bugsonmyboard

One of the great sources of trepidation I’d had since setting off on this trip now loomed 200 feet ahead of me on the highway.  There wasn’t a lot of time to think about what to do, so I set my gaze dead ahead, slowly opened the throttle, and hoped for the best.

The day hadn’t started out great with my bike refusing to run after just pulling out of my camp spot.  Symptoms indicated that she was either fuel starved or not getting enough air.  While this sort of problem inevitably comes up after many miles of dirt riding and usually has a simple solution, it’s still an irksome feeling when your bike kills leaving you by the roadside hoping that you don’t have to start taking things apart in a dirt patch under the beating sun.  While I worked on the bike a portly Frenchman named Henry approached to see if he could be of assistance.  When I told him that my plans for the day were to ride from San Pedro towards Abidjan, he advised caution, as there had been reports of bandits wielding Kalashnikovs along the road between San Pedro and the next big town, Sassandra.  A substantial UN troop presence was apparent since I’d entered Ivory Coast, and a contingent of the blue helmeted soldiers with a fleet of armored vehicles prowled the streets of San Pedro. A UN convoy was leaving that day which would have been good to travel along with, but I’d already missed them.

As I sped towards the barrier now about 100 feet away, I could see that there were 4 men, 2 of them in military fatigues, talking to one another in the shade off the road. They had not yet noticed me approaching.  I had passed more than a dozen military checkpoints since entering Ivory Coast and this one had two important differences: 1) There was a makeshift barrier from branches – every checkpoint thus far had the same spiked steel barrier laid across the road and 2) The 2 men wearing fatigues were of a color that I hadn’t at any checkpoint in Ivory Coast yet.

Back in San Pedro, I’d checked that fuel was flowing to the carburetor and banged some dust out of the air filters.  That seemed to do the trick and sent Dyna Rae roaring back into action. I was more than ready to get going, as San Pedro had turned out to be a bust for surf.  I did a lot of looking and no surfing.  Before I’d gotten underway, Henry the Frenchman had told me that 3 days ago a woman was robbed of everything she had including her documents along the stretch of road that lay ahead of me. He added that couple weeks ago a friend of his on a motorbike along the same stretch had made run from the bandits and escaped but not without a bullet landing in his leg.

By the time I was 30 feet from the barrier, a man had looked up from the covering of shade to see me approaching and stood up.  My heart beat faster. I was wearing my goggles with a reflective lens on, so it wasn’t obvious from a distance that I was a white man. I pretended not to notice anything other than the road ahead and carry on steady forward.  Still, no command had been issued from the men at the roadside. As I shot through the small opening in the branches, one man gave an indeterminate shout at my back. And then there was silence.  After a couple miles, the thump of Dyna’s single cylinder overwhelmed the thumping in my chest.

For all that I know, I’d just blown through a legitimate checkpoint.  In which case, there never was much danger. When I’m stopped at checkpoints, soldiers and police usually just want to chat about where I’m from and where I’m going and my motorbike, and of course they often want some money. I took a calculated risk that panned out and hope I don’t have to take another one anytime soon.

After all of the fun on the road, I was really ready for a wave to ride.  The best I managed was some bodysurfing in pounding shorebreak slamming into the steeply sloped beaches near Abijan. I shook the sand from my hair and pointed the bike east to Ghana. One of the great things about traveling is that you continually get to satisfy your curiosity of whether the grass is greener around the bend than the patch you stand on.  In this case, the grass couldn’t help but become greener, as I had finally run into the rain.  I donned my rain gear for the first time on the trip, put my visor down and spent the day hoping to punch through the other side of a nasty storm.

Ghana welcomed me with another easy border crossing, a far cry from the trials I’d become accustomed to crossing borders in the north of Africa. However, the rain had turned to roads to a red slippy slidey mud pit.  I watched a huge passenger bus in front of me do a slow-motion sideways drift as its rear wheels spun in vain, gaining little purchase in the mud. I was sure that it would end this comical looking maneuver resting perpendicular to the road, blocking traffic in both directions. It proved tremendously advantageous to be on a motorbike.  As trucks and buses lined up either direction for their turn to get stuck in a narrow section of road, I simply motored along the side of everyone.

While feeling pretty smug about the agility of my motorbike I stopped to take a photo and found that the toolbox latch that I’d repaired in Freetown had failed and my tool roll was missing from its usual place inside the narrow aluminum box. I’d just ridden 10 miles through this slop of a road and now I had to turn back to retrace my tracks.  On the ride back, every black plastic bag lying in the mud inspired a moment of hope that was quickly dashed as I came close enough to correctly identify it.  Traversing the mud for the third time to get back to where I was 2 hours prior, a hollow feeling of defeat occupied my belly.  I was now powerless to solve even the simplest of mechanical problems. As luck would have it, my carburetor had just started acting up in the last couple days. It was probably just a clogged jet but without tools, every hiccup of the carb provoked a twinge of unease.

I found a clear patch in the forest to make a camp and discovered that the zipper of my tent had finally given up the ghost, so I now had poor sanctuary from things that creeped and crawled in the jungle.  As darkness fell, the clouds let loose some more rain and finished the job of soaking me to the skin. My boots, clothes, bike, bags, and board were absolutely covered in the red mud of Ghana.  I simply looked forward to the packet of Lemon biscuits that I’d bought at the gas station and stuffed in my bag that would serve as my dinner.  I dug them out and found banana rather than lemon biscuits. Devastated. I hate banana  flavored biscuits.  It was the final blow for the day. I was soaking wet, cuddling up with bitey things in my broken tent, had a carburetor with a cough and no tools, and choking down banana cream biscuits in the dark. You could say that it was a low moment.  I told myself that his is the adventure part of the surf adventure.