bugsonmyboard

Traversing the Kwazulu-Natal Coast of South Africa we didn’t know whether or not Mozambique would let us into the country. For the most part, my worries of getting visas and crossing borders have been on hold, as most of southern Africa requires no visas for US citizens or issues them on arrival.  Mozambique is an exception and it didn’t even occur to us to try to get one in Cape Town. We received mixed reports of success at obtaining a visa at the border and some folks were positive that we’d be refused flat out. Like lots of things in Africa, conditions can change on a weekly basis and the nearest embassy in Johannesburg was a long way off, so there was nothing to do but ride to the border and give it a try.   There was good reason to do so, as there are a couple of classic righthand pointbreaks along the southern Mozambique coast that we were keen to ride.  Some years back, a wave was even reported further north up the Mozambique channel dubbed the ‘African Kirra’ referencing its similarity to the famed world-class sand-sucking cylindrical dredger on Australia’s Gold Coast.

We had our story ready at the border of why we weren’t able to obtain a visa beforehand and a few bills ready to slide into the passports to grease the wheels of tourism.  The border crossing on our coastal route was a dusty, quiet outpost, as the main road diverges north from the Kwazulu-Natal coast.   To our delight, the fellow in uniform hadn’t a question for us at all. We just filled out the visa applications, took our photos, forked over the cash and we had Mozambique visas in our passports.  We were stoked and ready for some warm water waves to ride but we weren’t quite ready for the long miles of deep sand ahead.

We were both loaded heavy and didn’t bother to air down our tires and we suffered for it.  The tracks just went on and on as we foot dabbed our way down the track.  Mike and I both smelled our clutches burning a bit when the track climbed to the top of a dune.   The first surf spot wasn’t far, but it was hard work muscling our bikes around the whole time.  Mike fared better on his 250 than I did on the 650.  A tractor would have been best.

I only dumped the bike once but had plenty of ugly looking moments with the bike wanting nothing more than to go sideways to the course I set dead ahead.  Of course I managed to dump it on the side with the surfboard again.  Awesome.  I heaved the bike upright and waddled on through the sand, legs outstretched like training wheels, without a shred of pride intact.  It was the off-road motorcycling equivalent of riding a one-foot wave on a ten-foot foam board.   And falling off.  My ego was no longer involved in this endeavor.  I was not going to look cool ripping through the sand toward the beach.  It was hot, and I was exhausted from wrestling the bike and just wanted to get to the end of the ride.

Like all things, eventually the deep sand did pass. From our camp we found only windswell waves breaking at very the top of the point; barely enough to hit the lip and do a chop hop.   Nothing was wrapping around and peeling along the sandbank beautifully as we’d imagined and there was no swell on the horizon. We had incorrectly assumed that the same swells that hit the Durban area would be lighting up these points, but apparently not so.  Even though we’d only climbed a little way up the Mozambique coast we were already in cyclone country, where the waves appear as cyclone storms spin their way up the Mozambique Channel.  Cyclone season had just come to a close. That’s what I get for not doing my homework. The only consolation for us was there was no longer any reason to struggle through deep sand for more than a hundred kilometers northward as we had initially planned.   After three days camping on the point we decided to pack it in. We had been properly skunked.

The local surf shack owner told me about a local 10 year-old local kid named Jackson with no board to ride who desperately needed one. Mike and I were about to turn inland to ride through Botswana, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Malawi and Tanzania it felt like a good time to say goodbye to my trusty companion who had ridden at my side through everything Africa dished out.  By all accounts the surf in Tanzania and Keyna is marginal so it would certainly do Jackson more good than it would do me in the months to come. We called his mom from the surf shack to let her know that we had a board for him to ride and she assured me that he’d be over the moon. I still plan on finding some waves in Tanzania and Kenya, but I’ll now have to do it on craft begged, borrowed, or created.

I rode off feeling a bit sad, but satisfied that my hard working surfboard would have a good home. I made it 100 meters from our campsite through the sand before the bike killed.  It would idle fine, but anything more than about 1/8 throttle and she would sputter out. Why couldn’t this have happened yesterday while we were sitting around at camp all day?  I unloaded the bike and started taking things apart.  We found the spark plugs the culprit, with one giving no spark and the other giving a very weak spark. Just down the road we found a couple guys tinkering in a shop who confirmed the diagnosis and had a couple of used plugs that we could instal to get Dyna Rae moving again.

We were determined for some redemption in the sand.  We left a bit lighter than we’d come and we aired our tires way down to about half of the pressure that they were at on the way to the point. It worked like a charm. We cruised in second gear maintaining speed the whole way along only dabbing a foot down every once in awhile, flowing right along with the little nudges this way and that from the edges of the track. We ruled it.  We found some more vegetated tracks on a less direct path to climb up and over the dunes. We actually had fun on the ride out rather than enduring and arduous trial.

We found the tarmac again crossing the border back into South Africa and as we sped along I couldn’t stop feeling naked without my surfboard by my side. It had helped provide purpose to the journey up until now. Seeking waves to ride was a grounding point, a compass to steer from when there was little else to go on.  It was the means by which I made connections with folks who lived very different lives from my own. Now it’s gone and I’m just a guy riding around on a motorbike to nowhere in particular.  Every once in awhile I would glance down and have a moment of panic seeing it missing as if it had fallen straight off the way it did once in Morocco. My wandering thoughts were interrupted when I smelled and saw smoke streaming from the front of my bike.

Few things can inspire more panic in a rider than the realizing that your motorbike is on fire.  Perhaps a grinding metallic cacophony from the engine would do so.   But stuff on fire is definitely up there on the panic meter.  I got to the side of road as quickly as I could, switched off the ignition and jumped off the bike.  Soon enough it was clear that the smoke was coming from my USB charger that I’d spliced into the wiring harness behind the headlight cowl.  Somehow there must have been too much voltage getting to the USB charger and it was frying its plastic casing.  Luckily I didn’t have my phone that I use for navigation plugged in at the time or it may have fried that too.  As I worked on the bike, Mike and I drew an audience at the roadside.

I soon had the USB charger disconnected, the wires buttoned up, and we were on our way again.  Embarrassingly enough, Dyna Rae had two issues in the same day while the Chinese Dream purred right along.  Well she wasn’t quite purring. By Mike’s description, at highway speeds the internal machinations of the Chinese Dream sound more like the death wailings of an alley cat.   To keep up with me on the 650 he feels like he’s choking the poor thing to death.   So far, his solution has been to turn up the music.  So far, so good.

Landing back in Pretoria, South Africa, we took to the bike shops to hunt for some spare parts and Dyna Rae got a new drive train.   Don’t she look pretty in shiny new sprockets and chain?

The last DID x-ring chain has for 21,000 miles and still seems OK. If this new one can do the same mileage I’ll be a happy camper.  Our bikes refreshed, we pointed them north towards Botswana, now headed for parts of the continent that have been in our imagination as the quintessential Africa since forever.