Migo was the first to crash. It was his second crash of the journey. The slick sole of his boot slipped as he went to stand up on his footpegs, and down went the capable German rider and his big KTM. Then Geoff’s Yamaha XT stalled in the middle of a mud pond, and had to be yanked out.

Not long after, Geoff took the first of two spills for the day, trying to maneuver down a slick footpath along the side of the road to avoid a long mud pond. He would spill later when his front tire got stuck in a rut, the crash busting apart his left Touratech pannier and forcing him to hammer the thin aluminum back into place, cursing the whole time.

Then it was my turn. I was nearly out of a mud pond when the front wheel went haywire. I’d struck something, it seemed, and additional throttle provide futile. The badly worn TKC 80 rear tire fishtailed as I tried to power out of the pond, and down I went, but at least on hard ground.

IMG_3304People from a nearby village gathered and watched as Geoff and I hosted my fallen bike. I relaxed for a moment and took off, running another mud pond about 150 yards away. For my exit, I chose a narrow ledge of terrain … bad choice, it turned out, because the ledge turned out to be slick and sloped and bam! Two spills in five minutes.

The villagers had watched as I pulled away, and a now I heard a great roar of laughter and hooting and catcalls as 15 or so of them came running with big beaming smiles and shouts of tombe! tombe! (“fall” in the French) and happily helped me right the bike. I laughed along with them.

Up ahead was another mud pond. My back-to-back spills didn’t trouble me in the least. I hit the mud pond with relish, delighting in the thrill of the splash like a little boy in yellow galoshes jumping in a mud puddle.

Video: Running the Congo

I have some fun gunning through one of the dozens of large mud puddles on the Congo piste just south of our crossing from Gabon, at a little village called Nyanga.

***
CumulonimbusGabonIt rained hard the night before. We had lodged in Ndende, Gabon. It was a tiny town with a single but decent hotel called Le Barbecue, 30 miles from the Congo border. In late afternoon, I marveled at a colossal cumulonimbus storm cloud that sprouted like a mushroom in the tungsten blue sky of the southern horizon.

By 8 p.m., the storm had arrived. It was a monstrous African thunderstorm, theatrical in scope and as riveting as an Oscar-winning film. Lightning flashed behind the low clouds and thunder cracked like cannons. The rain pelted down furiously, and I stood outside my motel-style room and listened to the staccato drumming of raindrops in the sheet metal awning above me and watched as Mother Africa turned the yard into a muddy swamp.

We were nearing the start of a rainy season. It was still technically a dry season in northwestern Congo, but the rains were due to start in February. To the south, it would be rainy as well, in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and Angola. Rain would mean mud – boue, in the French – and nothing but grief for loaded adventure bikes on a dirt road. Heavy rains a month ago in Gabon, north towards Libreville, had foiled plans of another adventure rider, a German named Michael Koesters.

Michael had planned to ride from the Gabonese capital, Libreville, to Cape Town starting on December 1. I had corresponded with him for months, with the idea that he would team up with Geoff and Migo and I. We weren’t in the vicinity of Libreville until early January and missed Michael, but we had kept in touch.

In an email, he reported: “The rain is overwhelming. I rode a bit around Gabon and will IMG_3233come back in the dry season, hopefully having found a partner by then. All screwed up.”

In Ndende, I met a young Congolese truck driver named Fabrice. We had passed each other multiple times on the road from Lambaréné, each time exchanging waves and smiles. He was a handsome and cheerful kid, and told me he was on his way to Dolisie in the Congo, as we were. He had made this run before.

I told Fabrice we figured to make Dolisie in one day. It was a little more than 180 miles. No, Fabrice told me in French. It will take you two days. Once you enter Congo, the roads will be very bad. Beaucoup boue – lots of mud. You’ll see.

Geoff and Migo and I wandered a few hundreds yards into Ndende center for dinner and beers, and seated ourselves outdoors in front of a religious revival. It seemed that all of the town’s few hundred inhabitants were here. Loudspeakers had been set up, and colorfully attired men and women danced and swayed to religious music. The songs were upbeat and in French, but often I could hear “Jesus” amid the verses.

TotoMore entertainment awaited back at Hotel Le Barbecue. A staffer had a pet chimpanzee named Toto. Toto was one year old. He was a bonobo chimp, the species closest to mankind in its genetic composition. The man led him over to me, and Toto immediately jumped to my leg, clutching it urgently.

I picked Toto and cradled him. His resemblance to a boy was uncanny and fascinating, what with his flesh-colored face and big ears and brown eyes and even his little fingernails. Toto nuzzled against my neck, and then Migo held him and Geoff held him.

The man said that Toto had been found in the bush. My guess was that his parents had been killed for bush meat by hunters. The man tried to take Toto back, and the little chimp screeched and resisted and held onto Geoff for dear life. It was clear that Toto did not like his owner, and it seemed evident that the baby chimp had suffered cruelty and abuse at this man’s hand.

It saddened me deeply, and for the rest of the night and the next day I would think about that poor little chimpanzee, and the dozens of dead monkeys that I had seen hanging ghoulishly on sticks, for sale as bush meat, on Gabon’s roads.

***

CongoBoundThe early morning was misty and cool, the clouds low like a damp blanket. We rode 30 miles of good, maintained piste to the Congo border. A large metal pole hung horizontally across the road, ballasted by a cement-filled drum painted the colors of the Congo -- red, yellow and green, which, incidentally, are the colors of just about every country in western and west-central Africa.

Nyanga was a small, little-used border crossing. Officials on both sides were friendly and welcoming, if inefficient. In the Congo immigration office, a man had a full-page magazine photo of Barack Obama taped to his wall. “Mon president!” I said, and gave the man an Obama sticker, which delighted him immensely.

It was Sunday morning. The chief of Congolese customs was also Nyanga’s Protestant pastor. He was leading a service at church. We would need to wait. We idled about, bantering with the officials and inquiring about road conditions, which were agreed to be abysmal. Migo lay down on the side of the road. He hadn’t felt well all morning.

CongoNyangaAfter 45 minutes, the pastor appeared. He led me into his shabby little customs shack and invited me to sit. I gave him the motorbike’s carnet document, and he flipped through the pages, sizing up my route through 13 Africa countries. He looked at me and laid his hands palms-down on his desk and began to pray.

The pastor’s prayer was loud and forceful. His voice was deep and melodic. I couldn’t understand all of his French, but I could tell that he was praying for my safe passage. I bowed my head, and unbidden came an electric tingle down my spine and a tear to my eye. I wiped it away when his prayer ended and we looked at each other, punctuating the prayer with an exchange of pregnant gazes. I nodded and told him, “Merci.”

Entering the Congo felt like starting the journey all over again. It felt very, well, African. The name itself, Congo, seemed emblematic of all of Africa. Our next three countries, Congo and DRC and Angola, had endured long and bloody civil wars. They were among Africa’s most notorious for political corruption. Infrastructure would be poor, and the roads difficult.

The road on the other side of the metal pole that separated Gabon and Congo signaled what was to come. The piste on the Gabon side was graded and tailored, right up to the last few yards. On the Congo side, the road was rutted from coursing rainwater and littered with debris, and a few miles from Nyanga, the mud ponds would begin.

CongoMudPondWe ran the mud ponds for 25 miles. We maneuvered carefully through slippery mud slicks. It was slow going and hard work. Our border crossing had taken nearly two hours, and it became clear that Fabrice was right – the ride to Dolisie would require two days. In one small town, police stopped us for a document check.

I asked the officer about road conditions south towards the next town on the Michelin map, called Kibangou. He said, ”Le route c’est bonne – impeccable. N’est pas probleme.”

The word impeccable leapt out at me. It’s the same in French and English. This road, impeccable? It seemed unlikely, but it turned out to be true. The piste had been graded and maintained. Gravel had been laid to minimize mud. The only issue was heavy corrugation, but the road was good enough that much of it could be run at 40 and 45 mph to minimize the pounding from the washboard surface on our motorbikes.

I would later learn that the road was maintained to smooth the passage for the many log trucks hauling old-growth timber from the Congolese rain forest. Those log trucks had created the corrugations.

***

IMG_3318We reached Kibangou at 4 p.m. after a 120-mile day. A police and army post was situated squarely in the center of this town of 500-some people. Our documents were examined. A crowd of dozens gathered to watch the entertainment. Auberge le Pamela was back down the road, we were told. It was Kibangou’s only hotel.

More dozens of people, nearly all young men and boys, gathered as we relaxed and unloaded our motorbikes in front of Auberge le Pamela. A woman sat unhappily on a step. I was invited to have her, right now if I liked. She is good, I was told. Only 5000 CFA. About $11 USD. A room was the same price.

Kibangou had no municipal electricity or running water. My room had a large bed with a green sheet and a cockeyed wooden table. There was nothing else. The room was dim. I laid out to dry the wet clothing and gear from my soft panniers, which had soaked through in the many mud-pond crossings. I laid my riding jacket on the bed for a pillow, and my sleeping bag for a blanket. I hung my wet riding pants and motocross flak jacket on a few rusty nails in the walls.

The walls were turquoise, the paint cracked and discolored and mildewed and moldy from the Congo humidity. The floor was bare concrete. I closed the wooden slats to the screenless windows to discourage mosquitoes. Down the hall I found a shared shower. It wasn’t a shower per se, given Kibangou’s lack of running water. There was no sink. I poured water from a large yellow jug into a plastic bucket and disrobed.

IMG_3343I lathered and ran water from the bucket over my body. The water was slimy; it was difficult to tell whether I’d washed the soap from my skin. I used the water judiciously. Throughout Africa, I had seen women carrying jugs and buckets of water from wells or streams to their villages. The large yellow jug I had lifted was heavy.

Twilight and then darkness fell. A young man named Bozy, who seemed to be Auberge le Pamela’s lone employee, gave me a lit kerosene lantern. Its pungent and metallic odor filled my room. It cast a faint glow. I got my Petzl headlamp out of my tankbag and anointed myself with insect repellent and found Geoff down the dark hall.

Geoff and I strolled a quarter-mile into the tiny center of Kibangou, past a cell phone tower powered by a noisy diesel generator and beneath a handful of solar-powered streetlamps. Migo remained at the auberge; he still was not feeling well. An open-air bar was squarely in the center, across from the police and army station.

We sat outdoors for cold Ngok beers. Insanely loud music pumped from a pair of massive speakers, trumping the noisy diesel generator that supplied electricity to bar. People danced. We joined a crowd of locals and enjoyed a good banter. I flipped through photos of the day’s ride on my camera, and men and women and children pressed over my shoulders for a look.

KibangouGreetingA man was roasting chicken on the street over a wood-fuel grill. This was Kibangou’s best restaurant. I ordered chicken for Geoff and I. The chicken came with slivers of onion and hot pimante sauce and salt. We ate at our table at the bar and drank another beer and I danced with a young woman, twirling her about the dirt yard, much to the entertainment of our small crowd.

A man suggested that I should have her for the night. I gazed up at the sky. A pewter moon cast a bright glow behind gauzy clouds.

“That looks like a full moon,” I said to Geoff. “You think?”

He studied the moon and nodded. “Pretty full,” he said.

I scrutinized the moon again, looking for a missing sliver that would betray something other than fullness. I could detect none. No, I thought, that moon is as full as it gets.

***

A rooster outside my window woke me before 7 a.m. I made my way to the outhouse outside the auberge. When I exited, I encountered two young girls maybe 5 or 6 years old. They screamed at the sight of a bare-chested white man and turned and fled 50 yards to the road, yelping the whole way.

They stopped and turned back to look at me, cautiously. I smiled and waved and yelled bonjour! MigoCongoAfter a moment’s hesitation, they returned my greeting with big beaming smiles.

Bozy was up and about. I asked him about hot water for coffee. He shook his head no. The auberge had no kitchen facility. A wood fire would need to be made; Bozy was disinclined to the chore. I tapped Nescafe into my camp pot and added bottled water and shook it and sat outdoors on a green plastic chair and sipped a cup of cold coffee.

I heard Geoff rattling about in his room. Then I heard Geoff and Migo talking in low voices. I heard Migo groan, and more talk that I couldn’t quite hear. Geoff found me outside.

“Migo’s got malaria,” he said.

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Video: Lovely Day in the Congo

After a spill on a mud-slick Congo road, Geoff shows off his metal-working prowess and expresses his appreciation for the durability of Touratech aluminum motorbike panniers and Hagon shock absorbers.

MigoMudRun

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Top of the World

Lambaréné, Gabon * January 9, 2009

IMG_3077Until Gabon, I had counted as among my favorite adventure motorcycling roads the Top of the World Highway in Canada’s Yukon Territory and the spectacularly desolate route across the Bolivian altiplano, south to a small town on the Chilean border called San Pedro de Atacama.

Now I had to add the 70-mile piste east into Gabon’s Lope National Park to my list. Gravelly and hilly and fast, the dirt road snaked up past alpine lakes and twisted through dense rain forest and vaulted past stunning inselberg rock formations to emerge on a green plateau that looked entirely unlike Africa.

It resembled instead Tibet, with that top of the world feel that I have always found so enchanting. Verdant savannah sprawled out on all sides, punctuated by the occasional solitary copse of trees and low mountain peaks in the distance. It was easy, atop this roof of Africa, to imagine that I was back on Bolivian altiplano at 16,000 feet.

The elevation here was only about 3000 feet, but it seemed deceptively high. I relished the feeling of altitude. It was getting into late afternoon, and the descending sun at my back balmed this majestic landscape with golden hues. This was the arresting scenery that I had I hoped to see in Cameroon, but which I had found disappointingly obscured by the windblown harmattan dust storms from the Sahara.

I tried to quiet my mind and fix myself in this extraordinary time and place. Once in a while, the immensity of the Africa ride concentrates itself into a singular moment. This was one of those moments – piercing, poignant, and unforgettable. I regarded the motorbike with particular affection, because getting here on it made the journey uniquely special.

I knew that gorillas and mandrills and forest elephants and other wildlife lived in the rain forests that sloped down from this crowning terrain. I would see no gorillas or mandrills or elephants, but simply knowing they were in the vicinity was somehow enough.

IMG_3104We didn’t have to come here. We could have remained on the good paved road south to the Gabonese city of Lambaréné, and towards our border crossing into the Congo. You choose the piste because it’s difficult; you know by experience that the gratification of getting to somewhere off the map via the hard road will be commensurate to the challenge.

By the end of the day, we had reached the tiny town of Lope, a settlement of a few hundred people perched atop a high plain near the mighty Ogooué River. The town had a remote and rough-hewn feel to it, with a dusty dirt main street anchored by a general store selling everything from fried doughballs to cheap padlocks to laundry detergent. It felt like the Wild West. A small hotel was just down the street.

The spectacle of three adventure bikes and their ruggedly attired riders pulling into town drew an immediate crowd. I relaxed and enjoyed the celebrity and admired the hardscrabble downtown and the expansive Gabonese wilderness that surrounded it. Twilight descended steadily. Across the street, men sat drinking beer at a small open-air restaurant.

I loved little middle-of-nowhere Lope, and loved the ride to get here. I felt as if I was on top of the world, literally and figuratively. I was dusty and sweaty and irrepressibly buoyant. My friends were not.

Migo fretted over fuel. The 22-liter tank his KTM will get him maybe 150 miles on a piste before it needs refueling, and Lope had no fuel station. Black-market fuel was said to be available, though, and negotiations were set in motion to locate Lope’s lone fuel entrepreneur and refill Migo’s tank and the jerricans he keeps lashed up on the rear.

Geoff wasn’t happy, either. We kicked about in front of the general store and he glugged on a bottle of Castel beer and cursed his motorbike. Its rear shock had failed catastrophically on the ride to Lope, and now the rear end of the Yamaha squatted forlornly, rather in the attitude of the bowel movement. RoadtoLope

“C’mon,” I told Geoff. “This is what adventure riding is all about. Broken bike, broken down little town in the middle of nowhere. I bet you look back on this as one of the happiest days of the trip.”

“Yeah well, I would have enjoyed the ride a lot more if it wasn’t for the bike,” he said. “That blown shock is a bugger. The bike is barely rideable. And this, this is a one-horse town. We shouldn’t have come here.”

He was, I thought, almost right. Our ride here had come at a price. For Geoff, the price was the blown shock that would bedevil his passage through Gabon and the Congo. Migo would suffer his first crash of the journey, leaving an unseemly gouge in the sleek black fairing on his KTM 950 Adventure.

For me, the price would very nearly be my life.

***

GabonLogTruckI first saw the log trucks earlier in the day, as we made our way to Lope after a night’s lodging in Oyem, Gabon. I rounded a corner to be confronted by the spectacle of a half-dozen log trucks parked off the road in a little village. Their flatbed trailers were laden with colossal rain forest timber.

I stopped and wandered about the trucks. A man approached me. He was a truck driver and from Cameroon and spoke good English. The logs, he told me, had been harvested from the rain forest in the interior by Asian companies. The trucks were bound for the Gabonese capital of Libreville on the Atlantic Coast for sea transit to Asia.

“My God,” I told him. “These trees are huge! The only trees I’ve ever seen this large were in the redwood and sequoia forests of California, United States. That’s where I’m from.” We spoke briefly about my ride to get here, and he told me about the trees.

“These are okoume trees,” the man told me. “We also take others, but not as many of them. They are very old. The wood is very good. Very strong.” I examined the hundreds of rings on the wood. Identification codes had been spray-painted with a stencil on the bottom of the trunks. I touched the wood. I tried to dig a fingernail into it, and then a key. It was nearly as hard as a rock.

GabonLogsProceeding south towards Lope, I would see more than 40 of these log trucks. The road was freshly paved and fast, and I passed at least a dozen log trucks trundling deliberately along. They were virtually the only vehicles on this road. Dozens more were parked alongside the road. Population density here was incredibly light. The only reason this road was freshly paved, I imagined, was to facilitate fast transit for the log trucks.

We stopped for obligatory photos at the sign for the equator, only to be harassed by swarms of tiny insects. Down the road, at the junction of tiny Alémbe, where we would turn for the 70-mile piste to Lope National Park, another half-dozen log trucks were parked. One of their drivers, an English-speaking Cameroonian, approached us.

The piste to Lope would be good, he told me. It is all dirt, no pavement. It will take you about three hours. Be careful, though, he said – lots of log trucks run this road.

East from Alémbe, the piste ascended dramatically. It corkscrewed through dense rain forest and past placid lakes and up rocky inclines. Cornering was fairly tight. I didn’t need the driver’s reminder to be mindful of oncoming trucks on a twisty piste. Around each bend, I bore in mind the mantra from my near-collision on a dirt road in Honduras back in 2004 – here comes the school bus.

Twenty miles in, I found Geoff and Migo parked alongside the road. Geoff’s chain had jumped off the rear sprocket after he hit a deep horizontal rut at speed, and he had loosened the rear tire to refasten it. He had been lucky to avoid a wrenching crash, and now he was concerned. Why had the chain jumped off? And why, after he had refastened it, was it so loose?

And another complication: I took a close look at the chain, and saw no rubber O-rings on it. Geoff examined it as well – it was not an O-ring chain. It was a cheaper and inferior chain, lacking the O-rings important to lubrication and preventing metal-on-metal wear.

IMG_3063This was Geoff’s spare chain, purchased from a motorbike shop in the U.K. He had installed it back in Yaoundé. He had never looked at it closely, but rather assumed that the dealer had supplied him with the top quality O-ring chain he had requested. “Bollix!” he exclaimed, after confirming his chain was a cheap knock-off. The chain was usable, of course. Its durability would be suspect.

I sympathized with Geoff. The preparations for a long adventure ride are so intense, so devilishly complex -- how can you possibly button down every last detail? You try. You work like hell. You brainstorm for months. You know that details will become magnified on the road, and the smallest oversight can come back to haunt you. You can bust your butt on preparations for 12 hours a day, seven days a week, toiling until 11 p.m. every night, and still miss a detail such as the fact that your dealer sold you an inferior chain.

We rode on. Geoff and Migo sped ahead, carving up this piste and challenging their technical riding skills. I lingered behind, stopping for photos and watching the diverse scenery of jungle and inselbergs and lakes and grand plateaus unfurl almost cinematically. I crashed with the violence of a lightning bolt.

I had begun to maneuver a right-hand bend in the piste. I had the motorbike as far to the right side of the road as possible. I had already encountered four or five oncoming log trucks. I didn’t trust them at all. The foliage alongside the road was dense. A six-inch earthen berm edged the right side of the piste, meaning no escape path. Suddenly, on the wrong side of the curve, aiming squarely at me, came a hard-cornering log truck.

I slammed on both brakes. The front tire skidded on the gravelly piste and put my Suzuki down in an instant. I leapt off. Prone on the triangulated sliver of piste between the truck’s path and the edge of the road, I watched in slow-motion horror as a white Mercedes 3340 cab bore down upon me with the purposeful malice of a tank.

IMG_3069I could see the malignant black tire on the driver’s side churning inexorably towards me. The leering grille on the front of the cab. Its implacable silver Mercedes logo. The huge cloud of dust churned up by the truck’s passage. The sound and the fury of the awful machine.

I rolled like a barrel towards the edge of the road. Move! Now! I grabbed the back tire of the fallen Suzuki and yanked myself in the dirt around the rear end of the motorbike, and watched almost dispassionately as the horrible length of the 18-wheel truck trundled past in a cloud of dust, a matter of feet from me and my downed machine.

Once the truck was past, I leapt up immediately. “HEY!” I hollered. “HEY!” The driver stopped. He looked back at me quizzically. “Get over here!” He did.

I had the driver help me hoist the motorbike. He was in his early 20s and from Cameroon. He spoke English. His expression was shy and sheepish. He knew he had nearly run me over. I might have been furious, but I found myself in an odd state of extreme clam.

“You’re a very bad driver,” I told the man. “Very bad. You almost ran me over – you almost killed me! Why are you driving all the way over on the wrong side of the road, and on a corner?”

The driver looked at me apologetically. On this particular corner, he said, the proper side of the road was badly sloped. He pointed to the other side of the piste. If he drove on that incline, his whole load could topple over. On the wrong side of the road, the terrain was relatively flat. I looked at his parked truck. Its flatbed was laden with nine massive okoume logs.

“So instead you drive on the wrong side and try to kill an adventure motorcyclist?” I said. BadDriver

The driver shrugged. He was sorry. I took his photo. Then he asked me for a cigarette.

Geoff and Migo were waiting for me a few miles ahead. I switched on my turn signal as I stopped. Its amber lens cover had fallen on in the crash. The bare flashing bulb signaled that something was wrong. “Problem?” Migo said.

“Somebody crashed,” I said. “Me.” I recounted the details of the accident. When I was done, Geoff had his own tale to tell. He had a new problem with his Yamaha XT. He’d had to wait until I was done talking because, sort of as in poker, an accident trumps a motorbike problem any day.

“Well,” Geoff said. “My rear shock is screwed. Blown out. Lookit the bike.” It sagged badly in the rear. This was why his chain was loose and had jumped the rear sprocket earlier in the day. His shock was made by a Britain-based aftermarket provider called Hagon. It was believed to be stronger and more durable than the stock shock on the XT.

Now Geoff bitterly cursed Hagon and recounted how the company had refused to guarantee its product for the rough roads of Africa. We rode on. I could almost see a little black cloud hovering over Geoff’s helmet. Lope was thirty miles to the east.

***

MamaA woman I called Mama ran the only and best restaurant in Lope. She was a large, portly, gregarious woman in her mid-30s and wore a colorfully patterned orange dress. She had three young children. She liked that I called her Mama. She liked to cook, too, because the generous chicken and rice and cassava meal she prepared for us for less than $4 USD each was delicious.

We ate dinner and drank Castel beers at an outdoor plastic table and plotted our next steps. We were bound for the Congo. I had in mind to continue southeast on this piste through Gabon, towards a town called Franceville in the interior and a border crossing into the Congo at a burg called Akou, to Gamboma.

It would be roughly four days of traversing remote and mountainous terrain through the wilds of Gabon and the Congo. From Gamboma, it would be another two days on piste south to the Congolese capital, Brazzaville. The Michelin map showed but a few small towns on the route. It sounded like a great adventure. But Geoff’s blown rear shock foiled the idea.

“Mate, I need to get to Libreville,” Geoff told us. That would mean retracing our route out of Lope, back to Alémbe and the paved road south to the Gabonese capital

“I’m going to have to have a shock flown in from Europe and get it fitted,” Geoff went on. “The bike is shot. No way can I ride piste for four days. No way can I ride to Brazzaville.” Libreville was said to be extremely expensive, and it was out of the way. We had planned to bypass the city.

Migo and I suggested Geoff could and should press on to Brazzaville. We’d take what we expected would be paved roads. A shockless motorbike might not be fun to ride, but the journey could be done. I would have a new rear tire awaiting me at the DHL office in Brazzaville. If Geoff had a new shock shipped to Brazzaville as well, we could take care of both jobs in one city.

BustedXTWe talked about my crash. It was my second of the journey. I was still strangely untroubled by the near-disaster. The malicious and dusty whoosh of the log truck past me seemed to exist in an abstract, in a vacuum. In fact, since the accident, my spirits had been extraordinarily high. I knew it could have been very bad. It had been extremely close.

Coming face-to-face with my mortality heightened my appreciation for life and the moments that comprised it. It was like a drug. Risk is a narcotic. It was why I had so relished that singular and poignant moment of solitude atop the Tibet-like plateau en route to Lope. For every moment that I breathed, there was another reality in which I did not.

Now the evening Lope air was balmy and sweet and the chicken dinner delicious and the beer cold and soothing. I delighted in the camaraderie of my friends and our great adventures. I shared some local palm wine with a kindly old man who had helped us locate the black-market fuel peddler. I thought of the log truck driver with a peculiar compassion.

“The thing is,” I told my friends, “I did what you’re not supposed to do on a dirt road. I slammed the front brake. It was total instinct. If I had thought about, I might have used just the rear. The front brake put the bike down fast, and that’s what saved me. Sure as hell there was no escape path on the right, not with that high berm and the foliage.

“Luckily,” I said, “neither of us was going especially fast. Maybe 25 miles an hour. If he was going any faster, or I was, I’m pretty sure the result would have been quite different.”

***

IMG_3121I was up early and persuaded a man at the hotel to boil me water for coffee. Migo was up early, too. He wanted to visit Lope National Park, a few miles down the road. The park was one of the reasons we had ridden here. It was one of the few affordable wildlife sanctuaries in Gabon; the majority were fancy “eco-tourism” spots that demanded $350 USD or so for a visit.

I told Migo to go on without me. Wildlife viewing was not said to be especially good. It would mean a long hike into the park, and perhaps seeing some water buffalo. Chances of spotting a gorilla or forest elephant were slim.

“Enjoy your tour,” I told Migo. “I’m a biker, not a hiker. I’ll probably take off early and you guys can catch up down the road towards Lambarene.”

Sometime after 9 a.m., Geoff rolled out of his room in his characteristically foul morning mood and grunted. I was oiling the chain on my motorbike. Geoff had some wrenching to do himself, and pushed his bike backwards to a more suitable location on the hotel property. I heard a crash and a curse and saw Geoff’s Yamaha on its side once more.

I couldn’t help but laugh. I grabbed my camera for a quick photo. Geoff was on an epic roll with his bike falling over. Two nights earlier, he dumped his Yamaha in the sloped parking lot of our hotel in Oyem. The next morning, as we left the Oyem hotel, he dumped the bike again -- in virtually the same spot!

Now he cursed and kicked his Yamaha’s seat while I chuckled away. “What’s that, like 14 tip-overs now?” I asked him. He gave me a dirty look. Geoff was far ahead of Migo and I with his bike being on the ground, either from tip-over or crash. Migo and I each had two tip-overs. I had two crashes, including yesterday’s. Migo had none.

DownedXTLater in the day, Migo wold suffer his first crash of the journey. I left Lope first, and Geoff followed an hour later. Migo rode solo, gunning to make time and challenging his skills on the piste, as he likes to do. A vertical rut put him down. He was going too fast and lost control. He was unhurt, but the left side panel on his KTM was badly scratched.

I packed up to leave. A pair of prostitutes propositioned me at the hotel. I declined, and later they would hoot and jeer as I motored out of Lope. Three miles down the piste, I encountered a hard-cornering Guinness beer truck. Like the log truck, this driver rounded a sharp bend entirely on the wrong side of the road.

Omigod! I thought. What is the matter with these idiots?! It wasn’t close. He was 50 or so yards in front of me. But if I had been closer, a head-on collision might have been unavoidable, which would have really sucked, on account of I don't like Guinness. Paranoid, I edged around corners in second gear for much of the 60-some miles to pavement, at the junction to Lope.

The paved road we rode a day earlier had been fast and good, but south of the junction, it deteriorated. Its ancient tarmac was either badly potholed or destroyed completely. Log trucks kicked up huge clouds of dust, and opportunities to pass them on this narrow and winding route were rare.

IMG_3143After 25 miles, I stopped to wait for my friends in a town called Ndjole. I bought some chicken wings from a street vendor. Chicken wings can be found all throughout Gabon at streetside grills, and they’re every bit as delicious as the best chicken wings at an American sports bar. I was hungry and ordered 10 and paid a little more than $1 USD. I asked the vendor what the 80 miles of road south to Lambarene would be like.

“The road is very bad,” he told me. “It will take you four hours.” Four hours, I thought, to go 80 miles?! Ah crap. It must be the same sort of badly potholed pavement I had ridden to Ndjole. It didn’t bode well. It was nearly 4 p.m., and the map showed just one tiny town between Ndjole and Lambarene.

Now I heard a heavy mechanical trundling. A log truck was passing through downtown Ndjole on its narrow dirt main street. I looked down the road, and saw more trucks on the move. Several dozen log trucks had been parked on the outskirts of town as I pulled in. Now they were bunched as a convoy to make the 130-mile run to Libreville.

The trucks generated a harmattan-like haze of dust. Great plumes of choking black diesel smoke spewed from their exhausts. The many vendors of chicken wings and other grilled meats that lined the street scrambled to cover their grills with plastic tarp. Some pulled paper masks over their mouths and noses. I sat on a plastic chair and watched the convoy heave by.

Ten log trucks … 15 trucks … 20 trucks, each burdened with enormous loads of rain forest timber. Something more than two dozen percolated past, and when they were through, the meat vendors removed their plastic tarps. “Is it like this every day?” I asked my chicken wing guy, in bad French.

Yes, every day, a few times a day, he said. I asked again, And the road is bad, really? Very bad, he said. Geoff and Migo pulled up, and I told them the bad news: “This guy says it’s four hours on a bad road to Libreville. Oh, and a convoy of two dozen log trucks just went past. “

Migo&LogTruckOn a dusty and broken and twisty piste, we’d be hard-pressed to pass a convoy of two dozen log trucks. Given the late hour of day, it might make sense to spend the night in Ndjole. I could see a hotel sign up on a hill.

But you can never trust just one man on road conditions. It pays to ask multiple people, and make your best guess based on prevailing opinion. We did. Others contradicted my chicken wing guy. The road is good and paved, we were told. You can make Lambarene in 1½ hour, no problem. We fueled up and set off.

The road was indeed good – virtually impeccable. It snaked up into low mountains, around tight corners. Within minutes, I had caught up with the convoy of log trucks, took a few action photos and videos, and tore on down to Lambarene, enjoying a fast and spirited ride on U.S.-caliber pavement, carving through twisties and gunning hard on straightaways.

We made Lambaréné before 6 p.m. We found a hotel called Bananas and were enjoying a couple of cold beers at an outdoor bar when the rains came and the winds howled. The storm was torrential. The next leg of our journey would be mostly a dirt road to the Congo border.

“If it keeps raining like this,” Migo said, “that road to the Congo is going to be real bad.”

***

IMG_3167I knew the name Albert Schweitzer. I had him vaguely lumped in with Carl Jung and Albert Einstein and other Central European figures of accomplishment from the early and mid-20th century. To my discredit, however, I had missed the full greatness of this man’s life.

Albert Schweitzer helped to shape Lambaréné, a city of 20,000 on the banks of the Ogooué River. A Nobel Peace Prize winner, the Alsatian physician and theologian founded the Albert Schweitzer Hospital in Lambaréné in 1913, and would write more than a dozen books on theology, music, Africa, Indian thought, and the threat of nuclear war.

Over the decades, hundreds of thousands of Gabonese have made arduous journeys to the Schweitzer hospital, mostly by river from the surrounding rain forest, to be treated for such afflictions as malaria and leprosy and dysentery and necrosis and sleeping sickness. The hospital operates still, with Schweitzer buried on its grounds, and a visit to its museum proved rewarding.

Schweitzer’s medical equipment and leather-bound notebooks and pith helmets and other artifacts from the early 20th century are arrayed Albert_Schweitzerin the perfectly preserved office and treatment facilities and bedroom that he used. Hundreds of books by and about him are neatly displayed on shelves. I resolved that when I returned to the U.S., I would buy a book by Schweitzer; in fact, I would later find a 1922 copy of his “On the Edge of the Primeval Forest” in Cape Town, South Africa.

I found my visit to the Schweitzer hospital humbling and inspirational. The well manicured grounds seemed to reflect the beauty and generosity of Schweitzer’s towering humanitarian accomplishments, as did Lambaréné itself – “somehow kinder and gentler than the rest of Gabon,” as my Lonely Planet guide put it.

A ferocious noontime rainstorm kicked up as we rode back from the Schweitzer hospital. It would rain every day in Lambaréné – potent, howling storms that sent the locals merrily scurrying for cover, and left us wondering what muddy disasters lay south in the Congo. As the rain raged, I took shelter in an Internet café near our motel and read up on Schweitzer, and rainforest logging in Gabon.

IMG_3170European and now Asian companies had been logging the rainforest for decades. I would read in Schweitzer’s “On the Edge of the Primeval Forest” of how okoume trees were being hauled from the jungle even in the late 19th century. The scale of it was astounding – hundreds of thousands of trees felled over a century, and still more were being removed.

I did the math on the logs. I’d seen maybe 150 logs on trucks each day; that calculated out to 52,000 trees a year. How many had I not seen? I wondered. How large can that forest possibly be? Little of the proceeds the government derived from the sale of Gabon’s natural resources appeared to be routed for public benefit; other than good roads, the towns through which we rode were poverty-stricken and lacked running water and electricity.

It was a sad post-colonial story that had been repeated throughout the continent since the 1950s, when Ghana became the first African country to achieve independence. European powers depart, and newly empowered leaders quickly become corrupt and squander public resources on themselves and their cronies.

Yet Gabon was regarded as an environmental leader among African nations. In 2002, its president, El Hadj Omar Bongo, set aside land for 13 new parks after a presentation by adventure ecologist Michael Fay, who had made an epic trek called Megatransact across virginal Africa. Fay sold the Gabonese president on eco-tourism. Lope National Park was one of the 13 protected, comprising about 10 percent of Gabon’s land.

Migo and I talked about the log trucks. Like me, he found them affecting. “The national parks are being protected, but everything else is being destroyed,” Migo said. “It’s sad.”

BushMeatSouth of Lambérené, I would see no log trucks. Perhaps consequently, the road would turn unpaved towards the Congo. Traffic was remarkably light. We percolated through tiny villages of mud-brick homes – no industry, a few shops, a cell phone shack, and people sitting idly about, startled at the sight and sound of our adventure motorbikes, waving at us happily.

The road was in good shape and could be ridden at more than 40 mph. But now another, ghoulish spectacle slowed me. Dead monkeys hung from sticks on the side of the road. This was bush meat for sale. Men with rifles had killed these monkeys in the nearby forests.

I stopped at one bush meat display. A crowd quickly surrounded me and my motorbike. A dead monkey could be had for about $10 USD. Good to eat? I asked a man. Yes, yes, he exclaimed with a sunbeam smile. With a stick, he held a monkey carcass aloft for my better inspection.

Down the road, a hunter approached with a rifle over one shoulder and a dead monkey over the other. The skies south towards the Congo looked slate-grey and pregnant with rain.

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Video: Log Truck in Gabon
Laden with rainforest timber, a log truck wends its way on a twisty road in Gabon, bound for the capital of Libreville on the Atlantic coast and sea transit to Asia. We would see well over 100 of these log trucks in Gabon and the Congo.

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The Tank Is Half Full

Yaoundé, Cameroon * January 4, 2009

GeoffMarkMigoMy friend Joe Ortega, the San Francisco adventure motorcyclist with whom I’d ridden in Peru and Bolivia and Chile in 2005, put it well. “The most important piece of gear you can bring on an adventure ride,” Joe would often say, “is a sense of humor.”

How true it was. A sense of humor and unflagging optimism is every bit as essential as chain lube and motor oil for an adventure ride through Third World countries. The ride will inevitably challenge your resourcefulness, patience, ingenuity, and tenacity. To get through, a sense of humor is crucial – perhaps more so in Africa than anywhere else on the planet.

Tires and motorcycle parts are virtually impossible to find. Visas are required for most African nations, and securing them from a consulate in the neighboring country is often tedious, time-consuming, and costly. Border crossings can take hours. Interminable delays and misinformation are routine. Fuel stations are closed; gasoline from black-market peddlers can be dirty and expensive.

Things are broken. Things are missing. Things are closed, inexplicably. Cultural and language barriers complicate, often comically, a request for an item as simple as salt. ATMs may be found only in the largest cities. Money-changers will try to prey on your ignorance and shortchange you in a transaction.

Your arithmetic skills and mental dexterity are constantly tested in calculating exchange rates for a merry-go-round of African currencies, the dirham and the ougiya and the dalasi and the cedi and the naira and the Congolese franc and the West African CFA and Central African CFA and the kwanza and the rand.

The results are often distressing, because Africa can be punishingly expensive. With little manufacturing and heavy reliance on imported goods, prices for some items can be 25 to 50 percent or more of what you might pay in the U.S. In Accra, Ghana, for instance, Geoff and I were shocked to find that a motorcycle dealer wanted more than $35 USD for an ordinary can of chain lube.

AfricanGasStationPolice and other authorities can hold you up as they procure such important pieces of information as the names of your aunts and uncles, the ages of your siblings, and how much you paid for your passport. Attempts at extortion and bribes are not uncommon. Africa is nothing like the Western world that you know so well.

Africa is cockeyed and crazy, haphazard and improvisational. When things go wrong, as they inevitably will, Africa travel vets sigh a well-worn acronym: T.I.A. … This is Africa.

You have to view the glass, or your fuel tank, as half-full. You have to laugh. The Africans do – the continent is full of risible people just bursting for a good laugh. Most dilemmas can be solved with more time, more money, or some brainstorm of an idea. You can learn from the Africans, who are famously resourceful and inventive. Africa is the land of the possible.

It’s one of the reasons you came here in the first place, to test your wits. Riding a motorbike through the Third World teaches you what is truly essential. It demands you think outside the box. And when you think you’re stuck, you find yourself asking, What’s the worst thing that could happen?

The worst thing that could have happened was that you didn’t come to Africa on a motorbike in the first place.

***

IMG_2957The capital of Cameroon, Yaoundé, sprawls atop green hills in the southwestern section of the Idaho-shaped country. More than 1 million people live here, many in the shantytowns far from the city center. Yaoundé’s is a modern-looking downtown, by African standards. The broad boulevards and lazy roundabouts and French-Colonial architecture betray the influence of Cameroon’s French colonizers.

But Yaoundé is decidedly African, too, densely packed with reckless traffic and tilting shacks and thatch huts and street vendors selling grilled fish and hard-boiled eggs and cell phone chargers and used shoes and AA batteries that are virtually guaranteed to be worthless. We would spend six days here – six admin days, in the adventure motorcycling lexicon.

Geoff and I made a five-hour ride on a paved road from Limbe to Yaoundé, where Migo was lodged at the city’s Catholic mission. Our ride would have been four hours, but Geoff’s rear tire went flat 15 miles from the capital. A flat motorcycle tire is never a pretty sight. At one glance, it communicates an hour’s delay and sweat and toil and cursing.

A nail or a piece of glass wasn’t the culprit this time. It was the valve stem. It had torn away; the tube was ruined. Geoff had been lucky the failure didn’t occur at speed, or he might have found himself eating some Cameroonian pavement. He had one rear spare tube, which had already been patched multiple times. “What is that, like four flats you’ve had now?” I asked.

“Something like ‘at,” he said. “Actually, I think I’ve lost track.”

As he got to work on the side of the road, he elaborated on the flat tire he had suffered in Nigeria a week ago while he was crossing the nation solo. It occurred late in the day outside a little town called Ore. Ever conscious of security, Geoff had squirreled the bike away as best he could off the side of the highway and got to work.

IMG_2930“I get done and pack up and take off and – doh! The thing is flat!” he said. “Yep, I pinched the tube again. So I do the whole bugger all over, patch the tube a second time, and guess what?”

“No way!” I said.

“Pinched the bastard again!”

“Twice in the same tire change!” I said. “That’s like five pinches you’ve done, isn’t it? Tell you what dude, remind me to never let you repair a flat, if I get one. Actually, do you want me to do that one for you?”

In fact, I hadn’t suffered a flat, and would not throughout Africa. I would ride nearly 47,000 miles through Africa and Latin America and North America with just one flat … and that was in the first week of what would be 14 months of riding. It happened in Baja California, Mexico, when I was using a standard inner tube on the rear tire.

After the flat, I installed a heavy-duty 4 mm tube. They won’t prevent a nail puncture, but they would resist the valve stem tear that Geoff’s standard tube suffered. Rim locks helped, too, in preventing tire slippage and a valve steam tear.

As Geoff toiled alongside the road, some kids stopped by and happily took possession of Geoff’s ruined tube, no doubt to put it to some good use with African ingenuity.

We found Migo at the Catholic mission, and another rider reunion was under way. It was Thursday evening. Migo and Geoff hadn’t seen each other for three weeks. Migo’s right calf was badly burned. He’d touched it against his KTM’s hot exhaust while riding around Yaoundé in ordinary pants.

We sat on an outdoor balcony at the mission while Geoff tended to Migo’s scalded leg with burn treatment from his amply stocked medic pack. Migo bit his lip in pain. We had a couple of boxes of red wine from a supermarket. Migo had a bottle of whiskey. We had plenty to talk about – namely the long list of admin chores and motorcycle maintenance that we each needed to tend to.

IMG_2935“It’s amazing how long my list is,” I told my friends. “People who think this is a vacation … hell, it’s more work than a 9 to 5 job -- seven days a week!”

We needed visas for Gabon and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Neither was a sure thing, particularly DRC, and together they would cost more than $250. I needed to arrange shipment from the U.S. of a new rear tire and a new chain and sprockets to the DHL office in Brazzaville, Congo. Geoff was still working on shipment of a new rear shock and piston rings. His bike was slowly failing.

For weeks, it had been blowing great plumes of blue smoke. It was burning oil, and Geoff knew why. Somewhere in northern Africa – he couldn’t remember where – he had installed a new air filter. But he had discovered to his consternation that he had misinstalled the filter. The air cleaner element hadn’t been filtering at all, and for thousands of miles dust and sand had been sucking into his Yamaha’s 600 cc motor.

It wasn’t good. An air filter is among the most critical parts on a motorbike. My Suzuki manual warns: “The surest way to accelerate engine wear is to use the engine without the air filter element or to use a ruptured element. Make sure that the air cleaner is in good condition at all times. Life of the engine depends largely on this component!”

There are no Yamaha dealers in western or central Africa. New parts would need to be shipped via DHL from Europe, and not inexpensively. Migo had already had five DHL shipments, to Senegal, Togo, and elsewhere. We got to work on our many projects on Friday morning, starting at the Gabon consulate.

The consulate wasn’t easy to find. The map of Yaoundé in our Lonely Planet books was incomplete, missing a number of small streets. We maneuvered through heavy and reckless traffic towards the general neighborhood. I lost my friends, and after 15 minutes of hunting around and asking locals, finally found the consulate.

“It’s 45,000 CFA for a two-day turnaround, meaning we get the visas on Monday,” Migo said. That was three days away. “Or we can pay 70,000 CFA and have them back today. We’re thinking go with the 70,000 and we can get out of Yaoundé like Sunday.”

IMG_2967Seventy-thousand CFA! That’s more than $150 USD, and the highest visa fee we would pay in Africa. We filled out application forms, turned over our passports and a fistful of cash, and were told to return at 3 p.m. in the afternoon.

But once our visa applications were filed, we had second thoughts. We had ridden by the DRC consulate, and debated whether to file applications for DRC visas today, as well, even though the chances of securing a DRC visa in Yaoundé did not sound promising.

Migo had met German travelers in a 4x4 who had applied in Yaoundé and were denied. Another motorcyclist, Alex Rubstov of Russia, who was a few weeks ahead of us, was similarly rejected. Still, our luck might be better. You want to get visas when and where you can, because they are never a sure thing.

A civil war was raging in northeastern DRC. We would steer clear of that section of the country, but if the rebel uprising spread, DRC might stop issuing visas entirely. If we didn’t get DRC visa in Yaoundé, we’d need to divert course to Libreville, the capital of Gabon, or hope for the best in Brazzaville, across the Congo River from the DRC capital of Kinshasa.

We stopped at the DRC consulate to inquire. A friendly young man behind the counter encouraged us to apply. The chief is out today, he said, but would decide on Monday. The fee would be 45,000 CFA, about $100 USD. Ten dollars of the fee would be non-refundable, in the event we were rejected.

I slipped an Obama sticker inside my passport, for what little good it might be in our applications. “Please make sure the chief receives this,” I told the desk guy. “A small present for the chief.”

“Obama!” the young man exclaimed. “You have a sticker for me, too?”

We lingered briefly outside the DRC consulate. I happened to look at the rear tire on Migo’s KTM. The tire was inflated, but a nail was deeply embedded in the rubber.

***

IMG_2988It was lunchtime. We stopped at a small café. Chickens were roasting on a rotisserie out front. Geoff ordered a whole chicken. Migo bought pastries from the café. To me, pastries didn’t sound good and the chickens looked unappetizing, as if they had been spent the night in that grill. Across the street a cart vendor was selling sandwiches filled with egg, rice, and pasta. I bought one of those.

“Where did you get that?” Geoff said, with a covetous look.

“Lady across the street,” I replied.

“I should have got one of those,” Geoff said, “because this chicken is shit.” His lunch turned out to be the dreaded “hard chicken.” As we had learned, two sorts of chicken exist in Africa – soft chicken and hard chicken. Hard chicken is as tough as a catcher’s mitt. It’s impossible to tell the difference before your first bite.

“Yeah well, the sandwich lady didn’t have any salt,” I said. “This sucks without salt.” I carry a salt shaker in my tankbag, but had left the tank bag at the Catholic mission for our morning errands. I ate a dismally bland sandwich while Geoff poked with hostility at his dead bird.

Across the street was an Internet café. After lunch, I checked my email and spotted this alarming subject header:

DHL shipping estimate $1062

It was an email from my lifelong friend Tappy “Do-Right” Tapintyre. Tappy had generously agreed to tend to certain of my affairs, and was in possession of a new TKC 80 rear tire and a new chain and set of sprockets. My idea was that he could simply visit the DHL office a mile or two from his house in our hometown in upstate New York and ship them to Brazzaville. It wouldn’t take him more than an hour.

TappyDo-RightTapintyre(BTW, I’ll take this opportunity to say a big THANK YOU to Tappy Tapintyre as well as a friend in San Francisco, Elaine Brotherton. Both went out of their way to help handle my affairs while I was in Africa, as well as supply other assistance while I was in the U.S. Many thanks, guys!)Elaine

Each of Migo’s five DHL shipments to Africa had cost a couple of hundred dollars -- not cheap, but reasonable enough. I figured my expense for a shipment from the U.S. would be more, but not that much. But now Tappy informed me that DHL had curtailed its international business from the U.S. and that my shipment would cost $1062 USD. An estimate he procured from UPS was even more -- $1200 USD.

More than $1,000 USD! It was shockingly expensive. I emailed Tappy to hold off while I researched a less expensive alternative. Migo reminded me that Toni Togo, the KTM motorbike dealer in Togo, regularly shipped tires to Point Noire in the Congo. I had met the English-speaking manager, named Michel. I had seen 17-inch tires in stock at Toni Togo. I would try Toni Togo.

Back at the Catholic mission, I jotted some tire-buying notes. I copied the phone number from Toni Togo sticker than I had affixed to my motorbike. A call center was just across the street. I took a deep breath. This will be easy, I told myself. Go across the street, call Michel, order tires for shipment to the DHL office in Point Noire, pay with credit card, done. Twenty minutes.

The call center handled only calls inside Cameroon, a girl told me. A few hundreds yards down the street was an Internet café from which I could call Togo. I hied myself down the street and dialed Toni Togo.

I received only error messages. Something was wrong. I asked an attendant for help. He verified the country code and dialed the number, unsuccessfully. I kept trying. The little phone both was broiling hot. Sweat poured down my face. Dammit! I thought. This is going to be a freaking nightmare!

I thought to check the Toni Togo Web site for a different phone number. I logged on to a PC at the café. The French keyboard was badly stuck, in need of a thorough cleaning. The machine was painfully sluggish. After 15 minutes, Toni Togo’s Web page finally loaded. Then the browser crashed, and the PC itself, and my aggravation grew. OK bub, I told myself. Sense of humor. Patience. This is Africa. This is funny.

After more than a half-hour, I finally loaded the contact page at Toni Togo’s Web site. The number listed there differed by one digit from the number on the Toni Togo sticker on my Suzuki. Oh for Pete’s sake, I thought, there’s a typo on the bumper sticker!

I tried the new number and, incredibly enough, reached Michel on his cell phone. The connection was horrible. We could barely hear each other. Michel sounded distracted and unhelpful. Send me an email, he said brusquely. Now I was concerned about timing. If he didn’t check email until Monday, it would mean a delay in shipment and days of waiting.

Michel was insistent: Send me an email. Will you check it today? I asked. Yes, yes, he said, anxious to get off the phone. I sent him an email and hustled back to the Catholic Mission. It was nearly 3 p.m., and time to pick up our Gabon visas. Geoff and Migo were in the parking lot.

“Well that sucked,” I told them. “Before I went off, I said to myself, ‘There’s a call center right across the street. This will be easy.’ Bah! There was a freaking typo in the phone number on that Toni Togo bumper sticker! Finally I reached that Michel dude, and we couldn’t hear each other and he sounded busy anyhow. I sent him an email and will have to hope for the best.”

Once again I regarded the condition of my rear tire. The knobbies had grown distressingly thin. It would barely last until Brazzaville.

Geoff shook his head. He had problems of his own. He had tried to change his chain and sprockets, but discovered he needed a different fastening plate for his front sprocket. Without it, the replacement parts he’d lugged along for thousands of miles were useless.

We left our various issues in mid-air and rode, Migo carefully on account of the nail in his rear tire, back to the Gabon consulate, where, remarkably, our visas were ready as promised.

***
IMG_2942There’s a beat and a rhythm in Yaoundé and all throughout urban Africa. It’s intoxicating. It’s especially pronounced at night. It’s noisy and colorful and completely alien to the Western experience. Music pounds from cheap Chinese speakers; much of Africa has an appetite for music played at insanely loud volumes.

Kerosene lanterns or wood fires provide illumination. People jostle and holler and laugh and gossip, attired in colorful garb. The urban evening air is full of the aroma of fish and chicken and beef and innards roasting on streetside grills, or peanuts being cooked in an old hubcap, blended with exhaust fumes. Amid the carnival-like nocturnal revelry, the sight of a white person in a city like Yaoundé often elicits hoots and laughter from the locals, and giggles from the girls, all in good fun.

Cars and trucks and little motos honk and weave among pedestrians, who stride confidently around gaping holes in the pavement. Walking about urban Africa is a skill, perhaps a second sense that one acquires in youth. There are always holes in the pavement. For the Western visitor, it’s like playing high-stakes hopscotch. One misstep or moment’s inattention can result in a busted kneecap or snapped ankle. Migo, luckily, suffered only a sore ankle and a bruised shin.

It was night. Migo and I were walking through Lome, Togo, en route to a street vendor that sold what I called expired mayonnaise salad. Migo was a step ahead of me, and I watched in horror as his right leg suddenly plunged straight down. In a moment, he was collapsed up to his waist in an open manhole in the sidewalk, and now he groaned in pain.

Someone had evidently stolen the manhole’s metal cover. Migo’s lanky body was badly contorted, his left leg splayed across the sidewalk. It looked bad. Ironically, earlier that day, we had visited a voodoo market, and Migo had bought a fetish charm meant to ensure safe travels. The seller had provided elaborate instructions to “activate” the charm, but Migo had not yet done so.

I squatted with him, thinking the worst – broken tibia, smashed kneecap, and Geoff, our medic, out of town – and said, “Dammit, Migo! Why didn’t you activate that voodoo charm before we went out tonight?!”

He laughed. His leg was sore, but he was all right. I helped to hoist him from the hole.

Now in Yaoundé, we three walked at night around more gaping holes. “Hole!” we would occasionally announce to one another. The main drag from the Catholic mission in Yaoundé had an ample selection of bars and restaurants. Beer, thankfully, is one item that is cheaply priced. A large bottle can be had for a little more than $1 USD. In even the smallest towns, you can usually find a shack in which a handful of men sit drinking generous 1.5 liter bottles of strong beer.

TimesSquaresThe electric-light name of one place caught our attention. It was called Times Squares, with a humorous pluralization of the latter word. We sat for a beer, and Geoff, appropriately given the name of the establishment, bought a cheap Chinese watch from a peripatetic salesman. It lasted a couple of weeks.

I relished the evenings in Yaoundé. Despite its French design, Yaoundé struck me at quintessentially African. Of all the cities I visited, I felt the pulse of Africa perhaps most acutely in Yaoundé. I took time to study the faces of the people and the urban surroundings. It was exotic and electric.

Too, I relished sitting around with my friends at night, swapping adventure riding tales and laughing and bitching and brainstorming. We made a good trio. The dynamic was strong. We had had unforgettable adventures. We had the appetite for more. Remember this, I told myself. It won’t last forever.

No doubt about it, riding Africa was not easy. The challenges were manifold; every day was a misadventure. Before leaving, I had met a Horizons Unlimited member who goes by the name Pete from Berkeley; he cleverly called riding Africa “senior adventure motorcycling.”

The rewards, though, came in equal measure. As we sipped our beers at Times Squares, I told my friends, “You know, I think Africa has to be it – the toughest adventure motorcycling destination in the world. Especially the west side.”

“I’d say,” Geoff said. “Between the roads and the traffic and all the admin bullshit we have to do, yeah. The east side, it’s easier – lot more tourists and decent paved roads.”

“Months ago,” I said, “I was debating whether to ride Africa, or Russia and Mongolia and the ‘Stans, then into the Himalayas. The scenery in Asia might have been better, but Africa – man. This has to be it. The ultimate adventure ride.”

We tended to stay in cheap motels. Rooms were typically shabby and amenities few. We took cold showers and warm beer. We developed a taste for inexpensive street food. No health and safety regulations govern the preparation of street food. You didn’t want to look too closely at the dirty pots and pans. You didn’t want to wonder how long a piece of meat had spent broiling in the afternoon heat.

You looked the other way, and enjoyed the food and the African experience. Now Migo wondered aloud whether we would have done anything differently if traveling on unlimited budgets.

“I don’t think so,” Migo said. “This is the way to travel, on a local level. Some of the crazy places we’ve stayed and where we’ve eaten, I wouldn’t change that for the world. Hanging with the locals is a much richer experience than staying in a five-star hotel, if there even was one.”

IMG_2039In Yaoundé, Geoff professed a change of heart. When we started out in Morocco three months ago, the inconveniences and aggravations of riding Africa got under his skin. I found it odd, because he had traveled through or worked in Sierra Leone and Kenya and India and Iraq and Bolivia, among other countries. He, perhaps better than most, should know what to expect. Yet frequently he bitched.

“Well, it’s all part of the challenge – all good fun,” I told him back then. “All part of adventure riding. My buddy Joe in San Francisco would often say the most important piece of gear you can bring is a sense of humor. If everything was easy and all the roads were good, it would be like riding the U.S. or Europe, and what fun is that?

“Another thing Joe would say,” I added, “is that greatest thing he learned on his South America ride was sense of empathy. He wasn’t especially empathetic before, but he came to appreciate the people and life in the Third World. Y’know, Joe was an ex-Marine – sort of a military mindset like yours.”

I had hoped that Geoff would experience a similar transformation. And indeed, during his Christmas hiatus to the U.K., Geoff had time to reflect on our African adventures. His view had changed.

“It took me a while to get over my military perspective,” he said. “When I started out, it was just the raw challenge of it – just getting from A to B. Thinking like a soldier. Now I’ve learned to chill out and let the trip unfold. I’ve told myself I need to give Africans a chance and be open-minded.”

Or at least laugh along with the Africans. There was plenty of opportunity to do that. From Times Squares, we made our way to a restaurant called Le Globus. With a third-story view of a busy and colorful roundabout, the eatery was recommended in the Lonely Planet guide as offering Cameroonian dishes “and a few trusty standards, like chicken with rice.”

I ordered the chicken with rice.

“Le riz c’est fini,” our portly waitress told me. The rice is finished.

“What do you mean, the rice is finished?” I tried to ask in bad French. “You’re a restaurant, how can you run out of rice?”

But she was insistent. There was no rice. I ordered chicken with peas but no rice, and laughed in exasperation. Geoff and Migo shook their heads and chuckled, too. How typically African! But it nagged at me. I love rice. I was hungry. I had been looking forward to a large, steaming carbohydrate plate. I decided to have some fun with the staff, and made my way from our outdoor patio seats into the restaurant.

Throughout Africa, I would amuse myself by speaking in English to people who couldn’t understand what I was saying. I had great fun telling someone with a wry smile and upbeat demeanor, “You know, this chicken really sucked. Did it die of starvation?” I would laugh and my new friend would laugh, oblivious to what I had said.

At Le Globus, I launched into English with a mischievous manner. “You’re a restaurant. It’s 8 p.m. on a Saturday night,” I told two girls. “How can you run out of a staple item like rice? If you’re out, there’s a market right down the street – go buy some! For Pete’s sake, I was really looking forward to a nice plate of rice.”

IMG_2866A man was standing nearby. He was the manager, it turned out, and he spoke good English. He understood what I had said.

“Oh, we have rice,” he said. “But it’s not cooked. What you like us to cook it? It’s going to take 10 or 15 minutes.”

I laughed out loud. Ten or 15 minutes! If that were true, it would be one of the fastest meals prepared in Africa, where a simple cup of coffee could take 30 minutes, an omelette well over an hour. Sure enough, in about 15 minutes I had a generous plate of chicken and rice. On the table was a jar of hot pimante sauce.

I had found terrific homemade sauces throughout Africa – pimante, as the locals called them. They consisted of oil and ground chili peppers and were not commercially packaged, but rather made locally, I think by evil witchdoctors. As a hot-sauce lover, I was in my element. Geoff, with his delicate British palate, would say, “I don’t know how you can eat that stuff. Bah!”

The pimante at Le Globus was by far the hottest hot sauce I would encounter – maybe just a few degrees short of the San Francisco-made Dave’s Insanity Sauce on the Scoville scale of pepper piquancy, for you hot sauce connoisseurs. I liberally and masochistically anointed my meal with the fiendish oil.

My mouth was aflame, my tongue numb, and my eyes damp with tears. I rocked back theatrically in my chair and groaned in delicious pain before taking another forkful. The waitress, chuckling at the spectacle, stopped by to inquire whether I was all right, probably thinking I’d gotten my comeuppance for being a pain in the ass.

“C’est bonne,” I managed to choke, dabbing the tears from my eyes. “Tres bonne! Tres chaud! Tres fort! Delicieux!”

***

IMG_2944Migo extracted the nail from the rear tire of his KTM with a pair of pliers. The air escaped in a whoosh. Down the street, we had spotted a tire-changing guy. It was Saturday morning. Migo carried his tire a few hundred yards down the street from the Catholic mission and the tire-changing guy got to work.

The tire-changing guy wore sandals. Using only his feet, he broke the bead on Migo’s TKC 80 in minutes. Any of us three would have labored over the job, resorting perhaps to the sidestand on a motorbike to break the bead. The man worked with frightening efficiency.

He extracted the tube, patched it, and reinstalled tube and tire on rim, wielding a pair of crude tire irons with the skill of a sushi chef. The work took perhaps 15 minutes. Migo watched in amazement.

“It’s absolutely incredible!” Migo remarked. “He breaks the bead with his feet, and then it’s like, voom voom voom. It’s done. Just amazing! That would have taken me at least an hour.”

As we stood around with the tire-changing guy, a man on a Yamaha Tenere pulled up. His large motorbike, like mine, uses a 17-inch rear tire. A used rear tire was slung over his pillion. He was here for a tire change. His replacement didn’t have a lot of tread left, but would be preferable to the completely bare rear tire he was now running.

Still grappling with the dilemma of how to procure a rear tire, I asked the guy if he knew anyone in town who had for sale a new 17-inch tire – pneu, in the French.

“Oui, oui!” he replied. “Beaucoup nouveau! Beaucoup pneus!”

Like so many Africans, Louis was delighted to help. He was in his early 30s and, once he learned that was an American, told me he worked at the American embassy. I was dubious. Clever men throughout Africa and elsewhere will often fix on some detail you offer and claim a connection as a means of ingratiating themselves with you, ultimately with the idea of pocketing a little payout.

Oh, my cousin lives in San Francisco! Oh, I ride a motorcycle around my country just like you!

Still, Louis was decently attired and rode an expensive motorcycle. He spoke no English, which I thought odd for working at the American embassy, but decided to take him up on his offer to lead me to a shop that sells new 17-inch rear tires.

“Only a new tire,” I emphasized in bad French. “New – not an old tire like you have there. It needs to last 10,000 kilometers.” No probleme! Louis exclaimed.

I retrieved my bike from the Catholic mission and followed Louis and a passenger, the maintenance man at the mission, on a three-mile ride to an industrial neighborhood. We stopped in front of the shop of another tire-changing guy. A few old, badly used tires for large-cylinder motorcycles lay about the front yard. Louis spoke to the owner in French, and the man retreated into his shop.

IMG_2400I kindled a small flame of hope.

The man returned and presented me with a once-knobby motocross tire that appeared to date to the Nixon administration. Its rubber was dangerously cracked, its tread as bare as a dinner plate. “No, a new tire,” I said. The owner huffed and looked at me as if I was in idiot.

No probleme! Louis exclaimed. I know another place! I pursed my lips and rolled my eyes. Sure you do, pal.

Off we went. Ridiculously dense traffic was in a virtual deadlock. We spent 20 minutes inching between trucks and cars and among little motos, complicated by steep ascents up Yaoundé’s hills, until hitting stretches in which the streets were broad enough to enable us to weave through traffic in second gear. Louis raced ahead, showing off his urban riding skills, disregarding my request that he take it easy.

Then traffic would densify again, and we’d be at a standstill. I got stuck behind a bus that blew the blackest, most noxious diesel exhaust, ever. I gagged inside my helmet, and desperately negotiated to the side of the truck, where a lady street vendor shoved a bucketful of hard-boiled eggs in my face and strongly suggested that I purchase one.

How in God’s name, I thought, do I get myself into these situations? I had no choice but to laugh.

Unsurprisingly, the second tire guy didn’t have new tires, and nor did a third to whom Louis led me on our snipe hunt. He seemed nonplussed by our failure. I know where to go! he insisted. We headed towards a neighborhood full of repair and parts shops for the little Chinese motos so prevalent here.

Then Louis got a flat tire. Riding aggressively, he had gotten ahead of me by a block or two. He was pulling away gingerly as I rolled up, his flat rear comically deflated, presumably back to one of the tire-changing guys we had visited.

The mission’s maintenance man, who called himself Paulie, stood by the side of the road. He had disembarked from Louis’s motorbike and now hopped on the back of mine. We found the moto shop neighborhood, parked, and were immediately surrounded by a crowd of men.

With Paulie’s help on the French, I explained I wanted a new 17-inch rear tire. Men went scurrying off, inquiring among the many moto dealers for a new tire. If one of them located a tire, they knew a tip from the American motorcyclist would probably be forthcoming. I took a seat, chatted with the crowd, and let nature take its course.

Twenty minutes later, a man appeared with a new 17-inch rear tire. My spirits soared, and then sank as I examined the tire -- a cheap, Chinese brand called King’s Tire. Its diameter was indeed 17 inches, but it was far too narrow for the Suzuki’s rim. Its owner dismissed my concern. It will fill the rim once you inflate it, he told me.

Yeah bub, well maybe you’d run a cheap, narrow Chinese tire at 70 mph down a highway, but I won’t. Thanks anyhow.

IMG_2946Three hours after I set off on the tire hunt with Louis, I returned to the Catholic mission, dispirited. Geoff and Migo were wrenching on their motorbikes in the mission parking lot. “Three hours wasted, running around with this guy looking for a tire,” I told them. “The usual story – he knew guys with new tires. Yeah, right. Old, worn out motocross tires was all I found. Probably left behind by some adventure rider 10 years ago.”

Surely, I told myself, I would have better fortune with my next chore, to check in with Michel of Toni Togo on shipping at tire to the Congo. I pumped up my optimism and headed to an Internet café, but was not surprised to discover that Michel had not written back.

I sent Michel another email and called him again. Again, I could barely hear him. He sounded even more distracted than on our first call, and ended the call abruptly. I never heard from him again.

I scoured the Web for phone numbers of motorcycle dealers in South Africa. I reached on the phone a man at the Suzuki shop in Cape Town. He had a tire in stock, but I couldn’t pay with a credit card. He demanded a bank transfer, which I knew would be an ordeal unto itself. His South African accent was thick and barely intelligible. He kept interrupting me. The phone connection was awful.

I managed to get the dealer’s bank account number I would need for a bank transfer, and left it as a last resort. There had to be a better way. I tried calling other South African shops. No one answered the phone. One recording told me the shop closed at 3 p.m. It was 3:15 p.m.

Ah, screw it, I told myself. Shops were closing for day, and I was starving. I would start fresh on Monday morning. Up the street was a large, modern supermarket. They sold delicious egg sandwiches for a little more than $1 USD. I ate one in the parking lot, and found Geoff and Migo back at the mission.

“Well boys, my sense of optimism is not being rewarded,” I said. “I feel like Charlie Brown – you know the cartoon, where Lucy holds the football and then yanks it away right before Charlie Brown kicks it? That’s what it’s like trying to find a new tire in Africa.”

“That’s why I’m a pessimist,” Geoff said. “That way, I’m never disappointed.”

***

IMG_2943My room at the Catholic mission was quaintly monastic. I liked it. It cost $7 USD per night. It had a small, clean bed, a desk, a large bathroom, and a lamp fastened above the bed for reading, a small pleasure for which I was thankful. The mission grounds were pleasant and peaceful, with a large and handsomely landscaped backyard. Several nuns and priests and others lived here.

I felt at home in this atmosphere of religion and piety. It brought back fond memories. I had worked for four years in late high school and early college as the caretaker at the Catholic church in my hometown. I didn’t mind being awakened before dawn each morning by a choir of singing penitents, who assembled in the improvisational church beneath our second-floor rooms.

But Geoff did. He had tossed and turned this Sunday morning for more than an hour as the choir sang hymns in French, and now begrudgingly presented himself for breakfast, looking as if he had just played a rugby game. His demeanor in the morning could be inexplicably angry; Migo and I had chuckled over it time and again. As an agnostic, he found little charm in the morning church services.

I had been enjoying the morning, writing in my paper journal and partaking in the simple breakfast of bread and butter and jam and coffee that was laid out each day at 7 a.m. Geoff interrupted that, and then the construction started. It did at 8 a.m. every morning. Men were renovating a building. They used an old cement mixer, which rattled horrifically. The morning’s peace and quiet was shattered.

I retreated to my room to shave, but the water was off. It was every morning at the mission. I decided to make my way downtown and hunt for a 12-volt adapter to power my GPS. My adapter had failed back in Burkina Faso, evidently with an internal short. I didn’t really need a GPS as Migo had taken charge of navigation, but it did provide some entertainment. I missed it.

“Hey, before you take off, can I borrow that chain breaker you’ve got?” Geoff asked. Among his chores today was a second crack at his chain and sprocket problem. I handed it over to him reluctantly, with an uncanny sense that it would not be returned intact.

Hours upon hours of hunting for a 12-volt adapter in Ghana and Togo and Nigeria had proven fruitless. Entering Yaoundé, though, I had spied a number of electronics stores and street vendors selling gear for cell phones. It looked promising. I hiked 20 minutes downtown to a grid of streets packed with stores, only to find each one closed until Monday.

IMG_2960But the street vendors did not take Sunday off. Hundreds of them busily arrayed electronics gear and shoes and belts and books on sidewalk tables. I had brought my broken adapter with me, and presented it to dozens of electronics vendors. “J’cherche le meme,” I would say. I am searching for the same. They studied it curiously, and shook their heads no.

Almost every vendor had the corresponding, male part for a variety of cell phones. But none had the female part that one could plug, for instance, into a car’s cigarette lighter, or wire up to the battery on an adventure motorbike. These units can be found at any Wal-Mart or auto parts store in the Western world for $15 or so. In Africa, they seemed non-existent.

One man insisted he could have one for me tomorrow. Fine, I said, I’m at the Catholic mission. Bring it up there and I’ll pay you. He never showed up.

An impressive number of street vendors had books for sale. I browsed the selections. Nearly all of the books were in French, but I would occasionally spot an English-language textbook. A vendor eagerly approached me. I told him I was interested in English-language books. He pursed his lips, held up a finger, told me to wait, and went sprinting up the street.

When he didn’t return, I kept wandering. He found me a block or two away. He was out of breath from running, and with a winning smile held out for my perusal a tattered old Harlequin romance. “Anglais!” he declared.

On the cover, a scantily clad man and woman were portrayed in breathless embrace. I laughed and shook my head and told him thanks, but no. “Pour le poubelle,” I told him. For the trash.

I was hungry. I had seen just one restaurant open, and made my way there. It was a cafeteria style, but no food was arrayed, except for a lone piece of yesterday’s pie. I asked for a menu. There was no menu. There were no patrons, only two employees sitting idly about. I waved them off and headed back towards the Catholic mission. I could have another one of those tasty egg sandwiches from the supermarket across the street.

There were no egg sandwiches. The supermarket’s deli was closed for Sunday. Next door, though, was a restaurant at which I had an overpriced $8 hamburger with fries before returning to the mission, to find that Geoff had broken my chain breaker.

“I don’t know how it happened, mate,” he said apologetically. “I was just turning it and the pin snapped.”

A chain breaker is a critical tool for an adventure ride. The motorbike’s chain endures a great deal of stress and can be susceptible to failure. I had packed replacement master links and the chain breaker tool as a contingency. Geoff had neglected to bring a chain breaker, and had borrowed mine several times before prevailing on Migo to order one from Germany as part of a tire shipment via DHL.

The chain breaker Migo received, mystifyingly, seemed only designed to break the chain – not put it back together. We had spent hours riddling over the thing, turning it over every which way like a Rubik’s Cube. We were baffled. So I had the only chain breaker among us three, and now it was busted.

“I knew it – I knew it, I knew it, I knew you were going to break that thing!” I told Geoff. I wasn’t really mad at him, though I suspected his aggressive wrenching style had probably made him a chain breaker-breaker. My dismay over the loss of that tool could be fixed only by another tool -- that critical sense of humor.

I did owe Geoff one. On the his trip to the U.K., he had per my request bought me “The Poisonwood Bible,” a marvelous novel by Barbara Kingsolver about missionary family in what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo, in the late 1950s.

A good book is precious on a long adventure ride through the Third World. Absent TV or radio, a book spares you interminable boredom. But English-language books are nearly impossible to find in French-speaking western and central Africa, and even in the English-speaking nations of Ghana and Nigeria and sections of Cameroon.

By sheer luck, I had happened across a selection of used English-language paperbacks amid a hodgepodge of goods at a gas station in Calabar, Nigeria. Most were trash; the best of the sorry lot appeared to an 848-page American western called be “Power in the Blood” by an Australian-born novelist, Greg Mathews. The book turned out to be surprisingly good. I gave it to Migo once I was done; now he was as immersed in it as I had been.

IMG_2966Forgetting my busted chain breaker, I lay down in mid-afternoon with The Poisonwood Bible, turned on the lamp above my bed, and read until falling into nap. I awoke an hour later with a bright idea.

Back in Bolivia in 2005, Joe Ortega found ourselves in a remote city called Oruro on a Sunday in January. An NFL playoff game was to be played that evening. Improbably, we found a bar with a TV that could broadcast the game, and had ourselves a ball watching the Steelers down the Patriots, 20-17.

Now it was another Sunday in January. An NFL playoff game between the Dolphins and Ravens would begin at 7 p.m. Yaoundé time. There’s a Hilton hotel downtown, I thought to myself. A five-star joint like the Hilton might have satellite reception. As Geoff and Migo didn’t care about American football, I made my way alone to the Hilton with high hopes of watching the game.

Le Panoramique bar was atop the Hilton, on the 11th floor. The view of the twinkling lights of Yaoundé would have been panoramic, but a harmattan-like glaze over the windows obscured the view. I stepped inside and was greeted by a friendly girl bartender and spotted a neon sign for a beer called Castle Milk Stout.

Ha! I thought. That’s the same beer we drank on the night we got stuck by rain back in little Bodom, Ghana! I hadn’t seen Castle Milk Stout advertised since. My memories of that evening in Bodom were fond. I thought it would be ironically appropriate to have a Castle Milk Stout at the five-star Hilton, juxtaposed against impoverished Bodom.

I ordered one, and the girl told me with profuse apology they no longer carried Castle Milk Stout. I ordered a Primus for the five-star price of $7 USD and inquired about satellite TV. The girl shrugged her shoulders. I sweet-talked my way into possession of the remote, and flipped through 30 or so channels.

Soccer. Soap operas. The news. No American football broadcast. The girl set in front of me one of my favorite snacks, a bowl of mixed olives.

Be thankful for small pleasures. I ate five bowls of olives. They were delicious.

***

IMG_2390We pulled up to the DRC consulate at 11 a.m. on Monday to check on our visa applications. They had been denied. With a wordless scowl, a woman behind a glass window returned our passports, and 40,000 of the 45,000 CFA we had paid for the privilege of applying. My Obama sticker was gone.

“Why?” I asked. “Do you know why they were rejected?” She shrugged, not bothering to look up.

From a visa perspective, Africa was exponentially more problematic than Latin America. There, only one of the 14 countries through which I had ridden, Brazil, required a visa. I applied at the Brazilian consulate in Buenos Aires and, with no fuss, had the visa stamp in my passport the next day.

In Africa, 10 of the 18 nations through which we traveled required visas. Only several were issued on demand at the border. In most cases, we would have to find the consulate, submit an application, and wait for a day or two. And most African nations also required a carnet de passage for our motorbikes. It’s effectively a bond document that discourages a motorist from selling his or her vehicle in a country.

I had put down a deposit of $6700 USD with the Canadian Automobile Association for my carnet. Most of that would be returned once my motorbike was back in the U.S. No country in Latin America requires a carnet. It was another bit of administrative toil that helped make Africa, well, Africa.

We left the DRC visa issue hanging, and would try again in the Congo. And once in DRC, we would have to confront the wild card – the elusive visa for Angola.

Visas for Angola are notoriously difficult to secure. The best we could hope for would be a “transit visa,” allowing just five days to ride nearly 1400 miles of bad Angolan roads. I had read with dismay about a pair of U.K. riders named Dan and Linz who, riding south towards Cape Town in 2007, were denied Angola visas. After weeks of attempts and rejection, they gave up and shipped their motorbikes back to England. (The only alternative route is through DRC, from Kinshasa to Lubumbashi, on a road so awful it takes a 4x4 more than a month to traverse 1,200 miles).

To complicate matters, Angola was said to demand a “letter of invitation” from a person or business in Angola. Months before I left, I had written to tour operators and hotels, saying that friends and I would be riding from Morocco to Cape Town and wished to pass through scenic Angola.

IMG_2844From dozens of emails, I received only one reply, from an outfit called Angola Adventure Safaris. From there, it took four months – four months! – of emailing my contact to actually secure the letter, which finally arrived via email in late November. It was inexplicable.

Now in Yaoundé, Migo took a close look at our letter of invitation on his laptop, and spotted a typo in one of our passport numbers. That’s exactly the sort of thing an uncooperative consulate or border official could seize on as a justification for denial. I’d had a similar experience in Nigeria, hassled twice by immigration officials because a border crossing guard had misprinted January 9, 2008 – not 2009 – as the expiration for my two-week Nigerian visa.

But we had been learning from the Africans. Things could be fixed. A software programmer, Migo had a picture-editing program on his computer. With some finesse, he corrected the passport number, not a simple task when dealing with a digital image, as our letter of invitation was.

Geoff, too, was finding that things could be fixed. He’d located an old metal worker in Yaoundé who crafted from scratch a new fastening plate that he needed to secure his front sprocket. And, he announced to me with great satisfaction, the guy had fashioned a replacement pin for my broken chain breaker.

“Lookit this,” he said, returning the tool to me. “It’s like good as new! This guy was amazing. He takes one look at it and says, ‘No problem.’ I tell ya, we can learn a few things from the Africans. The ingenuity is incredible.”

I had good news myself that Monday afternoon. After another hours-long hunt on the Internet and telephone for a South Africa moto dealer that could ship me a new tire, I connected with a capable parts manager named Shafiek Isaacs at BMW Motorrad in Cape Town. Yes, he had a new rear TKC 80 in stock. Yes, he could ship it to Brazzaville. Yes, I could pay with a credit card.

My relief was profound. The cost would be high – nearly $750, nearly $600 of that for DHL shipping to Brazzaville, Congo. Atop that, I knew I would have to pay a customs import fee. It was, though, less expensive than the $1062 shipping charge from the U.S.

Forsaking the shipment from the U.S., though, meant that I would not receive the new chain and sprockets that Tappy Tapintyre was prepared to ship. The chain and sprockets I had installed back in the U.S. would need to last some 14,000 miles through Africa. And it meant that I would have to do without several other goodies that Tappy had in his package – an LED key chain flashlight and thick, quality athletic socks, neither of which I had been able find in Africa.

IMG_4632Most disappointingly, I would not receive from Tappy the piece de resistance – an empty McDonald’s bag, empty Quarter Pounder with Cheese and Big Mac wrappers, and empty French fries and ketchup packages. I had been riding a long, lonely road in Ghana when the devilish idea occurred to me. I told Migo about it one night over beers in Nigeria.

“So we’ll have all these McDonald’s bags and wrappers,” I told Migo, suppressing my hilarity. “In some plausibly large city down in Congo or somewhere, you and I can set them out on a table at some hotel when Geoff is off doing something. He comes back and sees all that McDonald’s stuff and will say, ‘Omigod, McDonald’s! Where did you guys find that?!’”

Migo broke into laughter. I went on, “And we say, ‘Oh, just down the street …take a right, down a block, it’s on the corner.’ He’ll be humping all over, asking people, ‘Where’s the McDonald’s?’” We laughed and laughed.

There are no McDonald’s in Western or central Africa, nor other Western fast food outlets. After months on the road and countless meals of chicken and rice, mutton and peas, bread and bananas, one can develop a powerful craving for Western-style fast food.

Geoff had been bitten by the fast-food bug. Only a week earlier, he had taken the time to check the McDonald’s Web site for restaurants in Africa. The site listed a McDonald’s in the capital of Namibia, Windhoek. A visit there was high on Geoff’s agenda. But when we arrived in Windhoek nearly two months later, we found that the McDonald’s had closed.

Over beers in Windhoek, I told Geoff about my would-have-been practical joke. “Ohhhhhhhhh, bastard!” he guffawed. “Oh, you would have gotten me but good!”

We left Yaoundé the next day, heading towards Gabon. The morning was overcast, but my mood was bright. It was the first time the three of us had ridden together since Ghana, nearly a month earlier. The sight of my two friends on their loaded adventure bikes, ahead of me, was beautiful and arresting.

On motorbikes, adventure riding through Africa! After six long admin days, the journey began anew. Suddenly, all the trials and tribulations of the journey seemed inconsequential. The world was right once more.

We fueled up before leaving Yaoundé. The station attendant overfilled my tank, spilling a little petrol. My tank was as full as it could get.

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Jungle Trail Christmas

Limbe, Cameroon * January 1, 2009

JungleTrailChristmasFor Christmas, Migo and I rode one of the most infamous pistes in all of Africa. Piste is a French word that means trail, or dirt road, or sandy track -- any route absent pavement. It is so central to the adventure motorcycling lexicon for Africa that riders of all nationalities use the word as if it was of their own language.

In this case, the piste was a grotesque scar across the jungle floor that led towards the vaulting mountains of east-central Cameroon and the largish towns of Mamfe and Bamenda. A piste in Cameroon is not in itself remarkable – less than 10 percent of the nation’s roads are paved.

What made this particular piste infamous was that it was the main road from Nigeria into Cameroon – a single-track jungle trail passable only by trucks and 4x4s and motorbikes, and virtually useless in the rainy season.

My Michelin map designated much of it as a “major roadway,” yet it was one of the worst roads I had ever ridden. I had seen photos of it on the Web, and knew what to expect. Trucks had gouged deep ruts through mud, leaving walls as tall as 10 feet on the right and left. The protective bark busters on my Suzuki’s handlebars banged against dense rain forest foliage hanging over this primitive track.

I negotiated around rocks and timber embedded into the trail. Then the piste would fork, with two alternative ruts for the next 100 or 200 yards. I would stop and analyze which track would be easiest. I was enveloped in glorious green and deafening silence, save for the birds and insects clucking and chirruping in the rain forest. Bright sunlight pierced the jungle canopy and dappled splotches of gold on the red-mud earth.

It was Christmas Eve day. Back in the United States, I knew, a frenzy of last-minute shopping and holiday preparation was under way. I thought of the bright store shelves full of the ridiculous gifts that one can find only at Christmas – the oversized golf balls full of bad cologne and the electric cheese grater/potato peeler combos and scented bath beads in the shape of butterflies.

MigoChristmasI didn’t miss it at all. I would spend Christmas traversing the jungle in a country so poor that the condition of its main road to Nigeria would be considered a shameful abomination in the Western world. The contrast between the privation here and the conspicuous holiday consumption of the West was mind-boggling.

Ahead was a small village. People lived in mud-brick houses and congregated on wooden benches and stood idly about. Few signs of Christmas were visible here and elsewhere in eastern Cameroon. Once in a while, you might spot some silver garland or a little fake Christmas tree, but you would see no twinkling lights or garish displays of Santa Claus with his reindeer and a sleigh full of gifts.

Villagers watched and waved as I rode through, standing tall on the motorbike’s pegs choosing lines between deep rainwater gullies. A woman in the middle of the road hollered and emphatically raised her hands for me to stop, and I did. Her smile was as wide as a palm frond. Her eyes twinkled like a Christmas tree.

“Happy Christmas!” she chortled. She was about 30 years old, and her cheeks were lightly and decoratively scarred from an adolescent ritual. She carried a blue plastic bucket on her head.

“Happy Christmas!” I answered.

“The road is not fine!” She announced this fact cheerfully, with an oxymoronic bon vivance that left me at a loss for words.

Before I could manage a reply, she summarily bid me adieu: “Happy New Year!”


***

IMG_2772Mixed feelings stewed inside my helmet. The road was not fine for the woman and her village, nor the dozen-plus other tiny settlements through which Migo and I motored on our way to Mamfe, and then to Bamenda. This piste was virtually impassable in the rainy season, when storms would turn it into a 100-mile mud swamp that could swallow a Mercedes truck like quicksand.

Deliveries of medicine and canned goods and bottled water and other commodities could be delayed for weeks. The awful condition of this piste impacted the quality of life in these small communities. Villages elsewhere in Cameroon and Africa linked by better roads enjoyed regular traffic and the benefits that it bestowed on their people and economies.

But from an adventure motorcycling perspective, the piste was more than fine. It was spectacular. For more than three weeks, through Ghana and Togo and Benin and Nigeria, we had been on pavement. We were dreadfully tired of paved roads. Riding a paved road is not adventure riding. And the thick and insane traffic of Nigeria’s highways had left us stressed and unsettled.

We were eager for the adventure that a challenging piste would offer. This piste into Cameroon was as challenging as it was remote. We saw but a handful of vehicles on our 100-mile run from the Nigerian border to Batibo, at which began a 20-mile stretch of pavement to Bamenda. Some sections were so narrow that we could only paddle along in first gear.

Long patches of residual and slick mud obliged a careful passage to avoid a slip and a spill. One truck had gotten itself badly stuck in a mud patch, and men were shoveling dirt and rocks and foliage beneath its tires to give them purchase. We were in the thick of the jungle, and Migo in particular was delighted. He loves jungles, and he stopped more frequently than usual to enjoy the surroundings.

This piste was in far worse condition than those we had ridden in the north. I’d received a heads-up that road conditions would worsen as we entered central Africa from Javvier Carrion, a Horizons Unlimited member from Madrid, Spain, who had ridden Africa in 2007.

“May I remind you that Africa is a laugh and easy UNTIL you get to Cameroon,” Javier wrote me in an email a few weeks earlier. “Then things become quite technical. A lot. Those potholes in West Africa are just an amusing and entertaining feature of the road.”

IMG_2777True it was. My spirits were high. I motored along that Christmas Eve day towards Mamfe and thought of my friend Peter Cullen, the Irish adventure motorcyclist with whom I had ridden in Morocco and Mauritania and Senegal and Mali. Peter had put it well.

“There’s nothing like a piste ride to liven things up,” Peter told me one evening back in Senegal, after we’d run a 60-mile dirt road to reach the French-Colonial city of Saint Louis. “I never feel so alive as after running a good dirt road. It’s invigorating. It focuses everything.”

We needed focus. Migo and I found ourselves in a state of mutual melancholy on our final night in Nigeria, in Ikom, in a relatively attractive town of perhaps 10,000 people about 25 miles from the Cameroon border. One reason was that Geoff and his dominating personality, his guffaw laughter and his ribald cursing and his litany of tales, was back in the U.K. He’d flown there from Lome, Togo, to tend to personal matters and would catch up in a week or so.

We took rooms at a place called Omali Motel and sat for a chicken dinner and beers. A 15-year-old boy named John joined us. John said his favorite subject in school was geography. I showed him the map of Africa in my Lonely Planet guidebook and traced for him our route, from Morocco to Senegal and east to Mali and south to Ghana and east to here, the rural southeastern edge of Nigeria.

I eyeballed the map myself. “Man, lookit this,” I told Migo. “Africa is such a huge continent. But in Cameroon we’ll turn the corner, and it’s all south from there.”

P1010364With the meandering route we had chosen, it appeared as if we had ridden 60 to 65 percent of the mileage we would do to Cape Town. We had been riding Africa for nearly three months. We had passed through 11 African countries. We had covered about 7500 miles. And now it was time to switch Michelin maps, from no. 741 northern and eastern Africa to no. 746, central and southern.

We were at a watershed. That night in Ikom, I felt the first faint inkling of the journey’s end. I said, “Before I started, I wrote an essay about riding Africa called ‘The Bittersweet Addiction.’ One of the bitter parts about it is that it has to end. Even though I sometimes feel like nothing else has ever existed, only this thing, this ride. It becomes a reality unto itself.”

I was totally immersed in the adventure riding groove. I wasn’t at all dispirited or tired or homesick, but I found myself troubled by the fact that I had begun to take things for granted. I had become inured to Africa. Sights that would have captivated my attention three months now barely warranted a second glance. The novelty was slipping away.

I had a bad dream. I dreamed that I had taken a wrong turn in Nigeria and found myself back in the U.S., on an eerily deserted freeway. I didn’t want to be back in the United States! I felt lost and disoriented. I knew how to get by in Africa – what would I possibly do with myself in the U.S.? In my dream, I felt like a stranger in my own strange country.

Yet in time, the ride would come to an end. In several months, I would return to the U.S. The Western world would become relevant again. It wasn’t relevant here in Africa, hardly at all. Occasionally, I would check the entertainingly sensational Drudge Report Web site and see words like “hemorrhage” and “bloodbath” used to describe the financial meltdown of late 2008.

The turmoil seemed distant and inconsequential when I was riding through subsistence farming communities with no electricity or running water. It didn’t matter to the people who lived here. For now, it didn’t matter to me, either.

I knew I had to come to grips with the inevitability of ride’s end, and fully appreciate where I was. “The thing for me is I have to focus,” I told Migo. “I have to remember where I am – Africa! -- and the special thing that I’m doing. It’s easy to forget after three months.”

IMG_2702Migo was at his own three-month impasse. He found himself growing impatient. It had happened to him before, on an extended backpacking journey through Central America. Something inside him switches off after three months, he said. “I just feel like I want to move, to get somewhere,” he said.

He was troubled, too, by his problematic KTM. It had nearly 24.000 miles on it, arguably a bit long in the tooth to be running through Africa. His litany of motorbike problems is long – failed water pump, inoperable rear brake, short-circuited headlight, and more. He had replaced the water pump himself, and in Lome, the Togolese capital, the bike received some much-attention from a shop called Toni-Togo, the only KTM dealer in western or central Africa.

But now the KTM was exhibiting a mysterious tendency to shut off in the morning, while Migo is riding. If that happened while cornering, the bike would probably go down. And in Calabar, he’d made the unwelcome discovery that right fork was leaking oil.

The fluid stained the tire and coated the brake caliper and confounded our plans to run a mountainous 220-mile Cameroonian piste called the Ring Road north from Bamenda, offering what my Rough Guide called “some of the finest scenery in Africa.”

“It’s always something with this bike,” Migo said with exasperation. “I was actually looking into just selling it and going on with a backpack, but it’s not feasible with the carnet restrictions. Maybe I’ll just run the beast into the ground.”

Why not, I said. Despite the leak, the fork was operable. He had adjusted the damping to stiffen his ride. Maybe we could still ride the Ring Road. I’d set off on my Kawasaki KLR into the Yungas jungle of Bolivia in 2005 with a fan fabricated from a paint can lid, and was rewarded with fantastic and unforgettable misadventures. Migo’s reward might be the same.

***

CameroonWe reached Mamfe at 3:15 p.m. on Christmas Eve Day after about 50 miles of piste. We’d gotten a late start, on account of it took the Omali Motel cook about two hours to go shopping for eggs and bread and prepare our breakfast. The border crossing into Cameroon, though relatively straightforward, also took more than an hour.

On the outskirts of Mamfe, we met a young man named Max. He was a moto taxi driver – in fact, the president of the Mamfe moto taxi union. We inquired about pressing on to Bamenda. It was just 75 miles to the east, over a road that Michelin had marked as a solid red and defined as “major roadway.”

But the Michelin map was conspicuously and illogically silent on whether this “major roadway” was paved or piste. One’s assumption is naturally that a “major roadway” is paved. But Max told us that most of it was not.

“The road is very bad,” Max said. “Like the road you have ridden from the border. Towards Bamenda you will find pavement, but to get to Bamenda will take you four hours.” That would mean arriving after dark.

Migo and I looked at each other. “Mamfe?” he said.

“It is Christmas Eve,” I replied.

Perched atop an escarpment, Data Hotel had good rooms with lovely views of the Cross River far below. Migo had told me that in Germany, Christmas gifts are exchanged on Christmas Eve, not Christmas Day. I showered and wrapped up the Christmas presents that I had for him – a set of prized and hard-to-find stickers of Nigeria to fasten up to his panniers.

IMG_2667I had great fun hunting those stickers down in Ikom the afternoon before. I liked Ikom. It had a rural, small-town feel that I found much more agreeable than the monstrous Nigerian cities through which we had passed. I motored through town alone and spotted a handful of moto repair shops along the main road. I parked my big Suzuki and strolled over to a shop.

I was greeted enthusiastically by dozens of moto dudes – an American on a motorcycle, here in Nigeria! I inspected some of the dozens of bikes scattered about the repair lot. None of them had a Nigeria sticker. Across the country, I had spotted just one Nigeria sticker on a vehicle, in Calabar. That told me that stickers were not widely available in Nigeria.

Nevertheless, I inquired. One guy told me he knew a vendor in the Ikom market who sold them. Off we went, him on his little QLink motorbike, me on my DR650. We maneuvered into the open-air market of shacks and stalls and hovels until the density of pedestrians was so great that we dismounted and walked for 10 minutes. Finally, we found the vendor the guy had in mind.

He had no stickers. My guide was undeterred. We stopped at a half-dozen other booths; no one had stickers, and no one knew where they could be found. Ah well, I figured. It was a long shot anyhow. I returned to my Suzuki, gave the guy some change for his efforts, and prepared to take off.

“Wait!” my guide yelled. “One more place!” Another man on a motorbike had arrived, and he insisted he knew where stickers could be found.

Ikom-NigeriaYeah right, pal, I thought. Throughout Africa, I had been misled and misdirected by well intentioned men who had led me on one fruitless snipe hunt after another. I had been burned plenty of times before. I told them thanks, but forget it.

“Come! It’s right up here!” The new guy on a motorbike was addressing me now. He was maybe 20 years old and, for some reason, wore eyeliner. He called himself Patrice. “Let’s go!”

Ah, what the hell, I thought. I didn’t have much else to do. Much to my surprise, less than a quarter-mile away, a man had a sandwich board full of stickers, including a half-dozen different types for Nigeria. Cha-ching! I paid about $2 USD for more than enough Nigeria stickers for Migo, Geoff, and myself.

I stood alone at my bike and admired my score. Inevitably, I was surrounded by a crowd of a few dozen men. We bantered back and forth about motorbikes and Africa and Nigeria and my travels. I was enjoying myself immensely. One cross-looking man forcefully shoved his way into the crowd.

“You!” he told me. “You have to leave. You are creating an obstruction. This is dangerous. You are illegally parked. Move your motorcycle now!”

I regarded the guy. He was in his early 30s and clean-cut and wore a pink Izod polo shirt. I looked around the street. Cars and motorbikes were parked all over. How was I creating an obstruction? He insisted I must leave for safety. I asked him who he was, and when he didn’t reply, I ignored him.

I thought the man was concerned for my safety, a white tourist surrounded by this boisterous Ikom crowd. But his concern was entirely different. Shortly he declared to the crowd:

SantaCastel“You black men, listen! This white man, he is here to take your money! He is poison! He will steal and rob you and turn his back on you black monkeys!”

At this, the crowed hooted and hollered its derision. When it quieted slightly, I said, “Sir – please. That is ridiculous. I am merely a traveler. We are having fun here. If there’s anything poisonous here, it’s you. Come here – look at this.”

I moved around to the back of my motorbike and pointed out the Obama sticker on its top box. The crowd broke into applause, and my antagonist stalked away, muttering about white thieves and black monkeys.

My little adventures procuring Nigeria stickers made my Christmas gift to Migo all the more gratifying. We sat on wooden benches for simple Christmas Eve dinner of rice and spaghetti and mutton and cassava from a street vendor in downtown Mamfe, and then downed a couple of nightcap beers.

I had Migo’s present wrapped in a September 2008 page torn from a calendar in my hotel room. It was fastened up with duct tape.

“Adventure rider gift wrapping,” I smirked.

He opened it and exclaimed, ”Oh ho, wow! Nigeria stickers! I thought we’d be leaving the country without them – where did you ever find these?”

***

IMG_2756We made Bamenda the next afternoon after another 50 miles of jungle piste, and then 20 miles of pavement. It was Christmas day. Migo fastened up an inflatable Santa Claus to the rear of his motorbike. We lodged at a simple place called the Ex-Servicemen’s Guest House and were greeted by a fellow guest.

His name was Vincent and he was 52 years old and a political science professor at a university in Douala. Vincent had been educated at Harvard University, a fact that that he pointed out at least 10 times. He even repaired to his room to grab his a copy of his Harvard diploma to show off.

Vincent was as annoying as he was pompous, but he was at least informed about road and meteorological conditions. On the road from Mamfe to Bamenda, we had seen a few Chinese men operating heavy equipment. They were improving parts of the piste. It was an odd sight, Chinese men in these small jungle villages. The Chinese have a heavy presence in Cameroon and elsewhere in Africa, often executing infrastructure improvement projects in exchange for resource extraction, oil or timber or minerals.

“That section of the road from Batibo to Bamenda, the Chinese paved that a few years ago,” Vincent said. “Now they have a contract to pave the road to Mamfe, and then all the way to the border. Everything you rode to get here will be tarmac.”

As they were when we embarked on the piste, my feelings were mixed. The poor villages through which we had ridden would enjoy newfound prosperity once that 100-mile piste was paved. And another of the planet’s adventure motorcycling destinations would be no more – no more grotesque scar in the jungle floor, just a strip of vanilla pavement.

I asked Vincent about the thick haze that hung in the air between Mamfe and Bamenda. We had climbed into mountains on the way to Bamenda, but the haze obscured what would otherwise have been magnificent scenery. Mount Bamboutos towered at more than 7000 feet somewhere nearby, but it was impossible to tell where, the haze was so thick.

It’s dust, and it’s here for a few months, Vincent said. Don’t expect to see much scenery on your Ring Road ride – the higher you go, the thicker the haze is. Migo’s Christmas present to me, a cardboard hat with silver coating to reflect the hot sun, wouldn’t have much utility beneath these grey skies.

P1010363It was dispiriting. It reminded me of how I had arrived at the Torres del Paine National Park in Chile in early 2005, only to find its magnificent scenery blanketed by smoke from a forest fire. Given the visual obscuration and Migo’s leaky front fork, we decided to split the difference on the Ring Road. We’d run the southern section of the Ring Road piste to Foumban, through what are known as the Grassfields, before heading south towards the coastal city of Limbe.

It was the only disappointment of an otherwise terrific Christmas. Two bridges had been washed on the Ring Road a few years ago, and I had wondered whether we’d be able to ford the on our motorbikes … and if not, whether we could figure a way across the water. We would never know.

We sat on the patio of the Ex-Servicemen’s Guest House and sipped Christmas beers. The melancholy of two evenings earlier, in Nigeria, was long gone. The piste was a panacea for what ailed us.

Migo said, “Christmas is a family day, but if you can’t spend Christmas with family, I can’t think of a better way to spend Christmas than what we did today.”

“Agreed -- cheers,” I said. We toasted our beers. “Good ride.”

***

IMG_2919I sat at the seaside patio of the Miramare Hotel in Limbe on the Gulf of Guinea with a cup of coffee. It was 7:30 a.m. The morning was bright and sunny – or at least it would have been, if not for the cottony haze that hung over Cameroon like a San Francisco fog. I could barely make out in the sizable islands of volcanic rock that protruded from the ocean surface. These islands were only several hundred yards away, but barely discernible.

Just a few miles away was Mount Cameroon. It vaults from the coast to more than 13,400 feet, by far the tallest peak in western and central Africa. The mountain was a key reason why we had ventured to Limbe. Yet I could make out nothing of its peak. Cameroon and much of western and central Africa was swaddled in the same haze I had first encountered around Mamfe.

“It’s called the harmattan,” an American named Owen told me at Miramare Hotel. He had lived in Cameroon for the last five years and married a Cameroonian and now was the father of a little girl. “It’s dust and sand from the Sahara. It’s here from a few months a year and even fertilizes crops. Did you know it’s been detected as far away as Las Vegas? It’s really quite miraculous, when you think about it.”

Owen was in his 50s and bore an unfortunate resemblance to George W. Bush in appearance and demeanor. A native Louisianan, he was a commercial pilot under subcontract with Del Monte to spray pesticides on banana plantations in this section of Cameroon. Owen volunteered that he was well read in quantum physics and other scientific subjects, so I decided to press him, just for the fun of it.

“But Owen,” I said. “I don’t understand. Dust and sand still weigh something. How can billions of grains of sand and dust remain suspended indefinitely in the air, in defiance of gravity?” And, I might have added, in a plain conspiracy to foil the enjoyment of mountain scenery by adventure motorcyclists.

“Well, I guess it’s hanging together like a cloud,” Owen said with a burlesque Southern twang.

Limbe-Cameroon“But how?” I said. “Why doesn’t it fall to the ground?”

Owen screwed his face in a mixture of exasperation and sheepishness. “I don’t know, Mark. Say, are you a football fan?”

The motorcycle journey reminds you of how many things you don’t know. A long ride always does. The ride leaves your mind as exposed as your body is while riding. It tantalizes you with wonders of the world you might otherwise take for granted. It taunts your ignorance and beggars your consideration. I find myself looking at the world as through the eyes of a child.

Why, I had wondered while riding the Yukon and Alaska several years earlier, don’t moose freeze to death in sub-zero temperatures? I had watched in amazement back in Burkina Faso as flocks of birds dive-bombed the road in front of me, and then turned in synchronized unison. Fifty birds, flying as one … how do they do that?

No ornithologist could tell me. No ornithologist could explain it. This particular beauty of nature defied my apprehension, as did so many other natural phenomena – the striated mesas of Utah, the bacteria that survives amid ultrahot volcanic vents on ocean floors, the harmattan haze, and why dogs, alone among all animals, chase motorcycles.

And as a motorcyclist, it interested me that science has yet to conclusively explain what causes the corrugation on dirt roads. I had ridden many of these washboard tracks, with horizontal ridges that punish a vehicle for miles on end, and it seemed to me, what with science’s research into fluid dynamics and crystal formation and so forth, someone would have pinpointed the cause.

LimbeWildlifeCenterThere is no shortage of theories. Researchers have blamed wind, vehicle braking, vehicle acceleration, tire diameter and sand/clay ratios in the soil as culprits, among others. Some claim they are right. Others claim they are wrong. Weeks earlier, I’d mentioned to Geoff that the cause of road corrugation remained unknown. He’d heard another theory, that sound waves cause corrugation.

I spent time talking with Owen about the Limbe Wildlife Center, which shelters orphaned and rescued primates, and about quantum physics and chaos theory, which intrigued him. Like me, he knew just enough about it to be dangerous. He wondered if I had heard about what is called the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, articulated in 1927 by the German physicist Werner Heisenberg.

I had, on account of having worked for a while at the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission. A foundation of quantum physics, Heisenberg’s principle states that you can know the path that an subatomic electron takes, or where it is at any given time, but you cannot know both at once. Uncertainty reigns. I liked it.

The same uncertainty regarding path and position seemed true for adventure motorcyclists, because around 7:30 p.m. on New Year’s Eve, Geoff Shingleton surprised me with a knock on the door to my bungalow at the Miramare Hotel.

***

IMG_2932I had no idea where Geoff was, other than somewhere in Nigeria. He’d returned to Lome a week ago after his jaunt to the U.K., packed up his Yamaha, and took off in pursuit of Migo and I. Now Migo was off on his own, gunning down to the coastal city of Kribi and then north to the Cameroon capital of Yaounde. I elected to remain by myself in Limbe.

I had emailed Geoff details of our route through Nigeria and passage through the Cameroon jungle piste, from the Nigeria border to Bamenda. But it had been days since we had heard from him, owing to the paucity of Internet cafes in Nigeria.

Migo and I figured Geoff was four or five days behind us. But now he stood at my door, attired in his adventure riding gear with a huge holiday grin on his face. We exchanged handshakes and bear hugs and hied ourselves to the Miramare bar to usher in the New Year.

Geoff, it turned out, hadn’t followed our path through the Cameroon rain forest after all. “Nah, I saw those pictures you sent of that road and thought, No way – not riding solo,” he said.

Instead, he found that a boat called the Angel Gabriel sailed twice a week from Calabar to Limbe. It left at 5 a.m. in an attempt to avoid pirates that prowled the Gulf of Guinea, he said. It had docked in Limbe an hour or two earlier, and now here he was, bursting to tell of his many misadventures through Nigeria.

He’d crashed on a busy Nigerian highway, but was unhurt. He suffered a flat tire late in the day outside of a small Nigerian town called Ore, then pinched his tube – twice! -- during repairs. With darkness falling, police approached him and told him he’d better move. If robbers found him, they’d steal his gear and shoot him dead.

The police helped him find a tire repair shop in Ore, and then a hotel, and he spent an enjoyable evening with the officers, drinking beer until the wee hours. “Some of the nicest, most hospitable guys I met on the whole trip,” Geoff said. “We had a hoot.”

Geoff and I left the next morning for Yaounde, where we would find Migo lodged at the city’s Catholic mission and celebrate yet another rider reunion.

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Nigeria

Ikom, Nigeria * December 23, 2008

NigerianBorderScrawled in a shaky hand in the paper journal that I carry in my tankbag:

Lunch break, roadside, west of Benin City – OK, officially the most insane road I have ever ridden! The drivers, so fast, so aggressive, so brutal!

Beneath that I drew a diagram of the four-lane road we had chosen through a southern slice of Nigeria. It is charitably called an expressway and is divided by a weed-infested concrete median. On a four-lane expressway in the Western world, vehicles in the two right lanes would proceed east, while those in the two left lanes motor west.

Not here. Not in Nigeria, not on this throbbing artery of blood-thick traffic and long stretches of destroyed pavement. My diagram depicts traffic flow with four arrows. The journal goes on:

Incredible! To get somewhere faster, drivers cross the median and DRIVE THE WRONG WAY DOWN A HIGH-SPEED ONE-WAY ROAD!

The first time, I thought I was seeing things. Then I thought, Oh wow, that driver really got screwed up, he’s going the wrong way against traffic! But then I saw it again and again, and watched in grim amazement as drivers jockeyed back and forth at a breakneck pace, going both ways on a one-way route, a hundred head-on collisions waiting to happen. My journal continues:

Saw a sign – “If You Can’t Read This, You’re Going Too Fast. Nigerian Federal Road Safety Commission.”

No, the sign didn’t make sense. Nigeria didn’t make sense – not on the highways we rode. Motorized and urban Nigeria was upside down and inside out, twisted and furious and mutant and crazy and brash and bold and filthy and horrifying and exhilarating.

Africa on steroids, Migo called it. And amphetamines, and crack cocaine, and LSD … name your drug. Nigeria was on a permanent bender, intoxicated on its own stinking exhaust.

NigeriaMap2Migo and I took three days to ride the 800-plus miles from Abomey, Benin, to a border crossing at Ilara, Nigeria, north of Lagos, to Calabar, a city of 500,000 in southeastern Nigeria. In Calabar, we found a rundown, overpriced hotel off the main market and wandered into the pulsating night, stepping through dense traffic and around open sewers and over gaping holes in the street, for dinner and beers.

We sat outdoors on wooden benches at a rickety table in a dirt yard. The municipal electricity was off. It often was, in Calabar and elsewhere in Nigeria. Cans of kerosene with open dancing flames furnished illumination. Migo chewed on a kebab of peppered meat from a street vendor. I poked at a bowl of rice and red sauce. We sipped our warm Gulder beers.

“You know,” I said. “Those were the three most stressful days of motorcycling I’ve ever done.”

Migo exhaled deeply. “Phew, me too,” he said. “That was absolutely crazy. In Germany we drive fast, but not like that. Not that crazily. The wrong way on a one-way road! That actually had me a little scared. It’s like there’s no law out here – anything goes. Completely lawless. Every man for himself.”

“Lord of the Flies,” I said.

A woman from a food stand stopped by to see if I would like some bush meat with my rice and red sauce. Bush meat means monkey or crocodile or rodent or any other animal hunted, often illegally, by natives in the bush. I had seen a sign for bush meat in the dirt yard. I told her no.

I thought for a minute. “The Nigerian motorist is like a dog,” I told Migo. “He’s all nice to you when you’re stopped or eating something and he wants some food or petting, but put him behind a wheel and he turns into a crazed animal that hates motorcycles.”

I looked at my friend and smiled and was glad that he was still with me.

***

MigoinLomeIt was close. Damn close. Migo hadn’t seen it. But he had very nearly been rear-ended by a speeding blue and white car earlier in the day. We would see dozens of these late-model blue and white cars – taxis, they were -- on the road from Onitsha to Calabar, the final day of our white-knuckle run across Nigeria.

Migo was ahead of me, as he usually is, on account of he rides more aggressively and has assumed navigational command for the group. He slowed for a vehicle trundling along in the right lane. This section of the road was four lanes. He checked his rear view mirror; a car was pulling up fast behind him on the left.

Once that car was past, Migo executed his pass. He is skilled and artful rider. Many times I have watched admiringly at how he tosses his big black motorbike to the left or right with a playful flair.

But Migo had not correctly judged the speed of a second blue and white car now racing down the left lane behind him. Or perhaps he hadn’t seen the car at all; he had no recollection of the incident. My estimate is that the car was doing 90 to 95 mph. I watched in horror as the car slammed on its brakes just behind Migo. I could see its brake lights flash a lurid red and the vehicle lurch forward and its front end dive as the brakes took hold.

I watched helplessly as the gap between the car’s front bumper and Migo’s rear tire narrowed to a matter of feet. My friend accelerated through his pass. Fear and then profound relief shot through me, and I thought of how I had made the same mistake in Portugal. Geoff had told me with chilling matter-of-factness how a car he estimated was running at up to 120 mph on a similar four-lane road had nearly taken me out from the rear.

GeoffA week later, in Limbe, Cameroon, I would learn that Geoff had crashed outside Benin City in Nigeria. He caught up with us after a 10-day excursion to England and Scotland, and as we sat for a couple of New Year’s Eve beers at our hotel in Limbe, he told me about the accident. A truck had slowed in front of him, but its brake lights were broken. Geoff slammed his brakes upon spotting the slowed vehicle and swerved hard to the right at about 35 mph, missing by inches the edge of the truck’s rear with his left shoulder.

Geoff powered through deep gravel along the side of the road, and angled to return to the pavement. But his rear tire got hung on the pronounced edge between pavement and shoulder, and his Yamaha XT went down, twirling 360 degrees across the road. He was unhurt and his motorbike was all right; the truck driver swerved around his prone Yamaha and never stopped.

“That traffic was the worst I’ve ever seen … and I’ve ridden through India!” Geoff said. “I couldn’t wait to get out of Nigeria!”

Thirty miles down the road from Migo’s near-disaster, we slowed to pass an accident. More than a dozen blue and white cars lined the side of the road. Their drivers stood idly about. I spotted a blue and white car freshly crashed on the right side, nestled into the dense foliage.

***

NigerianHighwayI lost track of how many wrecks I saw on the way from Ilara to Calabar. It was well over 50. Maybe 75, probably more. I would motor past and shake my head at the spectacle of a horrifically twisted truck or tractor-trailer lain on its side or upside-down, or the cannibalized carcass of a car or a small bus. I would think of the irony of how a couple of weeks earlier, in lightly trafficked Ghana, I had rhapsodized about the joy of speed.

Before Nigeria, I had counted coastal Route 101 north of Rio de Janeiro in Brazil as the most dangerous road I had ever ridden. Racetrack 101, I called it. Traffic there was thick and fast and reckless; tailgating is a Brazilian sport second in popularity only to soccer. At police checkpoints, the Brazilian authorities had assembled dozens of crashed vehicles as a means of encouraging drivers to slow down.

Our route through Nigeria was worse. Vehicles in Nigeria raced at astonishing speeds with little to no regard for others, nor for themselves. There are no speed limit signs. No police cars lurk off the road with radar detectors. It is entirely ruthless. Motorists seize the smallest advantage to gain time and space.

The four-lane sections were bad enough; two-lane sections posed their own perils. Parts of the two-lane sections would be clean and fast, but then another stretch would be badly potholed, or pavement destroyed completely. To negotiate these subpar sections, vehicles would slalom back and forth between enormous potholes, aiming for pavement that posed the least disturbance to speed.

This slaloming also presented an opportunity for the enterprising motorist to gain ground. If a vehicle ahead had chosen a line to the right, a vehicle behind would often opt for the left side. Then each would accelerate through the rough in a hellbent race to get ahead of one another. More than a few times, I would find myself stuck in the middle … or angling to gain ground myself.

An awareness of vehicles behind you is a principle of sound motorcycling. On an open road in the U.S. and its generally civilized traffic, it’s often a point of mere curiosity. In Nigeria, an awareness of what’s behind you is essential. Migo’s near collision had proven that. Weaving back and forth between potholes on my motorbike, I had always to pay attention to whatever fiend lurked behind me.

The blue and white cars were egregious offenders. So were small, white Toyota Hacia buses. They are sleek, late model vehicles and packed with passengers. You would think that a bus full of passengers would proceed at a judicious pace. Twenty or more lives are at stake.

IMG_2657But they did not. They tore past me at 85 and 90 mph. Or worse, they tailgated me at most uncomfortable proximity, and paid no heed when I pivoted my head around and gestured for them to back off. That technique had proven effective in Brazil and elsewhere, but it seemed only to antagonize the Nigerian. The traffic was so furious and reckless that I resorted to using my turn signals in an attempt to give pause to those vehicles racing up behind me.

And there were the trucks. The putative expressway was clotted with tractor trailers and mid-size trucks. They were old and beaten and creaky from the thousands of punishing miles they had endured. Despite their unsuitability to run at high speeds, their drivers used a leaden foot.

They barreled past me at 75 and 80 mph, and I observed with mounting scorn the colorful religious inscriptions that adorned these trucks. The inscriptions are schizophrenic. They suggest piety, but there is no piety on the highways of Nigeria.

Redemption Never Fails

If God Doesn’t Care, Who Does?

Jesus Is Coming Repent Your Sins

Repent YOUR sins, I thought, your speeding sins, you lunatic bastard! Would Jesus drive a beat-up old tractor-trailer at 80 mph, carving through traffic like a madman, running the wrong way against opposing traffic? A more appropriate inscription on these trucks, it occurred to me, would be Hammer of God.

Not long after spotting the crashed blue and white car, we tore up a long hill. I watched Migo dart from the left lane into the right, as a tractor trailer came heaving down the left lane, going the wrong way against traffic.

***

JimandEileenA few days before I left for Toronto and the plane flight that would take me to Lisbon, I had lunch with a pair of favorite cousins. They had driven more than a half-hour to see me off, and we enjoyed fish sandwiches and salads at a comfortable drive-in. We got to talking about travel and its inevitable difficulties.

Jim and Eileen are well traveled around the U.S., but not in foreign countries. In the winter, they often motor from their home in chilly upstate New York for warmer climes in the south, or hop a flight to Las Vegas. They have a TomTom GPS in their Ford Explorer, but nevertheless, became disoriented on a freeway that cuts through Wichita, Kansas.

It was quite an ordeal, Eileen said. They had missed the freeway exit at which their hotel of choice was located, and had driven down the interstate through Wichita before turning around and heading back. It was nighttime, and they began to get anxious.

I could picture it vividly: A well-marked U.S. interstate with civilized traffic, illuminated exit signs every half-mile, and colorful billboards advertising the comforts and convenience of Motel 6 and Denny’s and Applebee’s and the Radisson.

“Oh, it was horrible,” Eileen said. “I was so glad when we finally found our hotel!”

I thought of my cousins now. I thought of how they and other Americans of refined travel sensibilities would react if they were to be beamed down into the middle of the insanity in which I found myself in Owerri, a city of more than 225,000 people on the northern lip of Nigeria’s Delta Region.

Massive piles of stinking, rotting garbage lined the middle of Owerri’s main road. These half-dozen piles were the size of tractor trailers, and now a bucket-loader was laboring to remove them. The odor was piquant and nauseating, like diapers and death. The thousands of people crammed in proximity to this Third World urban landfill seemed oblivious, or at least resigned, to the stench.

Migo and I were crushed all sides by traffic, barely inching forward. A cockeyed old truck would lurch in front of me from the left. A grimy mini-bus crammed full of people and baggage, sitting on the roof and hanging off the sides, would be stuck in front of me. To my right, dozens of whining little Chinese motos angled for the slightest opening. These openings would often be extremely slight, because to the right would be a rubbish-filled open sewer, carved a foot down into the earth and roughly parallel to the road.

IMG_2590The asphalt had been destroyed long ago, tortured and chewed by ceaseless traffic. Instead, we crawled over huge undulations on an earthen surface. Potholes brimmed with garbage and debris. I had to watch where I put my feet down, because chances were fair that it would be into a hole, or in the path of a bus tire. I was sweating profusely.

Exhaust belched, choking us with noxious fumes. Horns blared incessantly. Motors idled and roared, many of them ungoverned by mufflers. People hollered and chattered. Peddlers of bananas and phone cards and bags of water stepped gingerly through the clotted traffic, shoving their wares towards motorists. On each side, hundreds of people congregated around shacks and stalls. Music screeched at ridiculously high volumes from huge old speakers set up in at storefronts.

I had never seen anything like it. The anarchic density of vehicles and people and noise and exhaust was outside of my experience. The poverty was grave and arresting. You could see it in the hard and haunted and hollow faces and filthy clothing of the hundreds, the thousands, of people jostling and yelling and shoving through these African Calcuttas.

Nothing in Morocco or Burkina Faso or Ghana, nor any Latin American city through which I had ridden, was comparable to the chaos of a Nigerian city. It was unreal, and made all the more unreal by the incongruous sight of Migo and his sleek, loaded adventure bike inching along in front of me, traffic and people crushing him from all sides. He looked as out of place here as a supermodel in a leper colony.

People stared at us. Young men, swarthy and broad-faced and shirtless, their muscular black torsos glistening with sweat, hooted at us with a macho verve I had not heard in countries past. Men on motos gave us leering smiles, as if in satisfaction at the shock we were experiencing. Some wore the silliest little blue hardhat helmets, which, unstrapped beneath their chins, would fly off at the first hint of a collision. “I want your bike!” a moto dude would holler. “We trade, huh?”

I felt as if I was in an alternative universe devoid of sense and reason and order and decorum. It seemed imperative to get through and get out of this vortex. Though I would regret it later, I took no compelling photos of the chaos I observed in urban Nigeria. If I did so, I reasoned, I would have lost Migo, and we would have the hassle of reuniting. I would be instantly surrounded by people; the idea of taking of my camera seemed wholly inappropriate, to do what – document the miserable conditions in which they spent their days?

IMG_2652It wasn’t just Owerri. It was each large Nigerian through which we passed – Abeokuta and Ijebu Ode and Benin City and Onitsha and Aba. I had read guidebooks that even average-size Nigerian cities were monstrosities, but that benign description did not prepare me for what I would see.

In Abeokuta, I looked in vicarious horror at hundreds of people jammed onto a narrow strip of pavement, between a wall and an open sewer, and the absurdly coagulated traffic at sewer’s edge. The people just sat there, perhaps hoping for a coin to be tossed from the stalled traffic. My God! I thought. Why are those people crammed together like that, so wretchedly, in such filth?!

Leaving Onitsha in a preposterous snot of traffic, a mid-size truck elected to maneuver through vendors off the right side of the road. The truck inched ahead of me to my right, and I watched with escalating dread as its left rear wheel sank into a deep depression and the tall rear trailer canted over far to the left, nearly at 45 degrees.

Omigod! I thought, suddenly fearful for my life. That truck is going to fall over right on top of me! Migo, just behind me, was equally alarmed. The truck lurched upright from the concave surface and crawled ahead.

Outside Abeokuta, I saw a man sitting in the middle of a huge pile of garbage. Just sitting there. I saw another man, naked and slack-jawed, sitting at the edge of a city street. Cars and trucks and buses and motos edged uncarefully around him. His expression was completely vacant, catatonic.

***
IMG_2567It wasn’t just the highways and cities of Nigeria that didn’t make sense. The whole country was a knot of contradictions -- upside down and inside out, like the black and white negative of an old Kodak filmstrip. Nigeria is crisscrossed by more power lines than a Godzilla movie, yet electric service is sporadic across the nation. It is Africa’s largest oil-producing nation, yet fuel stations were often empty of gasoline and diesel and kerosene, or jammed with long queues of waiting vehicles.

Nigeria is infamous in the Western world for email scams that promise millions of dollars, yet I spotted just one Internet café in our crossing, in Calabar (compared to the abundance of Internet cafes that one finds in most African nations). And we had expected to be stopped and extorted at the police checkpoints for which Nigeria is notorious, but we passed without incident through more than 300 checkpoints, being stopped just once (by an immigration officer, not the police), despite officers’ fervent entreaties that we pull over.

Our entry began tamely enough. We chose a quiet border crossing from Benin about 100 miles north of the Gulf of Guinea coast, to avoid the Nigerian capital, Lagos, which with 15 million people is Africa’s largest city. (I would later meet, in Limbe, Cameroon, a pair of Irish adventure riders who told me it took them nearly four hours to ride their KTM 640s through heavy traffic into Lagos center).

We cleared Benin immigration and customs, swapped our CFA for Nigerian naira with a moneychanger, and found ourselves on the rugged dirt streets of Ilara, Nigeria. It’s a small, forlorn little border town. No signs of Nigerian immigration or customs were evident. I stopped in the center and asked where we could find the immigration office. A man in a car volunteered to lead us.

Migo, parked behind me, said, “I think we need to go to the police.”

The police?! We’d been speculating for days about the rumored corruption among Nigerian police and how we would likely be shaken down for “dash,” meaning small bribes, and Migo wanted to go straight into the lion’s den!

We debated back and forth. Migo thought we needed a police stamp in our passports. I insisted we needed to find the immigration office for our passport stamp. I relented. “OK,” I said. “You want to go see the police, we’ll go see the police.” Some memorable misadventure would probably ensue.

Police headquarters were up a dirt street. I let Migo go into headquarters by himself, and parked in front of a nearby municipal building. A handful of men and boys were hanging around outside, and they greeted me warmly. This was the seat of local government – the Kingdom of Ilara.

IMG_2523The traditional tribal hierarchy is still in place here. The chief of the kingdom percolated up on a little Chinese moto and invited me into the building, telling me he was second in command only to the king. Inside was a large and elaborate throne, with two smaller but still impressive chairs to the left and right. I enjoyed my visit and chatted with the men and traced for some shy youngsters our route on the African continent sticker on my motorbike

Fifteen minutes later, a slightly red-faced Migo emerged from police headquarters. We did indeed to visit the immigration office, not the police, he admitted. But now the police chief had been summoned and would be at headquarters shortly. We would wait for him.

I stepped into the police station and showed my passport. A nice lady officer gave us some bananas and told us to sit. When I told her I would rather stand, she pointed to a chair and said firmly, “SIT.” I sat and chewed on a banana.

The chief arrived, ensured that all was in order, and tasked a young man on a motorbike to lead us to the Nigerian immigration office, a half-mile up a sandy track. We cleared the police, immigration and customs without being asked for a bribe, and I had something to tease Migo about.

The countryside east of Ilara was green and rolling and lovely, but a spectacle other than scenery captivated my attention. As soon as we left Ilara, we encountered roadblocks every few miles. Men had wooden boards full of nails across or the side of the road. With a rope fastened to the end of the board, they could readily yank it across the road to stop traffic, either by encouragement or puncture.

It was impossible to tell who these men were. Some wore uniforms, some did not. Were they police, privateers or army – or a little of all three? Some carried automatic weapons over the shoulders. Others wore pistols around their waists. I was in the lead, and my nerve and well-practiced habit of cheerily waving my way through police checkpoints would be tested.

IMG_2976Unless an officer is standing in the middle of the road and clearly gesturing for me to stop, I’ve always been able to slow a bit, keep my head straight ahead or feign some distraction, wave at the last minute, and accelerate on by. No one has ever given chase or fired a shot at me.

But the nail-studded boards gave me pause. I slowed out of caution that someone would yank the thing at the last minute, blowing out both my TKC 80s. I tried to conceal myself behind trucks and buses and cars and even motos, so that by the time I was at the roadblock, no one would have noticed me and I could motor on through.

Still, some roadblock men spotted me from a distance. My headlight signaled my approach. Motos here turn their headlights on only at night; mine cannot be turned off. Some men waved us through, as if we were nothing out of the ordinary. Others, though, gestured for us to stop, usually with a half-hearted pointing to the side of the road, sometimes with a hoot and a whistle.

I would slow and percolate on through with a wave or salute. After each instance, I’d check my rear-view mirror to make sure Migo was still behind me. If I had insulted the men by neglecting to stop, they could well take it out on Migo. He kept close on my tail, though, and we proceeded through without incident, occasionally trailed by catcalls that were more forceful and virile than any I had heard in other nations.

Later, Geoff would report that he had been stopped multiple times at these police checkpoints. He blamed Migo and I. “The cops said a couple of riders passed through a week earlier and they never stopped!” Geoff said. “They weren’t too happy about that, and they made sure as hell they stopped me. So thanks a lot, pal!”

IMG_2557It was after 5 p.m. by the time we reached Abeokuta, the first large (with some 600,000 people) Nigerian city we would encounter. Traffic densified towards the center, and we stopped to try to get our bearings. A huge crowd surrounded us on a slope, crunched in between stalled traffic and vendors along the side.

My Rough Guide to West Africa offered three paragraphs of information and a couple of hotels, but no Abeokuta map. The book said a cheap hotel could be found in a district called Oke Ilewo, and men in our large crowd pointed up a hill. Migo took the lead now, relying on his Garmin 60Csx GPS unit to find the way through traffic denser than I had seen elsewhere in Africa.

Migo enjoys navigation and is good at it; Geoff and I have swapped grins many times over his initiative. It meant that we wouldn’t have to trouble ourselves with the chore. With him charting the course, we found a place called Hotel O. It was off the main drag, down a garbage-strewn dirt hill. The light in my room didn’t work. Neither did the sink nor the shower; I bathed with a bucket of cold water.

The electricity went off in the night, taking with it the fan, and I lay uncomfortably in the oven-like room in the wee hours, slicked with sweat and tossing back and forth, until being awakened before dawn by the rooster-like call of a diesel generator, producing electricity, outside my room.

***

IMG_2561I stopped at the bridge leading over the Niger River. It was a milestone of sorts, as I had crossed this same 2400-mile river to enter Timbuktu in Mali. It was after 5:30 p.m., and I was on the outskirts of Onitsha, a city of more than 550,000 people in south-central Nigeria. Migo was ahead of me, out of my sight.

I was exhausted. The day’s stresses on highways and in cities had taken their toll, and my concentration was failing in lockstep with daylight. My nerves were on edge, electric and erratic. My ability to safely operate the motorbike was compromised. I needed a break.

I took out toilet tissue from my tankbag and wiped my brow and my face. The tissue was black with grime. I had been riding with my faceshield up for optimal visibility, and soot from vehicle exhaust had fastened itself up to my skin. A man on a Chinese QLink moto rode over the bridge’s pedestrian walkway and stopped.

Ten minutes later, I was surrounded by 50 moto guys. They chattered away in the local language, incredulous that I had ridden here from San Francisco, California, United States of America. No one rides through Nigeria, they said, not here, on the upper edge of the oil-rich Delta Region, notorious for gun-toting bandits who kidnap and ransom foreigners.

Another moto dude rode down the pedestrian walkway. He was not pleased with the obstruction he encountered. The motos surrounding me blocked his way, and within minutes he was in a heated argument with another man. They hollered at each other and slapped each other upside the head, in a seemingly practiced manner. I thought, man, how fiery is this Nigerian personality!

It looked like a full-fledged fight was about to break out. The crowd hooted and hollered and egged the antagonists on. I began to excuse myself, and the crowd parted to let the aggrieved rider through. Where are you going? I was asked. I told them I had in mind a place called the Bolingo Hotel. We’ll take you, let’s go, they yelled.

One guy leapt boldly out into bridge traffic, his arms raised as an order for it to stop. It did, honking in irritation, and I took off over the Niger River like a VIP with an entourage of a few dozen moto dudes in tow.

P1010242Migo, it turned out, was in the center of the bridge, waiting for me with his camera. The Bolingo Hotel was less than a mile away. It was also expensive. Rooms would be more than $50 USD each. The girl behind the counter would not negotiate. I headed out to give Migo the bad news, and the hotel manager caught me in the large, secure parking lot.

“How much do you want to spend?” he asked. A lot less than you’re asking! I said. He offered a two-bed business suite for about $40 USD, and encouraged me to take it. Migo and I could split the cost. ”This is Nigeria,” he said. “You need security. You are white. Don’t try anywhere else. You and your bikes will be safe here. This is the best hotel in town.”

I gave the moto dudes who led me about $5 USD for their trouble, and I could hear them arguing loudly how it would be divided as I retreated behind the tall, lockable gates of Bolingo Hotel.

Down the street was a lively outdoor bar. Migo and I sat for a couple of beers, and got to talking about a Ryszard Kapuscinski essay called “The Hole in Onitsha” in his book, Shadow of the Sun. I was pleased to be here, in a city that Kapuscinski had visited, even though it looked like a chaotic disaster of a place.

What Kapuscinski had observed in Onitsha the 1960s was still true today, in areas of central Nigeria where pavement was destroyed and traffic hopelessly backed up. These areas gave rise to teeming cottage industries. Kapuscinski had written about a huge hole in an Onitsha road through which just one vehicle could pass at a time, requiring strong men to push it from the bottom:

“I was immediately struck by how the area around the hole had become the epicenter of local life, how it drew people, engaged them, spurred them to initiative and action,” he had written. “In the normally sleepy, lifeless backwater on the outskirts of town, where the unemployed slumber in the streets and homeless malarial dogs roam, there arose, thanks solely to that unfortunate hole, a dynamic, humming, bustling neighborhood. The hole created work for the unemployed, who formed teams of rescuers and made money hauling cars out of the pit.”

IMG_2562And stuck drivers, Kapuscinki reported, became customers for sellers of food and drinks and cigarettes and car-repair entrepreneurs and tailors and barbers and families who placed clumsy “hotel” signs outside their homes. We had seen very much the same phenomenon on our way here.

I asked several people in Onitsha if they recalled that colossal hole, or had heard of Onitsha’s fame at Kapuscinski’s hand. None had. But at the bar where Migo and I passed a few hours, a young man who said he worked in the computer industry had heard of Nigerian email scams, and that his country was notorious for it in the West.

“Oh, that’s called the 419!” he said, referring to a section of the Nigerian penal code. “The authorities will arrest you if you’re caught doing that. Me, I would never do it.” He pointed skywards. “The big man will get you.” And he had some questions for us, namely, was it stressful to ride a motorbike around Africa, what with immigration and customs procedures and police checkpoints and all?

I laughed out loud. “Stressful – customs and immigration?” I said. “The most stressful thing I’ve done is ride 275 miles from Abeokuta to here! You Nigerians, my friend, are the worst drivers in the world!”

We enjoyed his company for a while, until he excused himself to attend an evangelical revival that was about to get under way across the street.

Migo and I wandered over to the revival. It was 9:30 p.m. Hundreds of people sat on plastic chairs, waiting and listening to horribly loud recorded hymns, made even worse by someone’s bad idea to play two tracks simultaneously, each screeching over the other, while someone else clumsily tried to tune an electric guitar. No more chairs were available, but shortly a man approached with a pair of chairs and bid us to sit down beneath a loud loudspeaker. We did, and waited for the spectacle to get started.

IMG_2565And waited. And waited. More than 1000 people now crammed into the revival. A large sign hung over the crowd: “Winners Chapel Onitsha (New Branch) | Covenant Day of Deliverance | Recovery of Destiny.” Migo nodded off around 10:15 p.m. Others fell asleep, too. Young women giggled and stared and pointed at the only two white people in attendance. Finally, at 10:30, the revival got going.

“Hallelujaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!” the loudspeaker over my head blared.

“Hallelujaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!” the crowd responded, suddenly rising to its feet in a tidal cheer.

“Can someone begin to clap?” the loudspeaker demanded, and the crowd obliged feverishly, in a sudden burst of energy, and a jaunty hymn played, and everyone sang along, these many hundreds of faithful in the sweaty and humid Onitsha night. We made our exit from the thundering cacophony 20 minutes later.

I awoke for a pee at 3:15 a.m. The electricity was off. Our room at Hotel Bolingo overlooked the side street on which the revival was held. I looked out the window. The revival was still under way. The crowd had thinned only slightly.

***

IMG_3437I stood with my Suzuki at the inaptly named Nelbee Executive Guest House in downtown Calabar. Our motorbikes were parked conveniently in front of our shared and shamelessly overpriced $50-a-night suite. I held a new sticker that I had carried from the U.S., bought from the Adventure Rider Web site.

“Welcome to the Asylum,” the sticker said, in part.

I chuckled at the irony. Urban Nigeria was the real thing. Whoever thought up the slogan could not have imagined the demented Nigerian cities through which we had ridden, nor the treacherous highways. And in Calabar, bizarrely, the Cross River State Psychiatric Hospital was just a few blocks away from our motel.

I contemplated where to fasten the sticker on the bike. A young man named Jerry stood with me. He was 22 years old, and had been painting the exterior wall surrounding the Nelbee Executive Guest House. Jerry read parts of the sticker out loud: “’Adventure Rider. Ride the World.’ You like Nigeria?”

In fact, I wasn’t sure. The country’s traffic had terrified me. The cities horrified me. I had awoken this morning in Calabar with bad dreams of Nigerian cities lingering in my head. I dreamed I was a small boy and an evil carnival had visited my little town, full of cackling clowns and sideshow freaks and huge, seething mechanized amusement rides.

The Nigerian people were …not unfriendly, exactly. In fact, almost everyone I had met was perfectly sweet. But the Nigerians struck me as disconcertingly aggressive in speech and tone of voice. It had given me pause. We were called “master” and “sir.” I started saying “yes sir” a lot. The Federal Republic of Nigeria commanded my respect. And I had witnessed the oddest things … an evangelical revival that starts at 10:30 p.m. and goes on past 3 a.m.!

Nigeria, with 140 million people Africa’s most populous nation, struck me as the black sheep of the continent. The description of the country in my Lonely Planet guide didn’t seem far off: “As a travel destination, Nigeria seems more a place to avoid than book a flight to. … Challenging yet exuberant, this is Africa in the raw – there’s nowhere quite like it on the continent.”

Jerry was a nice, quiet kid with a striking resemblance to the American baseball star Ken Griffey Jr. He prefaced most things that he said with a shy chuckle. He said he was a university student, but would not specify the focus of his studies, nor which university he attended. I suspected he was just getting by with painting and other odd jobs. He offered to take Migo and I on a tour of Calabar’s sights.

IMG_2631“Probably we should go,” Migo said. “I just reread my blog entry and I realized I didn’t have much good to say about Nigeria. I feel like I haven’t given Nigeria a chance.” I felt the same.

Jerry showed up promptly at 4 p.m. to lead us around. He was dressed in his Sunday best, with blue polyester pants and shiny black shoes and a white dress shirt, its long sleeves rolled up. Jerry and Migo and I rode moto taxis to a place called Marina Resort, a new municipal facility on the lazy Calabar River. We stopped to regard the merry-go-round. It was surrounded by a tall metal fence to keep thieves out at night. It looked like something from my dream of the evil carnival.

We strolled down the waterfront. I teased Jerry about whether he had a girlfriend, and he replied with only his shy chuckle. We spent 10 minutes admiring a colorful lizard, and on our way back, I had to pee. I retreated behind a maintenance shed to relieve myself. The voice of a park staffer barked behind me: “Please, don’t piss here! We have toilets!”

I thought to myself, how upside-down, how quintessentially Nigerian! The Nigerian towns and cities I had seen were perfect dumps. Throughout Africa, men relieve themselves whenever and wherever they feel like it. And I was reprimanded for going discreetly behind a shed, into thick foliage.

Calabar was, though, a decided step up from Abeokuta and Onitsha and Aba and the other cities. We entered the city two days earlier, down a broad and handsome four-lane boulevard that looked almost Western. I would see municipal trash baskets and streetlights and police directing traffic and a fast food outlet called Mr. Bigg’s, with relatively good food. But these niceties were not to be found in the center, where we lodged, full of lunatic traffic and garbage-filled open sewers.

IMG_2627From Marina Resort, we hopped another set of moto taxis for a 15-minute ride to the outskirts of town. Out here, I would see a handful of old, rusted signs on each street block for all sorts of churches and religious congregations. Other signs for little eateries advertised bush meat. Jerry led us to a hotel and resort where he did odd jobs. I couldn’t figure out why, until I learned he lived just a few blocks away. He wanted to introduce us to his family.

We made our way down a dusty street to a low, concrete building full of passageways. This was Jerry’s unassuming home. He opened the door to a tiny bedroom. A shirtless man and a woman in a nightgown were lying in bed. An air conditioner was running and they were watching TV. They got up to greet us, and I thought, What the hell am I doing in this guy’s bedroom?!

An outdoor bar was down the street from Jerry’s house. We sat for beers. Twilight was upon us. It was Sunday evening. Here in the hood, our simply being white (forget our adventure motorbikes) was enough to attract stares from the locals. A drunken old man in filthy clothing who lived across the street insisted on buying Migo and I beers. I had to turn away, he smelled so badly. His wife looked on, appalled.

“Bakara! Bakara!” I heard the word hollered in our direction a few times. I looked at Jerry quizzically. “Bakara means ‘white man,’” he told me.

Up and down the street, men percolated around on QLink motorbikes. These are 125cc machines made in China. They cost 65,000 naira brand new, or about $650 USD. Many men eke out a living using their motos as taxis; I didn’t spot a single four-wheeled taxi in Calabar.

IMG_2638It was dark and time to go. Migo and I bid farewell to Jerry, and gave him about $10 USD for his efforts. Jerry had shown us a kinder, gentler Nigeria, and I was pleased for our experience. We hopped on a pair of moto taxis for a 15-minute ride back to Nelbee Executive Guest House.

We went fast. The drivers of our respective moto taxis seemed to be dueling with each other to see who could go faster. They beeped and swerved and hit their puny throttles. They sped around slower traffic and rode on thin strips of pavement between stopped cars on the left and open sewers on the right.

I didn’t care. This was Africa style. Months ago, I hated riding on the back of a moto taxi. Now I loved it. I hollered at Migo, and he turned around and gave me a huge grin. The breeze buffeted my bare face. I watched the lights of nighttime Calabar whiz by in a blur. White noise and honking horns roared in my ears.

I looked over the moto dude’s shoulder to see how fast we were going, but his speedometer was broken.

***
Finally in Calabar, I saw a white person. A white woman sat alone at the Marina Resort. Over four days in Nigeria, I had not seen a single white person, except Migo, of course. But I had thought about white people. Inching through the crazed urban chaos of Onitsha and Aba and Owerri and other cities, I imagined seeing just one white person living among the Nigerians.

It almost stood to reason by sheer numbers. Wouldn’t some white person among the billions on the planet choose to stake his or her life in these demented urban centers, amid the noise and the garbage and the exhaust and the insanity? Wouldn’t at least one find a charm amid the abomination, some redeeming value, some worthiness?

I knew the answer was no. The question, really, was: Are we that far apart?

Then at the Cameroon Consulate in Calabar, which Migo and I visited to secure Cameroon visas for $150 USD, the highest fee yet, I saw lots of white people. They were part of a British-led tour group that had passed through Nigeria on a northerly route, through the capital of Abuja and south to Calabar. I asked the leader how the traffic was up north.

“Horrible …just horrible,” he told me. “Freaking Nigerians, they’re the worst drivers in the world!”

Comments (10)

Togo & Benin

Abomey, Benin * December 17, 2008

We spent 10 days in the coastal city of Lome, the capital of Togo.

It was extremely hot -- 100+ F and humid.

I met nice people on my wanderings through the city. They were happy to have their photos taken.

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Comments (1)

Speed

Kokrobite, Ghana * December 7, 2008

IMG_2206Long sections of the road south from the feverish trading city of Kumasi in central Ghana were fast and freshly paved and unblemished. This highway was even embroidered with white lines down its center and shoulders, a nicety seldom seen in sub-Saharan Africa.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

WesternStates-V65SabreI certainly wouldn’t find out in central Ghana. Motoring along, I rued my decision to leave at home the stock 15-tooth front sprocket for the DR. With it, I could have ponied the Suzuki up over 100 mph. Now I was left to only fantasize about those higher speeds. I chuckled over the seven speeding tickets I had accrued in the U.S. and Canada on my big Honda, including an unfortunate three on one three-week Western states tour, and how I had persuaded nearly all of the ticketing officers to stand for a photo.

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

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

YamahaFZ1For sheer sex appeal, I like the looks of the new Harley-Davidson XR 1200. I learned about this bike in a post at Motorcycle Misadventures, an eclectic and entertaining blog by my friend and fellow writer Carla King of the San Francisco Bay Area. I’ve never owned a Harley, but if I did, it would be the XR 1200. It wouldn’t be as fast as the Yamaha FZ1, but it might be enough. (By the way, if you haven’t read Carla’s excellent book, “American Borders,” about her travels around the U.S. on a cranky Russian Ural motorbike, what are you waiting for – winter?)

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

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

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

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

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

Nnnnnnuuuuuuuuuurrrrrrrrrhhhhhhhhhhhhhhmmmmm!

Nnnnnnuuuuuuuuuurrrrrrrrrhhhhhhhhhhhhhhmmmmm!

Nnnnnnuuuuuuuuuurrrrrrrrrhhhhhhhhhhhhhhmmmmm!

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

***

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

God Provides Everything I Need Beauty Salon

Beloved Fertilizer Depot

Jesus Never Fails Chop House

Holy Spirit Full of Grace Drinking Spot

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

Even Jesus

Good Father

For God’s Sake

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

Except the Lord

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

IMG_2245It had rained every afternoon or early evening since our night in the tiny Ghana village of Bodom, when a storm prompted us to seek improvisational lodging. This is supposed to be the dry season in central Ghana, but now I found myself in taking shelter from the storm beneath the overhang of the aged and tilting Ebenezer Methodist Church, circa 1922, the yellow paint on its exterior cracked and faded and crumbling.

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

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

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

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

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

IMG_2259I had a rain jacket and a raincover for my tank bag squirreled away in my luggage. To retrieve them, I would need to brave the storm and make my way to my motorbike across the road. I looked at Geoff.

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

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

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

***

IMG_2204It’s election season in Ghana. In a week, this country of 21 million people would elect a new president. Signs of political activity are all over – the numerous and impressive billboards for the presidential candidates, front-page coverage in the newspapers, and dialogue with the locals.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***
IMG_2274Geoff and Migo set off the next morning to visit Cape Coast Castle, the former British slave fort, and proceed east to a beach town called Kokrobite. I lingered over a 40 cent USD coffee and omelette breakfast in a little streetside eatery down the hill from Amkred Guesthouse with the idea to leave later, visit the castle, ride solo and fast, and meet them in Kokrobite.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***
IMG_2291Man’s inhumanity to man has always fascinated me. For weeks, I had been looking forward to visiting the notorious Cape Coast Castle, one of more than a dozen colonial installations along the so-called Gold Coast of Ghana. I had read in my Rough Guide that more than one million slaves were transported from the Gold Coast to the Americas from 1600 to the mid-nineteenth century. Hundreds of thousands died at the forts or during the long trans-Atlantic voyage.

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

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

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

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

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

***

IMG_2309I lingered at Oasis Beach Resort until noon, and motored through town. Despite its distinction as an educational center, Cape Coast is a poor and ramshackle and improvisational city. The lovely beaches are littered with garbage, and the sidewalks lined by open, trash-filled sewers that both stink and present a pedestrian peril.

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

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

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

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

IMG_2344Only a month earlier, we learned, masked gunmen had broken into the compound in the middle of the night. The bandits broke into bungalows and shoved shotguns against the throats of Western tourists and made off with a bounty of jewelry and cash and cameras and computers. They were not apprehended.

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

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

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

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

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

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It Doesn't Rain Here

Kumasi, Ghana * December 3, 2008

ThreeAmigosWe fueled up in a small town called Jema in central Ghana. It was 4:30 p.m., and once again we were pushing the envelope of daylight. We were bound for the Boabeng-Fiema Monkey Sanctuary, a small preserve in the rainforest with a large population of the small and sociable mona monkey, and the larger but reclusive black-and-white colubus.

Villagers there ran a simple guesthouse. We would be able to spend the night, and in the morning take a walking tour through the thick forest and feed the mona monkeys bananas or corned beef and observe the colubus primates in the trees. It sounded like great fun.

From Jema, we would ride a 35-mile piste to the monkey sanctuary. An attendant at the fuel station told us the road would be bad. So did a taxi driver. We did the math. Whatever its condition, we should be able to run 35 miles of dirt road within the hour of good daylight that we had left.

As we buttoned up from the fuel stop, Geoff looked to the east.

“That sounds like thunder,” he said. “Look over there -- are those thunderclouds?”

The sky did seem to be darkening in the east. That was the direction we were heading. Migo shook his head and put on his helmet.

“It doesn’t rain here,” he said. Off we rode.

***
IMG_2090Contrary to reports, the piste was fairly fast and easy. The setting sun was at my back, lavishing a golden tint on the red-dirt road and the gently rolling hills and the tall green grasses and the towering coconut trees. It was a lovely way to end the day. I motored along at 40 mph or so, thankful to not have to contend with corrugations and potholes and sand, and instead enjoying the exquisite emerald scenery.

Ahead, though, the sky continued to darken. And then a lightning bolt cracked from a gunmetal grey cloud. The air grew slightly cooler, and another lightning bolt struck. I felt a drop of rain on my face, and then another, and soon it was rat-a-tat-tatting on my helmet.

It’s always something in Africa, I thought.

What Migo meant when he said that it doesn’t rain here is that it doesn’t rain here now, not in early December. This is the dry season in central Ghana. Rains fall here heavily from March to June, and then more lightly in September and October.

But now the rain intensified, and I realized we were going to be in trouble. Rain would quickly make the piste more slippery than a congressman. Mud and adventure bikes don’t mix. I had struggled through the stuff for days on the rugged dirt roads of the Yungas jungle in Bolivia back in 2005, and was not eager to repeat the experience.

And I recalled another episode in Bolivia, riding a mud-slick dirt road in the rain at night. I was with my friends Joe Ortega and Vlad Sotoh of San Francisco. We had suffered a delay of nearly five hours because the Rio Grande, south of the Uyuni salt flats, was so swollen by heavy rains that it was impassable to most vehicles.

We finally made it across the river by paying construction workers to carry our motorbikes, one by one, in the business end of a bucket loader. By the time that was done, though, darkness was upon us. And the rain came, and strong wind, and the earthen road turned to snot, and Vlad crashed on the slick.

A few miles later, quite incredibly, we happened upon a fine hotel in an otherwise ramshackle town, not even on the map, and enjoyed delicious French onion soup and warm beers and dried our soaking motorcycle boots and riding pants around a raging fire.

IMG_2094Now it poured. I doubted that we would find a fine hotel with French onion soup and a raging fire a mile down this Ghana piste. Great sheets of rain fell hard and I pottered along, my visibility compromised by rain on my helmet faceshield. I tried riding with the faceshield up, but the rain was too hard on my bare face and unshielded eyes. A small village was ahead. I spotted Geoff’s and Migo’s motorbikes parked beneath a low, broad tree.

In the shelter of the tree, we shook our heads and rolled our eyes and laughed and marveled at the torrential storm. The wind ripped ferociously, tearing leaves from the trees and straining their limbs. The rain turned the red earth around our bikes into a swamp. Thunder boomed.

With a self-satisfied smirk, Geoff unfastened the large umbrella that he carries along a pannier rack on his Yamaha XT and opened it, protecting himself from the downpour. “Ha?” he asked. “Ha? What did you say about my umbrella, bub?”

When we met in Portugal in late September, I had chuckled at the thing and questioned why a motorcyclist would want an umbrella in Africa, particularly in the Sahara towards which we were headed. Now I laughed and flipped him off.

The adjacent building had an overhang, and I hustled up there with my tankbag to protect my passport and other paper materials from water damage. Geoff and Migo joined me. We watched the rain fall.

Migo said, “Geoff, you almost went down in the mud, huh?”

“Oh ho ho ho ho,” Geoff said. “Now that was close. The front tire slipped and then the back went out and I was going, ahhhhhhhhh, this bike is going down!”

IMG_2096We talked about mud riding. A thick, harder mud is doable, though still difficult on a loaded adventure bike. The thin, slick mud right after a heavy rain is something else entirely. It was a little after 5 p.m. The monkey sanctuary and its guesthouse were less than 10 miles away. Could we? Should we? If the rain persisted and we were relegated to paddling along at 5 mph, in the dark, and Migo’s KTM with an inoperable headlight, it could be a long journey.

The adjacent building, it turned out, was a school. A woman came out, and then another. They were teachers. They greeted us warmly. The town was tiny – about 600 people, I would later learn. I looked around. There were wooden shacks and mud buildings with corrugated tin roofs and goats and chickens and larger concrete buildings, in general disrepair. Rusty red rainwater coursed along dirt footpaths throughout the village.

Geoff asked one of the teachers if it would be possible for us to speak with the head of the village and inquire if there would be a place to stay.

As we talked, the rain eased. A patch of blue sky appeared. So did some children, bouncing and giggling and chattering at the uncommon sight of three white men and their outlandish motorbikes. We continued debating whether to press on to the monkey sanctuary and its guesthouse.

I was ambivalent, but began to lean in favor of staying in the village. It was called Bodom.

The experience, I figured, was bound to be rich.

***

IMG_2022Almost every experience in Africa is rich. The adventures unfold with a furious intensity. The sights and sounds are smells are forever changing, the people are warm and welcoming and curious, the dirt roads challenging and rewarding in equal measure.

From the Nazinga wildlife preserve in Burkina Faso, we’d made our way into Ghana, down a long, red, and dusty piste and a border crossing at Navrongo. Ghana is an English-speaking country – a welcome change from the Francophone nations through which we had journeyed.

Over nearly two months, we had grown accustomed to speaking French. Geoff had a clever idea. “First man who says something in French once we’re in Ghana buys a round of cold drinks, ay?” he said. “Merci, sil vous plait, après, whatever … deal?” Deal.

The Burkina Faso to Ghana border crossing was easy. Back in Ouagadougou, we had secured for about $10 USD visas to enter Ghana. As we began the passport and motorbike documentation process with the friendly Ghana border officials, I said the bet was now in effect.

Geoff was explaining our route to one of the Ghana officials.

“…through Burkina Faso, and après – um, after – Ghana we head to Togo and Benin,” Geoff said. Migo and I heard it and high-fived and once the border formalities were complete, we enjoyed cold Coca-Colas and orange Fanta, compliments of Mr. Geoffrey Shingleton.

But the French was quickly forgotten. Suddenly and happily, we were speaking English again. We lodged in the sizable town of Tamale, in a hotel with TVs in the rooms. A news channel reported in English on the upcoming Ghana elections. The nation was about to elect a new president, and the race was tight between two candidates, John Atta Mills and Nana Akufo-Addo, who with his chubby and cherubic face and spectacles and big white teeth has to be the world’s cutest politician.

We left the next morning for Ghana’s Mole National Park. The 3000-square mile park harbors elephants and water buffalos and baboons and dozens of other wild animals. To get there, we rode 60 miles of pavement and then 60 miles of piste – the definition of dual sport riding.

IMG_2009The earth is red. Dust is everywhere. Riding a relatively well-trafficked piste like the road to Mole means contending with other vehicles, either in front of you or oncoming, and the massive dust clouds they generate. I would tell my friends, “If a large truck or something is coming at me, I just hit the kill switch and stop the motor. I don’t want to ride through it and breathe all that dust, or have it sucked into the air filter.”

Geoff and Migo motored through the massive dust clouds. They gained ground on me as I stopped more often, but none of us went very fast. This piste had a little of everything – heavy corrugation, sizable rocks, loose dirt, huge potholes, gravel and sand.

A bit of construction work was under way to smooth out corrugations. The men laid a fine, loose dirt on the piste after grading it, which called for sand-riding techniques – sit back, keep your weight off the front, and let the front wheel dance over the soft stuff at 40 mph or so. Then there was real sand – one unexpected, wholly anomalous sand pond about 15 miles from Mole Park.

I spotted it ahead of me by about 50 yards, but there was no time to slow down. My first thought was, What’s that huge sand pond doing out here? The terrain was largely hardpack, but there it was, a massive sand pond across the width of the road. It was as if someone had dug a hole in the piste and deposited in it two dump trucks full of sand.

I hit the throttle. Vooooo-WOOOOOOMP! The motorbike dove into the depression, the front wheel buried itself in the soft stuff, and I hit the throttle again, driving the bike straight forward and then into a fishtail, and out. It was like riding a roller coaster. I found Geoff and Migo in a town called Larabanga, a few miles outside of Mole Park.

“Did you see that sand thing back there about six kilometers?” Migo asked. “I was riding along pretty fast and said, Whoooooaaaa! I really couldn’t slow down and just gunned on through it.”

***
SantaElenaVZtoSanFrancisco 019The setting of the Mole Motel, a compound of bungalows and shared dorms and tent sites with a good restaurant and bar and even a swimming pool, will take your breath away.

It sits atop a tall, steep escarpment, and spread out gloriously below is Africa in a nutshell – a primeval landscape of towering palm trees and sprawling savannah and two enormous watering holes at which animals drink and swim. Beyond the watering holes, a dense green forest extends to the west as far as the eye can see.

Geoff was setting his tent up near the edge of the escarpment. The orange ball of the sun was setting over the forest, seeming to grow larger and it dropped towards the horizon. The twilight deepened. The aesthetic beauty of our motorbikes at rest punctuated the scene. I said, “Man, now this is living!”

He straightened up and took in the stunning view once more. “Beautiful, isn’t it?”

We spent two nights at Mole Park. A few elephants could be seen near the watering holes, as could a large herd of antelope-like animals and stork-like birds and crocodiles. Warthogs wandered about the tent site, grinding their snouts into the red earth in search of ants. A baboon sat on Migo’s motorbike.

Migo is leery of baboons, owing to a frightening encounter with a mean-spirited one a number of years ago in Tanzania. And we had heard that a hostile baboon troop visited the restaurant area a day earlier, forcing a crowd of tourists to leap into the pool to keep the primates at bay.

IMG_2064We sat for dinner and beers and I said, “Y’know, I was just talking to one of the staff and he said the baboons like to come right up your tent at night. They even try to get in it.” Migo’s eyebrows arched and I let him worry for a minute before I laughed and speculated that an ideal piece of gear would have been a baboon costume, to scare the bejeepers out of Migo in the middle of the night.

The next day, we rode 100 miles of piste east from Mole, towards a mostly paved road that would take us to the crossroads town of Bamboi and the Boabeng-Fiema Monkey Sanctuary. Like the road to Mole, this piste had a little of everything – mostly potholes.

Huge, sharp-edged craters in the dirt obliged me to slow down. I ran fast for a while, but the front end of my DR650 kept bottoming out. Daaaa-DUNK! I could feel the fork springs compress fully, metal thunking on metal, and it dawned on me that something had changed in my motorbike’s performance.

I’d hit potholes of comparable depth a month earlier, and the front suspension took the punishment without complaint. I had been pleased with the performance of the industrial-strength Eibach front springs I had installed. Now the suspension seemed disturbingly soft. I caught up with Geoff and Migo at the end of the piste.

“Man, that was rough,” I told Geoff. “How many times did you bottom out on the front forks?”

“Maybe two, three times,” Geoff said.

“Damn, I bottomed out like 12 or 15! And you were running hard, right?”

“Pretty hard,” he said.

It was official. I had my first motorcycle problem of the journey.

***

IMG_2112The rain stopped entirely, and now half of Bodom came out to see the white men in their strange riding costumes and their big rugged motorbikes, parked conspicuously outside the school in the center of the village. We were led about to various homes and spoke with elders, with dozens of adults and children tagging delightedly along.

“Obruni! Obruni!” they hollered, at us and among themselves. White man! White man!

One boy grabbed my right hand as we walked down the main street. He was about 10. “I want to be your friend,” he said. “You are wonderful.” Another boy the same age grabbed my left hand, and I strolled along hand-in-hand with these two youngsters.

We told a village leader it would be very difficult to ride our big motorbikes through the mud to the monkey sanctuary. He said that we could sleep at the community center, which, contrary to what its name might suggest, was a small, broken-down concrete building. A room with a pit toilet was crammed with all sorts of junk, and men quickly removed it for our use.

With our entourage in tow, the kids jumping and yelling, we moved our bikes a quarter mile up the piste and down a muddy trail to the community center. A crowd of about 100 watched and jabbered as we began unloading our gear. The children were ebullient. Dozens of them, mostly boys with some girls, tugged and poked at us and implored us to give them gifts and take them to the monkey sanctuary in the morning and then take them to America.

Just about each of them wanted to shake my hand, and shake it more than once. “Shake me! Shake me! Shake me!” the children yelled. Their faces were marvelously bright and excitable and uninhibited.

When I got out my digital camera, the kids hammed it up and squealed with delight when I showed them the pictures on the LCD screen. Older people looked on with amusement and curiosity. It was dark by the time our gear was unpacked and inside the community center. Distant heat lightning flashed across the clouded sky.

IMG_2107Geoff got around to asking one of the adults a critical question: “Does anyone sell beer here?”

Just 50 yards from the community center was a small thatch hut, indistinguishable from others in Bodom. There was no sign. This was the local bar, and we ducked our heads to enter and be served three large bottles of Castle Milk Stout. We sat at a small white plastic table was in the center of the hut.

Someone lit a candle and set it on the table. Bodom did have electricity, but the late afternoon rain had knocked it out.

Ordinarily in the evening, we’ll relive the day’s adventures over a couple of beers, flip through the day’s photos, and “talk business,” as Geoff puts it, among ourselves. We would not be by ourselves this evening. Villagers poked their heads curiously into the bar and entered, and within minutes the small hut was jam-packed with more than 50 teen-agers, adults, and children.

We were surrounded. They loomed over the little plastic table. Flesh pressed against flesh. A woman shoved her breasts against the back of Migo’s head. The air was hot and close and ripe with the smells of dozens of different bodies. The candlelight was dim. Everyone was jabbering, usually in the local language, which I was told was called Bono, of the Bonoahafo clan.

It was as marvelous as it was dizzying. The hut would fall quiet, however, when one of us obruni spoke. Everyone, except for the youngest children, understood English. They bore in to hear our every word – how we had ridden from America and England and Germany, through Morocco and Mali and Burkina Faso to Ghana. And we like Ghana very much!

“I like you!” one young man piped up. “We like you very much to be here, thank you!”

Another young man stood close to us. He was quiet and soft-spoken and handsome. Others pointed him out to be a science student at the university in Kumasi. His name was Baffoe and he was 19 and he was studying to become a doctor. He asked for our email addresses, which we provided. I volunteered the address to this blog and encouraged him to check in several weeks for my report from Bodom.
IMG_2123Then a bearded, middle-aged man named John elbowed his way into the center of the hut. He announced himself as Bodom’s “information officer” and launched into a speech. “The people of this community are very grateful to welcome you,” he said, loudly. “May God bless you!”

Someone began singing. It was an upbeat song in the local language. Then everyone began singing, and clapping and chanting Bono words unintelligible to me. Fifty or more villagers, chanting in claustrophobic cacophony, surrounding us in the dim light and closing in.

The din grew louder, hands slapping me now about my back and shoulders, the damp heat of the jam-packed hut and bodily smells more intense than ever. The surreal crescendo rose towards a furious climax. This is where, I thought to myself, if I was in a movie, the film fades to black.

***

The next morning was bright and sunny. I stood with my friends and the school’s headmaster and teachers before a crowd of more than 100 children, along with a number of adults on the periphery. Most of the children wore blue uniforms. They were assembled in neat, long phalanxes, the boys and girls separate.

IMG_2138The headmaster addressed them in the Bono language, and in unison the children recited in English the Lord’s Prayer and sang the Ghananian national anthem. Then it was our turn. Geoff explained a little of our adventure, how motorbikes enable us to better visit villages such as Bodom, and why we had stopped here.

Then I addressed the crowd. I thanked Bodom for its hospitality and said that we had greatly enjoyed our stay. I presented the headmaster with an English-language book I had bought in Dakar, called Chaka, about a Zulu king in what is now South Africa. The headmaster explained the gift in the local language.

Then I presented an Obama sticker, noting that a black man would soon become the president of America. Finally, we donated about $30 USD to the school, for books or pens or whatever needs it might have. At this, adults and children alike broke into long and loud applause.

It was heartwarming. It took 20 minutes to exchange farewell greetings with the teachers and adults and the children. I shook my head in amazement at the whole thing. We took a left at Bodom onto a poorly maintained track to the Boabeng-Fiema Monkey Sanctuary, maneuvering through muddy ruts and around chocolate swamps.

The terrain was still slick from yesterday afternoon’s rains. It would have been a difficult ride.

***

We strolled through the rainforest monkey sanctuary with a guide named Edwin. I carried a large bag of bananas. Edwin led us to a grove and looked up into the canopied trees. He made a clucking sound and held out a banana and motioned for us to be still.

A little mona monkey watched him. Cautiously, it leapt and skittered down through trees, and hopped along towards Edwin to snatch the banana and peel it. The monkey ate. He was cute. Then we all took bananas and spent a half-hour among the monas, feeding them and watching them trapeze through the trees.

We walked deeper into the rainforest, past grand ficus trees, towards the village of Boabeng, “where human beings and monkeys live happily together,” as a sign put it. A large, mature tree lay fallen across the dirt footpath.

It had toppled yesterday afternoon, Edwin told us, in the fury of the torrential storm.

MonaMonkey

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I See an Elephant

Tamale, Ghana * November 30, 2008

NazingaElephantI suffered my first spill of the journey on a narrow, sandy, rutted and twisty piste in a wildlife preserve called Ranch de Gibier de Nazinga in southern Burkina Faso. I ran this track hard and fast. I had ridden it two days earlier, to enter the park and view some of its elephants, and on the exit knew what to expect.

It was mid-morning. The DR650 felt strong and agile, and so did I. I stood on the pegs and steered with my feet and gripped the tank lightly with my knees and gunned through long sandy stretches and took corners aggressively. First I passed Migo in a section of deep sand, and then I passed Geoff on hardpack. A few times I stole an admiring glance in the rear view mirror of the large cloud of dust I left in my wake.

The motorbike went down as I exited a rut on the far left of the track. The rear wheel slipped on what upon post-crash inspection proved to be a fairly steep incline on the right side of the rut. I had hit the throttle to return to the center of the road and the bike fishtailed from rear on the brittle earth and spun 180 degrees.

Now my bike lay on the ground pointing back towards the lodge we had left this morning. I waited for Geoff and Migo to catch up. ”You all right?” Geoff asked. I was. “You were running pretty hard there, mate.”

We took the obligatory fallen bike photos and Migo helped me hoist my DR. We stood around, taking a break and inspecting my motorbike for damage. I heard a strange sound from behind the tall grasses and trees that lined this piste – an inhuman crashing, cracking and thrashing sound.

I stood and listened, and a horrifying thought occurred to me. I said, “Is that an elephant?”

Geoff and Migo had heard it, too. “Nah, I think that’s the fire,” Geoff said. The park rangers managed fires throughout the preserve to curb excessive foliage growth and provide a savannah for the 1000 or so elephants that live here, along with lions and monkeys and baboons and water buffalo and gazelle and dozens of other species indigenous to Africa.

No, that’s not the fire, I thought. We watched and listened. It was quiet for just a moment and then again came the crashing and cracking and thrashing and I saw it, a massive dark grey head just behind the tall grasses to my left, and I exclaimed, “IT’S AN ELEPHANT!”
NazingaSpill
I grabbed my helmet and slammed it on my head and leapt on the bike. Geoff and Migo did the same, and now came a blood-curdling trumpeting. In fact, there were two elephants, less than 10 feet away from me in the grasses, and one of the creatures had its massive ears fully extended, a sign of aggression and hostility.

Don’t panic, I thought, in a suddenly panicked state. Think. Look. Do. I tried to right my bike before starting it, but it was leaned over far to the left on the irregular surface of this track, requiring a strong hoist to get it straight up.

My left foot slipped frightfully on the sloped and crumbly earth and I struggled to right the motorbike. “I can’t get my bike up!” I hollered at Geoff, but he had a problem of his own. He had started his bike but then it stalled, as in the panic in he had forgotten to put up his kickstand.

Then I heard it again, the long and mighty and bellicose trumpeting of an elephant, so close that it seemed to be from a megaphone pressed up to my ear. By instinct I could feel the massive presence of an elephant behind my left shoulder, could feel its enormous bulk and towering height, and it was moving towards me.

***
A day earlier, I’d sat in the shade of a lakeside observatory at Ranch de Gibier de Nazinga. It was mid-afternoon. We were in the bush, but it was oddly cool here …or at least, it wasn’t hot. A soothing breeze wafted across the small lake in front of me. Two small birds of an iridescent neon green frolicked in the air; a poster at the observatory informed me they were rose-ringed parakeets.

SantaElenaVZtoSanFrancisco 007And then came a mighty trumpeting. The great bull elephant’s trunk was in the air and the rest of the herd paused for a moment. Eleven elephants were on the other side of the small lake, wading into the water and splashing about, massive creatures like the bellowing bull with his huge tusks, and smaller females and adolescents and a single baby, the size of a Volkswagen Bug.

I had never seen an elephant in the wild before, and I admired these beautiful beasts as intently as I often do the motorbike that as brought me here. I was alone. The peace was luxuriant. This is Africa, I thought. I realized I had a green apple in the motorbike tankbag that I’d carried down the trail to the observatory.

I had bought the apple in Ouagadougou the day before. I bit into it and it was sweet and good, so incredibly delicious that I studied it closely to be sure that it was, indeed, an apple. The motorcycle journey, it occurred to me, makes the simplest things the grandest of all.

After a half-hour, the elephants repaired to the savannah, out of my sight. I found Geoff and Migo back at the restaurant lodge. We passed the afternoon relaxing and reading the discussing various problems afflicting both Geoff’s and Migo’s motorbikes. The front and rear lights and RPM indicator on Migo’s KTM 950 Adventure had failed.

Migo had stripped the bike in the morning and we analyzed for a blown fuse or bare wire that might be the root cause. We could find nothing. And he had changed the fluid to his rear brake, which had been inoperable on the moderately technical 30-mile piste here. On this sort of dirt road, you want to favor the rear brake, as the front brake can lock up the front tire and put the bike down.

To make matters worse, Migo was still running a worn road tire on the front, rather than the aired-down knobby that would be ideal. “That was fun,” Migo said with understatement of his piste ride to the lodge.

Geoff had his own problems. The bleed valve on the oil cooler he had installed on his Yamaha XT 600 back in Dakar to lower its engine temperature had failed catastrophically. He’d lost perhaps a liter of oil before he noticed a huge stain of oil on his left leg. He’d fixed the problem with Loctite, but the failure was troubling.

Still, the bikes were running. We were happy. We enjoyed a dinner of chicken and rice and peas and green beans and toasted some Castel beers. Tomorrow we would continue through the park, down the semi-technical track for maybe three or four miles towards what my GPS indicated was a broad, graded piste to the town of Leo in Burkina Faso and a border crossing into Ghana.

IMG_1992
Except there was no broad, graded piste to Leo just a few miles down the track. The GPS was wrong. And so were a few fellows from the lodge, who had assured me that, yes, head down that track and you will shortly come to the main piste to Leo. Is the track OK for a large motorbike? Easy? Difficult?

No probleme pour moto! they assured us.

We headed down the track. It snaked off in various and confusing directions. It was more narrow and technical and overgrown than the piste that has brought us here, from Po – little more than a small farm footpath. We found a small village and asked for directions. That way. And now this guy said that the farm-track would run for 12 miles – not a mere three -- before it reconnected with the main piste.

Fifteen minutes later we stood in front of a smallish body of water. Locals had used rocks to fashion something of a bridge. I walked through the water and found the bed littered with sizable rocks. Water fordings are great fun, but you want to be sure you’re not running a rocky bed. Chances are good you’ll go down if your front tire strikes a large, slippery rock.

My vote was to push the bikes across the water and continue on the farm track. It couldn’t be that bad, I reasoned, and it would exit somewhere, probably. Geoff and Migo voted to turn around and return east towards Po, from which we had come, so we did. Consensus prevails.

***

You know, even as they are unfolding, that certain moments in your life will never be forgotten. Forever I will be able to feel the presence of the elephant over my left shoulder, and the characteristics of that presence. It felt colossal and leaden and electrically charged. It was as if I was in proximity to a primal force of nature -- the force that governs the movement of planets around a star, or protons and electrons around the subatomic nucleus.

The blare of the elephant’s trumpeting, too, is imprinted forever in memory. It was terrifying and as loud as anything I have ever heard, and yet as these moments unfolded, I found myself watching myself in a sort of slow motion – filming myself, as it were. The memory of it is as clear and hard as a diamond.

IMG_1952I righted the DR with all my strength and concentration from its severe lean to the left on the sloped road surface. Don’t panic. Execute. You have started a motorbike a million times. I turned the key on. I pulled in the clutch lever. I hit the starter button. The DR started immediately, even after my crash. I jammed the foot shift lever from second gear down to first and took off.

Immediately I was confronted by a large, deep, gravelly rut running vertically down a slight decline. I had no choice. There was no time to maneuver. I took the rut and the front wheel shimmied hard and slipped and silently I screamed at myself: Don’t dump this bike!

I kept the bike in a steady second gear, acutely conscious of avoiding a crash. I stole glances in the rear view mirror for an elephant charging down the piste behind me. The road was empty. After a quarter mile or so, I stopped. I parked horizontally across a clean stretch of the piste, so that I could take off either to the left or right, as circumstances might dictate.

I was drunk with adrenaline. My heart was pounding. I took a deep breath and debated whether to get off the bike. Finally I did, and removed my helmet as well, and stood and listened and figured what to do. On a deeper level, I marveled that I had just experienced an unforgettable moment, and I shook my head at the fantastic unbelievability of it all. I even smiled.

I thought, too, of my armored Icon motorcycle gloves. They had fallen to the ground in all the excitement, but there had been no time to pick them up. I wondered how I might be able to retrieve them, or whether they would need to be a sacrifice to the elephant gods.

Because of the way my motorbike landed after the spill, I had fled back towards the lodge. Geoff and Migo had gone in the opposite direction. Again I heard a sound in the bush – the same cracking and crashing and thrashing sound I had heard minutes earlier. By gut instinct, in a matter of seconds, I decided which way to go – towards Geoff and Migo and out of the park. I slammed my helmet on, started the bike and took off.

My reasoning was that the elephant I had just heard was the same I had encountered a quarter mile earlier. But that was incorrect. As I approached the scene of my crash, I could see the towering grey heads of two elephants and heard again the powerful trumpeting. I rode past briskly, ruefully eyeing my prized motorcycle gloves lying on the ground.

Geoff and Migo were waiting for me a half mile to the east. We were shaking and smirking and trembling and laughing all at once, wanting to say a million things in a minute. I shook Geoff’s hand and then Migo’s and we talked in rapid-fire about how the moments had unfolded and our various perspectives and then again came the awful crashing sound in the bush. We bolted.

***
IMG_1961The main entrance to the park was less than four miles down the piste. I was in the lead, and kept my eyes trained to the left and the right for elephants. As I rode, it occurred to me how foolish I had been to ride aggressively on a semi-technical piste in a wildlife preserve. The potential consequences had never occurred to me.

I shrugged it off quickly, though, because the thrill of what had just happened was more electrifying than anything I had ever experienced.

We stopped at the entrance gate and were greeted by a half-dozen men who worked for the park. Now, in this relative safety, Geoff and Migo and I could relive the incident for the first time of what would be many to come.

“I saw the elephant – two of them, actually -- and you,” Migo said. “He was very close to you – like two meters. And then it started trumpeting. The last thing I saw was him moving towards you.”

Geoff said, “I saw the elephant’s ears go wide and I thought, ‘Oh man, this is serious.’

“I think the fire probably had the elephants scared,” Geoff went on. “They must have been fleeing the fire and came across us in their path and man they were pissed.”

We retold the tale to the park workers and they listened, eyes wide and chuckling. Stupid tourists. I asked if they had a car or a truck. I would gladly pay them for a ride down the road to pick up my motorcycle gloves, which after serving me well for 35,000 miles through Latin America and now Africa had accrued a sentimental value.

IMG_2001They had no car. A 4x4 full of tourists passed through, but the vehicle had suspension problems and the driver was loath to help me out. I told Geoff and Migo to run the 20 miles down to Po and have lunch and I would catch up.

A kid about 18 years old who worked at the park overheard me talking about my lost gloves. He had a small Suzuki 200. He would run down to fetch them, with a friend on the back.

“But the elephants?” I asked. He just smiled. No problem. He returned 20 minutes later with my gloves intact. The elephants, he said, were still there at the scene. I gave them 4000 CFA each (about $8 USD) and an Obama sticker for the kid’s bike. I remembered the word from my French study – oublier.

I told the kid, “Ce je ne oublie pas.” This I will never forget.

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Them

Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso * November 27, 2008

IMG_1800They watch us. We watch them.

They’re harvesting millet in a sun-parched field or sitting idly outside a wooden shack or a thatch hut. A shirtless man is laboring along on a rusty single-speed bicycle towards town with a large load of branches fastened up on the rear. Two others on a smoky moped potter along on the shoulder of the road.

Women in colorful dresses and headscarves stroll through a village with baskets full of tuber roots on their heads and babies in pouches on their backs. Men sit on wooden benches and plastic chairs and watch their goats amble about a dusty street while barefoot children kick a dented can or lounge in the shade of a tree to escape from the burning sun.

The settlements are shockingly poor to the Western eye. Every day the sight is the same -- mud homes and cockeyed weathered shacks and dirt streets and broken vehicles and creaky bicycles and scrawny chickens and frisky goats and garbage scattered liberally about.

They hear us coming. Heads swivel in unison. Some stand to look, so arresting is the sound. Then they see us – three monstrously large, outrageously outfitted adventure motorbikes from distant lands. I can only imagine what they hear – a three-stanza Doppler Effect symphony as we roar past:

Vrrrrrrrrrrr-OOOOOOOOOOMMM!

Vrrrrrrrrrrr-OOOOOOOOOOMMM!

Vrrrrrrrrrrr-OOOOOOOOOOMMM!

We are acutely conspicuous. The motorbikes command attention. They are huge and loud and ostentatiously arrayed with gear – the big silver top box on the back of my Suzuki DR, the sleek panniers on the sides of my partners’ motorbikes.

IMG_1440And there is us, riders flamboyantly attired in large shiny helmets and armored gloves and fortified riding pants and big black buckled boots and rugged jackets and alien goggles and dark sunglasses.

Some gape in what appears to be amazement. Some observe each rider individually, heads turning back and forth like a kitten watching a ping-pong ball. Many smile and nod and wave, and of course we return the greeting. Many break out in an appreciative grin and thrust a thumbs-up or holler an unintelligible encouragement.

A few scowl. Fewer still narrow their dark eyes in palpable hostility. Others watch with narcotic apathy, their faces expressionless. But rarely does someone see us and simply look away.

I can only imagine what they see and think as we ride past. They stare, as would I if I saw an equally alien spectacle in the United States -- three donkey carts loaded with wood and thatch and piloted by barefoot and shirtless men wearing headscarves, creaking through the streets of downtown San Francisco.

By and large, they are poor and uneducated. We are, comparatively, immensely wealthy. Many are illiterate and eke out an existence by subsistence farming; we have college degrees and are educated in geography and history and mathematics and literature. We have traveled the world. Many of them have never been beyond the next village.

DogonThe gulf between us is galactic. It compels my consideration. One, I am intensely curious about what these people – them, for lack of a better word – think and see as we ride past, and what they are doing there along the road.

Two, I struggle to come to grips with having an audience, with being the center of attention, if even for an instant. Why are they beaming and smiling so brightly, why are they thrusting their thumbs in the air or pumping their fists? It can turn your worldview and sense of identity inside out.

But often it is more than an instant. When we stop for a break, the crowds that surround us can be large. Two dozen people, 50 people, even more than 100.

One singular thing supplies a common denominator that they see and appreciate in an instant – the motorbike.

***
Geoff and I lodged at an auberge called Maison de Arts in Sevare, Mali. It’s a lovely place, with clean, simple rooms and a scrupulously tended garden courtyard. It had been recommended by Peter Cullen, who for the past several days had been off on his own exploring Mali’s tourist jewel, the Dogon Country.

IMG_1294
I had been wondering how Peter was doing. It was about time for him to turn around and head back towards England to meet a November 29 deadline, and it saddened me to think I probably would not see him again.

It was morning, and I was getting started with the task of installing new knobby TKC 80s on the DR650 in the Maison de Arts courtyard to better ride the sandy piste run to Timbuktu. I heard Geoff say, “Hey hey hey hey hey hey!”

I looked up to see Peter maneuvering his BMW 650 Dakar into the courtyard. His stopping here was a pleasant surprise, and the three of us spent the next hour trading stories of our adventures. I hadn’t seen Peter since November 4 in Ziguinchor, Senegal, when I took off solo for Cap Skirring on the coast, and Peter and Geoff rode east towards Mali.

Peter’s biggest bit of news was from an email Migo had sent the group. Neither Geoff not I had checked email recently, so we were delighted to learn that Migo had fixed his KTM’s water pump problem back in Ziguinchor and was heading towards Mali.

Over farewell beers at Maison de Arts that evening, we got to talking about why we were riding motorcycles through Third World nations. I found Peter’s perspective interesting. He is a lifelong traveler, by planes and buses and trains, but only 15 years ago, at age 53, had he begun motorcycling.

Peter started touring in Europe, and then made a two-wheeled foray into Turkey and Syria, and now he was in Africa for a second time on a motorbike. He was hooked.

“A lot of it is that the bike enables you to better engage with the people,” Peter said. “You see how the crowds form around you, and all the waves and the greetings we get from people along the road. The motorcycle intrigues people much more than a car, or if you’re getting around on a bus. Then you look like any ordinary tourist.”

Bankass
But we didn’t look like ordinary tourists, not when we were on or near our motorbikes. A loaded adventure bike is perhaps the most compelling conversation piece outside of the Western world. It is among the most outrageously conspicuous vehicles to pass through the areas we have ridden.

When we stop for fuel or a cold drink in the middle of the night, a crowd gathers – as many as 100 people. It is an incredible phenomenon. The questions come, along with a studied curiosity of our motorbikes, our gear, and us, white men in black Africa.

A toothless man will ask where we are from, and whistle when we tell him. I’ll trace our route on the sticker of the African continent affixed to the rear of my bike’s top box. A teen-ager will point to my GPS unit as a way of asking what it is.

A boy tugs on the motocross armor that I wear and asks for a cadeaux. Another boy pets the stuffed rat that Geoff has fastened up to his front fender and giggles. An old man pats his stomach and points to his mouth and looks at me beseechingly.

Outside our hotel in Ouagadougou, the capital of Burkina Faso, I asked a guy whether he and everyone else in the crowd would pay so much attention to us if we were not on motorbikes.

He thought about it for a minute. ”No,” he said. “Your motorcycles are very beautiful. Very beautiful.”

He stepped back to admire the bikes and went on, “I would like to travel on a motorcycle. You are doing something we can only dream of. We have no money. There are no jobs. You can’t even buy a big motorcycle here. You are strong men. You are seeing more of Africa than Africans ever do.”

IMG_1455
I want them to understand us. I want them to see that we are good and ordinary men, though our elaborate motorcycle attire may suggest otherwise. I think occasionally of what a small boy in Latin America said to my friend Joe Ortega of San Francisco, who rode South America in an armored motocross flak jacket and big buckled Sidi Discovery boots: “Are you a Power Ranger?”

That’s the impression that I believe some of the children have – we are from another world. And in many ways, we are – same planet, different world.

I hope that somehow, some way, we provide some sort of inspiration. Maybe there’s one kid in a crowd of 20 who will study harder or strive to go to college because of the impression that we and our motorbikes make. It’s hard to say, and perhaps I am overstating. But maybe not.

Many of the towns and villages in which we stop are dirt poor. Some of the people having nothing more than a filthy shirt and a plastic water jug and a stick and rubber sandals and space in a crowded mud hut and the hope of one meal a day – some rice with sauce and a boiled egg. In towns with no electricity or running water, I suspect that a visit from an adventure motorcyclist may be the highlight of the day, the week, maybe the month.

It is difficult to know. The motorbike engages people, but often my interaction with them raises more questions than it answers. It is maddeningly fleeting and superficial. The language barrier often makes meaningful conversation virtually impossible.

We are besieged with requests for gifts or money. Some requests I oblige with a coin or a balloon. At one stop, a boy tugged on my arm and asked for a pen. It was a small, impoverished settlement. His eyes were big and brown and earnest. He wanted a pen for school, because he didn’t have one.

I carry three pens for journal writing, a blue and a red and a green. I gave him the green one, and the other children wanted a pen as well. A day later, I would buy a selection of pens to give away the next time I was asked.

Ouaga
Most times I cannot satisfy the requests, simply because I don’t have enough coins or balloons or pens. One would need a tractor trailer full of coins and balloons and pens for all the children and other people who would like something.

Another sort of person we frequently encounter in larger, touristed towns is the merchant, the hustler, the tout. They are selling African masks or bracelets or tapestry or wooden elephants. They see us coming and hustle over and make a quick introduction and inquire about our nationalities and our motorbikes. Then they launch into a sales pitch. The zeal with which they attempt to close a sale can be astounding.

That farewell night at Maison de Arts, Peter Cullen reminded us of a bit from a book called Adventure Motorcycling by Chris Scott. “As the book said, these guys have barely anything,” Peter said. “No healthcare, no Social Security – they’re just trying to get by.”

Part of the challenge of adventure riding is dealing with these hustlers graciously when you are hungry and tired and irritable, and after you have politely and repeatedly declined a purchase and explained you can afford neither the weight nor the volume of a nice African mask on your motorbike, and they continue to pester and harass and tag along.

Peter left the next morning. We bade him farewell outside Maison de Arts and watched him turn the corner from a dirt street, bound for England. The crowd of dozens of youngsters and adults that had gathered to watch the rich adventure rider setting off on his big fancy motorbike now turned its attention to Geoff and I.

With us was Kaye, the gracious 50-something English proprietress of Maison de Arts. Kaye said, “I would think you like theatre, because everywhere you go and everything you do, you will always have an audience in Africa.”

An audience of many – many, many, many thousands of them.

***

IMG_1787Little has changed here in centuries. There is no electricity or running water. People live off the earth in the same manner as their ancestors. They harvest millet and onions and tend cattle and goats. Their mud homes are built with unique conical roofs of thatch. This is Mali’s Dogon Country, a string of primitive settlements at the base of the vaulting and picturesque Bandiagara escarpment.

With his KTM repaired, Migo had caught up with Geoff and I in Sevare and we rode pavement, and then a red-dirt piste, to reach Dogon Country. Now Geoff headed off solo to a town called Koro with the idea of fixing a motorcycle for a Dogon village leader he had met, while Migo and I opted to stop in a tiny village called Kani-Kombole.

To the east from Kani-Kombole was a sandy track, leading to villages named Teli and Ende and Yabatolou and Doundjourou and Gimini and Nombori and Tirelli and Ireli and Banani and Ibi and Koundou and Youga-Dogourou and Sanga and Bamba and Bongo. These are rural settlements with no infrastructure. Migo and I stood at the intersection and debated whether to ride the track. As always, a crowd gathered.

A man on horseback told us the track was very sandy – deep sand. It will be difficult on your big bike, he said. Stay here in Kani-Kombole, he said, and we can take you to Ende on horseback.

Migo and I decided to try the track. It was indeed difficult, with deep sand and dry riverbeds and tight corners and shadows from trees that made it difficult to assess the terrain. And it was well trafficked by people and donkeys and goats and cattle. To better enjoy Dogon Country, we returned to Kani-Konbole and arranged to tent at a place called Campement Arneme.

In the afternoon, we set off for a six-mile ride to Ende on the back of a wooden cart pulled by an ox named Nanga. Our guide was named Sekou. He was 23 years old and fascinated by the idea of America. Someday, he said, he would like to go there.

IMG_1807
On the hour-long ride to Ende, I observed the people. They greeted each other in the local language, with a well practiced exchange that was almost musical. Everyone said the same thing: How are you? Well, and you? Fine, how is your mother? Well, how is your father? In the Dogon language, this was a rhythmic, singsong dialogue, pleasing to the ear.

The Dogon people are notable for having resisted Muslim influence and preserving the way of life of their ancestors. They believe in a single god called Amma, with an elaborate creation myth. On the ride to Ende, we could see holes in the cliffs of the grand escarpment. Centuries ago, people lived on those cliffs. The caves date to the third century B.C. How they got up and down, I have no idea.

In Ende, women pounded millet. Men lounged about on benches and talked. Tourist activity here is brisk, and local entrepreneurs offered jewelry and carvings and colorful cloth. Migo and I bought pieces of cloth and fastened them up as seat covers – Africanizing the motorbikes bikes, as Migo put it.

It was a beautiful and fascinating journey into another time and another world, where traditional ways of life have been preserved and even honed, to better sustain tourism and its economic benefits. That night, back at Campement Arneme, our guide, Sekou, played with his cell phone.

Kani-Kombole had no electricity except from solar panels and diesel motors, but unlike the Dogon villages to the east, it had a cell phone tower. Throughout Africa, I have observed that life’s priorities seem to be food first and a cell phone second. Cell phones are used in all but the poorest communities. This makes sense, because the importance of family and community in Africa is far greater than in the West.

Sekou sat with Migo and I for a dinner of chicken and couscous at Campement Arneme. It was dark. We ate by gas lantern. The couscous was hot and delicious. I had told Sekou I had a gift for him in appreciation for his good work as our guide to Ende, and now I got out an Obama sticker.

IMG_1844
“Barack Obama!” he declared. He was enchanted with the idea of a half-black man becoming the president of the United States. The next morning, he showed up at the campement with a small American flag draped about his shoulders.

After dinner, Migo got out the IBM ThinkPad laptop he had bought in Senegal and played music by the Malian artist Ali Farka Touré and showed pictures of our trip to a crowd of eight or 10 young men. Then I showed my pictures on my computer, too. They watched intently as we explained our travels by bike through Senegal and Mali.

Our motorbikes were parked just 10 feet away. After our picture session, we sat quietly at the outdoor table. The young men remained, just sitting there with us. Someone would say something, then it was quiet. It was enough simply to be.

We slept outdoors next to our motorbikes. The stars were amazingly dense and bright and resplendent in the clear night sky.

***

The first thing that struck me about Ouagadougou, the capital of Burkina Faso, was neon lights. We rode into the city at dusk, through rivers of scooters and small motorbikes. The density of bikes here was matched only by that in the Malian capital, Bamako. These are dirty, two-stroke machines, and chiefly responsible for the huge cloud of smog that hung over Ouagadougou.

IMG_1507In the dark, we found a cheap, shabby hotel in the center of town called Hotel Zaaka. We took cold showers and stepped out for dinner, and two blocks away were neon lights for banks and insurance companies. I couldn’t recall having seen a neon light since Dakar, Senegal. Burkina was by no means prosperous, but clearly it was more economically advanced than the poor Malian towns and cities through which we had ventured.

Over my two days in Ouagadougou, I saw traffic lights and public waste receptacles. These were uncommon sights, as well. Some downtown streets were graced by large, leafy trees. Most of the streets were paved. Along them were a variety of small stores selling electrical equipment and hardware and cell phones and even, I was pleased to see, books.

People were all over. The city was a bustle. It was noisy and busy and throbbing. Young men selling pornographic CDs and phone cards and magazines hung about the Marina Market, a sizable, semi-modern supermarket three blocks from our hotel, waiting for a white person to come along. They would implore a purchase and chat us up. In the evening, hundreds of hookers sat at large outdoor patio bars that reminded me of Paris or Rome.

Everyone is friendly. My Rough Guide to West Africa called Burkina Faso the “friendliest country on the continent,” and that seemed approximately correct.

Across the street from Marina Market, I spotted a sign that said horloge – clock, in the French. I wanted to buy an alarm clock. The man had a small one for sale. How much? I asked.

Forty-thousand CFA, he said. I laughed out loud and waved him off and started to walk away. It was a cheap, Chinese-made piece of junk that might or might not work – and he wanted $80 USD for it!

You have to love these guys. They are bold and inventive. You can see them thinking furiously once you ask the price. The clock-seller trotted down the street after me, and then began the negotiating process. We argued and bickered, but he would go no lower than $20 USD. Finally, I gritted my teeth and told him no and turned on my heels and walked firmly away, while he trotted along beside me for the next block until finally giving up.

Later, I stopped at a bank to withdraw money from its ATM. The clock guy found me and negotiations resumed. After 15 minutes, I had him down to $10 USD. Close enough. I bought the thing, and was not surprised to find that it lost 10 minutes every hour.

BarryA bank security guard watched me negotiate with the clock-seller. He said, “You speak good French.” I laughed, because I do not speak good French.

I got to talking with the guard. His name was Barry. He was 27 years old and from Conakry, the capital of Guinea. He had moved to Ouagadougou three months earlier, from The Gambia, where he had lived for two years and learned good English while making a living selling clothing.

He came to Ouagadougou, he said, to earn money to send back to his four younger brothers and sisters and his blind father. His mother was dead. He stood about 5 foot 6 inches and was slightly built and his face was soft and open and handsome. He showed me the inside of his forearms. They were covered with what appeared to be puncture wounds, like a heroin junkie’s.

These were mosquito bites. He had slept on the street, homeless, for a few weeks after arriving in Ouagadougou. He was penniless. Mosquitoes ate him alive, and he contracted malaria.

He recovered and found a job as a bank security guard. He worked seven days a week, 10 hours a day, from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. He earned 25,000 CFA a month – about $50 USD. That’s $600 USD a year. I invited him to join me, and Geoff and Migo, for dinner that evening. We sat at an outdoor table at a place called Le Bureau.

We talked about white men and black men. “It is hard to speak with the white man,” Barry told me. “He is always so serious and he does not have time. He doesn’t want to speak with me. I don’t think he likes me. The white man needs to take it easy.”

“But Barry,” I told him, “it can be difficult to speak with the black man. Every day the black man asks me for money or tries to sell me something. In Ouagadougou I have been approached by, what … dozens of men, 50 men? In two days. I cannot speak with every one of them and become their friends. You saw me today with the clock-seller. It’s not easy for us.”

OuagaDinner
I asked Barry how the black man felt about the legacy of slavery. He didn’t recognize the word immediately, but then said, “Oh – colonialism!” He grew animated and his soft voice ratcheted up a couple of octaves. He had learned about colonialism in school, and volunteered that Kunta Kinte, the protagonist in Alex Haley’s book Roots, hailed from a village in The Gambia, not far from where he had lived.

“Some black men, they cannot let it go. They hate,” Barry told me. “For me, it is past tense. I have to forget the past of Africa to make my future – to make my way.”

He picked at his omelette and refilled his glass with Castel beer and took out his wallet and wrote on a piece of paper, “Tonight Wednesday 26 November 2008 I have dinner with three white men, Mark of America and his two friends.”

What Barry really wanted, he said, was to finish his education. Some years ago, he had taken a couple of college computer classes. “But it is so expensive,” he said. “Life is hard. It’s a bitch, man. There are no good jobs here. They pay me nothing.”

He looked at me hopefully.

***
IMG_2330People alongside the paved road from Douentza to Sevare in Mali clapped and cheered as Geoff and I rode by. It was an incredible sight. I had not seen people clap and cheer before. It was oddly unsettling. It wasn’t just one group of people, but several groups of people, in different settlements.

If you didn’t know better, you could easily imagine that they were clapping because they knew you had just ridden a sandy and challenging 130-mile piste from Timbuktu to Douentza strongly and well. As if they mysteriously apprehended the magnitude of your whole Africa ride and were cheering you on. The sight of those people clapping and cheering was so affecting that it came to me in dreams.

They – them – are my audience. I entertain them. We are, in some strange and symbiotic way, in this journey together.

I rode through Venezuela in May 2005, bound for its capital, Caracas, and a plane flight to Miami. My eight-month ride through Latin America was about to come to an end. I motored through small, poor rural communities and outside their decrepit homes and wooden shacks shirtless men and barefoot boys and women and girls beamed and smiled and waved and hollered at the spectacle that I was.

I cried. Tears streamed down my cheeks inside my helmet. I rode and cried for their hardship and privation and earnestness and joy and innocence and hope. For eight consecutive months I had seen them, every hour, every day that I rode through their communities.

I knew I would miss their beaming brown faces and their waving hands and their big bright smiles and the children, jumping and yelling and chasing after me and my big loud outrageous motorbike. I had come to love them.
Burkina

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