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 […]

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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), […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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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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Well not really.
I did manage to snap another cylinder head bolt (in my defense, it had gotten bent from the impact from the gas tank during one my many medium-speed wipeouts in sand in southern Angola that popped off the rubber gas tank mounts and was leaking oil), and this of course means with no […]

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…If you’re on a motorcycle somewhere in southern Angola between Lubango and Benguela and have cable-tied your GPS into its mount and it feels secure, and you decide to not watch it much as you’re feeling good and flying down a halfway decent dirt and rock track, you will probably look down at some point […]

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After going partially insane waiting on motorcycle parts that never arrived in Windhoek thanks to the absolutely incompetent inbreds at Kawasaki Namibia and thus left me forced to hot-wire the cooling fan to the ignition, and going completely insane in Tsumeb waiting on some metalwork for the bike and to recover from a bizarre stomach […]

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…If you go in for a tire fitting at the only Kawasaki dealer in all of Namibia, and you specifically ask them NOT to use your fresh tube but rather patch the slow leak in the old one and ask them NOT to steal your metal valve covers, they WILL use your fresh tube and […]

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