I apologize for causing offense but my lighthearted comment was intended for the author of this travelogue whose exploits I have been following from the beginning (you might want to check my previous comments) not least because I spent twenty years in Santa Cruz myself (I was not born in Half Moon Bay but I did sail there overnight a few times and enjoyed the fog). I believe Gary took my back handed congratulations on his achievement in the spirit it was intended.
Erm...I am a man (though my man card is revoked as I enjoy riding a vintage Vespa in my home Key West) and my wife of twenty years is a woman who grew up in Palo Alto and also lived in Santa Cruz. Neither of us surfed.

I answer 911 calls for a living in Key West overnight and I greatly enjoy the pictures and humor of this story. A dry sense of humor in between 911 calls is a pleasure. Thanks for suggesting I be banned; i have never had the honor previously on any forum.
cheers
Michael.:mchappy:
Back to regular- surfboard free- programming.

'I have been kicked out of far better places than this dump' :cool4: :mchappy::clap:

Ganarol--thanks for your link to your guys' 'gorilla's in the mist' video clip. Great video, and I like the bit where you guys were riding before the apes which showed just how chaotic the roads over there can be (and I bet that wasn't anywhere near some of the chaos you rode through...)! :helpsmilie:

Oh dear threads like this do little to persaude me to stop travelling and get one of them "real jobs". Amazing stuff!!

Hey! Awesome to hear from you. I hope no more run-ins with trucks on the road for you two. I couldn't believe all of the bicylces when I got to the Gambia - I think bike projects like yours are having a big effect there! It does seem like a lifetime ago...

All the moto riders reading this if you think yourself a hardcore adventurer you should meet these two - England to the Gambia on a tandem bicycle! :mchappy:

No offense taken at all Conch.

Appreciate the support from the Mdog anyhow for when the real troll appears :2guns:

thanks Yuma - more chaotic riding coming in the next vid...

Sorry, maybe I read the above quote wrong? The "retinue of assorted women" comment kind of got me.

Last I checked you've been with your girlfriend almost the entire trip ... and most of the time she with a head scarf on! (save one stunning bikini shot!) So "Assorted women"? :innocent: WTF? Never saw any.

Anyway, as usual this report JUST GETS BETTER with every installment.
Congrats on the recent write ups!

You mentioned Austin Vince! Great guy and true ADV pioneer. I've met him! But from the sounds of it you've spent FAR MORE time in Africa than Austin ever did ... and i'd wager you know it better as well.

As you know Austin's trips are fairly FAST and furious. I prefer the surf a little, ride a little style you've done. Much more time connecting to locals, hanging out.

I loved it when you've met locals surfing along your route ... and didn't you give your board to one? That is very cool!

I did the same ... but in El Salvador in 1973. I was living and surfing there (La Libertad) and a very new Surf Scene was just cropping up. Just a few passing Gringos at that time.

Almost none of the locals had boards. Well, my board hit me in the head in a particularly Kook-ish wipe out ... and broke right in half. The 13 year old kid I gave the pieces to made a nice board out of it. A few years later ... dozens of locals surfing there ... a whole scene had appeared.
:D

It's hard to imagine the trip without Jamie at all now! If you can believe it, the bike even feels weird to ride without her on the back..

I missed AV when he came to do a talk in the SF Bay Area a few years back, but watched Mondo Enduro enough times that I feel as tho I've met him.

I was in La Libertad in 1998 and there was a fair crew of locals and traveling surfers there. Unfortunately the vibe between the locals and travelers wasn't so jolly 25 years later...

https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/ii...M=w732-h550-no

We rolled off the ship in Athens with rain stinging our faces, which set us immediately wondering why in the world we’d landed ourselves in Europe in February. We ran around Athens looking for anything ancient looking that we were supposed to be gawking at and stood around gawking at it.


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At the Acropolis we pondered the ideas of the ancient philosophers and at the temple of Zeus we paid homage to the god of sky and thunder.


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It was all pretty cool. Via the Roman empire, Greek culture became the seminal culture that provided the foundation for modern Western Culture. The ancient Greek philosophers focused on the role of reason and inquiry, and a clear line of influence can be traced from ideas espoused by characters like Plato and Socrates to the modern science. And the western literary tradition has its roots in epic poems like The Odyssey and The Illiad. Great civilizations aside, it was also nice and sunny out, making for a great stroll around the relics they left behind.


Greeks are mad for their motorbikes, and they rule the road in Athens. Everyone seems to ride aggressively and some do so with utter abandon of all caution. I felt like a grandmother driving a Honda c90 through a China shop in comparison to the riders around me. African cities are more chaotic by a fair distance, but the chaos moves a quite a bit slower.


https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/4M...Fa0I=w413-h550


We were in big bike country again and multi-cylinder BMWs, KTMs, Yamahas, Suzukis, and Hondas, were everywhere weaving in and out of traffic lanes at high speed.


https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/kO...kxu4=w733-h550


I was keen to look around on the other side of Greece along the coast of the Ionian Sea for a wave to ride. The only problem was that I was again without a wetsuit or surfboard. If you can believe it, there is a surf shop in Athens. I got in touch with the guys at the shop called ‘Surf Salad’, told them about my journey, and they invited me over to the shop for the afternoon. They filled me in on the where and when of surf conditions in Greece, gave me a wetsuit to borrow, and provided a contact info for friends out on the coast who could loan me a board. Waves come and go quickly in the Mediterranean, but these guys have it dialed and are on top of every wave in Greece when it works.


https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-7...A=w732-h550-no


With a wetsuit strapped to the pannier bag, we rode west ascending into the mountains and it wasn’t long before we were right up at the snow line near Tripoli. When the rain started to fall and soaked us through, the wind quickly stripped the heat from our bodies leaving us shivering until we descended to lower altitude on the other side of Greece hours later. All in all it was a brutal 5-hour ride to the village of Finikounda, and we were happy to find a warm tavern there with a fire going to dry ourselves out a bit. After an hour or so, we were the only ones there and the staff peppered us with questions about where we’d been and where we were going. Just like nearly everyone we met in Greece, these folks had some connection to the United States usually via friends or family living there. They were wonderful people and happy to let us explode all of our wet gear out around the fire.


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Via Couchsurfer, we’d gotten in touch with a British couple called Alf and Rose who lived in a tiny village just up from the coast and invited us to come stay for a few nights.


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Alf and Rose are wanderers like us and we had a blast swapping travel stories with them over a few pints. For five years Alf and Rose roamed the continent in a Caravan and more recently had done an extended tour in Lada Niva with a roof tent.


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The Lada Niva is a fantastic little Russian-made 4x4 that hasn’t changed much in its design for decades – kind of like the Suzuki DR650. Loaded up in the Lada with Alf and Rose, we bounced down a bumpy track to attend the Greek festival that was going on in the village of Methoni that had something to do with Lent and primarily seemed to involve a stage production of a story about someone accidentally marrying their mother-in-law and lots of people dressed up like pirates. Something like that anyway. There was free soup and wine and everyone was in a festive mood and throwing confetti around.


We climbed around Methoni Castle scanning the coastline for surf. I think that the last time that I checked the surf from a castle battlement was in Scotland and I never imagined that I would be doing the same thing in Greece many years later.


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The next day the sun busted through the clouds so we set off on the bike to explore further up the coast. The beachbreak waves we saw were more powerful looking that I’d thought we’d find, given the short fetch of storms in the Med, and the pointbreaks were as clean as you could hope for.


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We finally followed a track out to the coast where I spied a head high wave dumping onto a sandbar with a few shoulders to ride.


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https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-2...41.02%2BAM.png


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The water was warm by Northern California standards, but I’d gone soft after so long in Africa, and my borrowed suit had a few holes in it. I launched myself into steep faced waves and managed to hold a few seconds of trim on my wonderfully simple surf craft before being embroiled in whitewater. It was a pretty sad display of wave riding, but it was fun all the same. Sure is easy to duck dive a lunch tray.


After a few days out on the coast, we rode back to Athens just barely avoiding the high altitude rain that had made the journey out of Athens so difficult. I’d been wearing the same pair of jeans since I left South Africa. They had been my riding pants, my hiking pants, and my going out pants. They’re my only pair of pants. Lately, they’d developed some unwelcome ventilation in the crotch that the cold weather had made me numbingly aware of.


https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-K...o/P1040784.JPG


Likewise, my jacket was coming apart everywhere and the zipper that I’d replaced in Nairobi had broken again. And after losing one of my leather gloves in Khartoum, I’d made do with some cheap work gloves from a Sudanese hardware store all the way across northern Sudan and Egypt. With lots of extra layers on and my bursting jacket pinned together at the front I was starting to feel ridiculous. Jamie assured me that I also looked ridiculous and took a photo to demonstrate.


https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-a...o/P1070723.jpg


Needless to say, some upgrades were in order if I was to make it across Europe on a motorbike. After a look around town, I found some Kevlar denim jeans, a Cordura jacket, and some leather riding gloves all on sale for about half what I would have payed back home. It was good deal all around and but still painful on a moto hobo’s wallet.


https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-a...o/P1050421.JPG


On an excursion away from Athens alone the next day, I started to feel a nasty shimmy from the back wheel. When I pulled over to check it out I found a disconcerting amount of play in the rear wheel that made me suspect a bearing failure. I had been riding about 70 mph on the motorway and didn’t want to risk that speed in case of a total bearing disintegration, which could cause the rear wheel to lock up and really nothing good to happen after that. It took me hours to limp back to Athens on the secondary roads, but it was a beautiful ride. Sometimes I can do with a reminder that slowing down can be a good thing.


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In Athens I took the rear wheel apart and confirmed play in the wheel bearing, though the sprocket carrier bearing still seemed fine. I found a shop in Athens with a large diameter socket to help me pound in the replacement bearings along the outer race without damaging the casing, put it all back together and she was right as rain once again. I’d carried those bearings all the way from London to Cape Town and back up to Athens, and I finally used them 36,000 miles later at a spot where I could walk down the road and purchase the very same ones!


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With the bike sorted again, and prices out of our budget range in Athens, we were ready to get moving again and booked a ferry that would motor through the night across the Aegean Sea to the Greek island of Chios. We were headed back towards Turkey, which we’d bypassed on our ship from Israel but both of us very much wanted to visit. From Chios it would just be a short hop to Turkey aboard a smaller boat. Jamie slept on the floor of the boat crammed into a corner with my new jacket over top of her while I stayed up and listened to the wind whipping across the deck for most of the night. We arrived before dawn feeling like we’d been on an all night bender and had to collapse at the port-side pension to recover.


https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/xJ...o=w732-h550-no


We found the people of Greece incredibly warm and welcoming – usually eager to share bits of their culture and ways with a couple of foreigners who stumbled into their neighborhood. Finding surfers and waves to ride in was an unexpected treat. I could see Turkey across the water from the window of the pension and I couldn’t help wonder if it would fit into the expectation box that we’d created it our imaginations or would be something else entirely.

still loving this report, great photos:scooter:

Makes my night shift down time so much more enjoyable

A bike for Mike
 

Hey you guys remember my buddy Mike who joined me in SA? He's about done teaching school for the year and back on the Moto ADV summer program. http://d26ya5yqg8yyvs.cloudfront.net/clap.gif

https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/z7...g=w711-h533-no


I can't believe his girlfriend has let him take off for another summer to ride. Noe we have to find him a bike somewhere in Europe - for less than 2K USD. Most decent shape Japanese dualsport 650 or 250/350 will do.

Also any he needs to be able to register it somewhere - so if anyone has advice on that front it will be appreciated. Drop me a PM if you have a line on anything!

:D:rofl: Pot/Kettle/Black?

What a great RR. Many thanks for sharing :thumbup1:

cheers Chris - enjoyed some of yours too :thumbup1: