To Bamako and Beyond

• Question: Hi there,
  Very nice blog and journey. Me and some friends are going to buy some bikes in Bamako and drive around for 4 weeks in januari. As I was in Bamako last winter I know my way around. Can I ask you were you bought your bike, and was it hard to register it (did it need plates and how long did this take) and to insure it?
  Greetings from Belgium,
  www.tony-ontheroad.blogspot.com - wwwtony
• Answer:

  I found the card of the guy I bought the bike from in Bamako, tell him you got his address from Damian, the guy who bought the silver Super No. 1. Anyway here it is: Tidiane Traore
  Imm. Mandjou SIMPARA
  Bout. no. 11 et 12
  BP 459
  Tel: 20237934 / cell 76014364
  Ask him to do all the paperwork and be prepared to pay a bit extra. You’ll need it! No licence plate so ownership papers are very important. I paid around 350,000CFA for a 150cc bike inc. documents.
  
  Insurance can be got from:
  Assurance Lafia
  Ave. du Mali
  Hamdalaye
  229 09 40
  assurlafia@yahoo.fr
  and if you are doing a tour make sur you get ECOWAS area insurance (covers most of West Africa).

So this really is the final post from me now safely back in my London flat sitting across the room from a door made by a Dogon craftsman. This is the story of the loose ends.

A couple of days before I left for the UK, I still had the motorbike to dispose of. One morning as I was getting on the bike outside the hotel I was staying in, a guy came up to me and asked about the bike. I said it was for sale if he knew anyone and he said he did. He jumped on the back and we made our way to a craft market building that looked curiously familiar but not before I made a pilgrimage to Mali K7 (k-sept, cassette, get it?) the recorded music store set up by Ali Farka Touré to sell cassettes that were both legal and reasonably priced to help local musicians get some money back on their recordings. It is a hidden away gem, not large but stacked with CDs I wanted to buy, in fact I bought 17 - the largest number of CDs I have ever purchased in one go for around £50.

When we got to the shabby building housing various artisans, I realised this was one of the first places in Mali I had ever been to on my first visit. A guy tried to sell me a door for CFA700,000 (£1000) but I bargained him down to a quarter of that and told him I’d think about it. We wandered downstairs to the only proper shop of sorts and met Daouda. He was a shrewd businessman and although he didn’t normally buy and sell 

motorbikes he seemed interested and we discussed the idea of a swap. A door for a bike. It turned out that he not only sold doors, he wholesaled them to all the artisan markets in Bamako and we went off to see his secret warehouse. Maybe a hundred doors were there in a nondescript lock up a mile away from the market. I saw one I liked and we haggled on price, discussed how on earth I would get it home and the such like. In the end no money changed hands just a door and a key. The door had to be put on a taxi roof and taken to the national museum to be authenticated as non stolen or antique.

The business concluded, me and the guy I met outside the hotel went back for lunch at the hotel to await the certified door turning up. By now I realised that I knew this guy from my first trip too. His name was Omar and he was at that time one of the most 

irritating hucksters I had ever come across. Complete with cringeworthy habits like shouting ‘hakuna matata’ at every one he met even though no one speaks a word of Swahili for thousands of miles. The intervening years had left him marginally less irritating and left him looking a lot older.

With a bit of work I eventually shrugged him off and set about redistributing a series of personal affects to people I knew like Blaise, who worked as a driver for my friend Sarah. I left the door at the hotel and spent the last evening hanging out at Sarah’s until my taxi came at 11pm for the airport. With the door strapped to the roof we made our way to the airport avoiding all the normal routes. After a while I found out this was to avoid the police who loved to stop anyone with an unusual load.

At the airport an arsehole from Royal Air Maroc refused to carry the door even though he should have and there was no moving him on the issue. I would have to freight it but there was a problem. My flight left at 2AM and the freight office opened at 8AM. In desperation I called Daouda and half expected him to wash his hands of the whole thing but instead he came to the airport and tried to sort it out. Eventually I handed over a large chunk of change to him for freighting and hoped I’d see the door someday.

On the face of it, it seemed unlikely that he would not just keep the door and the cash for freighting but I had travelled 7500km by bike and a few thousand more by other means and apart from the guy who ran off with a pair of £2.50 cycling gloves (he ran off with such comic delight that at the time I could only laugh myself), I had only been impressed by people’s goodness so far so as I waited for news of my door, I somehow felt it would be OK.

A few days later I got a call from the freight company, the door was ready for collection (having acquired a shocking amount of handling fees, customs and other stuff) and I collected it from Heathrow cargo in my van, aware that now the adventure was well and truly over but like the item Mr Ben keeps from his travels, I had my door to remind me that it had all actually happened.

Well, despite the hoped-for job interview not coming through (the rumour is that Prof. Brian Cox got Sir David Attenborough to write him a job reference and that swung it away from me), I am looking forward to coming home in a few days.

In Bamako, it’s mostly tidying a few loose ends like sorting out stuff to bring back, trying to flog the bike and hunting down a bit of music before I make my way back. I might make another entry or two if something exciting happens but then again I might not. If I don’t, then this blog is dedicated to my Uncle Mike who without ever realising it made the trip possible and who knew instinctively that a good story is ultimately the only thing of value we ever leave behind us.

I am not saying it is impossible to have a good time in Sikasso but a few things seem to conspire against it. Firstly it has a traffic system so complex and so full of traps that you feel disinclined to risk it. Perhaps my experience is coloured by my double infraction the last time I was here but there it is. At night even the main roads are so poorly lit that you have no idea what is where and the evening I spent in Sikasso was worse than usual because a power cut had snuffed out what little illumination there once had been. The hotel though had a generator and a restaurant so I pinned my hopes closer to home. Unfortunately for me a big group of Opthalmists had monopolised the kitchen and the best I was offered was a vague try again later.

The road system had put me off trying to find the remnants of the former kingdom that was based here and the symbolic planting (or desecrating) of their sacred spot with a French tower. My half formed notion of going and finding some local caves bit the dust when the owner said I would be able to get there and back by six on the motorbike. This I took to mean that if someone who drived fast and confidently on dirt tracks knew the way, he/she could be back before dark and thus not me.

So the day promised to end with a bit of an anti climax but had started well enough. The owner of the hotel in Bobo escorted me from the hotel to the right road and waved me on. The road out of Bobo towards the border is one of the prettiest in my travels. A wonderful variety of trees and palms, some huge and imposing grace the road. Now and then pretty villages loom into view and friendly villagers wave at you or go about their business. You climb gentle hills and at this time of year, the very driest, you pass the odd river with a little bit of water still in it. 

At one point, I topped a hill and there below me in the distance was a huge brown mass that I couldn’t quite make out. I then noticed it was moving. As I drew closer I realised that there were hundreds of young men wearing nothing more than loin cloths all with pick axes over their shoulders congregating for some reason. If it was ceremonial, why the pick axes? If it was work, why the identical loin cloths? I cruised slowly past them but detecting neither hostility nor a wish to engage with me I left them and their mysterious gathering behind and climbed out of the valley.

I left Burkina with a minimum of fuss and entered Mali. There was a slightly sticky moment when the police asked if I was military and said my bike was an army bike. Thrown first by the idea that I could be mistaken for a soldier and then puzzled by the reference to the bike I looked over at Super No. 1 and realised he was referring to the army surplus panniers slung over the seat. I explained they hadn’t been in use since the 1950s and invited him over for a closer look. My poorly sewn on cloth fishing badge seemed to settle the matter in my favour. Deep down, I don’t think he was really serious but it had been a slow week and it was a boring afternoon and I think he just wanted to chat a bit. A look at the register as my passport details were laboriously copied over by hand revealed an average of three foreigners a day were going into or out of Mali at this major crossing point. Not much to keep more than half a dozen police officers busy.

And just as I was about to call it a day, the music started. A band playing two large balafons and three drums began to play a wild and hypnotic kind of music I’d never heard in Mali. More like the trancey music of Konono No. 1 from the Congo but without the distortion. And the dancing, an impossibly tricky set of spasmodic shivers set off each and every limb and part thereof of the dancers. It was a wonder.

It was a pretty gruelling ride in the heat of over 330km to sweet, friendly Bobo, Burkina’s second city and a stop over on my way to Bamako for my new plan. A friendly convoy of two French vans waved at me as they overtook me and an hour later I bumped into them at the same lunchtime Maquis and joined them for unremarkable spaghetti and some chitter chat about the pros and cons of our respective means of transport for similar tours. I envied the comfort and the sharing of driving but having to park the van and take taxis whenever the road is crap seemed a bit much to me and they got whacked on customs after so many people have driven down bangers to sell in West Africa. It was a nice chat though and they passed me again on the road a couple of times.

Finally I pulled into Le Pacha, the place I’d previously stayed at in Bobo, pretty shattered but pleased to have arrived and was touched when everyone recognised me and wanted updates on my travels. I really felt at home. Before conking out for an hour. I treated myself to one of their rather expensive pizzas for dinner and caught up with the eccentric but likeable owner, himself much more of a biker than I’ll ever be.

Then I took a ride down to the Bois D’Ebene to see who was playing. A pretty good traditional band with some great dancers were doing their stuff to an almost empty club. I wondered if this was Bobo on a Friday night did it ever get that lively here but after a while people started rolling in while I started fading away so I headed back for a sleep.

Apart from the bucket showers life was pretty sweet at the Pavillion Vert. Nice food, decent wifi, calm and peaceful garden and friendly staff. (Apart from the manager who I still think held a grudge about the water draining incident).

On the first mooring, I called Boukary as he needed a reference letter from me. He is a nice enough young man and he followed me round for FESPACO but dropped in my estimation somewhat when he asked me for loads of money before I left. I did’t mind him tagging along during FESPACO and paid for food and tickets for him but he went too far. Nevertheless, I decided to give him another chance. “So you need a reference, OK, I’m in the town centre”, I said. “Can you come to the other side of town and do it?” This went on for a while. In the end I said come to the PV if you want the reference and he came. I wrote a glowing and extensive reference for him, bought him a drink and some lunch. Then thinking our business was concluded I said I’d see him maybe the next day but now I was going to rest and then find a pharmacy. “OK, I’ll wait here till you have rested and then you can give me a lift.”

Now feeling rather used, I went off and when I was ready took him on the bike. I dropped him off and wished him well. Just before I set off again, he asked me for money again and this time I bit his bloody head off. 

Anyway with that out of the way I had a lovely time at the nearby pharmacy chatting with the doctor about tropical medicine and malaria. He explained that Burkinabe don’t take prophylaxis (preventative) drugs as everyone is constantly infected to a low level and only takes medicine to manage the fevers if they come. If anyone gets malaria out of their blood, by living abroad for a few years for example, it is really dangerous for them when they return as they then lose their ‘immunity’.

That evening the two Clelias, both French doctors doing a 6 month placement in Burkina turned up on a moped and we went off in convoy to a bar opposite the Neerwaya cinema for a chat. I’d met them in Grand Popo with their friend Julia. Julia had returned to France for the funeral of her grandfather though so there was just the Clelia show in town. I’d been hoping to bump into them when I realised we’d all be in Ouagadougou at the same time but they were frantically doing their last minute goodbyes and shopping before returning to France a few days later and they were pushed.

All the same we agreed to meet the following afternoon and one of them solved a puzzle I was wrestling with. I had applied for a really intriguing job in London but had no idea if I was to get an interview. If I did, I would have to be in London a week later, which meant flying from Bamako. On the other hand, if I didn’t get the interview I could continue north from Ouagadougou and visit the Dogon country before returning. The problem was that I wouldn’t know the result until it was too late to get back to London from the Dogon. The solution was simple. Hang out in Bamako until I know and then either return or do a new trip out to the Dogon and back. Sorted.

The following day I met Keith for breakfast a super smart American born in China and doing his own round Africa odyssey. He’s been to a Songhai Institute in Porto Novo, Benin and came back with tales of ingenious recycling ideas. Got a dead rat? Let it rot and then feed the maggots to the fish you are raising.

I went off to a wonderfully eccentric dealer in masks and artisanal goods with fixed if high prices but lots of information, a lovely selection and no pressure. It was heaven. I spent hours there and bought the mask I saw as soon as I entered and couldn’t think of not buying. Two pregnant women sit on the head like horns of the mask while the face has three mouths, three noses and 4 eyes between the three faces. Under the chin is a fish. Sadly except for being from the Cote D’Ivoire nothing was known about the mask but it clearly was abundantly rich in meaning.

That afternoon the Clelias and Damian motorbike convoy made it into the north of the city and we visited the chi-chi Ricardo Hotel. It has a pool, a lovely pool used by a handful of tourists and a boisterous bunch of well-off Burkinabes. Something about seeing Clelia do the high dive ignited my inner macho and I decided to do it. It was bloody terrifying but I felt really proud of myself all the same (silly I know). Later we went for a record breaking splash by jumping simultaneously. I think the splash was 90% me though.

That evening I caught up again with Keith amid tales of Beijing hackers, Uranium mining and other fascinating stuff over dinner at the PV.

I left the Princess Hotel in Daopong sad to leave the friendly staff but pleased to go someplace that doesn’t use toilet bleach to wash its glasses. The impossibly elegant amazonian waitress there having barely cast a second look my way during my couple of days there suddenly got all flirty and insisted on putting her number in my mobile. Moments later I left almost certain never to return.

My moto was purring sweetly now after its thorough tune up from the lads the day before. I cruised along the increasingly crappy road out of Togo into Burkina glad of the cloud and cool, a first for me on this trip.

Every time I go past a bar, enter a hotel or enter an office there is a TV or radio with the latest news on Gbagbo’s spectacularly protracted and murderously selfish exit. At the Burkina border, I somehow acquired a fixer. I’d never had one before and wasn’t quite sure how I got this one but he was useful enough as one of the officials in customs was not really convinced that tourists would be riding a local bike like mine and it had to go all the way up to the head of customs. The guy issuing carnets joked that my fixer was a ‘Gbagbo’, a now universal term of derision. Anyway a little behind schedule, I set off across the now determinedly dry scrubland between me and Burkina’s capital. I played tag with a couple of minivans along the way. We pretty much did the whole 270km in the same time. 

One thing I have noticed on my trip is that no major cities in West Africa are complete without massive and many mile long dust-cloud roadworks to welcome you into town. Having already suffered its western entrance I thought I’d get a pass coming from the east but no they had dug this way in up too.

I made it safely through Ouagadougou’s rush hour to the backpacker favourite, the Pavilion Vert. I paid extra for a room with a shower only to find it was a trickle since the roadworks had cut off the water supply. I changed down. I could now get a communal not working shower.

It’s great that the internet’s here and in almost every town of any size but connections are slow, slow, slow most of the time and powercuts stop play in every country I have visited.

Do you remember the days of dial up modems and how you’d repeatedly click a page unable to decided if it was downloading slowly or had gone to sleep? I’m right there now again.

The capitals are a bit better though. What you may ask are West Africans using the internet for at this very moment? I can tell you: checking out music on YouTube, catching up with their Yahoo.fr mail and more often than not logging onto Facebook. I don’t know when Facebook hit but by golly it’s big now. Cybercafes are also where people go to burn disks or type out formal letters for their parents too. Why am I telling you this? In case you want to know and because I have nothing better to do while waiting for the server to come back online.

The LP guide to West Africa is written by different country specialists among them my dear friend Katharina (who is uniformly brilliant). I have spent an unholy amount of time with that book as I am sure many of its buyers do so this is one for the editors. 

First of all, when was the last time someone invited you for a “sundowner”? Apparently this is what we all seek in almost every town in Africa. It seems that “perfect for sundowners” is short hand for an expensive place with few if any customers, bored staff, high prices and a nice view. Why not say so?

If there is ever a positive occasion calling for the use of the expression, “killer” I can’t think of it. But it happens to our Burkina guy all the time. A cold beer. “Killer!” And yes, as if the phrase wasn’t jarring enough, it needs an exclamation mark.

You can bring your own “vehicle” to a wide variety of parks. If that is your vehicle is not a truck, coach, motorbike or any one of a thousand types of vehicle. If you mean car, say car, how hard is that? Even Katharina is guilty of this one.

If you stay at a basic campement type place. You will never have an omelette cooked, made, prepared or served. In this circumstance it will invariably be “rustled up” as if pulled from a guide’s sleeve and magicked into existence. It’s not a bad expression but perhaps they could rustle up a few alternatives. Note only omelettes are rustled up.

Almost invariably all African capitals are described as noisy, dirty, charmless places, which has some truth, but can it really be the case that invariably they will win you over? Sadly how this happens remains a mystery.

And finally a suggestion or two. They rightly point out that the book is too big and kind of marks you out from a distance for touts, could they make the individual country guides as separate pull outs so you only need to take the bits you need with you. With the internet around the corner and all it might be worth innovating a bit. 

I could go on, but I feel better already.

It seems as hard for a group of foreigners to avoid falling into a conversation about what they’d change here as it is for nerds to avoid discussions of the Windows vs Mac vs UNIX kind. So as I plodded along on my bike one day I imagined the same conversation but taking place in Europe among a group of African ex-pats. 

“The problem with Europeans if you ask me,” said the Professor using his status as an elder to cut across the banter, “is that they know the price of everything and the value of nothing. Look around you: everyone is miserable, isolated and either obese or anorexic. And the children, by the time they are 10 most of them are the implacable enemies of their own parents. What can we do to help these poor people?”

“For once,” his wife shot a cheeky smile at her husband, “the Professor is right. I think the problems start with the family. How is it that a country can have too many grandparents and not enough nursery places? Perhaps they should put 2 and 2 together. The children are like cuckoos, no sooner have they fled the nest than they turn their back on the people who nurtured them. And they know that the same lonely fate awaits them in time. And look how these children are raised, you will never see them helping their parents and the family, they are like little princes and princesses. And does it make them happier, no, half of them are living in a fantasy world of video games and the rest of them are on Facebook documenting their impending suicides.”

“Certainly, teaching the children some respect and making them a useful part of the family would help,” chipped in a colleague of the Professor, “but it’s not just the family. People never greet each other and when they do they find out nothing. ‘How are you?’ pah. What about the family, the wife, the children, the community? I am thinking of starting an NGO that goes from door to door making people meet their neighbours.”

“There’s an app for that!” Joked his daughter. “How can you expect anyone to be happy when they are all dressed like they are going to a funeral? What the people need is some bright fabrics, perhaps the UN can ship a few million yards over as an emergency measure.” She added, not entirely in jest. Warming to her theme she continued, “have you seen the way people sing and dance, no? That’s because they don’t. How are you ever going to be happy with no channel to let it all out? I went to a rave once and everyone had to take drugs to make them dance. I nearly took some myself to stay awake. Thank God for the people of African descent acting like missionaries bringing the good vibe to the West.”

“Well that’s the problem”, concluded the Professor. “We’ve spent the last four hundred years working in their communities to bring about change and they seem to have learnt nothing at all. I am wondering if aid of this kind is really making any difference. I am loathe to admit it but I do sometimes wonder if there’s any helping these poor souls.”

There are few things that will put a spring in your step more reliably than the passing of a digestive ailment. And so in a positive frame of mind I left the tropical lowlands of coastal Togo and climbed a series of massive hills, or rather my motorbike did. One particularly snaky and steep section had seen off no fewer than three lorries that morning alone and they blocked the road for cars and other lorries with a huge tailback. Although lorries are one of my greatest dangers, I have to admit to a lingering admiration for these intrepid folk, always living one pothole away from death and catastrophe. If they are going in the same direction as me, we often get to waving at each other as I overtake them on the steep or really rough sections and they return the favour when the going is good. I am acutely aware that danger can be lurking anywhere so having a few friends on the roads can’t do any harm and brings a smile to the face.

At the top of the steepest hill, I pulled over and drank some water. An old guy came up to me for a glass and a chat. The universal reaction to my journey is “on that motorbike there? Phew!” We passed a few pleasant moments talking about this and that and then I looked down on the massive plain that awaited. The tropics were over. Bananas were swapped for baobabs, happy clapping for the call to prayer, green for brown and dense populations for scattered villages. My journey was coming full circle. It was going to get really hot, over 40c but the humidity drop would be welcome at least.

The next time I pulled over I was deep in savannah and taking a moment’s rest under a tree. I heard children’s voices before I saw them emerge from the scrub with a donkey pulling a huge cart loaded with water containers. Not one of them could have been more than five. Before they crossed the road, they had to get the donkey and this massive cart up a steep slope. I joined in the fun and we soon had the wagon up the incline. It’s hard to be down for long with an ample supply of these cheerful smiling creatures dotted all around.

That evening the night was lit by lightning and the odd spot of rain. “It’s like that here,” said the hotel owner’s son. “Always promising rain but it never comes.” Well that night it came and didn’t stop coming. At least two months early. The following day I had planned to visit a nearby cliff-top settlement but the thought of the tracks being harder going than before was not appealing and the fear that there would be another outburst while I was there leaving me stranded, convinced me to have a day of getting my stuff together  before crossing back into Burkina Faso instead. My bike was pretty much taken apart and put together, better than ever before with a few new parts for a fiver and I resolved to flood the internet with updates of my travels. (Internet connections have been pretty patchy of late, so sorry about the bunching). The one downer though was my digestive system progress had worryingly gone into reverse. Hopefully this was just a blip.

I am writing this entry for my blog and also for the HUBB http://www.horizonsunlimited.com . The place to go for the latest news from people travelling overland (mostly on two wheels) around the world and the even greater number of people sitting at home thinking about it. I had spent many hours reading reviews of bikes, itineraries, tips and more and once or twice posted asking for advice. It is a wonderful place in many ways but I always ended up with the feeling that the bikes were more important than the places people went to. There is nothing fundamentally wrong with that but it is just not me. The bike is a means to an end for me. What’s more, unlike many of the fine fellows on the HUBB, I had absolutely no meaningful mechanical experience and the idea of buying a huge bike, loading it with spares and somehow effecting roadside repairs was way beyond me. Also the thought of shipping, let alone re-assembling a bike at an airport leaves me cold. So for all those similarly inclined (or some might say impaired), here is my bike guide to travelling round West Africa if you don’t want to spend a fortune on the bike, can’t change a tyre and neither know nor care how much a BMW RS80 weighs.

Buy a local bike

I think Burkina used to make bikes but now a local bike means one made in China and sold in West Africa. There are essentially only three bikes in Mali, Senegal and Burkina (and a few more in Benin, Togo and I suppose Nigeria and Ghana). The first are fast Yamahas, but these are only for the police so they need not bother us. The second you’ll see by the million in every city and everywhere with something approaching a road and that is a Jakarta or a Super K. It is a low powered moped and in skilful hands can get all kinds of places but it is painfully slow for longer distances and requires great skill to ride well in sand and on bad surfaces. The third comes by many, many names among them Sanili, Sanya and my own Super No. 1. It is normally a 125cc bike but a few like mine are in fact 150cc. It is capable of doing over a 100kph but tends to shake a lot after 90kph. It comes with city tyres, a cigarette lighter socket (Super No. 1 only) to make phone charging possible, a back rest for the passenger and decent sized rear foot rests. I paid about £450 for mine in Bamako. Mali is relatively cheap because the customs are less. Expect to pay about £100 more in Burkina or Senegal for example. Get a trusted local to help you and insist on getting proper documentation even if it costs more. You’ll never get out of the country otherwise.

It and the legion of almost identical bikes is the only bike you’ll see when the going gets rough and I can attest that it can handle deep sand, steep rocky inclines and anything else you are likely to encounter. Whether you the driver can handle them is of course another matter. My solution has been to go slow and keep slogging away until I have got through it. I am aware of other approaches and commend them to the more skilful drivers.

Modify it a little (by paying someone else to modify it)

The first thing you’ll need and you will really need this is a knobbly back tyre. You could arrange this when you buy it so you can get something back on your unused back tyre or wait until you skid all over the place in the sand and fall off a few times like me before changing it. You won’t pay more than £30 for it and you will never ever regret spending that money. You won’t get a lot of extra benefit from changing the front one at the same time but it might be worth doing if you fancy it. It certainly looks cool.

Get that handy socket in use but buy the car charging attachments for your phone before you set off. My iPhone died while being charged so I can’t rule out the possibility that the charger killed it so beware.

Following the advice of some of the HUBBsters, I bought a pair of canvas 1958 pattern army day sacks and strapped them to each other under the saddle to form a pair of handy panniers. Total cost £15. They have done sterling service but it does take ages to put them on and off again so I don’t leave anything valuable in there.

Those with more ample arses may not have this problem but after a few hours I get really uncomfortable in the seat. My solution has been a deep lump of foam I use as a cushion. I am sure there are better solutions out there.

If I had known how quickly the chain would become loose and rattle, I would have bought a decent quality chain and had it fitted but there you go. Instead I have forked out 15p on many occasions while someone else did all the hard work tightening and ratcheting.

Mechanics for lazy idiots

This is how it works, you see something is not working. You pull into the little shed with a couple of lads pulling apart some ageing motorbike and they immediately fix your problem, you pay them anything from 15p to 50p for something more involved and off you go. What about parts? You don’t need any, wherever you are, because your bike has exactly the same parts as everyone else’s you can get what you need easily and quickly. A new indicator unit? £1.25, a new cable for the speedo? £1.25. Oil change? £3. A new chain? £3. A few spanners come in handy if you need to get the bags off and on again for a clean and a full set can be picked up for less than a tenner.

But what happens if you break down miles from anywhere? The next person you see will stop, tinker a bit and probably get you going and if they can’t someone will lift your bike onto a truck or minibus and take it to the nearest village or town where it gets fixed. Or someone will call a mechanic and he’ll come out to you and sort it there and then. In Africa lots of things don’t work but the people are remarkably ingenious and should never be underestimated. Even when you think it is looking hopeless, someone will find a way, a way you would never have dreamed of most likely.

Myths

When the going gets tough only a big bike is going to get you out of trouble. 

It may be true at extreme altitudes, in the deep desert or if you are idiotic enough to travel in the Congo during the rainy season. But quite frankly very little of Africa and none of west Africa is at an extreme altitude, Al Qaeda are more of a worry than underpowered bikes in the desert and only a lunatic would risk malaria and civil war to travel through central Africa in the rainy season. With my rudimentary but growing offroad skills I have handled some horrendous roads and seen more skilful riders do so at great speed. Spend some money on learning some skills and forget about what the bike can do.

Cheap Chinese bikes are unreliable

It’s kind of true in the sense that things do fall off or break but that’s true of any bike put through its paces. The difference is that repairs are a couple of quid and half an hour away. They do not involve leaving your bike and travelling hundreds of miles to a dealer who orders a part from Europe by courier at great cost and which no one has ever seen before let alone fitted properly when you finally get back to your defanged monster bike.

When you do get to a good road, you’ll need the power to eat up those miles

This may for all I know be true in Southern Africa but here the roads are never that great and going more than 60mph is crazy because you have less time to deal with the next pothole, donkey wandering onto the road or lorry driving towards you on your side of the road to avoid a pothole on his. Take your time and enjoy the scenery, it is after all why you are here.

Anyway this post is for all those people who like me lurked on the HUBB and felt that somehow it was too hard, too expensive or too complicated for them to get on a bike and go. If i have one regret it is not doing an offroad course before leaving home as it’s always better to make your mistakes on someone else’s bike and with help at hand. The bike though I’d buy again and I honestly wouldn’t swap it here for the top of the range BMW or Yamaha. But this is Africa and I still have lurking somewhere a plan to get a big bike and travel in South America, where I think it might make a lot more sense. But that’s another story yet to be written.

One of my bugs turns out to be an amoeba, or rather thousands of them that have been fornicating and having fun in my intestines for the past month. As best as I could make out between my limited French and the Dr’s limited English, this was basically amoebic dysentery, a lingering, unpleasant and in some cases fatal infestation. No wonder I was conking out in the afternoons and feeling listless.

My second visitor was some kind of fungus. The Dr himself had had it. He had been suffering for a few weeks so he dosed himself with all the normal stomach problem killers and it persisted. Eventually he handed over his stool sample to a colleague and found out it was a fungal infection. Anyway I got the pills and immediately felt a lot better with the end in sight at least.

During those days of visits to the doctor in Lomé I otherwise rarely left the hotel. It had wifi, toilets when I needed them and reasonably priced food when I could muster an appetite. My Facebook friends offered good wishes to me and it was much appreciated. The last couple of days in Lomé were further lightened by some English-speaking travellers. The first was a pair of retired Kiwis who’d travelled most of the world before they retired and immediately after retirement they went on a 27 month long tour of Asia, returned for a year and then set off for a 13 month tour of Africa. Quite an inspiring pair.

My other companion during my convalescence was a Brit, Chris. He was floating easily for a few months in Africa but so far had spent three of them in Ghana figuring if he liked it so much why hurry onto the next country. He told me the tale of his ex who had also picked up a fungal infection. It was left undiagnosed for a couple of years and eventually the fungus broke through the intestine and started poisoning her blood, causing a raft of physical problems and crazy mood swings. Eventually she got a confirmation from a lab in the US about what it was but as it was so rare in the UK, the NHS refused to treat it on the basis that it wasn’t classified as an illness on the system. In desperation she turned to an alternative healer and spent two years trying to starve the fungus out with a diet of potatoes and rice. Fortunately she succeeded before she added scurvy to her woes. I was very pleased that all I had to do was take tablets for a week.

That day I took no fewer than 18 pills for my stomach related stuff (including some Immodium to make sure the rest stayed in the system) and topped it off with a Malarone for dessert.

After a breakfast of yet more pills and some toast and coffee, I left the safe haven of the Galion and feeling if not great at least hopeful of improvement and made my way north. It was clear that I was not going to get into Ghana because of their ludicrous visa system (all visas have to be issued in the visitors home country). I was now determined to travel the length of Togo, cross Burkina into the Dogon country and make my way down or rather up as it flows away from the sea to Bamako.

Most nations having gone to the expense of building an international airport, usually think nothing of topping it off with a couple of road signs to let people know where it is. Not Togo though. Eventually I found my way out of Lomé all the same and the road was pretty decent all the way to my stopover in Atakpame at the Hotel California. I felt about 160km was my limit until I got my strength back and I have to admit to being relieved when I arrived in this busy crossroads town set amid coffee producing hills.

After pottering about, I returned to my sweltering box room and when I stepped out again, it was almost cold. The difference in temperature was huge. A few minutes later the most spectacular thunder storm electrified the night sky, breaking right over the town and an almighty downpour began. Rather than petering off, it just grew and grew in intensity. Bar a few spots near Pendjari, this was the first real rain I’d seen in over two months and I watched in awe. The rainy season was well on its way here and I was glad of tarmac roads to take me out of it ahead of me but somehow I felt that the storm set a marker for me too and the end of my period of malaise and illness. 

My bike got a good soaking and I would now be able to try out the outback trick of wetting a canvas bag (in this case my panniers) and letting the wind cool the content. A trick I gleaned from my new Kiwi pals. I waited for the rain to stop so I could nip to the restaurant and get some food to go with my pills. It looked like Hotel California was where I was going to have to spend the evening. The food was not bad but I only managed about half the chicken in peanut sauce as I peered at the TV set trying to work out how much longer Gbagbo had in power and wondering if the new guy would be any less wretched than the old guy.

This time I made it nice and early to Ghana’s Embassy in Lomé. The lady asked me if I was a resident here and I said I wasn’t and so she said they wouldn’t issue me with a visa. I asked how a tourist could visit Ghana from here and she said they couldn’t. They would have had to have had a visa already. I said, “you don’t really seem to want tourists to come to Ghana.” She shrugged and indicated that was about the size of it. What about the road crossings? “Eugheua,” she replied in the near universal way of saying you can’t really tell white people anything, better to just humour them.

So that left the option of trying it on at the border or rethinking the whole plan drastically. By the time I got back to the hotel I was leaning heavily towards the second but first I had to see a doctor and deal with this stomach bug that has dragged on for a month, leaving me slim but lethargic. The Lonely Planet guide says consult your embassy if you want to find a good local doctor. It also says there isn’t an embassy in Lome. (It also says you can get a visa at the embassy and gives the wrong hours. Whoever did the Togo section was seriously sleeping on the job).

Fortunately the hotel recommended me a doc and I went off to see him. He took my case history and asked to see my tongue. “Malaria,” he said confidently, asking the nurse to have a look and she nodded in agreement. In all my reading on malaria I had never come across the tongue diagnosis method, nor did I have the hot and cold sweats and I protested I was on Malarone™, the Rolls Royce of malaria prophylaxis for travellers. “Pah, Malarone™ no good,” he scoffed. He took a blood test too so I awaited the result with some curiosity. He also handed me a stool sample thing so that will be nice to deal with the following morning I thought.

I was walking in the street on the way back past a little barber’s shack when one of the lads called me Jesus. No doubt on  account of the lengthening hair and beard. “That’s the last thing I need, a personality cult,” I thought and I asked his mate to shave off the beard. I might have malaria or some other tropical nasty but I am at least looking a whole lot smarter now.

When I got the results of the test that evening I was delighted to hear it was not malaria. I think the doctor was a little disappointed with the efficacy of his tongue test but there you go. I decided to have a slap up meal and celebrate. After all I had a stool sample to prepare for.

I am making my way, but glacially, to Lomé, perhaps it is the thought of the capital’s famous traffic that’s slowing me down or perhaps it is the pull of Lac Togo that won’t let me go but I think I made it a mere 20km before pulling into the auberge for the afternoon. It so happened that there was a huge party for secondary school children going on so the place was full of music, dancing and splashing around in the lake.

I noticed some windsurf boards and I asked if there were the sails to go with them and to my delight and trepidation there were so I hired one for an hour and ended up losing track of time and spent 2 1/2 lovely but exhausting hours crisscrossing the lake. At one point a black kite pulled a fish out of the water only yards from me as I skirted the palm leaves deposited in the lake to attract fish as they rot and make them easier to catch. The kids soon got involved and demanded rides on the board with varying degrees of success.

I got talking to Abraham the owner and the self-appointed president of the local village and he wanted me to make a Facebook site for him. I told him that there wasn’t much time as I would be off the following morning but he persuaded me to stay another day and attend the party he was throwing to honour his grandmother who passed away 30 years ago. That evening he took me on a tour of the little village hidden away behind the auberge and I met his numerous aunts and uncles, ate with two families and tried the local palmwine-based moonshine. I made the obligatory exhalation and expression of surprise at its strength and all were pleased. That evening it became clear that all the photos on his new camera were in fact videos of someone’s feet walking on the sand so I resolved to get up early and take a few snaps to have something to put on the site.

After the photos I got on the moto and went to a cybercafe 10km away and painfully slowly uploaded them. Take a look at http://www.facebook.com/pages/Auberge-du-Lac/156059381122465 and like the page, it’ll make me look really good, I got back late for the party but it carried on most of the afternoon with food and much drink being consumed as you’d expect while the children played in the shallow lake. That evening we again sat in the bar, me the owner, his pregnant wife, her pregnant friend and a constant stream of folk who came to say hello to Abraham. The next morning he only charged me for one night’s stay and the beer I drank, which was very kind.

Feeling the heat and still unable to really shift this stomach bug even after a month and a week of antibiotics, I made my way carefully into Lome, the capital. In common with nearly every major African city I have been to, there were mile after mile of roadworks going on. I suspect the scale of the roadworks has more to do with using up EU funding than a sensible road maintenance policy but without incident I found the hotel I was looking for on the far side of town and made my way to the Ghana Embassy. It was as advertised open but not for visas so I sloped back to the hotel and flaked out the rest of the day with slow but free wifi acting as a golden cyber prison to keep me from straying too far.