bugsonmyboard

The further south we rode, the greater power the desert seemed to have to undo what had been done to hold it at bay.  The asphalt crumbled at the edges and lobes of sand crept inward across the road, threatening to consume the black strip that bisected the sea of dunes. The sand blew across the road in a steady stream, invading eyes, nose and mouth. I’d turn my head almost 90 degrees from the vertical to avoid receiving a blast up into my helmet when I saw a particularly solid looking wall of sand hovering above the road surface ahead. We’d ridden hundreds of kilometers through this barren scene since the hills had given way to the dunes.

I was glad to have met Thomas, a Polish rider on a Honda XR650R along the roadside two days prior, to avoid traversing such a landscape alone.  I was also glad that he was riding in front when we crossed a finger of sand 6 inches deep extending onto the roadway so that I had an additional moment to react. Jamming on the brakes seemed like a bad idea, so I just gassed it and let the front get wiggly for a moment.

We had run out of daylight and had hardly seen anything for hundreds of kilometers along the coastal plain, including a place to camp that would hide us from the road.  High cliffs ubiquitously blocked access to the beach.  In the fading dusk light I spotted some dunes out by the coastline that I thought would do the trick.  Sure enough, we were able to find a nice rocky, ridable path into the dunes and tuck in behind them.  We set up our camp on the soft sand and watched a giant grapefruit moon float into the sky.

All that I had for clues to surf spots in Western Sahara was some chicken scratch on a napkin from a Portuguese surfer I’d met at my last stop. I was pretty sure that he’d misspelled the name of the village he mentioned since I couldn’t find it on any map.  On the way south towards Dakhla, I dragged Thomas off of the highway a number of times to look for waves. The general process was to identify a point of land on the GPS sticking out into the ocean facing the right direction to bend long period swells from the northwest and motor out to have a look.  Sometimes there was a track and sometimes we made our own.

Motoring cross-country. it did cross my mind that Western Sahara is one of the most heavily mined countries in the world, owing to the conflict between Mauritania and Morocco for control of the territory.  It crossed my mind and then left it, because I simply had to see if some of these points on the map had surf potential. Besides, there were plenty of tracks off the highway and no exploded burnt out vehicles to be seen, and we were still a long way from the border with Mauritania, so I figured the odds were with us.

Since there was no swell in the water yet, all I got to see was the potential for surf, but there seemed to be plenty of it, with a number perfect looking pointbreak setups with perfectly groomed sand bottoms just waiting to come alive when a big storm started spinning in the North Atlantic.   The camels thought it looked pretty good too.

Upon arrival at a campsite near Dakhla, we were immediately befriended by the neighborhood expats and recreational residents – a mix of wandering motorcyclists and windsurfers.  Five days of waiting for waves seemed to mush together in a smoky blur of evenings filled with wild boasting from some big fish living in this small pond and a perpetual game of one-upmanship centered on which country had invented the best stuff.  England, Germany, Poland, and the USA were represented. They said McDonald’s doesn’t count.

We met more overlanders coming north and south.  The Belgian couple in this super kitted-out land cruiser had just finished a year long trip all the way around Africa!

Dakhla sits at the end of a massive 40 km long sand spit peninsula and is separated from the mainland by a shallow channel. Since the peninsula is less than 2 km across and often has a steady wind from the northeast, it makes for an excellent ocean playground with windsurfing in the channel and points for surfing on the other side.  After a week of killing brain cells the swell finally arrived and it was time to find what all that potential I’d seen a week prior could churn out.

I motored northward to find a point that I could see on the map, but couldn’t see a road to it.  The reason, of course, was that there was no road, just some tracks leading off of the highway in vaguely the direction I was after.  It seriously looked like riding into desert oblivion.  It’s moments like these that I question what in the world I’m doing out here.  It just feels like the maddest thing in the world to ride across a mud flat towards a massive dune field in the distance in the middle of the Sahara desert on a motorcycle with a surfboard.  Lots of fun of course, until things start to mess up.   When I hit the dune field, things started to mess up.

The deep loose sand made for difficult riding and I proceeded rather gingerly since I wasn’t wearing my boots and I really didn’t want to fall and break my surf rack again.  I seem to have a problem of leaping before I look on two wheels.  I just figure, keep your momentum and you’ll roll on through the tough part or sail right over a gap.  Sometimes that works and sometimes it just gets you in over your head rather quickly when the terrain only gets worse up ahead.  This time happened to be the latter situation.  After grunting and sweating my way along in most ungraceful fashion for 500 meters or so, I found some Land Rover tracks that made riding easier and eventually saw a headland and whitewater appear over the dunes – I’d found the surf spot!  Within a few hundred meters I got a full view of the shoreline. The waves sucked.

Riding back out to the road earned me even fewer style points than the ride in, and this time I had a full escort.   As I turned around in the sand, seven feral dogs darted from a fishing shack in my direction with canines blazing.  I kept my cool and waddled along with this raucous pack nipping at my wheels the whole way.  I hoped that these dogs were as docile as the others I’d already met, but nonetheless I now had another reason not to dump the bike. I kept telling myself: this is the adventure part of the surf adventure.

With one wave hunting fail under my belt for the day I continued north to one of the points I’d scouted on the trip south.  Looking down from the cliff I was dumbfounded to see ruler edged perfection wrapping its way around the point.  Holy crap. It was time to go surfing.

First I had to find a way down to the beach.  The only way seemed to be the steep sandy track that the fishermen used to drag boats up off the beach with tractors.  Going down was fine, but given my recent sandy trauma I really wasn’t sure that I would be able to make it back up the steep slope, but I also didn’t feel like leaving my bike out of site at the top of the massive cliff.  There was nothing to do but go all in, so I slid down the track to the beach.

I rode 400-yard long, 5 ft. reeling waves all day by myself.  Wave after wave I rode to the beach, hopped out, and walked back up the top of the point for another.  On one of these rounds I helped the fishermen carry one of there boats up to the beach, which made me feel a bit less of an oddity that had invaded their world. There was no reason not to try to go big turns because if I fell off, there was usually an identical wave to the one I was riding right behind it that I could easily paddle into.  Not sure how me going big on turns looks in real life, maybe a bit like a guy throwing pizza while swinging wildly back and forth on a slack line. But I sure looked good in my imagination. The whole thing just seemed unreal. After 5 hours or so, exhaustion started to set in and I felt as though in a dream floating from one ride to the next.  In my euphoric haze, I thought:  this was why you come to the middle of the Sahara Desert with your surfboard and fall all over the place in the while being attacked by feral dogs.

As the tide began to come high, and the hard, packed sand was inundated, the thought of escaping the beach on my moto started to weigh on my mind with each wave I rode. What looked like an armada of identical blue fishing boats appeared on the horizon, done for the day they headed for the beach.  By the time I was finally able to stop myself from paddling out for just one more wave, the dry part of the beach was completely crammed with fishing boats and the hard packed sand was covered by the tide.  As I sat with my board loaded up and the engine running I thought about the fact that the cost of those last few waves was that I now had to ride my steel framed bike through the fantastically corrosive saltwater. I waited for a lull in the sets gunned the throttle, bolting across the soupy wet sand the receding wave uncovered and made it to safe ground in front of the steep sandy trail up the cliff.

The only way that I would make it up the slope was fast, so there would be no foot paddling to keep balance. I got the best run at it that I could with the small area of sand left dry, got to second gear, stood on the pegs, leaned back, let the front do what it wanted, and steered my way up the slope from the back wheel.  I let out a shout when I edged over the top of the cliff.  After all the fun that the ocean had provided, the beach dealt out the final thrill for the day.