bugsonmyboard

I rode away from the Angola desert with my brain still full of memories of racing down watery walls above desert sandbars. A gorgeous canyon of metamorphic rocks with walls dropping vertically to the valley floor guided my way south.

In Angola, the level of development had ticked up a substantial degree from the Congo, and now in Namibia it did so again.  Things were remarkably organized.  I felt as though I may need to actually stop when someone in a uniform told me to.  And things were cheap –  with prices a half to a third of those in Angola.

The highway was a flanked by game parks that seemed to stretch on endlessly. The air temperature was perfect and as the sun went down, I would turn on my music up and float down the road as kudu at the roadside prancing about wearing their twisty horns. Total bliss.  I’m riding a motorbike through Africa. There are African critters about.  I have a surfboard strapped to my motorbike. This is ridiculous.

I just didn’t want to stop riding those nights. It didn’t have to plan very carefully either, as a nice little safari lodge with bush campsites seemed to come up every so often along the road. Sure enough, one of the little lodges appeared ahead in the fading light and I tucked to enjoy a first beer in Namibia.

There were some uninvited dinner guests.  Or maybe he was just the local lawn mower.  At night in my tent at the bush camp I would hear these guys milling about making grunty noises.

I got up at 5AM the next morning to go find some critters.  I had no idea that animals got to work so early in Africa.  The jackals flanked us.

The lions lurked about stealthily.  I swear there’s a lion in this photo.  He just happens to look quite a bit like a brown rock.

The zebra got surly.

The Rhinos did pretty much wherever they wanted.

A  sea of pink flamingos bobbed about flamboyantly.

I also spied a dik-dik (super cute little miniature gazelle thing), oryx, springbok, and giraffe, loads of birds that the safari savy folks all seemed to know by name.  Pretty cool. Maybe there is more to Africa than great surf.

Regardless, I rode off the same day to go find some surf. Approaching the coast, the air became very wet and cold It was the first time I’d been truly cold since the Atlas Mountains of Morocco, a century ago.  I made camp on the Skeleton Coast in frigid temperatures and a thick blanket of fog that completely obscured my view of the ocean.  The Skeleton Coast is so named after the true account  of the wreck of the British passenger liner Dunedin Star, published in 1944 by John Henry Marsh. The cold ocean water and dense fog that’s so common here results from upwelling of deep cold water along this stretch of coast and the northward flowing Benguela current.

When I crawled out of my tent in the morning, I wasn’t exactly charging into my wetsuit. For months I’ve dreamed of being cold, but the novelty has worn off quickly. This Northern California surfer has gone soft in the warm waters of Africa, and my wetsuit isn’t quite thick enough for the temperatures here. But I was here to surf, so I manned up, got on my bike, and blazed forth into the cold misty morning.  After about 10 miles, the bike killed.  Wonderful.

I took the tank off and started fiddling. Plugs were fine, but I found the fuel filter clogged and cleaned it out.  It was so cold that the fuel line was frozen stiff to the carb inlet and after a couple of yanks I got it loose, but gauged my thumb in the process. My manliness quickly faded.  Nothing like the combo of a frigid motorbike ride followed by a good thumb mangling to wake you right up in the morning.

Owwwwwwwaahh.

Don’t even need coffee after that. I pressed on and eventually found a well know chunk of reef with a mellow rippable right and left peeling to either side.

The next day I ventured further afield looking for a wave that has enjoyed recent Youtube fame and is claimed by some to be the best wave in the world on its day: a long, long, dredging, fast, lefthand barrel with a very difficult take-off.  That’s a lot of expectation to put on the day as you munch your corn flakes.  Today I’m going to try to find and ride the best wave in the world.  Better have another cup of coffee.  The sand tracks gave me a bit of Sahara Desert deja vu.

Along the way I met Jim, a bodyboarder/surfer from Durban, South Africa, who was traveling through Namibia with his friend Anna.  He flagged me down on the road to ask what on earth I was doing with my surfboard strapped to my motorbike.  He happened to be in search of exactly the same wave that I was, so I led the way with Jim and Anna in their 4×4 following behind. I rode along a narrow causeway between miles of salt farms, or whatever places are called that extract salt from seawater.

The salt crystals made some fantastical looking dendritic branches into the water.

When we got into the vicinity of where I thought the wave should be, Jim and I tried to decide which way to head. We hemed and hawed about a number of different spots.  Could this be it?

When we finally came upon it, it was strikingly obvious.  Ah, there it is.

We hopped around to warm up as we turned our wetsuits right-side-out and steeled ourselves to jump into the frigid looking water with a bone crunching little barrel grinding through it.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Jim got some nice little tubes on the bodyboard.

I mostly got stuck in the lip and pitched ass over tea kettle.

Once in awhile I made the drop and stuffed myself into a little backside tube.  By the second day of surfing here, I even made it out of one or two of them.

The surf was good, but nothing legendary and we had as much fun exploring as we did riding waves.  Even the best wave in the world has its off days and we had a swell running that was angled a bit to southerly for this spot to really do its thing.

While usually I don’t like to stray too far from the coast, I have to say that after the swell subsided I was happy to leave the drippy wet weather for the inland desert.  I crawled out from underneath the fog bank to find another gorgeous desert landscape stretched before me as I headed south.

Soon after leaving the coast, a young blonde guy in a land cruiser called out to me.  It was Jonah!  Remember this guy?

He and his uncle Chris had helped push me out of the Senegal River and Jonah and I had ridden 2-up on my bike from Dakar to the Gambia.  Since then he had come to Namibia to work for a desert resort owned by some family friends.  Quite a turn of chance to run into each other on the street half a continent from our last encounter!  Jonah invited me to come stay at the resort free of charge.  This place was a true Oasis in the middle of a completely barren landscape and had the coolest pool I’d ever seen.

I slept in a wonderfully comfortable bed for a change and was happy not to cuddle up with some of the dessert crawly things.

We had a commanding view of the valley floor from the rocky outcrop the resort was built upon, making for a gorgeous desert sunset as the shadows of the hills stretched long below us.

The morning brought another long day on dusty roads with gorgeous vistas.  The gravel roads were perfect – better quality than the tarmac roads in most of Africa. Again riding adjacent to game parks, Oryx and Springbok matched my pace running alongside or right on the road.  Some Springbok stayed with me for several miles running at nearly 40 mph.  One poor unfortunate Springbok darted for the barbed wire fence that ran parallel to the road, leaped, and caught one of his horns in the wire.  The poor little fella’s body whipped over the fence, snapping his neck.  I stopped the bike and walked up to him as his eyes gaped wide and a trickle of blood ran from his nose and his mouth. These animals have the prettiest looking faces. It was a sad interlude to the day, but overall I was having a fantastic time riding my bike around in Namibia and hardly wanted it to end.  Only a few hundred miles of coastline lay ahead before reaching the bottom of Africa.