bugsonmyboard

It’s a strange feeling when a foreign capital like Dakar begins to offer the comfort of familiarity.  I’ve run up and down the Cape Vert peninsula so many times looking for various embassies that I no longer need my GPS anymore to navigate.  After two and a half weeks here, I have my regular coffee shop, market, bakery and I know the gas station with the cheapest beers. The fisherman who watches my bike while I surf brings me a fish to eat hot off the grill as soon as I’m out of the water. The girls at the coffee shop laugh at my pronunciation of French words that they try to teach me.  I know where to turn off to avoid traffic jams and when I can ride up on the sidewalk to pass cars without encountering a massive drop-off or hole.  I’ve developed jedi-like powers for anticipating particularly dangerous moves from a taxi driver. Every day I ride less than 2 miles and every day I see at least two traffic accidents. Today I saw three.  If I happen to forget my sunglasses I constantly have little bits of diesel debris flying into my eyes.  The little tree-lined corner of a parking lot where my tent sits feels like my little sanctuary from the chaos of the city, even if the tent floor was copiously littered with the corpses of giant ants that I do battle with nightly.  I’ve ridden lots waves and I have the visas I need, so its time to wedge myself out of this comfortable corner of the city. I got the bike ready and did some surgery on turn signals that had fallen victim to the Sahara dust.

Before I was to leave Dakar, there was another swell on there was another swell to ride. While about the same size as the one that rolled in when I’d arrived, this one had a bit more northerly direction to it, making the right-hand breaking part of the reef the better wave to ride.  For two days I surfed through the low tide and finally found the exits from some proper tubes.  Getting yourself into and out of small tubes is much easier on your forehand (right breaking waves for me since I surf regular foot) than on your backhand.  The first day I surfed with a crowd of locals and a few French grommet rippers, but the second day I had two 3 hour sessions all to myself.  At dead low tide, I watched dry rocks exhumed just shoreward of where the lip of the wave landed as I slotted in for a little barrel and I could just about feel my fins dragging on the urchin laden reef below me. In waves like this, the safest alternative is always to stay where the most water is, which is on the wave.  The worst thing to do is not to make the wave and have to straighten out or get pitched over with the lip.  That lands you right where the least water is.  I made a few errors that a in more powerful surf would have had me doing a very ugly and painful reef dance, but on these days was give a pass and always seemed to be allowed to squeak off the reef and back to the channel.

I left Dakar much heavier than I arrived.  Jonah, the young German traveler who had helped push me out of the mud on the way to Dakar had briefly returned to home to Europe and needed a lift down to Banjul in The Gambia after returning to Dakar.  In addition to the strapping lad I added to the bike, I also added at least 6o pounds of wonderful German cheese, salami, and sausage that Jonah had packed in to sustain himself and his uncle Chris in style as they motored southward in their Toyota.  The bike seemed to give up most of the rear travel as soon as Jonah sat down with his backpack.  This was going to be an interesting trip.

Dyna Rae turned from a lithe gazelle into a drunken pig.  Everything happened in slow motion now – acceleration, braking, and steering all turned to oatmeal.  Every hit the bike took from a rock or pothole was exaggerated and felt like an undeserved beating was being served on my poor beloved machine.   It put me a in a bit of a bad mood.   We weaved back and forth across the tarmac finding the lines through the minefield of square edged craters.  Eventually the tarmac had deteriorated to the point that I thought we’d be better off in the dirt, where at least the edges of holes are less square.  As if to call my bluff, the tarmac went away and there we were, two up and loaded in the dirt.

I like riding my bike in the dirt.  But this was not my bike. This was some uncoordinated, gelatinous grontor donut-devouring version of my bike. To add to the fun, my rear brake had packed up, so I only had the front to use.  It wasn’t fast or pretty, but we made into The Gambia and to the ferry port to cross the river to across the river to the capital city of Banjul. We were the last passengers squeezed onto the last ferry of the day, with my rear wheel nearly hanging off the rear of the slowest ferry boat in Africa.

We arrived in The Gambia to find that our young German friend who I’d first met in Dakhla was finally out of jail after a few weeks of less than ideal accommodation and Jonah’s uncle, Chris, camped out at a compound on the beach south of Banjul.  Chris had spent weeks trying to help him straighten out the inevitable mess that happens when you cross an international border in a vehicle where lots of joint rolling had happened and very little cleaning had happened. With plenty of stony dipshit detritus laying about the car, getting out of jail had become rather time consuming and expensive.

The surf was windblown and abysmal looking, so Chris and I laid around on the beach on the beach like indulgent tourists while Jonah rigged up the kite to show us how it was done.

We camped with some folks Chris had befriended named Freeman and Osman who were starting to build a beach bungalow and restaurant.  For now it was just  a clearing of the jungle on the beach, but it suited us just fine and I pitched my tent right on the sand.

To build their place, they make all of the bricks by hand using sand straight from the beach mixed with less that 10% cement.  These guys have a dream of what this place could be and are making it happen, literally brick by brick.  We were honored to be their first guests.   As they had nothing to offer other than space on the sand, rather than charging us to camp the Germans and I bought dinner and beers in return for their welcoming hospitality. Since Freeman’s and Osman’s palm trees were still only about 3 feet high we didn’t have much shade on the beach, so I was feeling pretty crispy after three days and decided to motor south.

Through the south of The Gambia, even riding on the tarmac road just feels like adventure with the jungle crowding in on either side along with people, animals, and villages strewn out along entire length of the roads.  The smells of the jungle are overpowering. The air  feels absolutely fantastic.  The world was meant to be traversed by motorbike.   A simple thing, like taking away the frame to look out of seems to have made all the difference in the seeing of it.

Approaching the southern border of Gambia I had my biggest scare yet while on the moto. As I was dreamily floating along through the jungle scene at about 50 mph,  a kid of about 10 years pedaled his bicycle furiously on the shoulder ahead of me.  At the instant before I passed, without even a sidelong glance he darted left across the road and right into my path.  I barely had time to pull the front brake an heard the tire skid for a fraction of a second and he was safely past me.  Were we to collide, I would have basically hit him broadside at full speed.  He could easily have been killed and I probably would have fared better, but not very well either.  I must have missed him by 2 feet. I stay about 45 mph now and try to anticipate even the most nonsensical acts that seem to defy a basic sense of self-preservation.

Aside from near catastrophes on the road, The Gambia has been a great reprieve since English is generally the second language spoken rather than French, and Gambians have an incredibly welcoming spirit to tourists of all sorts.  You commonly see a European couple or group with a young Gambian guy who serves as a guide or host of some sort. The place is absolutely filled with English tourists.  I happened to find one of the tourist enclaves on the beach with cool tree houses to put my tent next to.  Which also provided me the opportunity to repair my rear brake.

She is a little crusty around the edges, but I love her just the same. She earned those scars.

I went out and had a surf in the most meager of conditions with the waves standing up so softly that I could barely catch one and get to my feet before they would outrun me breaking down the line.  Although not so fun, conditions like this are actually quite good for your surfing. Slow reactions and inefficiencies of motion are magnified because the power that the waves provide is so little, there is no extra, no slop to cover your own shortcomings.  The ability to feel and respond to even the most subtle of changes in curvature of the wave is needed to suck the most energy out of the wave possible to keep you moving smoothly. This is how nice it is on the beach in Gambia – I’ve managed to find the bright side of a mortifying surf session hopping around in 2 ft closeouts.