bugsonmyboard

Riding across the Guineas served up a bit more than I had anticipated. It started uneventfully enough leaving The Gambia to re-enter Senegal for a couple of days on the road and a brief stay at Cape Skirring.  I rode ride some mediocre beachbreak for two days and explored the inlets and peninsulas that occupy the craggy southern coastline of the country.

The guys at the Guinea-Bissau border were incredibly laid back and welcoming, and I found this warm attitude prevalent throughout the country.

At the first customs stop in Ginnea-Bissau I heard someone sitting at the nearby shop give a shout: “Hey, it’s the guy with the surfboard on his motorbike!”  This was Niels, an expat from Germany living in Santo Domingos who had heard about me from another traveler that I’d met in Morocco.  After sharing a couple of beers at the shop he invited me to stay at his place for the night where I got a taste of village life in Guinea-Bissau.  All of the houses were constructed nearly identically, with handmade blocks and corrugated tin roofs and are only accessible by footpaths.  No one has electricity or running water. I watched one woman carry water from the well (about 200 meters away) to her home all day long.  At night, we walked into the center of town to eat from the street vendors who operate in nearly total darkness, with no ambient light source from anywhere in the town. Niels does what he can to help the local villagers by bringing things down from Europe, making improvements in the compound of homes where he lives, and coaching the local soccer team.  A group of soccer players turned up in the evening and sorted through used soccer cleats that Niels had brought down on his last drive, looking for a pair in their size.  Among them was the goalie for the Guinea-Bissau national team.

I bush camped across most of Guinea-Bissau enjoying some epic jungle meadow sunrises.

As I rode I would periodically emerge from thick vegetation to a river valley where women were usually doing laundry on the volcanic rocks that the rushing water cut through.

Finding place to bush camp had actually become rather difficult to due to the ubiquitous presence of people.  Time after time I would head off down a dirt track off of the main road and run in to the a group of huts or after stopping for a while someone would eventually wander out and find me.  Basically any place that you may think would be a great camp site near some shade trees or a water source is sure to have someone living there. After spending the entire day interacting with people and communicating with some difficulty I usually just wanted some solitude, so I would motor on, looking for my place to hide in the jungle.

About 50 km from the border between Guinea-Bissau and Guinea (Conakry), the tarmac ended and the road turned to a rutted out mess that alternated from two track to single track.  I don’t see how you would traverse it in a truck, and during the wet season, it looked as though this stretch may be difficult to pass even on a motorbike.

Moto fans mugged for the camera.

This is what the international border crossing between Guinea-Bissau and Guinea looks like:

After crossing the border, the same road conditions persisted. I couldn’t believe what I was riding through, given that I had simply taken what looked to be the most direct route between Bissau and Conakry. Stream crossings of varying depths continued, and finally the road dead-ended at a river that even the mighty Dyna Rae balked at.

The guys by the side of the river were hand building canoes for crossings and joked that I would need to wait until they were finished before I could cross.  After a couple of hours, a guy came across on a cable driven barge to carry me to the other side.

Rather, to carry me almost to the other side.

As the sun sank low, the road became graded, my speed increased, and the grassy plains turned red before me.

At the town of Boke, the tarmac unexpectedly resumed after more than 150 km of dirt tracks. I had resolved that getting to Conakry was going to take days longer than I anticipated.  It seems that nothing is wasted here.  The villagers use the tarmac as a surface to dry their harvested grain.

It was smooth riding all the way to Conakry, other than a stop by a shabbily dressed policeman who demanded my passport and proceeded to disappear into the adjacent busy marketplace.  Of course he wanted some money for its return, but I had run out of the local currency, Guinea Franks, so he settled for a few Central African Franks that I still had from Senegal. In Conakry, by pure chance I met Tony, the Belgian in the van, on the street near the Sierra Leone Embassy. We hadn’t seen each other since Dakhla. Conakry was a hot, sticky, loud, stinky mess and it was nice to find a familiar face.  The only place we could find to stay was the parking lot of the Total gas station, which also happened to be next to the local dump/open sewer.  The highlight of the day was when a cute gaggle of piglets would waddle in to root around for their lunch.

At night it smelled as thought I had my head inside the gas tank, headlights periodically blazed straight into my tent, the club across the street blared music until 3 AM, and the military guy holding the semi-automatic weapon tasked with protecting the gas station milled about 10 ft. away from my tent joking with his friends. I lay there sweating through my sleep mat.  This is the adventure part of the surf adventure. We got on the road an hour before dawn.

The crossing into Sierra Leone proved to be our next trial of endurance. Having come across a rural border crossing I had no entry stamp on my vehicle document, the Carnet de Passage, for Guinea, which was sure to cause some kind of problem and ultimately cost some money. There were a mind boggling 5 customs stops before leaving Guinea, each of which checked the exact same thing. By pure luck, I miraculously managed not to show my Carnet to anyone at any of these stops. After each one I breathed a sigh of relief and couldn’t believe it when another one appeared 200 meters ahead on the road. At the final checkpoint, we found large man in a bad mood, He had an air if self-importance and seemed to enjoy scolding some local folks trying to clear customs. I thought, ‘This is it, I’m sunk’. Again, I just chatted to the police guys about my bike while Tony got his documents stamped and in the end realized that the big man in the bad mood didn’t realize that we had two vehicles.  Due to poor coordination between him and the guy who held the gate I was allowed to pass undeterred.

On the Sierra Leone side, the red tape continued, although in more organized fashion than in Guinea.  Again and again, we thought that we were home free only to come upon another stop to sweat through in the mid-afternoon heat.  The final stop was the kicker.  We were being asked to pay 50 Euros for liability insurance that Tony and I had both already purchased. The folks selling the insurance indicated ours was not valid because it was a different color than the one they were selling even though it said the exact same thing on it.  The army guys running the checkpoint were in cahoots with the insurance guys and they wouldn’t let us pass without a receipt.  After 1.5 hours and much frustration on our part trying in vain to get someone to even respond to any sort of logical statement, we talked them down to a 15 Euro ‘handling fee’.

We had finally made it.  We were free to explore the fabled beaches of Sierra Leone! We sped along the tarmac, busting to find an ocean to jump into to wash the dirt and frustration away.  Then Tony’s van broke.

A bushing on his shifter had disintegrated and the van would no longer stay in gear.  We found a mechanic who jumped on the back of my bike as we sped back 10 km north to find a part that could be used to bodge it together for the time being.  A few hours later we were back on the road and almost immediately found an ideal camp spot next to a gorgeous river.  Its what we had been dreaming about since Conakry and it seemed that after our series of trials in the preceding two days, the universe had ultimately provided.

I jumped in and had my first proper wash and shave since two weeks time.