bugsonmyboard

Some of the most unique situations I’ve found myself in while traveling probably never would have happened if I weren’t wandering around on my own.   Alone, you get to go where you want when you want on a whim if you like, without any compromise whatsoever.   You also end up sharing time with people simply based on meetings of happenstance, and there’s something magical feeling in those moments that come and go. Partly because you never know when they will occur – your social sustenance is continually at the mercy of the universe.   All of that said, there is something about experiences shared with the important people in your life that somehow make them seem more real.   The experiences, that is, not the people. If you’re not sure important people in your life are real it may be time to go home.

When I left California 10 months ago, I kissed my girlfriend Jamie goodbye and we left things a bit up in the air, as I wasn’t really sure when I was coming back.  We had only been dating a few months but we both felt that goodbye kiss came far too soon. We talked about what would happen next, including the possibility that she would join me somewhere in Africa.  Jamie is the adventurous type and we packed lots of backpacking trips in the summer before I left, so I knew that she could handle traveling light, sleeping on the ground, and getting dirty.

There was so much uncertainty about what I was launching into that the last thing that I wanted to do was rope her into my hair-brained plans prematurely. Plenty of questions crossed my mind. What if the bike breaks and I can’t fix it?  What if I never even make it to Cape Town?  What if I get thrown in a Nigerian jail?  What if roads are to hard or we just can’t hack it riding two-up on the bike?  In the end, we’ve missed each loads and Jamie was too amped about the idea of crossing Africa not to give it a go.  So she quit her job, moved out of her place, and flew to South Africa to jump on the back of my bike and ride back to London.  This is how Jamie remembers it:

After we had been dating for a few weeks we were talking about travel ambitions and I asked, “If you could go anywhere right now, where would you go?” I was thinking maybe we might agree on a place and the wheels would start turning to put a small adventure together sometime in the next few months.  Without pause Gary blurted “I would ride my motorcycle across Africa searching for waves to ride. Did that come out too fast?”  Over the next few days he shared his idea with me of strapping his surfboard to his motorcycle to chase waves in the remote corners of Africa.  Then he spilled that he had already bought a flight to London leaving in 3 months.  This wasn’t the first time I was in a conversation like this but it was the first time that I was on the receiving end of the departure news. I could think of no other response other than to be supportive. I could tell from how he talked about it that he had to make this happen or it would haunt him forever.  At least that’s how I would feel.

As Jamie and I grew closer, the idea of her joining me somewhere along the journey kept coming up.  She’d never been to Africa and is as much as a minimalist vagabond in disguise as I am.  And now here we are, together again. Except now we live on a motorbike. It’s hard to believe that it all worked out this way.  It’s hard to believe that all our stuff fits on the bike!

Jamie brought with her a new Pelican hard case to bolt to the back of the bike. It’s larger than my old one that has had the latches broken since Senegal. She managed to fit all of her stuff in a 20-liter Kriega bag and a 15-liter bag in the Pelican case.  Pretty good for a chick, eh?  My girls are all loaded up and Kalahari ready.

From Pretoria, we rode straight north towards Botswana.  A huge portion of Botswana is covered by the Kalahari Desert.  We ripped though most of it heading for the north of the country where we heard about some great places to check out big critters.  Mike was stoked on the Chinese Dream. He was stoked it was still moving forward anyway.

We foraged for food

We uncovered artifacts

We rocked out

In desert-chic style

Before I’d left, the furthest Jamie and I had ridden on the bike was from Santa Cruz to Felton, a total of 9 miles.  So we were fully prepared to ride across Africa.  Needless to say, riding two up presented some initial challenges.  When you’ve gotten to know and love your motorcycle, a new person on the back feels like an unwelcome intrusion to a harmonious relationship.  The mobility you previously had in the relationship is gone.  Your relationship is no longer so dynamic – nothing happens as fast as it used to.  The bike makes unbidden shifts of weight, caused by the interloper.  The three of us took some time to adjust, but by the time we had ridden across much of Botswana, Jamie, Dyna and I were a pretty harmonious riding unit.

In the north of Botswana, Mike got the tunes cranking and the good times rolling.

Jamie looked cute under a tree.

I set up our camp in desert as the sun went down and got a kiss for my trouble.

As the sun went down we curled up for a frigid night amongst the sand and thorny things of the Kalahari

We found the way northward and headed for the Okavango Delta.  Not surprisingly, when the road turned sandy, Dyna Rae was a handful two-up. By some calculations, the Kalahari Desert has more sand than any desert in the world, which meant that Jamie and I wouldn’t be venturing too far off the main roads, since most of those tracks were deep sand.

At the delta, some local guys guided us through the shallow water on narrow little boats called Mokoros, push-poling our way along.  I couldn’t help wondering if you could ride a wave on one of those things. The guides had grown up in the delta and knew the place like backs of their hands.  In these little craft we could move straight through thick stands of reeds and they always seemed to know just where they were going.   The Mokoros were the only way to get around the place, as the water was too shallow and thickly vegetated for motorboats. Some places there were what looked like trails in the water made by the passing Mokoros. The banks of the delta were flanked by elaborate tangles of branches and reeds.

They brought us to banks of the delta only accessible by these lithe craft, where we had a look around for critters.  We found some zebra.   And a very big thorny tree.

We rode north towards Chobe national park mostly eating a steady diet of gas station fare and developed a persistent habit of Coca-Cola.

We were blown away when we arrived near dark at a bush camp to find elephants milling about right at the watering hole in front of the place.  As darkness fell we sat spellbound watching them lumber about and shepherd their young to the water.  The young ones sparred with each other, advancing on one another or backing away with their still growing tusks locked together and grinding.  They trumpeted here and there and we did our best to guess the social interactions unfolding in front of us.  In the morning before the elephants arrived, the baboons and Vervet monkeys ruled the show. That night we went to sleep to the sound of lions roaring in the distance, perhaps signaling a kill to other members of the pride.

We motored eastward towards Chobe National Park where the elephants were so abundant that they became a road hazard.  At one stage, Mike was rode out along a deep sandy track to scout a campsite when a whole herd of them came rumbling across the track.  In the deep sand, turning around wouldn’t have been easy, so there he stood on the edge of the elephant storm.  Eventually a safari guide in a land cruiser drove up and Mike shouted out to him over trumpeting elephants “What should I do?” The guide responded, “Just go!”  Given the size the creatures intermittently emerging from the brush and stomping their way across the road, and the lack of agility of his fully loaded bike in the sand, that somehow didn’t seem like a good idea. Before rolling on the throttle and kicking up a cloud of sand, Mike appealed to the guide, “Can you watch?”  He wanted someone to be able to tell his mom about his untimely end in Africa:  trampled to death by elephants.  Hemingway would approve.

As often as we saw them, their slow motion movements as they loped along never became less enchanting to watch.  Driving through Chobe Park was kind of like being in the middle of a scene in the Lion King movie.  Elephants, giraffes, warthogs, impala, kudu, buffalo, and hippos all milled about in our field of view as they went about their morning business.

We even spied a pride of lions not far from the roadside, including the male sporting his bushy dark mane. It was all just too rad.

As we bounced along the track through the park we came close enough to giraffes to reach out and touch them.   I looked over at Jamie and she had this huge grin on her face.  She was so excited I thought she might jump from the truck.  This is fun.

The tenor of this trip has shifted with Jamie’s addition and I know that I’ll have to make a few adjustments as a result.  Two up, my bike rides like a lame cow in high heels, the panniers are loaded to the gills, getting on and off the bike is a bit of a production, and I don’t get to spend every single moment in obsessive pursuit of finding the next wave to ride. But I like knowing Jamie is back there as we blaze through the Kalahari. There is no guarantee of success on this little venture, but we’re in it together now and that feels good. Of course I realize that riding two-up on a big dirt bike across Africa sounds like a bit of a nutty idea. It gets bugs on my girl.  😉