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.

Late in the day, I turned off the tarmac and onto the mud, which quickly turned into hardpacked sand.  Riding on the hardpacked stuff is just like riding on dirt, and I puttered along fine until it got too dark to see.

I had started to set my tent up on the far side of a road embankment when two locals pushing ancient bicycles came by.  The older (and slightly crazier) one claimed to be the chief of the village down the road, told me I HAD to come spend the night at his house as his honored guest, and in fact several tourists had stayed in his house the previous year.

I couldn’t turn down the offer, especially not when Mr. Chief kept on slapping his chest and saying “vous vienez a MON maison!  MON maison!” with his buggly eyes.  So I puttered down the road to the village, where I sat around watching the women cook, watching about 30 kids watch me, and waiting for Mr. Chief to wheel his bicycle back to the village.

After sitting around for an hour, Mr. Chief came to fetch me, after apparently having forgotten that he had invited me to his village.  Also note that during this time, I had repeatedly asked about when the chief was coming, only to be met with puzzled amusement.  Also note that it wasn’t an issue with my French but rather the fact that Mr. Chief is actually only Secretary of the Village (yes they have a Secretary), but he will still be referred to here as Mr. Chief.

Here’s a picture of the chief and his house:

Mr. Chief then spent the next 30 minutes cleaning and prepping the room where I was to spend the night as his guest (note the blanket he draped over the door for my privacy).

After a dinner of palm wine and glucose biscuits and an hour of being stared at in front of the fire by the local kids while Mr. Chief drank a whole bottle of palm wine and babbled in what must have been half-French half -Likongo and totally crazy, I hung my mosquito net in my room and hit the sack, knowing I had a loooooong day ahead of me.

I rose at dawn, packed the bike, said my goodbyes, and headed out on the road (sand) around 7am.

It was mostly hardpacked sand until the Congo border, and I was pretty euphoric about reaching what I thought was the end of the sand around 2pm.  There is about 30k between borders - once you leave Congo there’s a pretty large stretch of no man’s land until you reach what is technically Gabon, but considering it’s pretty dense jungle with not much else, I’m not sure anyone really cares.

There was one section that was mostly mud and in relative thick jungle cover, and I picked a line through a flooded section that avoided the deepest part of the water.  I slowed down too much riding across some flat rocks and like the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man, I slow-motion tipped the bike over, pretty much submerging it under water.  I managed to stay mostly on my feet, and as I sat there in thigh-deep water and mud, staring at the bike like an idiot, I started to realize that my (underwater) tank bag, which not only was not waterproof nor even fully closed, contained my Nikon camera, both lenses, my Ipod, and all my power cables.

Oops.

As soon as I figured THAT out, I ripped the tank bag off the bike, and as far as I can tell, after a little au naturale drying, everything survived.

I arrived at the Gabonese border on a stretch that was getting progressively more difficult in the looseness and depth of the sand tracks, and the border cop went through an excrutiatingly painful explanation in both English and French of exactly why the 2000 CFA exit fee (about 5 USD at the time) was required by the government, and was not, in fact, going into his pocket like every other “official fee” on the continent.  I almost offered to bribe him just to stop talking about how he wasn’t asking for a bribe - which may have been a whole metaphysical reverse-reverse psychology thing, which makes my glorified motorcycle mechanic brain hurt.

Anyways - things went downhill after that.

Really downhill.

The sand got thicker, the day got longer, and I got more bike-droppier (Editor’s note:  not actually an adjective).

In fact, during one uphill stretch of deep sand in a clearing that passed through a village, I dumped the bike right in front of a bunch of kids playing kick-the-ball-of-rags-tied-together.  They all immediately rushed over to help me pick the bike up, laughing hysterically at me the whole time.

I thanked them, got on the bike, headed up, and promptly dumped the bike about 20 meters up the road.  The kids all roared with laughter again and rushed over to help me again, I thanked them, and then - surprise! - I dumped the bike again about another 50 meters up the road.  Again, everyone roared with laughter and ran down the road to help me up again, as there is nothing like a white man dressed like an alien falling off an overloaded motorcycle to brighten your day.

As you might imagine, by this point I was getting a little tired of dumping the bike and either trapping myself underneath it next to a sand berm or just slamming myself against the ground.  The problem really was due to several things:  1) I wasn’t going fast enough in the sand, and every time my back tire started to squirm I let off the gas - a definite no-no 2) I wasn’t packed well - I had too much weight too high and too far back and 3) I wasn’t standing on the pegs or shifting my body weight often enough.  Plus, the more I dropped the bike, the more I had to struggle to get it back up again (and/or repair something) which drained the life out of me in the heat and humidity.  It wasn’t much hotter than about 80-85 F, but at 95% humidity in full gear and direct sunlight I was getting a serious ass-kicking.

After dropping the bike a few more times (out of view of an entire village these times), it was getting late in the day, and I seemed like I was nowhere near my destination (the road supposedly turned into tar sometime soon), and I was starting to get discouraged, tired, and frustrated.  I had read that other overlanders on bikes had done this stretch in a day, and it looked like I wasn’t going to be able to do it (NB:  I read later on that in fact, most people did the hard loose-sand part in one day, and another half day to do the hard-packed sand - oops).

As the shadows grew longer, a truck that I had passed in a previous village watched me topple over another time pulled up and the crew hopped out and tried to convince me to load the bike in the truck.  They seemed trustworthy, and genuinely concerned that some idiot white tourist kept on dropping his motorcycle and may just plop face-down in the sand and never move again, and who wants to have your truck squish over THAT?

I declined the offer, but after figuring out that the tar didn’t start for another 50k (which would have taken me another 2 hours at least if I didn’t set the bike on fire in frustration first), I begrudgingly accepted after dropping the bike again another 10 meters away (may have been subconscious - who knows).

So the crew of the truck helped me load the bike into the back, we lashed it to the sidewalls, and I climbed in after it for a ridiculously bumpy ride with the crew as we flew at breakneck speeds through the sand.

For the first time I really felt like I was “cheating” - hitching a ride instead of toughing out the road, and combined with the misery of the day, I was not exactly in high spirits.

I felt like I really hadn’t planned ahead, both in timing, ride skills, packing,  and mental preparation for the sand, and was feeling pretty down on myself.

The true irony, of course, was that my lack of preparation paled in comparison to that of the truck crew.

Their (my?) first mistake was letting them secure the bike.  I had monitored it pretty carefully, chiding them for running my ropes and bungee cords through anything that looked like metal (who would EVER hook a bungee cord through a rotor unless they were desperately trying to deform it?), but let them, under their extreme insistence of “no problem no problem!”, rig the bike via the handlebars vs. only via the frame.

About 10ks into what was apparently the first of a series of “Formula One - Gabon Edition” races, the bike was flying around so much against the rigging and the sidewalls of the truck that the handlebars, which are just one-inch aluminum tubing, had deformed completely (one side was bent up completely at 90 degrees basically).  I didn’t realize it until it was too late, and given my mental state, I was aghast, making the crew stop the truck to attempt to re-rig, and periodically screaming at everyone and bemoaning loudly like a wounded dog how awful the situation was.

I finally gave up and accepted that I was going to have to somehow get it fixed somewhere in one of the cities on the Gabon side, and cringed over every bump as we made our way out of the jungle and sand, finally arriving where the road began about 30ks before Leconi, the first town on the Gabon side.

It was about 8pm, my cell phone had been smashed during one of my falls (or possibly my attempt at motorcycle SCUBA-diving), and my back was in incredible pain from lifting the bike over and over again, but I was in relatively high spirits - I was back on the road, I had enough water left to last me until we arrived at Leconi, and I could lay down in the truck among the packages of glucose biscuits and my bike and take a semi-nap.

Unfortunately for me, and the rest of the truck crew, there was not exactly going to be an on-time arrival in Leconi, and once again, things were going to get worse before they got better.