I stayed an extra day in Brazzaville, partially out of laziness, and partially out of fear of the road ahead - I had one easy day on the only tar road in the country (which goes about 400k north from Brazzaville to the president’s hometown of Oyo - total coincidence, of course), but after that I had a day or more of really tough off-road riding on deep sand tracks.

Here’s a pic of the “easy part” (stolen from another overlander’s website - not sure where exactly this is on the road, but a looooot of it looks just like it):

The first day on the road was uneventful, and I cruised along at about 120k/hr when I wasn’t dodging massive potholes and completly insane homicidal Congolese drivers. [Read more →]

Brazzaville, the capital of the Republic of Congo, is Kinshasa’s less psychotic younger brother.

Both cities are dirty and run down, and fit my usual description when describing ex-colonial African cities to foreigners:

“Imagine a mid-size European city, with wide boulevards, planters in the medians, etc. Now imagine most of the streets never get paved and just potholed dirt or sand tracks. Now imagine no one does any maintenance or any trash collection for 100 years. And now imagine it’s filled with 10 times as many Africans as it was designed to hold.”

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Arriving on the outskirts of Kinshasa as the sun was starting to fade didn’t cause too much alarm at first.

In the hills outside the city there were a surprising amount of very nice houses in private compounds (obviously belonging to either government officials or the business elite - ok so they are the same thing), and there was a surprisingly small amount of shanty towns ringing the main road into the city, unlike Luanda’s kilometers upon kilometers of shanty towns and non-existent roads.

As I descended out of the hills towards to Congo river, I started to get more and more worried that without a GPS, map, compass, or any sense of direction whatsoever (I get lost in my hometown - regularly - this is not a joke), I was going to be up a certain creek without a paddle.  As all you excellent geography students know, part of the Congo river separates the DRC from the Republic of Congo (yes they are different), and the only way to cross is by ferry. [Read more →]

Not much (due to glacial internet speeds), but some here.

By the time I made it to the Angola/DRC border, it was getting dark, I was severely dehydrated and hadn’t been able to keep down hardly any food.

I had read somewhere online that the border was open until 6PM, so with my 5:45 arrival time and the fact that the border was remote and had almost no truck/commercial traffic led me to believe I would be able to squeeze past and get to my intended destination of the Catholic Mission (where you can camp for free) in Matadi, the DRC border town.

The Angolan side in Noqui was in fact open until 6PM - score!

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Sort of.

Apologies for the posting delay, but a variety of things and unforeseen circumstances have gotten in the way. 

Expect a flurry of updates shortly, and a new joke involving a Congolese woman beaten to a pulp by police, a fat-ass mosquito-catching corrupt  Cameroonian cop, and Nigerian ferry-hijacking pirates. 

It’s hysterical.

So after a fitful night of half-consciousness (and one episode of flagging down the only truck that passed by the whole night for water), I woke up to find 5 bushmen poking around the outside of my tent.

Besides the whole crashing constantly thing of the previous day, I also, in my infinite wisdom after my cheap sidebags (from the UK apparently and not South Africa!) shredded, put a can of DEET spray in my duffel bag as part of my mildly futile attempt to repack my gear with 80 liters less of space.  (I also ditched some things in the bush that I didn’t badly need - left myself with just the bare necessities).  Of course the spray exploded everywhere, and melted everything made out of plastic and some synthetics and left me with a gooey mess all over my gear.

I did my best to clean stuff off before passing out, but left a lot of gear outside the tent to dry, figuring I would be alone until sunrise.

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So it’s now one day out of Luanda.  I haven’t slept well, it’s hot as Hades, and packing the bike is a pain in the ass (thanks to my overflowing wisdom in not bringing hard metal panniers and being forced to shove everything inside crappy softbags, my duffel bag, and the rest bungee’d and cam-buckle-tie-down’d to the back.)

I’ve been riding on prepared piste (the fancy motorcyclist word for dirt or sand track that is packed flat by a gravel grader so it can is relatively flat and not horribly covered in debris), since about 100ks north of Luanda where the road ended, but that changed quickly.

I had been warned that the roads in northern Angola were worse than the south (”hah!  worse?  how was that possible!” I had thought) and you know what?  They are!

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Today is my 29th birthday - I can’t tell you where exactly I am in Central Africa because my blog is not up to date thanks to glacial “internet” speeds and that would derail the whole telling-the-trip-story-in-order train, but I can beg you all for a happy birthday text message at +972 543 562 761 (the plus sign can be entered as plus or two zeroes - same thing.)

For the price of a text message, you make a little child in Africa happy.  Sally Struthers was totally right - you CAN make a difference.

After the Great Valve Cover Bolt Airlift of 2008 was completed, and the victory parades had stopped, the ticker tape was swept from the streets, and the NY Times journalists had (mostly) stopped calling, it was time to hit the road.

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