bugsonmyboard

Jamie and I saddled up and rode west from the N’gorongoro crater, headed for the coast and hoping to find a wave to ride somewhere in Kenya.   We rode through the quintessential African landscape of the Serengeti: red earth underlay the grassy yellow Savannah dotted with the umbrella-like Acacia trees providing shade for weary travelers, human and animal alike.

Where we stopped for the night we found our usual friendly neighbors ready to join us for an evening beverage.

The ugliest surfboard in Africa

We arrived at the coast and found a remote beach-side camp spot. We even had a living room and an oil-burning lamp this time around courtesy of the completely empty lodge. In fact, just about everywhere we stopped was completely empty as the headline-making security issues of the last few years have kept the tourists away from Kenya. Most businesses are barely hanging on, and the and local village folk who staff the resorts and lodges are all on reduced hours or no longer have jobs. We walked along the shoreline of a lonely beach as fishing boats drifted listlessly in the wind and as the local soccer game progressed on the low tide hard packed sand in the distance.

Where we were camped most of the swell energy was blocked by offshore reefs, so we motored northward to find some little waves breaking on a beach near a town called Malindi Bay. We found a cheap little guesthouse to crash in with big airy rooms, high ceilings, and balconies overlooking the main street. They even let me put my park my bike inside the restaurant overnight to make sure it was safe.   Mailindi Bay is filled with Italian expats and tourists, which seems a bit of an oddity since I’ve hardly met Italians anywhere in Africa. Apparently tour groups have been coming to the place since the 80’s, growing in numbers every year until the recent terrorist attacks. Lots of Italian expats makes for fantastic food and we enjoyed many a good meal in the beachside restaurants.

I wandered around on the beach and asked a couple of young guys if they had every seen anyone riding the waves. I met Akhmed, who was about 17 years old by the look of him and of mixed African-European parentage, with dark curls, mocha coloring and wearing day-glo Ray-Bay knock–off sunglasses. He knew a guy with a surfboard that I could borrow and so I jumped on the back of the Indian-made 125cc bike with Akhmed and his friend and off we sped 3-up, through tiny streets and alleyways and to find a surfboard. He was going so fast that he nearly brought an unsuspecting old woman doing her washing along with us for the ride. When we found the one guy in town who had a surfboard, he proudly produced 7 ft single fin board that was painted over with yellow acrylic paint on top of the fiberglass. The thing was so heavy it had surely been broken in half and stuck back together, probably more than once.   Near the nose of the board there was painted a skull and the text ‘Liquid Shredder’. It was the ugliest surfboard I have ever seen, but if Kelly Slater can ride a wave on a door and a coffee table, I should surely be able to find some trim on this beast. I was ready to shred.

The three of us rode off again, me in the third position on the bike holding my Shredder. Akhmed didn’t reduce the speed much to account for the added bulk of the board and some of the Shredder’s yellow paint was left on the corner of a building. There was no wax on the board and the best I could do was find some candles and drip the wax on the deck as they burned. The waves were so small and messy it didn’t matter much what I was riding anyway. I scratched into a few waves and pumped down the line before hitting the lip a it closed out.

Jamie came out and shredded a few waves too.

After awhile, some kids turned up down the beach carrying either half of a suitcase which  turned out to be their innovative wave riding craft. I can’t imagine a better example of the spirit of surfing than two little kids in Kenya riding waves on a suitcase. You can find surf stoke in plenty of unlikely places when you spend a bit of time looking. I love it.

A Jungle Rendezvous

Jamie and I spent a week in Malindi Bay enjoying great pizza and dodging rainstorms that flooded the streets. With all of the rain, we were happy to be holed up in our little guesthouse rather than in the tent.   We’d been enjoying the reprieve from big cities, but it was finally time to head to head to Nairobi to apply for visas to the countries ahead. Our route took us on some dirt tracks to avoid passing through Mombasa where the rain had created some red mud pits.

Jamie got off of the bike a couple times as I powered through puddles of unknown depth.

By the end of the muddy sections Dyna Rae had gotten a proper mud bath. She doesn’t mind though, it improves her complexion.  I would have traded a few more miles of muddy roads to avoid some of the Mombasa highway, which was fully packed with trucks running containers from the port at Mombasa to Nairobi. There were hardly any passenger cars at all, and certainly no other motorbikes. The trucks were incredibly slow moving, even on flat ground, which normally wouldn’t be such a problem since we can just whiz past on the bike. The trouble was that the line of trucks seemed nearly continuous in both directions of the two-lane road. When we did manage to bust ahead of a line of trucks into a section of diesel dust free air, we were constantly in danger from oncoming trucks passing one another. They could see us coming but they didn’t care, and we were run off of the road into at least a dozen times before the journey was finished with varying degrees of danger.

The overlander sanctuary known as Jungle Junction in Nairobi was a welcome sight for our road weary eyes. As soon as we saw the stacks of motorbikes and 4×4’s dotting the compound we knew we were in the right place.

 

We even found Dyna Rae’s big brother – the 750cc DR Big, rarely spotted in the wild.

Jungle Junction has been in Nairobi since 2003 and it has become a bit of an overlanding institution. It was a great place to meet with other travelers to discuss all things overlanding: obtaining visas, border crossings, road conditions, water crossings. Speaking to folks who have come south from Europe yields invaluable information about the difficult border crossing between Sudan and Egypt and how to get across the Mediterranean from Egypt to Turkey. Ferry runs have been sporadic over the last couple of years and it seems like the operators and status changes from month to month. We heard a nightmarish tale of getting stuck in a shipping yard for a week from a British couple in a Toyota land cruiser. My hope is that getting across some water is easier with a bike than with a truck, as it usually is.

Chris, the German proprietor of Jungle Junction, runs a mechanics shop right out of the place, so it was to perfect time to get to some well overdue moto work done. The Junction has a real workshopy vibe, with everyone fiddling with bikes strewn about the place. Even the reception desk lives in a converted garage space. We set up our tent in the front yard and I tore into the bike.

Once again I found the valve clearances not to have budged a micron since their last inspection 8 thousand miles ago. I changed the oil and spark plugs then set about fixing some other niggling bits. The rubber of my grips had begun to disintegrate into a sticky mess, so I found some replacements; too bad they say Husqvarna on them instead of Suzuki.  Sorry girl.

Over time and under a heavy load, my side stand had slowly bent so that the bike was often was often leaning way over on its side. I got the side stand off and the in-house mechanic Samuel set to work cutting my stand in half to insert a 1.5 inch piece of steel that would lengthen it. After multiple checks on the lean angle of the, Samuel welded the stand back together and Dyna Rae was standing tall and proud again.

The rain and humidity of the west coast journey had taken its toll on Dyna Rae, with rust and bolts that just didn’t want to move anymore. I’d known about them for some time now and have just put off dealing with them for fear of twisting off a bolt head as I’d done when my surf rack bolts had seized up. I bathed them in WD-40, gave plenty of whacks with a hammer to try to scare them out, but still managed to twist off a couple of bolt heads. At least this was the best place to do it, right next to a full mechanics shop. Samuel helped extract the broken bolts, we cut some new bolts from spares around the shop, and soon enough Dyna Rae was feeling and tight and toned.

I even got my newly air conditioned boots resoled with some used tires.

The visa game

After roaming around southern Africa the last four months, where everyone seemed happy to allow us in for a visit, we’d become rather complacent about our research. We simply assumed that we’d be able to obtain visas for countries north of Kenya while in Nairobi, but found little hospitality at the local embassies. Ethiopia sent us packing immediately.

Ethiopia: Why didn’t you obtain a visa in your home country?
Me: I haven’t been there for a year. You must have some provision for folks traveling overland as we are.
Ethiopia: You can obtain a visa on arrival at the airport in Addis Abeba
Me: But we’re riding a motorcycle
Ethiopia: You can obtain a visa on arrival at the airport in Addis Abeba

From their response to our request, you might think that we were the first people ever to arrive in the country not on an airplane. Before they would issue a visa some guy called Isbaruk, who is the head of the entire Ethiopian Immigration department in Addis Ababa, had to tell them it was OK. They had no phone number or email address for this character.   They couldn’t even tell us his last name. But Isbaruk has to say its OK, or no visa.   Strike 1.

Sudan wasn’t very keen on giving us a visa either. They told us that we needed a letter from the American Embassy explaining what we are doing in Sudan before they would issue a visa. The weren’t very keen on remodeling either.

All American embassies now have a policy that require an appointment, which may take weeks to schedule. Unfortunately the Nairobi online appointment system wasn’t functioning, so we had nothing to do but show up at the embassy and try to explain our situation. After being told by several people that they could offer us no help, we finally got in front of the vice consul, Daniel, who was incredibly helpful. He certified affidavits about what we were doing in both Ethiopia and Sudan and even sent a message to his colleague in Addis asking them to contact the ministry of foreign affairs there.

We rode back over to the Sudan embassy, hopeful of our prospects, but on our return, the story had changed. They would need to get approval from Khartoum before they could issue a visa. The dialogue went something like this:

Us: How long will that take?
Sudan: I have no idea
Us: You must be able to give me some idea. A week? A month?
Sudan: Sorry, no idea

As far as I can gather, the chilly reception probably has to do with the United States’ involvement in the recent war and the creation of the new nation state, South Sudan. In any case, that felt like strike two in the visa game.

Given the uncertainty of obtaining our Sudanese visa in Nairobi, we set to researching where else we might get it. It seemed that if we had an Egyptian visa in our passport, the Sudanese embassy in Ethiopia may be inclined to issue us a transit visa.  That is of course assuming of course that we can even get into Ethiopia. We motored across town and submitted our application and documents at the Egyptian embassy thinking that this should be a piece of cake. American tourists go to Egypt all the time! Later that evening, we received an email explaining that since we weren’t Kenyan residents, we couldn’t apply for a visa in Nairobi, and that we could obtain a visa on arrival at the airport in Cairo. It seems that most embassy folks in Nairobi think that we are on a flying type of motorbike. This was nearly strike three, but we persisted and explained our trip to the consul the following Monday, trying to make it sound as fascinating as possible. He was very friendly and finally relented to issue us a visa.

We were glad to be on a bike for all of the running around on the terribly congested streets of Nairobi. There was often plenty of dirt road shoulder or walkway available to plod right past the gridlocked traffic. One day after we’d had some rain, we were riding the dirt path alongside the road, when we hit a mud bog, my tires spun, and we dumped the bike. It was the first spill with Jamie and I both on the bike, and thankfully neither bike nor riders were damaged. I picked the bike up and we continued down the same path. The cars beside us never even moved during the whole episode.

While we were waiting for something to happen in visa world, we went to check out the Nairobi National Park, which sits barely outside of the city boundaries. It’s truly a surreal scene to behold the zebra, giraffe, buffalo, wildebeest, ostriches, and rhino milling about the savannah with a cityscape in the background. This park must be unique in the world, having such animals living so close to a large city.

After two weeks we still had no response from our compadre Daniel in the American Embassy even after repeated emails. We’d been to the Ethiopian embassy 4 times, but hope for obtaining a visa locally was running out. Unfortunately, that was the good news. Sudan flat out rejected our visa application, with no reason given. We were desperate to make some progress on the Ethiopia front, since South Sudan is the only other route option traveling north.  South Sudan sounds a bit lawless and in danger of going the way of Somalia and becoming the next failed state in Africa, so it is not exactly an ideal travel destination at the moment. We made contact with the Ethiopian embassy in Washington D.C. and yesterday we chose the less-than-ideal option of sending our passports there via DHL in the hopes that they will issue us a visa. And so now we wait in Nairobi, without passports and hoping that nothing goes awry with our precious documents whizzing halfway around the world to someone who cares a lot less about them than we do. We’ve got two massive countries in front of us who just don’t seem to want to meet us. The road ahead is unclear and  this trip is starting to feel rather adventurous again.