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!

They are terrible.

They are not roads.

They are rutted earth winding through steep jungle hills, cut through by 5 feet deep and 3 feet wide rain gutters, and sprayed liberally with tons of loose rock and sand. 

An experienced rider who came through north to south last year wrote it about it as the “single most challenging off-road terrain he’s ever tackled.”

I had planned on doing this stretch in one long day of riding - hah!

This is a really remote part of Africa - in the last half of northern Angola, I only saw about 6 trucks come by in both directions, and much less foot traffic (usually in Africa on the main roads there are people everywhere - it’s not Manhattan, but every time you think you’re alone, some bushman walks out of nowhere with a machete in hand wearing a pair of ragged filthy pants and a pair of of cheap chinese-made flip flops).

I don’t remember the first time I fell - after about the 15th time, they all started to blend together.

And these were not like my nice, sweeping piroutte in front of the Belgian family in Namibia, or my constant low-speed dumps in the sand in southern Angola.

I am talking hardcore, bike-flips-sideways, rocks-flying-everywhere, head-hits-the-ground-hard, break-something-on-the-bike-every time crashes.

And when you’re by yourself, and have a fully loaded bike, if the bike isn’t on flat ground, and sometimes even if it is, it’s an absolute, complete, full body effort to get it back up again.  A few times, especially when I was crushed underneath, I had to reach and untie my gear, which necessitates a full repack, which is a pain-in-the-ass 20 or 30 minutes sweating to death in the sun.

The crashes I remember the most are:

1) Trying to pick a line coming through a steep downhill that was criss-crossed with potholes and rain gutters large enough to hide cars, getting tracked too deep into a pit of loose rock, and losing control hard as the bike pitched sideways, crushing my right leg underneath the exhaust, as I screamed and tried to get myself out from underneath before I had 3rd degree burns all over my leg (mission accomplished).

2) Trying to pick a line on a similar stretch of terrain going uphill, but coming down so hard that I bent the handlebars and landed in the gutter with the bike trapping my left leg.  It took me almost 20 minutes of wedging the bike up inch by inch and levering it using my helmet to get me out.

3) Another bad choice of line which resulted in me going down hard on the left side, which thankfully was the a path carved deep in the hillside so the bike wasn’t completely down on the ground, but unthankfully had snapped off my clutch lever and necessitated putting on my only replacement.

4) Coming up over a tough hill, picking another bad line, and getting completely clotheslined by a tree branch - bike kept on going; I stayed strangled in mid-air.  I also happened to do this right in front of two women who were squatting in front of two huge piles of oranges (not sure if they picked them?  Had them dumped there?  Who knows?).  They watched me stone-faced, until I finally coaxed them to help me with the bike.  One was Congolese wth giant Ol’ Dirty Bastard-style braids (NB to anyone over 40:  google it), and when she found out I was going to Matadi (just over the DRC border), she gave me her phone number - not sure if she wanted a reward for helping me with the bike or wanted to hang out and talk fine art, politics or wine-making, but I would find out later it wouldn’t be the first time with the Congolese.

This is just a sampling of the crashes - at least a half dozen of these took me at least 20-30 minutes to get the bike upright, catch my breath, adjust the rigging, walk off the pain, scream and curse and cry in self-pity, and finally get back on the bike ’cause I really didn’t have another option.

And it wasn’t just the crashes - during one flat stretch as I finally shifted into 4th gear for the first time all day my bike’s exhaust all of a sudden started to sound like a jet engine.  I stopped and realized the exhaust pipe had blown all the bolts and completely separated from the tubing.  30 minutes later after burning my hands repeatedly, I had put it back together using almost all of my increasingly precious spare bolts.

At some point (maybe the third crash?  fourth?) my side bags had shredded completely.  I mean three walls had completely separated from the side wall and my stuff went launching into the dirt.

Now, had I been riding with someone and they had fallen and that would have happened to them, I would have died laughing.  I really would probably have wet myself laughing so hard.

But in this case, all I felt like doing was dousing everything with gasoline and setting it on fire.  Instead, I packed everything in my side bags into my duffel, and backpack that I could, lashed the rest to the top, and essentially completely overloaded the bike, killing the handling profile, and combined my physical exhaustion and increasing dehydration, probably contributed to the next dozen or so crashes.

By about 5:45pm, I had no idea where I was (no GPS map, remember), and only knew that I hadn’t seen any of the towns that my map had said I should have passed if I had actually ridden more than 80ks in almost 10 hours of riding/crashing/being crushed.

It was starting to get dark, and with the steep terrain gutted out of the hillside and the thick bush on either side of the “road”, there was no place to camp.

This was definitely starting to really suck.

As I contemplated my options (not much), a pickup truck with two guys came in the other direction - I flagged them down and my desperate begging for water was met with a full bottle of the wonderful stuff.

They told me that the town I was trying to reach was almost 40k away, and they tried to get me to leave the bike in the bush and hitch a ride with them back to the nearest town (another 30k back the way I had come). 

No way was I backtracking and leaving the bike, so against my better judgment I continued on looking for a place to camp.  I dumped the bike soon after (ok about 50 meters), and luckily found a place off the side of the road that was flat enough after removing a bunch of rocks for my tent, and with my duffle bag halfway under my sleeping mat, I was angled just enough so I wouldn’t start rolling down the hill.

After flagging down another truck for water a few hours later (the only one until the next day), I fell asleep for a few fitful hours.

But I was rudely awakened bright and early by some new “friends.”

And you know what?

That was only the second day out of Luanda - I still had a least a full day of riding if not more until I made it to the DRC border.

And it was going to get worse before it got better.