Riding a motorcycle is never a question of IF you will crash, it is always a matter of WHEN you will crash.

And riding an overloaded dirt bike at 2000 meters in a high desert mountain pass doing 120k/hour on un-graded gravel roads with sudden elevation changes and blind turns is no exception.

Now, doing the above at say, 80k/hour is another story, but in my case, the crash diagnosis was is pretty simple - Too Fast For The Conditions.

After leaving the beautiful dunes of Sossousvlei and my over-priced campsite at Sesriem (note to the Namibian Wildlife Recreation staff - $45 US is way too much), and fully energized after the first few tough camping nights without enough warmth, I headed north-east towards Windhoek, the capital of Namibia.

With a 500K ride ahead of me, and after fixing a loose cable to the regulator that prevented the bike from starting up (frustrating!), I headed out around 10AM.  Around 11:30, I started to hit tougher gravel and some elevation changes and blind turns (imagine coming up Lombard street crossing the top at Polk St. in San Francisco at 120k/hour and discovering to your horror that not only is the road effin’ curvy, but it’s also covered in gravel.)

I slowed down a bit, but apparently not enough.

I had noticed around noon that counter-steering the bike was getting tougher and tougher, and figured the tires had slipped a bit off the back of my bag and pushing the center of gravity backwards.

This was true.

I also figured that I could handle it and just needed to be a little tougher with counter-steering.

This was not true.

Coming up around a blind curve near the pass, I realized I was going WAY too fast for the turn and if I didn’t do something, I was going to fly over the edge of the mildly steep ravine.  So I braked a bit trying not to lock up the rear wheel and quickly realized that if I didn’t want to launch into space then I had to bring the bike down.

So I low-sided, taking the bike on top of me and trying to hold on to it, but it caught my left boot and took it one way while the rest of me spun around the other way.  Had I not been wearing my ridiculous-looking motocross riding boots my foot would have been taken clean off - so NB to those who like to ride without gear or in tennis shoes.

So I go down and spin around and slide in a massive heap of motorcycle, gear, tires, rider, gravel, and cloud, and finally come to a rest on my back.

I look up, and realize I am about 20 yards away from a family of five sitting in lawn chairs in front of their hired truck, mouths completely agape.  This Belgian family, on their way to Sesriem where I had just come from, had decided that such a scenic mountain pass was a perfect spot for a picnic.

Had I let them know ahead of time where I was going to be wiping out, drawn them a map, had a dress rehearsal, and built a friggin’ diorama, they could not have been better situated for viewing.

Imagine:  You are a middle-class Belgian family of five in the middle of nowhere in Namibia on a high desert pass and haven’t seen another car for over an hour having a picnic and all of a sudden you see an idiot American on a motorcycle coming flying out of nowhere, crash, spin around, and come to a skidding halt right in front of you.

Definitely not on the typical tourist itinerary.

Here’s where I wiped out and where the Belgians were (click on pins to see more detail):

View Larger Map

After the family was able to close their mouths, dad and son rushed over to help the bike up, and offered me one of their lawn chairs for recovery.

Since my shinguards had gone flying a few days before, my left knee was pretty scraped up, but Belgian mom patched me up with her totally overstocked medical cut while making comments in Dutch (okay, Flemish.)

After a few swigs of water, 10 minutes of light chit-chat and pretending I hadn’t just skidded like a bat out of hell into their laps, I repacked the bike a bit and prepared to take off.

With a bit of minor scrape damage, a corrected alignment (crashing it actually straightened it), and a bruised ego, I headed to Windhoek, a bit slower, and with an increasingly sore ankle that would keep me from walking well for the next 5 days.

But that’s a story for another time.