Here’s a pic of the “easy part” (stolen from another overlander’s website - not sure where exactly this is on the road, but a looooot of it looks just like it):

The first day on the road was uneventful, and I cruised along at about 120k/hr when I wasn’t dodging massive potholes and completly insane homicidal Congolese drivers.

Late in the day, I turned off the tarmac and onto the mud, which quickly turned into hardpacked sand.  Riding on the hardpacked stuff is just like riding on dirt, and I puttered along fine until it got too dark to see.

I had started to set my tent up on the far side of a road embankment when two locals pushing ancient bicycles came by.  The older (and slightly crazier) one claimed to be the chief of the village down the road, told me I HAD to come spend the night at his house as his honored guest, and in fact several tourists had stayed in his house the previous year.

I couldn’t turn down the offer, especially not when Mr. Chief kept on slapping his chest and saying “vous vienez a MON maison!  MON maison!” with his buggly eyes.  So I puttered down the road to the village, where I sat around watching the women cook, watching about 30 kids watch me, and waiting for Mr. Chief to wheel his bicycle back to the village.

After sitting around for an hour, Mr. Chief came to fetch me, after apparently having forgotten that he had invited me to his village.  Also note that during this time, I had repeatedly asked about when the chief was coming, only to be met with puzzled amusement.  Also note that it wasn’t an issue with my French but rather the fact that Mr. Chief is actually only Secretary of the Village (yes they have a Secretary), but he will still be referred to here as Mr. Chief.

Here’s a picture of the chief and his house:

Mr. Chief then spent the next 30 minutes cleaning and prepping the room where I was to spend the night as his guest (note the blanket he draped over the door for my privacy).

After a dinner of palm wine and glucose biscuits and an hour of being stared at in front of the fire by the local kids while Mr. Chief drank a whole bottle of palm wine and babbled in what must have been half-French half -Likongo and totally crazy, I hung my mosquito net in my room and hit the sack, knowing I had a loooooong day ahead of me.

I rose at dawn, packed the bike, said my goodbyes, and headed out on the road (sand) around 7am.

It was mostly hardpacked sand until the Congo border, and I was pretty euphoric about reaching what I thought was the end of the sand around 2pm.  There is about 30k between borders - once you leave Congo there’s a pretty large stretch of no man’s land until you reach what is technically Gabon, but considering it’s pretty dense jungle with not much else, I’m not sure anyone really cares.

There was one section that was mostly mud and in relative thick jungle cover, and I picked a line through a flooded section that avoided the deepest part of the water.  I slowed down too much riding across some flat rocks and like the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man, I slow-motion tipped the bike over, pretty much submerging it under water.  I managed to stay mostly on my feet, and as I sat there in thigh-deep water and mud, staring at the bike like an idiot, I started to realize that my (underwater) tank bag, which not only was not waterproof nor even fully closed, contained my Nikon camera, both lenses, my Ipod, and all my power cables.

Oops.

As soon as I figured THAT out, I ripped the tank bag off the bike, and as far as I can tell, after a little au naturale drying, everything survived.

I arrived at the Gabonese border on a stretch that was getting progressively more difficult in the looseness and depth of the sand tracks, and the border cop went through an excrutiatingly painful explanation in both English and French of exactly why the 2000 CFA exit fee (about 5 USD at the time) was required by the government, and was not, in fact, going into his pocket like every other “official fee” on the continent.  I almost offered to bribe him just to stop talking about how he wasn’t asking for a bribe - which may have been a whole metaphysical reverse-reverse psychology thing, which makes my glorified motorcycle mechanic brain hurt.

Anyways - things went downhill after that.

Really downhill.

The sand got thicker, the day got longer, and I got more bike-droppier (Editor’s note:  not actually an adjective).

In fact, during one uphill stretch of deep sand in a clearing that passed through a village, I dumped the bike right in front of a bunch of kids playing kick-the-ball-of-rags-tied-together.  They all immediately rushed over to help me pick the bike up, laughing hysterically at me the whole time.

I thanked them, got on the bike, headed up, and promptly dumped the bike about 20 meters up the road.  The kids all roared with laughter again and rushed over to help me again, I thanked them, and then - surprise! - I dumped the bike again about another 50 meters up the road.  Again, everyone roared with laughter and ran down the road to help me up again, as there is nothing like a white man dressed like an alien falling off an overloaded motorcycle to brighten your day.

As you might imagine, by this point I was getting a little tired of dumping the bike and either trapping myself underneath it next to a sand berm or just slamming myself against the ground.  The problem really was due to several things:  1) I wasn’t going fast enough in the sand, and every time my back tire started to squirm I let off the gas - a definite no-no 2) I wasn’t packed well - I had too much weight too high and too far back and 3) I wasn’t standing on the pegs or shifting my body weight often enough.  Plus, the more I dropped the bike, the more I had to struggle to get it back up again (and/or repair something) which drained the life out of me in the heat and humidity.  It wasn’t much hotter than about 80-85 F, but at 95% humidity in full gear and direct sunlight I was getting a serious ass-kicking.

After dropping the bike a few more times (out of view of an entire village these times), it was getting late in the day, and I seemed like I was nowhere near my destination (the road supposedly turned into tar sometime soon), and I was starting to get discouraged, tired, and frustrated.  I had read that other overlanders on bikes had done this stretch in a day, and it looked like I wasn’t going to be able to do it (NB:  I read later on that in fact, most people did the hard loose-sand part in one day, and another half day to do the hard-packed sand - oops).

As the shadows grew longer, a truck that I had passed in a previous village watched me topple over another time pulled up and the crew hopped out and tried to convince me to load the bike in the truck.  They seemed trustworthy, and genuinely concerned that some idiot white tourist kept on dropping his motorcycle and may just plop face-down in the sand and never move again, and who wants to have your truck squish over THAT?

I declined the offer, but after figuring out that the tar didn’t start for another 50k (which would have taken me another 2 hours at least if I didn’t set the bike on fire in frustration first), I begrudgingly accepted after dropping the bike again another 10 meters away (may have been subconscious - who knows).

So the crew of the truck helped me load the bike into the back, we lashed it to the sidewalls, and I climbed in after it for a ridiculously bumpy ride with the crew as we flew at breakneck speeds through the sand.

For the first time I really felt like I was “cheating” - hitching a ride instead of toughing out the road, and combined with the misery of the day, I was not exactly in high spirits.

I felt like I really hadn’t planned ahead, both in timing, ride skills, packing,  and mental preparation for the sand, and was feeling pretty down on myself.

The true irony, of course, was that my lack of preparation paled in comparison to that of the truck crew.

Their (my?) first mistake was letting them secure the bike.  I had monitored it pretty carefully, chiding them for running my ropes and bungee cords through anything that looked like metal (who would EVER hook a bungee cord through a rotor unless they were desperately trying to deform it?), but let them, under their extreme insistence of “no problem no problem!”, rig the bike via the handlebars vs. only via the frame.

About 10ks into what was apparently the first of a series of “Formula One - Gabon Edition” races, the bike was flying around so much against the rigging and the sidewalls of the truck that the handlebars, which are just one-inch aluminum tubing, had deformed completely (one side was bent up completely at 90 degrees basically).  I didn’t realize it until it was too late, and given my mental state, I was aghast, making the crew stop the truck to attempt to re-rig, and periodically screaming at everyone and bemoaning loudly like a wounded dog how awful the situation was.

I finally gave up and accepted that I was going to have to somehow get it fixed somewhere in one of the cities on the Gabon side, and cringed over every bump as we made our way out of the jungle and sand, finally arriving where the road began about 30ks before Leconi, the first town on the Gabon side.

It was about 8pm, my cell phone had been smashed during one of my falls (or possibly my attempt at motorcycle SCUBA-diving), and my back was in incredible pain from lifting the bike over and over again, but I was in relatively high spirits - I was back on the road, I had enough water left to last me until we arrived at Leconi, and I could lay down in the truck among the packages of glucose biscuits and my bike and take a semi-nap.

Unfortunately for me, and the rest of the truck crew, there was not exactly going to be an on-time arrival in Leconi, and once again, things were going to get worse before they got better.

Both cities are dirty and run down, and fit my usual description when describing ex-colonial African cities to foreigners:

“Imagine a mid-size European city, with wide boulevards, planters in the medians, etc. Now imagine most of the streets never get paved and just potholed dirt or sand tracks. Now imagine no one does any maintenance or any trash collection for 100 years. And now imagine it’s filled with 10 times as many Africans as it was designed to hold.”

After the mental and physical stress of the DRC and northern Angola, I was looking forward to recovering a bit in Brazzaville, and stocking up on supplies, such as a new tent, as mine had disappeared off my bike in Kinshasa somewhere, most likely due to a crappy lashing job and hitting massive potholes at high speed.

I camped for free in the pool room at the Hotel Hippocampe, which is a run by Olivier, a french ex-pat, and his Vietnamese wife, Catherine. Olivier spent two years riding his bicycle around the world, and really understands the needs of overland travelers and isn’t put off by us being covered in dirt and oil and disassembling motorcycles in front of the hotel.

In the hills outside the city there were a surprising amount of very nice houses in private compounds (obviously belonging to either government officials or the business elite - ok so they are the same thing), and there was a surprisingly small amount of shanty towns ringing the main road into the city, unlike Luanda’s kilometers upon kilometers of shanty towns and non-existent roads.

As I descended out of the hills towards to Congo river, I started to get more and more worried that without a GPS, map, compass, or any sense of direction whatsoever (I get lost in my hometown - regularly - this is not a joke), I was going to be up a certain creek without a paddle.  As all you excellent geography students know, part of the Congo river separates the DRC from the Republic of Congo (yes they are different), and the only way to cross is by ferry.

I knew that the road curved quite a bit to get to the port, but after a few attempts to head towards what looked like the waterfront, I found myself along a dirt path in heavy traffic along the water heading away from the city. I started asking people who didn’t look either completely insane or destitute for directions in my mangled french, and I finally after a bunch of nonsensical answers and “oui!”’s that were obviously not supposed to be “oui,” I found a guy at what used to be a gas station who spoke a little bit of english and told me not only was I headed in the completely wrong direction, but the last ferry left at 4.

Oops.

I then entered what is known colloquially as “ohshitthisisbaduhohuhohuhoh” or more formally as “panic mode.”

I turned around and started heading as fast as possible over the potholed dirt road in thick traffic as fast as possible, skidding once with both brakes applied to avoid hitting a government-ish looking tinted-window SUV that decided it was going to try to pass at breakneck speed - we both stopped about 5 feet away from each other - not a fun close call.

Another thing to note - I had been having headlight issues since Namibia, as the main fan relay had melted and I had hotwired to the fan to the the ignition. (There was another problem but I didn’t sort that out until later - you’ll just have to wait for THAT story.) The main accessory fuse that covers the headlight and fan kept blowing, and of course I blew my very last fuse sometime that afternoon in the DRC and the darker it got, the less I could see.

There aren’t really any street lights in Africa - sometimes the government likes to play pretend and build some to appease a few angry mobs here and there, but they don’t actually hook them up to power, and a good chunk of cars and little chinese motorcycles that are on the road at night don’t have headlights (why bother? who needs to see?).

So as I made my way around to where the port actually was, it was almost completely dark, I had no headlight, no cooling fan (which means that the bike will overheat quickly when in traffic), no way to catch a long-gone ferry, no map, no GPS, and I just happened to be driving around in one of the worst neighborhoods in Kinshasa.

Being in a bad neighborhood in Kinshasa is like being in a bad neighborhood in Afghanistan - WTF are you doing there in the FIRST place?

So as I am driving along, starting to get more and desperate, knowing that there is no tourist infrastructure, what few hotels there are are outrageously priced in the hundreds of dollars (i.e. full of white people from NGOs or government orgs using our tax dollars to help save the poor Africans), no maps, and I have very little information in my Lonely Planet pieceofcrapguidebook, I all of a sudden spot about 7 white people standing next to a car on the side of the main road that runs along the waterfront/port/squatter camps.

Amazing. What the hell are these people doing here?

Turns out it’s two expat Portuguese families who have lived here for 11 years, and the wife of one of the, speaks perfect English, though the rest of them don’t.

Sensing my desperation, the English speaker and her husband and daughter offer to guide me to a hotel (was hoping for an invite to crash on the floor but no such luck), and after trying four places that were completely booked (thanks, UN staffers!), we finally found a hotel owned by a Portuguese expat that was dingy but a complete steal at $80 USD vs the $150 and up prices at the other places, and the restaurant even had air conditioning (when the power was on, which of course is rare in Kinshasa especially when it’s 38 degrees C (do the math) and 95% humidity.)

The Portuguese family ended up inviting me to dinner (where we had some of the most amazing Portuguese takeout I have ever had - giant prawns like I had never seen), and I got an actual espresso thanks to a machine they had brought over from Europe.

After a rough morning and early afternoon trying to muster the strength to head down to the port (which turns out was only about 100 yards from where I was rescued by the Portuguese family), I finally packed up the bike, buoyed by the fact that the generous hotel owner had comped me on the room that was seriously out of my tiny traveler’s budget.  80 bucks wouldn’t get you much better than a Days Inn in the states, but at that rate when you’re on a tiny budget and travelling indefinitely you expect either the Taj Mahal or the shower to spit out gold coins.

At the port I expected a bit of hassle, a few shakedowns by police and locals, and the general crap that any white tourist gets at your typical African border crossing.

I was definitely not prepared for what awaited me.

The second I rolled past the gates into the port, I was besieged by about 20 screaming Africans, some in uniforms, some not, all grabbing at my and demanding documents. 

I got flustered, but tried to maintain some composure, noticing that the boat was already docked and there was a mountain of people swarming it and scurrying around hauling sacks of whatever, pushing carts of junk, and generally screaming at and pushing each other.

As I slapped hands away from my bike and by tank bag, the head screamer in what appeared to be a port police uniform was demanding anywhere between $50 and $100 USD to get on the boat, telling me half in French half in what I assume was Likongo (one of the local tribal languages) and a third half in the form of flying spit that the boat was leaving shortly and I better pay him if I wanted to get on the boat

Now there are no signs here – no official anything, and no fixed prices, and the only people in uniform were either screaming at me or beating old ladies with braided rope.  Seriously. 

The level of violence and viciousness was unreal – port police or whatever they were randomly beating the absolute crap out of a bunch of peope, half of whom looked to either be drunk on palm wine or methylated spirits or sniffed-out on glue, including two little old ladies who may have been missing most of their teeth due to a lifetime of similar beatings.

After about only 30 seconds of this madness, I finally started to yell back at the police/touts/etc. and tell them there was no way I was paying over $30 USD (which was the going rate as per the locals in town) for myself and the bike.

This did not go over so well.

After a few minutes of arguing, the quasi-authority figure told me that $30 wasn’t enough, and I would have to come back tomorrow and was going to miss the boat.

As much as I wanted to get the hell out of Kinshasa, there was no way I was getting ripped off by those idiots, so I decided to take my ball and go home (i.e. turn around and go back to the hotel.)

Back at the hotel I drowned my sorrows in a few beers in the thoroughly refreshing 39 degree C heat and 95% humidity after taking an evening stroll around the filthy neighbourhood to observe a few locals beg me for change, yell “mundele mundele mundele!” at me over and over again, and most impressively, one guy squatting and building a garbage fire in the dirt and filth in front of a bank while simultaneously urinating on it – a feat of unparalleled post-modernist third-world irony, not to mention sniper-like aim and concentration.

Back at the hotel, a local government official who was dining at the hotel restaurant with several of his mistresses who happened to be vaguely in charge of the ports got wind of my story.

He immediately got on his cell phone and spent 10 minutes screaming at various underlings for mistreating a tourist and assured me that the next morning everything would be completely smooth sailing.

Ha!

The next morning, the scene was identical – so much for THAT.

But this time, I was prepared.  I parked by bike where I could see it from all angles and inside the various warehouse buildings with no signs that I figured I had to go get my little stamps from (cause as we all know by now, it’s the stamps that count in Africa).

I enlisted the help of a “friendly” tout who spoke decent English to guide me through (figuring I could pay him a few bucks for his trouble and save myself an hour of arguing), and we waddled around to the various warehouses to get meaningless stamps and my information written down seven times in various ancient primary-school notebooks, with every item in the wrong column (of course), and voila, thirty minutes later and $35 USD poorer, I was ready to run the gauntlet – squeezing myself and the bike onto a barge built for about 100 but packed with over a thousand Africans all jostling, pushing, and climbing over each other and everyone’s pushcarts made out of rebar and more sacks of the most random crap you’ve ever seen.

After paying the tout less than he asked for and physically shoving him off despites his protestations and his threatening to through my documents in the river (thanks, friend!), I squeezed on into what was probably the dead center of the barge, much to the amusement of the locals.

One thing to note about this barge is that the vast chunk of its passengers are Congolese heading over to Brazzaville to sell goods in the market, and for some godforsaken reason, a good chunk of those are cripples, some missing a limb or eye or something else not terribly essential, but most commonly shrivelled legs from polio.

Yes – polio – totally wiped out in the Western world and countered by a simple and cheap vaccine, but sadly still a terrible fact of everyday life in many parts of Africa.

I spent the next hour sitting uncomfortably on my motorcycle while teaching the locals what all the universal symbols for begging, give me money, I’m hungry, etc. mean to Americans.  So the next time you run into a Congolese who thinks that rubbing your stomach and holding your hand out means “what time is it?” and rubbing your thumb and forefinger together mean “I want to be your friend” you’ll understand why.

After docking on the Brazzaville side and finally rolling my bike onto the dirt in front of a bunch of unlabeled concrete buildings with a bunch of Africans waving papers at a bunch of guys without uniforms sitting at children’s school desks from the pre-colonial period (sadly no secret drawer to stash the answers to tomorrow’s geometry quiz), I was able to get my official stamps.

After a laughable shakedown attempt by a hustler to tried to tell me the port was “private” and I had to pay him for the privilege of arrival, I fired up the bike, ran over the fat guy’s foot, and hightailed it out of there.

In fact – I hightailed it around Brazzaville for about three hours looking for the hotel/guesthouse that supposedly allowed camping for overlanders (thanks to no GPS and all Africans universal inability to give directions – yes this is a scientific fact), I finally found it, of course located down the one side street I hadn’t turned down yet.

The Republic of Congo definitely had a more laid back feel, which was a welcome relief after the edginess of the DRC, and I was looking forward to a few days of relaxation before I had to attempt the Congo-Gabon border crossing, 250k of a deep rutted sand, which I was absolutely dreading.  And it was definitely going to suck.

I had read somewhere online that the border was open until 6PM, so with my 5:45 arrival time and the fact that the border was remote and had almost no truck/commercial traffic led me to believe I would be able to squeeze past and get to my intended destination of the Catholic Mission (where you can camp for free) in Matadi, the DRC border town.

The Angolan side in Noqui was in fact open until 6PM - score!

However, the DRC side closed at 5 (of course), so I was forced to stay the night on the Angolan side.  There was nothing remotely resembling a hotel or guesthouse or anything like it among the concrete and mud huts that made up Noqui, but I was welcome to camp on the porch of the police station.

I could barely walk, and unloading my bags and setting up my tent took almost an hour.  The police officers were extremely helpful however, and brought me sachets of water (no bottled water in the part of the world - just sealed plastic bags), and after a tour of one of the police officer’s homes (just a concrete walled, thatch-roofed, and dirt-floored 10 ft by 10ft hut), this particular toothless officer let me bucket shower outside his hut and had a local woman prepare me a huge plate of rice and mystery meat.  I gorged myself until I passed out, face smeared with rice and sauce, still amazed that I had actually made it.

The next morning I was awake bright and early.

That doesn’t mean I was able to move.

My entire body was covered in bruises, I had severely pulled an ab muscle (how do you do that?  seriously), and strained both my calves pretty badly.

I limped around slowly packing my gear, while avoiding the incessant asking by my toothless policeman “friend” if he could have various items, from my shoes to the soccer jerseys I bought to give me “something to talk about” with the constant police roadblocks (of course the only conversation topic is “hey can I have that?”).

Now there is plenty of begging in Africa, and all Africans assume white people are fabulously wealthy and have come to Africa to give Africans stuff and then high-tail it out of there.  This is (just one!) of the the ugly sides of foreign aid, and based on my constant observation one of the many things that holds Africa back in development.  This of course does not apply to all Africans or even the majority, but there is a significant minority that has simply been trained to think and act this way.  (This topic is worthy of another post, let alone an entire book or field of study, but I digress.)

So after completing the formalities on the Angolan side, I rolled my bike downhill the 100 meters to the DRC immigration hut.  Note that like most African borders, there is some sort of boom or piece of wood that approximates a gate, but thousands of people stream back and forth all day long, and without fail, there are thousands of people living/working/doing business in the space between the borders (which is anywhere from a few meters to 100 kilometers of “no man’s land.”)

I have no idea what citizenship these people claim, but it doesn’t matter - they all speak the same tribal language and are of the same ancestry as people on both sides, and the fact that there is a border between them is a legacy of ignorant and idiotic colonialists.

Prime example:  The Angola/DRC border is mostly defined by the Congo river.  If you’re some colonialist power, and it’s say, 1885, and you’re carving up Africa for resource extraction, and you see this big huge river and apparent natural barrier, you’d say “damn that looks like the obvious place to split these two countries!”

And you’d be wrong, since as long as people had been walking upright, they have been swimming/fjording/canoeing/whatever across the river on a daily basis, one tribe of people sharing a common language and history.

Anyways, I get my official immigration stamp at the immigration shack, and start to waddle down to the customs shack.  Remember - borders that are porous aren’t important, it’s the effing stamp that is important!  Africans loooooove stamps - if the West really wants to have an impact with foreign aid, it should air drop millions of stamps and inkpads across the continent - the locals will crap themselves with joy.

At the customs shack, after waddling 200 meters in full gear and blistering heat (left my bike under the slightly twitchy lazy eye of the stuttering immigration officer - note that this is not the first nor the last stutterer working in official capacity - there must be some sort of continent-wide hiring policy), I find out that since it is Sunday, the customs guy is not at his post, but is instead at church.

Of course.

The border is open on Sundays, but they will be damned if anyone crosses without a customs stamp! So I waddle back up the hill to wait at the immigration shack, as I am told that since it is almost 10AM, the customs officer should be back “any minute.”

If we were playing Jeopardy, the category would be “Bureacracy for 100, Alex,” the answer would be “The Great African Waiting Game,” and I would buzz in immediately with “What do I spend most of my time playing in Africa?” and I would be killing it, but it isn’t, so I’m not, and I sat my ass down in the sweltering heat until about 2pm until the customs officer arrived.

Take note that both the Angolan side and the DRC side were basically hassle-free, staffed by very friendly and helpful officers who wanted to chat about Barack Obama, soccer, and how nice the people of their countries were. 

Also note that the Lonely Planet guide for Africa, which for half the countries I have/will visit on this trip say it’s “too dangerous” to go in person and instead published a friggin’ guidebook by doing a few minutes of internet research, describes the Angola/DRC border as “rarely attempted by foregners and you could be faced with reams of bureacracy and a whole lot of hassle…unless you’re a truly intrepid overlander avoid at all costs.”  

The idiot responsible for this “research” is Brendan Sainsbury, and I hope he Googles himself one afternoon, finds this blog post, and then subsequently punches himself in the nuts for supplying such completely wrong information.

So - after finding Jesus and stamping my bike customs document, the customs officer sent me on my way, and with only 4 hours of daylight left, I hightailed it northward to Kinshasa on the only tar road in the entire country.

The road was in relatively good condition with the usually stretches full of axle-breaking potholes, and was too curvy for traffic to go more than 90k/hour at a time, which of course didn’t stop the usual ridiculously overloaded diesel trucks and minibuses from flying around corners at breakneck speeds.

Highlights of the ride include:

1.  Giant twisted-metal gaps in the guardrails every few kilometers or so where a car or truck had blasted through at highspeed on the way to certain death, with the occasional rusted-out wreck visible below (NB:  not the first or last time.)

2.  Minibuses passing me doing at least 120k with twice as many passengers as seats and goats on all fours on the top somehow managing to stay on top as the bus careened around corners.

3.  An old Peugot 504 taxi (they are everywhere in Africa) in worse than usual shape doing about 40k/hour and with at my last count 23 people on or in the vehicle.  There were about 10 people inside the sedan, with a sets of legs poking out each window, about 7 or 8 standing on the roof holding on to each each, and 6 or 7 standing on the hood like they were trying to set a car-surfing record.  The weight was distributed so poorly that the car was turned leftwards about 30 degrees yet still headed straight, with a tire about to explode any second.

I arrived on the outskirts of Kinshasa around 5:15pm, and had about 45 minutes of daylight left to find the port, get on the boat to Brazzaville, and exit the DRC.

That didn’t happen.

In fact my week was going to get a lot worse before it got better, and I was going to get a lot more acquainted with a good chunk of Kinshasa than I would have liked.

Apologies for the posting delay, but a variety of things and unforeseen circumstances have gotten in the way. 

Expect a flurry of updates shortly, and a new joke involving a Congolese woman beaten to a pulp by police, a fat-ass mosquito-catching corrupt  Cameroonian cop, and Nigerian ferry-hijacking pirates. 

It’s hysterical.

Besides the whole crashing constantly thing of the previous day, I also, in my infinite wisdom after my cheap sidebags (from the UK apparently and not South Africa!) shredded, put a can of DEET spray in my duffel bag as part of my mildly futile attempt to repack my gear with 80 liters less of space.  (I also ditched some things in the bush that I didn’t badly need - left myself with just the bare necessities).  Of course the spray exploded everywhere, and melted everything made out of plastic and some synthetics and left me with a gooey mess all over my gear.

I did my best to clean stuff off before passing out, but left a lot of gear outside the tent to dry, figuring I would be alone until sunrise.

I was, but as soon as light broke, a group of guys on their way to either hunt or gather (not sure what two machetes among five guys accomplishes).  They then spent the next 10 minutes pointing at each piece of gear and asking if they could have it - I said “no lo necessito” to each request (which is gringo Spanish but hey it’s close enough to Portuguese).  After this typical example of how Western aid has trained all of Africa to beg from the white man (because all white people are rich and the only reason they come to Africa is to hand out stuff to the poor little black Africans), I got myself together and packed up my gear - slowly.

I then proceeded to crash my way all the way to the DRC border. 

In between crashes, in my dehydration and dizziness, I flagged down another truck and was given a few oranges, some water, and a bread and mystery-meat sandwich.  I was able to suck down the water and oranges, but after tearing into the sandwich with animal noises, after the first bite I promptly puked everything back up.  Note to self - don’t eat meat sandwiches when suffering from exhaustion and dehydration.

I finally arrived at border as the sun was going down, but as is always the case in Africa, it wasn’t going to be a smooth process, and my body and my gear was in terrible. 

More next time - but for now - here’s the the final tally of destruction from Luanda to the DRC border (which took my 2.5 days and was only about 200K!)

• 1 broken clutch lever
• 1 torn palm
• 2 sprained ankles (couldn’t walk right for about a week)
• 1 pulled ab muscle (couldn’t sit up properly)
• Countless deep tissue bruises
• 1 missing toenail
• At least a dozen blood blisters on my hands/arms
• Almost an hour in total trapped under the motorcycle
• Two completely shredded side bags

I’ve been riding on prepared piste (the fancy motorcyclist word for dirt or sand track that is packed flat by a gravel grader so it can is relatively flat and not horribly covered in debris), since about 100ks north of Luanda where the road ended, but that changed quickly.

I had been warned that the roads in northern Angola were worse than the south (”hah!  worse?  how was that possible!” I had thought) and you know what?  They are!

They are terrible.

They are not roads.

They are rutted earth winding through steep jungle hills, cut through by 5 feet deep and 3 feet wide rain gutters, and sprayed liberally with tons of loose rock and sand. 

An experienced rider who came through north to south last year wrote it about it as the “single most challenging off-road terrain he’s ever tackled.”

I had planned on doing this stretch in one long day of riding - hah!

This is a really remote part of Africa - in the last half of northern Angola, I only saw about 6 trucks come by in both directions, and much less foot traffic (usually in Africa on the main roads there are people everywhere - it’s not Manhattan, but every time you think you’re alone, some bushman walks out of nowhere with a machete in hand wearing a pair of ragged filthy pants and a pair of of cheap chinese-made flip flops).

I don’t remember the first time I fell - after about the 15th time, they all started to blend together.

And these were not like my nice, sweeping piroutte in front of the Belgian family in Namibia, or my constant low-speed dumps in the sand in southern Angola.

I am talking hardcore, bike-flips-sideways, rocks-flying-everywhere, head-hits-the-ground-hard, break-something-on-the-bike-every time crashes.

And when you’re by yourself, and have a fully loaded bike, if the bike isn’t on flat ground, and sometimes even if it is, it’s an absolute, complete, full body effort to get it back up again.  A few times, especially when I was crushed underneath, I had to reach and untie my gear, which necessitates a full repack, which is a pain-in-the-ass 20 or 30 minutes sweating to death in the sun.

The crashes I remember the most are:

1) Trying to pick a line coming through a steep downhill that was criss-crossed with potholes and rain gutters large enough to hide cars, getting tracked too deep into a pit of loose rock, and losing control hard as the bike pitched sideways, crushing my right leg underneath the exhaust, as I screamed and tried to get myself out from underneath before I had 3rd degree burns all over my leg (mission accomplished).

2) Trying to pick a line on a similar stretch of terrain going uphill, but coming down so hard that I bent the handlebars and landed in the gutter with the bike trapping my left leg.  It took me almost 20 minutes of wedging the bike up inch by inch and levering it using my helmet to get me out.

3) Another bad choice of line which resulted in me going down hard on the left side, which thankfully was the a path carved deep in the hillside so the bike wasn’t completely down on the ground, but unthankfully had snapped off my clutch lever and necessitated putting on my only replacement.

4) Coming up over a tough hill, picking another bad line, and getting completely clotheslined by a tree branch - bike kept on going; I stayed strangled in mid-air.  I also happened to do this right in front of two women who were squatting in front of two huge piles of oranges (not sure if they picked them?  Had them dumped there?  Who knows?).  They watched me stone-faced, until I finally coaxed them to help me with the bike.  One was Congolese wth giant Ol’ Dirty Bastard-style braids (NB to anyone over 40:  google it), and when she found out I was going to Matadi (just over the DRC border), she gave me her phone number - not sure if she wanted a reward for helping me with the bike or wanted to hang out and talk fine art, politics or wine-making, but I would find out later it wouldn’t be the first time with the Congolese.

This is just a sampling of the crashes - at least a half dozen of these took me at least 20-30 minutes to get the bike upright, catch my breath, adjust the rigging, walk off the pain, scream and curse and cry in self-pity, and finally get back on the bike ’cause I really didn’t have another option.

And it wasn’t just the crashes - during one flat stretch as I finally shifted into 4th gear for the first time all day my bike’s exhaust all of a sudden started to sound like a jet engine.  I stopped and realized the exhaust pipe had blown all the bolts and completely separated from the tubing.  30 minutes later after burning my hands repeatedly, I had put it back together using almost all of my increasingly precious spare bolts.

At some point (maybe the third crash?  fourth?) my side bags had shredded completely.  I mean three walls had completely separated from the side wall and my stuff went launching into the dirt.

Now, had I been riding with someone and they had fallen and that would have happened to them, I would have died laughing.  I really would probably have wet myself laughing so hard.

But in this case, all I felt like doing was dousing everything with gasoline and setting it on fire.  Instead, I packed everything in my side bags into my duffel, and backpack that I could, lashed the rest to the top, and essentially completely overloaded the bike, killing the handling profile, and combined my physical exhaustion and increasing dehydration, probably contributed to the next dozen or so crashes.

By about 5:45pm, I had no idea where I was (no GPS map, remember), and only knew that I hadn’t seen any of the towns that my map had said I should have passed if I had actually ridden more than 80ks in almost 10 hours of riding/crashing/being crushed.

It was starting to get dark, and with the steep terrain gutted out of the hillside and the thick bush on either side of the “road”, there was no place to camp.

This was definitely starting to really suck.

As I contemplated my options (not much), a pickup truck with two guys came in the other direction - I flagged them down and my desperate begging for water was met with a full bottle of the wonderful stuff.

They told me that the town I was trying to reach was almost 40k away, and they tried to get me to leave the bike in the bush and hitch a ride with them back to the nearest town (another 30k back the way I had come). 

No way was I backtracking and leaving the bike, so against my better judgment I continued on looking for a place to camp.  I dumped the bike soon after (ok about 50 meters), and luckily found a place off the side of the road that was flat enough after removing a bunch of rocks for my tent, and with my duffle bag halfway under my sleeping mat, I was angled just enough so I wouldn’t start rolling down the hill.

After flagging down another truck for water a few hours later (the only one until the next day), I fell asleep for a few fitful hours.

But I was rudely awakened bright and early by some new “friends.”

And you know what?

That was only the second day out of Luanda - I still had a least a full day of riding if not more until I made it to the DRC border.

And it was going to get worse before it got better.

For the price of a text message, you make a little child in Africa happy.  Sally Struthers was totally right - you CAN make a difference.

My side bags, which of course are cheap South African brand and made of nylon, had been “sewn” back together by a bush shoe repair guy (ok so he technically lived in a slum, not the bush, but his talents do not exceed his less raw sewage-infested brethen).  As a general rule for those buying equipment in South Africa, if it’s a brand you haven’t seen in the States or Europe, not only is it made in some forced child-labor camp in China, it’s such poor quality that no one in the Western world will carry it.

So with my gear able to be packed again, I woke up early on my 3rd (4th?) day in oil company compound paradise after the previous day’s aborted attempt to head out.

I had fresh laundry (thanks to Chris), a fresh stock of powerbars (thanks to Chris), a fresh stock of water (thanks to Chris), and freshly manicured fingernails and toes (thanks to - just kidding),

I then promptly spent too long packing, and after leaving sometime after 10AM, headed the completely wrong way out of town for several hours.  Instead of using my new/old GPS (it doesn’t allow map loading, but at least shows what direction you are going), in my nonstop infinite wisdom asked for directions that were consistently worth precisely what I paid for them.

One thing that unites Africans, across over a billion people, 9,000 languages, and tens of thousands of tribes, is that they are all uniformly TERRIBLE with directions.  Just god-awful.  The answer, if not a puzzled look, is always “straight ahead!”

It’s never straight ahead.  Sorry.  If it was straight ahead I wouldn’t be asking directions, Magellan.

Anyways, the end result was that I was forced to turn around after almost 150Ks in the wrong direction (at least it was tarmac), and after screaming, stomping the ground, and swearing like sailor with Tourette’s syndrome, I had made it only about 150ks total before I was forced to bush camp on the side of the road somewhere north of Ambriz.

Then the fun began.

The next day after a poor night’s sleep (like any night bushcamping), I packed the bike, kitted up in the heat and humidity, and began what is tentatively titled The Worst Day of My Life.

Seriously.  This is not actually an exaggeration.

Read about it next time.

(And subscribe to email updates if you want to be one of the cool kids and be the first to know when it’s posted!)