as always... brilliant report and fantastic pics.. you really should publish a book of your travels. Safe riding..

Bones

Ha! Jamie liked this one. Happy to do it brother.

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bugsonmyboard.org
two wheeled wave hunting dispatches

Epic!! Thank you for letting us into your journey!!
I currently commute on a 200cc Chinese Enduro, and, since I live on the US/Mexico border, have contemplated riding to Ensenada or San Felipe, but was worried about how/if the bike would hold up for a few hundred miles in a foreign country.

Your friend Mike showed me I have nothing to worry about (I already took care of the chain)

Yes man, do it!

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two wheeled wave hunting dispatches

I’ve underestimated the difficulty of wilderness situations before and suffered for it, but even with that experience to draw from I still can’t seem to stifle my overconfidence in how far, high, and long I can go when I get moving. On the third day of our climb, at 6 AM after 5 hours of going straight up, most of my swagger had been swaggered out. In fact, I lost it about 1000 feet down trying to scramble across a rock face in the dark. The kicker is that we weren’t even climbing Kilimanjaro; rather, it is Killi’s little brother, Mt. Meru that was providing this early morning wind sucking exercises. For all of the effort of the ascent, we would hardly have any bragging fodder. Who the hell ever heard of Mt. Meru anyway?





If you’ve ever been backpacking in the wilderness of the American West, the Kilimanjaro region of Tanzania may not be what you expect if you don’t do your homework very well. I don’t do my homework very well. It’s kind of like a Disneyland ride version of mountaineering: it’s expensive, it’s as safe as something inherently dangerous can be made to be, tremendous efforts are taken to maximize your comfort, and there are lots of people there.





Jamie and I shopped around in the town of Moshi for a way up the tallest mountain on the African continent and the best price that we could come up with, not taking advantage of any of the cooks or porters was far beyond our budget on a long trip like this one. We’d been prepared that this was a possibility but hoped that by actually showing up we could find a cheaper alternative. Elimination of Kilimanjaro as an option brought our enthusiasm to a low point. We we went to the neighboring park to find out about climbing Mt. Meru, which in terms of sheer altitude pales in comparison to Kilimanjaro. Fortunately, the price to climb it is similarly diminutive, about one-quarter the cost of the Kili climb, which would cover our park fees and the cost of the required ranger. We’d heard great experiences about he climb, so we were stoked again and ready to head into the mountains.





Mt Meru is about 15,000 feet high. As a point of reference, that’s roughly 500 feet taller than Mt. Whitney in the Sierra Nevada, however the ascent is about 10 thousand feet in total rather than the 6 thousand required to climb Whitney from Whitney Portal. I’ve done lots of backpacking at similar altitudes in the Sierra Nevada, so I wasn’t daunted by the distance or altitude gain for this trip. And we certainly wouldn’t be making use of the multiple porters that organizers were nearly insistent that we needed to have to ensure a successful climb. We would carry and cook our own food, just like we always do back home. Call it backpacker pride. There are huts along the climb, so we didn’t even need to carry a tent or sleep mats, just sleeping bags, clothing and food. Piece of cake! Needless to say, after long distance trips into true wilderness back home, a sizable chip was developing on my shoulder about this whole experience.




My shoulder chip grew when we showed up on the first day and found that amongst 10 people headed up, Jamie and I were the only ones not using porters. One German couple had 5 porters. My pack was no larger than anyone else’s and was full of our cooking gear and food for two people. I couldn’t imagine what in the world everyone thought they might need up there. I found out later that one guy was carrying his 15’’ MacBook Pro in his pack. Just about everyone was wearing massive Everest-capable hiking boots. I was wearing my Keen sandals and someone asked if the porters were carrying my boots. I thought I would look funny wearing motorcycle boots with shorts, so I would do the climb in sandals. They’re comfy. And oh so stylish.





We met our ranger at the park gate, a mountain savvy fellow called Oswald, and off our merry band of hikers went, meandering though lush forests and meadows at the foot of the ridge that we would ascend during the following two days.





Oswald toted his rifle along to keep any wilderness critters such as buffalo and elephants at bay, which roamed freely about the park. While not normally a danger, if taken unawares at an inopportune moment or position, one of these creatures could become aggressive.




As we walked, I became increasingly annoyed at our maddeningly slow pace set by Oswald at the front of the pack that kept us in one tight bunch. I hate having someone right on my heels and staring at the back of someone’s head while walking in the wilderness. Additionally, I find it difficult and even more tiring to hike at a rate that isn’t my natural pace, even if it is slower. Eventually, Jamie and I got a head of the pack and felt as though I’d just burst out of traffic congestion in Dar Es Salaam.





After walking ahead of the pack for half of the second day, we saw something on the trail that gave us pause. The leg of a buffalo lie severed from its owner with blood drippings that looked like they were nearly still wet, but no sign of the rest of the buffalo. Frequently, you could observe buffalo trails with fresh tracks on both sides of the trail, so it was obvious that they were quite active on these lower slopes of the mountain. When Oswald arrived he studied the leg and surmised that the hyenas had been at the poor buffalo the night before and dragged the rest of him off into the bush.




As we all stared dumbly at the buffalo leg, Oswald shared that two months a tourist had been gored badly by a lone buffalo before a ranger was able to get a shot off at him. Imagining Hemingway’s Green Hills of Africa depiction of the danger of coming upon a buffalo in the bush, I swallowed my hiking ego and rejoined the pack, walking right behind the guy with the gun. Further along the trail we found some scraps of bushbuck pelt. By careful examination of a sandy part of the trail, Oswald made out a fresh leopard print and figured that he was the predator that brought the bushbuck to its end.





Porters passed us with massive loads balanced on their heads: wicker baskets or a tarps wrapped with rope that were full of food, cooking gas cylinders, and the full size packs of the other hikers. They raced ahead of the tourist, wearing jeans and sandals and carrying three times the weight of any of us. Jamie and I enjoyed a lunch of cheese, canned tuna, plantain chips, and apples and by evening we were more than ready for a double helping of pesto pasta to replenish calories and salt burned during the day’s climb. The huts had bunk beds and made for pure sleeping luxury while on the trail, which made it all the more difficult to rise at 1 AM to begin our push to the summit.





We spent hours in the dark climbing and either scrambling along rock faces that seemed to drop off into an abyss of darkness, or walking up a slope of scree that had you sliding half a step back down for every step up. My hands were very cold and I tried to keep them in my pockets when I didn’t need them for scrambling or holding an additional light for Jamie. I was wearing two pairs of socks, so my toes were cold, but still ok. By 6 AM, some light began to glow from the opposite side of the face we were climbing in the direction of Kilimanjaro. The sun was on the way up, and I couldn’t tell from the glow how long we had before it would crest the horizon. I was feeling strong still, but Jamie was nearly spent. She was breathing very hard trying to get enough oxygen to her muscles for every step up. Less than 100 feet from the summit, we even talked about stopping the ascent, but every time we stopped, after a short rest, she went a bit further, until we finally emerged to find Kilimanjaro poking its head from beneath its blanket of clouds as the first rays of morning sun turned the sky to fire.





We stared at the scene in front of us and finally laughed.





After savoring the sight for a while and having a rest it was time to begin the climb down. There was a storm forecast for the afternoon and we had 10,000 feet to descend before the sun reached the opposite horizon. The scrambling sections that we’d sweated on the way up now required due caution, but were no cause for concern as they’d been in the black of night, and the scree sections were a joy to bound down, sliding with every step and letting gravity do some of the work. When we reached the hut that we’d slept in the night before, we had a rest and made some soup and oatmeal to replenish some of the calories that the intervening 9 hours had transformed into altitude and elation. The soup was absolutely terrible, with clumpy bits of the powder that wouldn’t unclump to mix properly, but we drank every drop and thought it was fantastic.





By the time we were nearly to the bottom it was 5:30 PM and our thighs were on fire. Our legs would shake whenever we stopped moving. We’d been hiking for 16 hours on 4 hours of sleep with little more than an hour’s rest. I think this was the largest vertical decent that I’ve ever done in a single go. The flat meadow at the bottom was a joy to walk through. It’s hard to describe the wonderful flatness of that meadow. A perfectly level surface in equilibrium with gravity, with hardly any effort required from your leg muscles to keep you from toppling forward. A lone giraffe watched us and sauntered along a nearby watering hole. A family of baboons went about their evening business with the dominant male playing sentinel near the trail where we walked while the young ones tumbled about, wrestling one another and making quick runs out to get a closer look at us. Each time they would run out a bit further, testing their courage. Jamie and I got on the bike and rode back to Arusha, ready to sleep for a week.




In Tanzania, things happen riding in traffic about every 5 minutes that back home would warrant an exasperated tale upon arrival at your destination. Here though, a friendly nudge here and there in the fray of it all is quite alright and doesn’t indicate any aggression. Intersections are a comedy of chaos with street signs utterly ignored and everyone seeing just how far they can push before they are physical stopped from forward motion. No one gets upset, this just how it works. You get in the habit of using other cars as blockers when making a turn on a busy road, shielding you from other motorists that know you’re there but just don’t care. So it was upon our return to Arusha, but given my fatigue from the summit and decent of Mount Meru that day, it was all that I could do to keep the bike upright in the traffic maelstrom.


After a day of rest, we left the busy streets of Arusha behind us and rode westward across the windswept plains towards the N’gorogoro Crater, which was said to have the highest density of wildlife of any park in Tanzania. Even though Jamie had a harder time getting up the mountain than I did, I was now sore as could be and hobbling around while Jamie seemed perfectly fine. She giggled watching the comical spectacle of me gingerly hoisting myself on and off of the bike. The plains were full of Masai tending to their cattle, the warrior tribe known for their adherence to a traditional nomadic lifestyle. Their bright red and cobalt blue blanket garb punctuated the grassy landscape. Not from from N’gorogoro, one particular Masai tribe are said to be the last living functional hunter-gatherers.




At N’gorongoro Crater we found a continuation of the sky-high costs we’d found at Kilimanjaro. To enter the crater would cost ten times as much as the other safaris that we’d been on elsewhere, so we rode away without seeing a single furry critter. These places were just catering to a different audience than moto hobos. Riding away from the crater we fought a strong headwind that buffeted us around like crazy. I knew that our gas mileage was going to be suffering, and didn’t know if we would make it back to Arusha on what we had in the tank. Just as I was thinking that it was stupid to have set off without gassing up something moved at the edge of my peripheral vision, something big. I turned my head to the left to find that it was not one big thing that I saw moving but lots of big things. A massive herd of wildebeest was bolting for the road, making these direction changes that just looked fantastically fast for such big animals. The movements looked erratic, but somehow they all stuck together like a flock of birds in flight. They bounded lithely over the road then zigged and zagged their way into the distance as we stood by the by to bike and smiled. The wind shook our helmets sitting on the mirrors and whipped Jamie’s hair around. It wasn’t the canned safari with piles of lions and cheetahs dancing with rhinos that we imagined at the N’gorongoro Crater, but we found it pretty spectacular all the same.

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bugsonmyboard.org
two wheeled wave hunting dispatches

It is interesting that you find these costs on a continent that is supposed to be (at least in stereotype) among the poorest of places. I know that obviously the laws of economics are at play, with enough people with cash paying these extravagant prices to see the 'good stuff' of Africa, but it seems kind of weird at the same time.

I remember reading someone's travel blog here on HU several years ago they encountered the same kind of thing while motorcycle traveling in Africa. I don't remember the country in particular, but it had many resorts catering to Hollywood types, or wannabe Hollywood types costing several hundred $'s a day. It might have been the same country that Angelina Jolie was adopting her kids from which does not come to mind, but most likely factored in someone's business plan

Seems like its really just the places that have been established for decades as THE African Safari type destinations. Namibia, Botswana, Zambia haven't been as established, so while there are high dollar options for those places, they aren't the only options. Places like N'gorogoro crater are just for a different type of traveler. Fair enough, and you hope that the proceeds aren't going in too few pockets...

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two wheeled wave hunting dispatches

Jamie and I saddled up and rode west from the N’gorongoro crater, headed for the coast and hoping to find a wave to ride somewhere in Kenya. We rode through the quintessential African landscape of the Serengeti: red earth underlay the grassy yellow Savannah dotted with the umbrella-like Acacia trees providing shade for weary travelers, human and animal alike.








Where we stopped for the night we found our usual friendly neighbors ready to join us for an evening beverage.







The ugliest surfboard in Africa
We arrived at the coast and found a remote beach-side camp spot. We even had a living room and an oil-burning lamp this time around courtesy of the completely empty lodge. In fact, just about everywhere we stopped was completely empty as the headline-making security issues of the last few years have kept the tourists away from Kenya. Most businesses are barely hanging on, and the and local village folk who staff the resorts and lodges are all on reduced hours or no longer have jobs. We walked along the shoreline of a lonely beach as fishing boats drifted listlessly in the wind and as the local soccer game progressed on the low tide hard packed sand in the distance.











Where we were camped most of the swell energy was blocked by offshore reefs, so we motored northward to find some little waves breaking on a beach near a town called Malindi Bay. We found a cheap little guesthouse to crash in with big airy rooms, high ceilings, and balconies overlooking the main street. They even let me put my park my bike inside the restaurant overnight to make sure it was safe. Mailindi Bay is filled with Italian expats and tourists, which seems a bit of an oddity since I’ve hardly met Italians anywhere in Africa. Apparently tour groups have been coming to the place since the 80’s, growing in numbers every year until the recent terrorist attacks. Lots of Italian expats makes for fantastic food and we enjoyed many a good meal in the beach-side restaurants.



I wandered around on the beach and asked a couple of young guys if they had every seen anyone riding the waves. I met Akhmed, who was about 17 years old by the look of him and of mixed African-European parentage, with dark curls, mocha coloring and wearing day-glo Ray-Bay knock–off sunglasses. He knew a guy with a surfboard that I could borrow and so I jumped on the back of the Indian-made 125cc bike with Akhmed and his friend and off we sped 3-up, through tiny streets and alleyways and to find a surfboard. He was going so fast that he nearly brought an unsuspecting old woman doing her washing along with us for the ride. When we found the one guy in town who had a surfboard, he proudly produced 7 ft single fin board that was painted over with yellow acrylic paint on top of the fiberglass. The thing was so heavy it had surely been broken in half and stuck back together, probably more than once. Near the nose of the board there was painted a skull and the text ‘Liquid Shredder’. It was the ugliest surfboard I have ever seen, but if Kelly Slater can ride a wave on a door and a coffee table, I should surely be able to find some trim on this beast. I was ready to shred.





The three of us rode off again, me in the third position on the bike holding my Shredder. Akhmed didn’t reduce the speed much to account for the added bulk of the board and some of the Shredder’s yellow paint was left on the corner of a building. There was no wax on the board and the best I could do was find some candles and drip the wax on the deck as they burned. The waves were so small and messy it didn’t matter much what I was riding anyway. I scratched into a few waves and pumped down the line before hitting the lip a it closed out.







Jamie came out and shredded a few waves too.





After awhile, some kids turned up down the beach carrying either half of a suitcase which turned out to be their innovative wave riding craft. I can’t imagine a better example of the spirit of surfing than two little kids in Kenya riding waves on a suitcase. You can find surf stoke in plenty of unlikely places when you spend a bit of time looking. I love it.




A Jungle Rendezvous
Jamie and I spent a week in Malindi Bay enjoying great pizza and dodging rainstorms that flooded the streets. With all of the rain, we were happy to be holed up in our little guesthouse rather than in the tent. We’d been enjoying the reprieve from big cities, but it was finally time to head to head to Nairobi to apply for visas to the countries ahead. Our route took us on some dirt tracks to avoid passing through Mombasa where the rain had created some red mud pits.





Jamie got off of the bike a couple times as I powered through puddles of unknown depth.





By the end of the muddy sections Dyna Rae had gotten a proper mud bath. She doesn’t mind though, it improves her complexion. I would have traded a few more miles of muddy roads to avoid some of the Mombasa highway, which was fully packed with trucks running containers from the port at Mombasa to Nairobi. There were hardly any passenger cars at all, and certainly no other motorbikes. The trucks were incredibly slow moving, even on flat ground, which normally wouldn’t be such a problem since we can just whiz past on the bike. The trouble was that the line of trucks seemed nearly continuous in both directions of the two-lane road. When we did manage to bust ahead of a line of trucks into a section of diesel dust free air, we were constantly in danger from oncoming trucks passing one another. They could see us coming but they didn’t care, and we were run off of the road into at least a dozen times before the journey was finished with varying degrees of danger.





The overlander sanctuary known as Jungle Junction in Nairobi was a welcome sight for our road weary eyes. As soon as we saw the stacks of motorbikes and 4x4’s dotting the compound we knew we were in the right place.







We even found Dyna Rae’s big brother – the 750cc DR Big, rarely spotted in the wild.




Jungle Junction has been in Nairobi since 2003 and it has become a bit of an overlanding institution. It was a great place to meet with other travelers to discuss all things overlanding: obtaining visas, border crossings, road conditions, water crossings. Speaking to folks who have come south from Europe yields invaluable information about the difficult border crossing between Sudan and Egypt and how to get across the Mediterranean from Egypt to Turkey. Ferry runs have been sporadic over the last couple of years and it seems like the operators and status changes from month to month. We heard a nightmarish tale of getting stuck in a shipping yard for a week from a British couple in a Toyota land cruiser. My hope is that getting across some water is easier with a bike than with a truck, as it usually is.





Chris, the German proprietor of Jungle Junction, runs a mechanics shop right out of the place, so it was to perfect time to get to some well overdue moto work done. The Junction has a real workshopy vibe, with everyone fiddling with bikes strewn about the place. Even the reception desk lives in a converted garage space. We set up our tent in the front yard and I tore into the bike.





Once again I found the valve clearances not to have budged a micron since their last inspection 8 thousand miles ago. I changed the oil and spark plugs then set about fixing some other niggling bits. The rubber of my grips had begun to disintegrate into a sticky mess, so I found some replacements; too bad they say Husqvarna on them instead of Suzuki. Sorry girl.






Over time and under a heavy load, my side stand had slowly bent so that the bike was often was often leaning way over on its side. I got the side stand off and the in-house mechanic Samuel set to work cutting my stand in half to insert a 1.5 inch piece of steel that would lengthen it. After multiple checks on the lean angle of the, Samuel welded the stand back together and Dyna Rae was standing tall and proud again.





The rain and humidity of the west coast journey had taken its toll on Dyna Rae, with rust and bolts that just didn’t want to move anymore. I’d known about them for some time now and have just put off dealing with them for fear of twisting off a bolt head as I’d done when my surf rack bolts had seized up. I bathed them in WD-40, gave plenty of whacks with a hammer to try to scare them out, but still managed to twist off a couple of bolt heads. At least this was the best place to do it, right next to a full mechanics shop. Samuel helped extract the broken bolts, we cut some new bolts from spares around the shop, and soon enough Dyna Rae was feeling and tight and toned.


I even got my newly air conditioned boots resoled with some used tires.


The visa game
After roaming around southern Africa the last four months, where everyone seemed happy to allow us in for a visit, we’d become rather complacent about our research. We simply assumed that we’d be able to obtain visas for countries north of Kenya while in Nairobi, but found little hospitality at the local embassies. Ethiopia sent us packing immediately.
Ethiopia: Why didn’t you obtain a visa in your home country?

Me: I haven’t been there for a year. You must have some provision for folks traveling overland as we are.
Ethiopia: You can obtain a visa on arrival at the airport in Addis Abeba
Me: But we’re riding a motorcycle
Ethiopia: You can obtain a visa on arrival at the airport in Addis Abeba


From their response to our request, you might think that we were the first people ever to arrive in the country not on an airplane. Before they would issue a visa some guy called Isbaruk, who is the head of the entire Ethiopian Immigration department in Addis Ababa, had to tell them it was OK. They had no phone number or email address for this character. They couldn’t even tell us his last name. But Isbaruk has to say its OK, or no visa. Strike 1.


Sudan wasn't very keen on giving us a visa either. They told us that we needed a letter from the American Embassy explaining what we are doing in Sudan before they would issue a visa. The weren’t very keen on remodeling either.





All American embassies now have a policy that require an appointment, which may take weeks to schedule. Unfortunately the Nairobi online appointment system wasn’t functioning, so we had nothing to do but show up at the embassy and try to explain our situation. After being told by several people that they could offer us no help, we finally got in front of the vice consul, Daniel, who was incredibly helpful. He certified affidavits about what we were doing in both Ethiopia and Sudan and even sent a message to his colleague in Addis asking them to contact the ministry of foreign affairs there.


We rode back over to the Sudan embassy, hopeful of our prospects, but on our return, the story had changed. They would need to get approval from Khartoum before they could issue a visa. The dialogue went something like this:
Us: How long will that take?
Sudan: I have no idea
Us: You must be able to give me some idea. A week? A month?
Sudan: Sorry, no idea


As far as I can gather, the chilly reception probably has to do with the United States’ involvement in the recent war and the creation of the new nation state, South Sudan. In any case, that felt like strike two in the visa game.
Given the uncertainty of obtaining our Sudanese visa in Nairobi, we set to researching where else we might get it. It seemed that if we had an Egyptian visa in our passport, the Sudanese embassy in Ethiopia may be inclined to issue us a transit visa. That is of course assuming of course that we can even get into Ethiopia. We motored across town and submitted our application and documents at the Egyptian embassy thinking that this should be a piece of cake. American tourists go to Egypt all the time! Later that evening, we received an email explaining that since we weren’t Kenyan residents, we couldn’t apply for a visa in Nairobi, and that we could obtain a visa on arrival at the airport in Cairo. It seems that most embassy folks in Nairobi think that we are on a flying type of motorbike. This was nearly strike three, but we persisted and explained our trip to the consul the following Monday, trying to make it sound as fascinating as possible. He was very friendly and finally relented to issue us a visa.





We were glad to be on a bike for all of the running around on the terribly congested streets of Nairobi. There was often plenty of dirt road shoulder or walkway available to plod right past the gridlocked traffic. One day after we’d had some rain, we were riding the dirt path alongside the road, when we hit a mud bog, my tires spun, and we dumped the bike. It was the first spill with Jamie and I both on the bike, and thankfully neither bike nor riders were damaged. I picked the bike up and we continued down the same path. The cars beside us never even moved during the whole episode.


While we were waiting for something to happen in visa world, we went to check out the Nairobi National Park, which sits barely outside of the city boundaries. It’s truly a surreal scene to behold the zebra, giraffe, buffalo, wildebeest, ostriches, and rhino milling about the savannah with a cityscape in the background. This park must be unique in the world, having such animals living so close to a large city.






After two weeks we still had no response from our compadre Daniel in the American Embassy even after repeated emails. We’d been to the Ethiopian embassy 4 times, but hope for obtaining a visa locally was running out. Unfortunately, that was the good news. Sudan flat out rejected our visa application, with no reason given. We were desperate to make some progress on the Ethiopia front, since South Sudan is the only other route option traveling north. South Sudan sounds a bit lawless and in danger of going the way of Somalia and becoming the next failed state in Africa, so it is not exactly an ideal travel destination at the moment. We made contact with the Ethiopian embassy in Washington D.C. and yesterday we chose the less-than-ideal option of sending our passports there via DHL in the hopes that they will issue us a visa. And so now we wait in Nairobi, without passports and hoping that nothing goes awry with our precious documents whizzing halfway around the world to someone who cares a lot less about them than we do. We've got two massive countries in front of us who just don't seem to want to meet us. The road ahead is unclear and this trip is starting to feel rather adventurous again.

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two wheeled wave hunting dispatches

Hey folks - Jamie has taken up the notebook and put together our latest update - enjoy!



After making contact with the Ethiopian Embassy in Washington, DC and receiving the green light to send our passports there for visas, we thought we were home free. We heard that DHL provided a visa service “all the time” for other overlanders. We thought that we would simply tell DHL when the passports were ready to be picked up and they would pick up the passports. A few days after the passports arrived in Washington D.C. we called to make sure everything was in order and the Ethiopian Embassy informed us that the passports would be ready to be picked up on Thursday. Great! On Thursday we went to DHL and told them that the passports were ready to be picked up. That was when we had the first clue that this final leg of the process was not going to be as easy as we had hoped. DHL wanted reference numbers that would have to be obtained from the Ethiopian Embassy. We wanted the passports to start their journey back as soon as possible and we knew that getting a reference number meant another phone call. The Ethiopian Embassy in Washington does not make it a regular practice to pick up a ringing phone nor do they respond to their emails so we considered ourselves lucky to get that Thursday pick-up communication. After two nights up till midnight trying to call the embassy, we informed the DHL staff here in Kenya that we couldn’t get those numbers and that in our experience, they wouldn’t be able to contact the embassy staff, but we needed the passports picked up. Each day that passed we told DHL to pick up the passports, but they wouldn’t do it without calling the embassy first. Since the Ethiopian embassy never pick up the phone, our passports were never picked up and the Ethiopian embassy sent them off to my Mom’s house in California, where we’d had the visa payment sent from since we couldn’t courier cash and no bank here in Nairobi would give us a cashiers check and none of the Western Unions offices would provide a money order. Now we had to get DHL Kenya to contact the DHL in Sacramento to let my Mom ship our passports back to us in Nairobi. We got that handled but then had the worry that since the passports were no longer arriving from an embassy, they may be held up in customs.


Officially grounded in Kenya while our passports were globetrotting without us, we were forced to slow down and check out Nairobi and the surrounding areas a bit. The first must do was to have dinner with one of my school friends, Sarah. Sarah prepared a delicious dinner and she and her husband Imran provided us Kenya travel tips. On Sarah and Imran’s advice, we headed to Lake Naivasha and Hell’s Gate National Park. Lake Navaisha is one of the Rift Valley lakes and to get to it we, um Dyna Rae, first had to climb to the top of the massive valley escarpment.





Near the top of our climb Dyna Rae became asthmatic and the weather turned cold and rainy. We stopped in a pine forest to add a couple layers and let Dyna have a rest. When Dyna Rae started playing hide and seek we knew it was time to go.





Once we started the descent, the weather cleared and Dyna was herself again. We made our way to Fisherman’s Camp and were struck by the feel of the camp. Until now, most other campers we’ve met were travelers, but this camp was full of Kenyan families and even a youth group. We were surrounded by loads of friendly Kenyans who didn’t see us as oddities or walking cash machines.


The place was full of animals. There were vervet monkeys who acted like street kids – mostly tumbling through the trees and with each other but always on the lookout for some unattended food morsels. Any food an arms length away was vulnerable to these critters. Then there were Black-and-white colobus monkeys, Egyptian geese, hippopotamuses, and most noticeably the huge storks. We first noticed these giant storks in Nairobi and were amazed that such big birds were so abundant in a big city. Then we arrived at Fisherman’s Camp and these birds were everywhere. Where the vervets would steal our food, the storks would take anything they could carry in their beaks including a plastic baggy containing Gary’s spork.






Hell’s Gate National Park was one of the main attractions of this little adventure. We were allowed to ride bicycles right into the park without a guide. Nearly every other National Park won’t even allow a motorbike. We hired some bikes at Fisherman’s Camp rode 5k to the park and another 6k in the park surrounded by warthogs, zebra, and buffalo.





Once deep into the park, we dismounted our bikes and had a wander around the sinuous Lower Gorge Canyon.





When you are promised hot springs sometimes it is just a hot spring. There was no soaking here.





And we finished off with a bike ride home.





Back in Nairobi, and still waiting for our passports so we managed to fill the time with cuddly wildlife.


Baby elephants!! The David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust, located just a couple miles from our Nairobi home, takes in orphaned baby elephants and raises them to the age of three. At three years the elephants are weaned and moved to another facility in a national park to be reintroduced to the wild.





The youngest baby elephants are fed milk on demand day or night. The older elephants receive milk approximately every 3 hours.





Young Rothschild Giraffes!! The Giraffe Center, just around the corner from our place in Nairobi, was started in 1979 to help pull the Rothschild Giraffes from the brink of extinction. Here we were allowed to feed the giraffes food pellets. The giraffes would allow us to pet them or even kiss them as long as we had food pellets. We made momentary fickle friendships.






Local, wild warthogs decided to join the party. I hear a giraffe center is a great place to raise your young.





Finally, since reminders of the Danish Author Karen Blixen have been everywhere since we entered Kenya from the Karen Blixen Café in Malindi Bay to the Karen District we have been staying in since we arrived in Nairobi, we watched the film “Out of Africa” and then paid a visit to Karen Blixen’s historic home where her famous novel was set.





Our stay in Nairobi has been better than we had hoped but the fancy malls, fancy coffee shops, light-speed internet, and daily hot showers are starting to wear on us. We are ready to hit the road and meet our next challenges.

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bugsonmyboard.org
two wheeled wave hunting dispatches

Awesome! Ive never managed to combine my two biggest interests but it was as simpel as a board rack.
Great eye for photography too so looking forward to your updates.
Instagram? Youtube account?

simple, right! I was always a surfer and really got into riding pretty late.

glad you're digging it!

On the website in my signature the Vimeo and Instagram are linked on the home page in the upper right hand corner

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bugsonmyboard.org
two wheeled wave hunting dispatches

Plenty of dudes have an unhealthy preoccupation with gear of one kind or another and I'm no different. Shiny new things provide fleeting distraction from bits of day-to-day suffering, and preparation for a long journey provides an excellent excuse to fill your garage with stuff. Not long after I’d bought the DR650, I’d learned it inside and out, and spent a chunk of change bolting on this and that, in addition to tools, spare parts, camping gear, riding gear, surf gear, etc. Acquisition of all this stuff provides some concrete evidence to yourself that you’re actually going to huck into the abyss and ride off on your bike for who knows how long. The gear accumulation, tinkering, and over-preparation can become a hobby in itself, so much so that its possible to loose sight of the true objective: creating an independent means to experience new landscapes and peoples. You’re building an adventure sled, no more, no less; and any bit of tinkering that doesn’t directly contribute to the utility for that purpose is unnecessary. But it's still fun.


With so many unknowns ahead, it’s easy to dwell endlessly on which bit of kit is worth some of the precious space in your saddlebags. In reality, very few of these decisions matter much one way or the other. Nevertheless, at the height of my gear obsession before leaving home, one thing that helped me was reading what other folks had to say about their tried and tested gear. Now a year into my own journey I thought that I’d relay my experiences to date, but first, a tour of our adventure sled.

How to move into your motorbike with your girlfriend

Jamie and I regularly meet single travelers with more stuff than we have between the two of us. They are usually on big heavy bikes (e.g. BMW GS, Africa Twin) with massive metal boxes attached to the side and a huge duffel bag lashed to the back rack. This sort of setup has a number of disadvantages. The metal boxes sitting on a robust rack tend to add a fair bit of width, which inhibits movement through city traffic, or through narrow doorways. Some of these bikes we encounter weigh hundreds of pounds more than ours, making muscling them around in rocks, mud and sand much more difficult, not to mention hoisting them into a boat here and there. Rough offroad tracks can put a beating on the bike frame and I’ve met a number of travelers who have cracked their rear sub-frames. In addition, the energy used for packing, unpacking, and keeping track of extra stuff can outweigh the value of having it.


A lighter bike more sparsely loaded has all the advantages in these regards. Jamie and I have very little that we don’t use and I wouldn’t want to load the bike any heavier than it already is. In the images below you can see the bike all loaded up.





Our right saddlebag holds all of the camping gear and a 10 liter dry bag sits on top of the pannier which holds all of our warmer layers. We generally have about 2 days worth of food on board along with cooking essentials such as salt, olive oil, and chili sauce in the blue 15 liter dry bag.





Our personal gear rides in the pelican case (model 1550) bolted to the back rack and a 20 liter Kriega dry bag on top of the case. All of the tools stay bolted to the bike an aluminum toolbox that rides just behind the left side cover. The left saddlebag is filled mostly with bike parts and maintenance stuff. We usually carry 2-3 liters of water, but can strap more on if needed. It’s a tight fit and we are pretty minimal, but we like it this way and I honestly can’t think of anything that I am truly suffering without. Now into the details for the gear nuts…

The Bike

Once deciding that a moto is the way to travel overland for you, the obvious question is of course, which bike? Countless book chapters and discussion forum threads abound on this very topic, which can be rather helpful if you start out knowing zero about motorbikes, like me. Was shacking up with a Suzuki DR650 the right decision? Put it this way, I may name my first-born daughter Dyna Rae in honor of my faithful girl. She’s getting a bit long in the tooth now at 45K miles, bears the scars of a hard journey, and she has something to groan about from time to time, but I think she looks good with a bit of African patina on her. The only troubles that she’s ever given me are things for which I could hardly lay the blame at her tires. A bit of carburetor drama from bad gas, some spark plugs carboned up from too-rich running, a missing bolt here and there rattled loose on rough tracks, and some desert dust getting into the ignition switch are all I’ve had to resolve on the road.
To my thinking, a relatively light 650-class bike is the perfect machine for this type of trip. It’s nimble enough that riding really rough stuff, tight single track, and loose sand is manageable, and you still have enough power on the highway. Even having had moments on the west coast of Africa where I would have loved a lighter bike, I wouldn’t trade the power of the 650, as it’s very often a huge asset getting around massive trucks and buses that clog lots of Africa’s highways. The DR is usually small and light enough for a few guys to lift into a boat, get through a narrow doorway, or to muscle up a set of stairs into a hotel lobby, and these types of situations occur with some regularity when traveling in Africa.

Modifications

A DR650 doesn’t come ready for overland adventuring straight out of the box. This can be a very good thing since it provides a novice mechanic like myself an opportunity to get to know the bike while doing all of the modifications.

Cockpit

The windscreen by Screens for Bikes in Australia is a pretty good compromise for maintaining a dirt friendly cockpit while still providing a good degree of wind protection. However, I do find a tendency to smack my helmet on the top of the screen when standing up in the dirt. Some spacers that push the screen to stand more vertical may be a good solution although my first attempt resulted in turbulent air hitting me in the head.

The hand guards by Cycra are have survived plenty of impacts. The hardware that they come with corrodes easily and I ended up having a couple of bolts with the heads snapped off, but otherwise, they’re great.





I started out with a USB plug wired to the spare lead behind the headlight, which lasted until South Africa before it fried itself. Good timing, really, since SA is the only place on this entire trip that I could get a replacement, and the navigation app on the Iphone eats the battery pretty quickly. The new one bought in Pretoria came with a fused harness that I wired straight to the battery and I find it’s nice to have power with the bike off. It also has two USB outlets and better weather protection than my previous one. I started with the RAM Mount X-holder, but the rubber feet that hold the device eventually disintegrated and I replaced it with the RAM Mount Personal Device holder – this one seems more robust and easier in and out.

The seat foam and cover from Seat Concepts is excellent and also very good value compared to some of the other options. With the stock seat I never would have been able to do some of the long days in the saddle. I busted the cover stitching dragging my boot on the edge when mounting the bike and had it repaired in Togo, which has be solid ever since.

Carrying


The minimal side racks from Ebay have worked perfectly as has the rear rack from Moto-Billet, which works great for bolting down a Pelican Case. My first case was the Pelican 1450, which had both latches broken by the time it was finished. When Jamie arrived, she brought us a Pelican 1550, which holds double the volume of the 1450. The extra locking space is very nice to have. While Dyna looks a bit less like a sexy dirt bike with all that junk in her trunk, I think that for an overland trip, a bigger case is worthwhile.

I use a Klean Canteen to carry stove fuel that wedges neatly between the Pelican case and the turn signal and secured with a hose clamp.





My aluminum toolbox from MTE Engineering (via DRriders.com) has been a great solution, but not without a few problems. The lock broke somewhere in Sierra Leone, which was also the latching mechanism. I created a temporary solution with a welder in Freetown, but when that failed the bumpy, muddy road entering Ghana I lost my entire tool roll. After picking up tools one by one from street vendors to reassemble a tool kit I managed to loose all my tools for a second time in Togo. I ended up JB welding a new latch to the box and it has been solid ever since. Either the box or the frame mounts have bent inward and allowed it to smash up the chain guard, so in Nairobi I made up some 1-inch hard rubber spacers to push the box out, away from the bike. The tool tube hose-clamped to the side rack works well enough, but the screw cap tends to jump threads when opening and closing it.





The saddlebags from Ortlieb are tough as nails. I’ve abused the hell out of them on this trip and others and they are still kicking. On this trip, I repeatedly shoved one of them between my surf rack and the bike and had a few crashes that sent them flying about the bike. They are completely waterproof as long as you roll them shut properly. The Ortliebs have been around forever and are simpler and cheaper than most of the newer, ‘adventure’ marketed panniers more recently available. The plastic inserts keep the bags stiff and make them more user friendly day to day. The straps that go across the seat are very low profile, with no huge buckle or thick strap for you or your passenger to sit on. These bags don’t have lots of straps going all over the place, which seem totally unnecessary to me. A simple carabiner attached to the rear rack can be hooked to the haul loop of whichever bag is heavier to make sure that they ride evenly. A few things could improve the design (please take note Ortlieb) . Firstly, make them narrower – 7 inches wide rather than 8 helps keep everything closer to handlebar width, which is invaluable when navigating through traffic in busy city streets. Second, make bags square-shaped rather than tapered towards the bottom to make us some of the volume lost on the width. Finally and most importantly, the collar of the bags should be taller to allow a greater variable volume. This is a simpler solution than attaching a drybag to the top as we've done.





The best compact dry bags that I’ve found are the Outdoor Research Durable Dry Bag. They have webbing loops sewn to the side that makes attaching them easy, they pack small when not in use. Jamie’s Kriega 20 liter bag is great design that makes secure attachment to the bike a snap. Inside the saddlebags and pelican case we use these ‘Mud Boxes’ made by Eagle Creek, which I’ve found very durable and convenient for organization.
Suspension

The stiffer straight-rate front springs in the fork along with a stiffer spring and Race Tech gold valve installed on the shock improved the off-road capability of DR650 considerably. Two-up, we could really do with a stiffer spring than the 7.5 kg/m one that we’re currently running on the shock.


Fuel and Engine



The 5.3 gallon tank from Acerbis has performed without issue and provides a safe range of about 240 (2 up) to 275 (alone) miles. If you can believe it, I've never once carried gas outside of this tank on the entire trip. That’s not to say that there were always petrol stations or that I could have planned better, but I have always been able to find someone in a village somewhere with some petrol that they were happy to part with. If the newer 6.6 Acerbis tank was available when I built the bike, I probably would have gone for that one instead.





The bash guard and case armor from Procycle has offered peace of mind when dropping the bike whether on on a rocky uphill track in the Congo or the streets of Nairobi.


The Hyabusa exaust along with the mid pipe and mounting bracket from Keintech have held up beautifully.
Drivetrain



The last 525 DID x-ring chain lasted 20K miles without a problem and I’m hoping (counting on) similar mileage from the current one. The steel rear and front sprockets also lasted 20K miles and still had plenty of life left when I replaced them in Pretoria, though the 15 tooth front sprocket had been alternated with a 14 tooth one for at least 5K miles.

Tires


On this trip I’ve ridden the Michelin Anakee (rear), Mitas E07 (front and rear), Continental TKC 80 (front and rear), Haidenau K60 (rear), Kenda Big Block (front), and the Kenda 270 (rear). The best combo that I’ve found has been a high mileage 70/30 rear with a more knobby front to help stop from washing out on loose stuff. Carrying tires sucks and this combo can usually get you from one tire stop to the next.


The Anakee seemed fine – mostly ridden on tarmac, useless in the sand of the Sahara, changed it out in Dakar, which turned out to be a bit too soon.


The Mitas E07 rear wore quicker than I’d expected from previous reports after 5K miles away from Dakar. I never liked the way the front felt in the dirt. I had the opportunity to change for a pair of TKC’s that another rider had shipped to Accra and wasn’t going to collect, so I ditched the E07 with life still left.


The TKC’s were great in the mud of the Congo – they clear packed up knobs well with just a bit of speed and allow you to regain some traction. I was looking at the steel belting by the time I’d made 6K miles to Cape Town.
I rode the Haidenau rear (140 width) for 7K miles from Pretoria to Nairobi and it looked like it could go another 7K miles. It would have been great except for the fact that it had a delamination or something that caused a lump in the tire and vibrated something awful. From others’ reports it sounds like the 130 width (stock DR650 size) doesn’t get the same mileage as the 140 width tire, and I wouldn’t want to deal with wedging the 140 back onto the rim after a puncture repair, so I don’t think I’ll try it again.


In Nairobi I installed a Kenda Big Block front and Kenda 270 rear and this should make it all the way back to Europe. The Big Block front is about the same pattern as a TKC 80 and the rear Kenda doesn’t vibrate, so I love it.
Tools and Spares




You can build a smaller and lighter tool kit, but it’s always a compromise for convenience. Having tools that you like using really makes maintenance and repairs much more fun. I’ve got wide mouth crescent wrench rather than the 7’’ Knipex pliers that I started with and everything else is about the same. I replaced the Wolfman tool roll with the Kriega tool roll which seems a bit nicer. I have yet to use the Motion Pro chain tool, but good to have just in case.





Most of one saddlebag is taken up with spares and maintenance stuff. I’d say that all that I’ve brought along is worth having on a long trip if you don't want to end up having parts shipped from far away. In the blue case on the left are carburetor rebuild parts, spare brake pads, bulbs, fork seals, shock seal, front sprocket, wheel and headstock bearings, fuel filter, fuel line, gaskets, spare bolts, etc.. The stuff sack in the middle holds standard thickness tubes (heavy duty ones are installed), and the zip sack on the left holds spare straps, carabineers, tow strap, zip ties etc. I’ve hardly used any of the spares that I’ve brought, but I’ve been happy to have a few things when I needed them. The extra straps were very handy when my board rack broke in Cameroon and I used the tow strap on the fateful evening in Nigeria that landed me in the police compound.
Riding





The Revit Turbine jacket was a great choice for Africa- it flows a decent amount of air and the Dynax mesh is very robust. Just don’t throw it in the dryer like I did or the glued bits are likely to start letting go. The AFX dual sport helmet has performed admirably for a $100 helmet. It’s great value, but noticeably heavier and lesser quality finish than other options, all of which have price tag 2-3 times larger. I hardly ever use the Smith Intake goggles and opt for cheap sunglasses bought here and there instead. The Alpinestars Scout boots are good value and pretty waterproof, but they are plastic rather than metal where the buckles connect to the leather. One of mine broke and I had to JB weld it back together. The soles are stitched on so they are fairly easily resoled when the time comes. At about $100 more, I’d probably go for the Gaerne Balance instead.

I started out with some Joe Rocket Atomic Pants - they were only about $100 and had zip-off mesh panels, so they seemed to fit the bill, but in the end they were just too damn hot when stuffing around at borders and the like. Since Dakar I’ve just worn a pair of Carhartt work pants, and when those wore through I bought some jeans in Cape Town.





My Aerostitch Roper gloves are now the nastiest looking bit of kit I have. If the creature Gollum wore gloves, they would look like these. They are crusty, slimy, and the snap closures have ripped out, mostly due to weathering multiple rainstorms and my poor treatment of them. I still kind of like them though.
Bike Security



The bike is the least likely thing to get stolen on a trip like this. Europe and South Africa hold the highest risk of bike theft. In Africa you can usually park it somewhere secure or identify someone to look after it for you. Most places in Africa are exclusively the domain of 125cc bikes, and a big 650 is so foreign and conspicuous that very few folks would have a mind to try to make off with it. Owners and staff of guest houses are often sensitive to your concern for your bike and will have you bring it straight into a foray or a restaurant. Half the time I’ve been camping and sleeping right next to it anyway. A big security chain is definitely not worth the space and weight to carry. I have a PacSafe cable lock that I’ve used one time to secure the saddlebags, and I always put a disk lock on if security feels uncertain.

Camping




The zipper of my original REI Quarterdome 2 tent packed up in Sierra Leone and I suffered many a night for it. It was my own fault for trying to ride across Africa with a well-used $60 dollar tent bought on Ebay. The REI stuff is generally great value, especially when you can get it on sale. A tight fitting 2-person tent is definitely worth carrying rather than a 1-person coffin-sized tent. Jamie arrived with a REI Quarterdome 3 tent that fits us and gear perfectly and only cost about $200.





I carry a Trangia mini alcohol burner that fits inside its own pot/pan. It’s compact, simple, requires no maintenance, doesn’t turn your pot black, and I don’t have to get gasoline on my hands when I’m about to cook dinner. You can find denatured alcohol or ‘mineral spirits’ nearly anywhere and in a pinch you can even just burn rubbing alcohol from any pharmacy. The downside is it doesn’t burn as hot as a multi-fuel stove, so its not as good for really cooking and you don’t have a huge supply of fuel always on hand from your gas tank. We don’t cook every day, as many places it’s just cheaper and simpler to eat the street food, so I still like the alcohol burner above the multi-fuel option.


Zebra-light makes awesome bright headlamps and Ka-bar makes great knives that hold an edge for a long time. While we often buy bottles of water, we also use the Sawyer filter all the time to filter drinking water. A length of nylon cord has lots of uses from a clothesline to creating tie-downs on the bike.





My first Exped air mat was plenty comfortable, but blew its baffles in Angola and my board bag became my bed. Jamie arrived with a replacement mat made by Big Agnes and an Exped mat for herself. The Exped mat is a bit thinner and way quicker to inflate, but I’m not completely sold on the reliability of the flat valves that they use compared to the screw valves more commonly used by other manufacturers. Most of Africa is pretty warm unless you're in the mountains and there is no need for an insulated sleep mat. The air that fills these ones is plenty of warmth and they pack to less than half the size of those lined with synthetic or down insulation.


Jamie uses my Montbell Down Hugger #3 (30F bag), which I found too warm on most of the journey down the west coast of Africa. The down has lost some it’s loft that I attribute the constant humidity across west Africa. I now use the Montbell Thermal Sheet (50F) that Jamie brought with her. While I had a couple of cold nights in Botswana, I’ve been just fine since then, but I do tend to sleep warm. The Montbell down products are some of the best stuff available – light, compact, durable, and decent value. I’ve only ever owned two sleeping bags in 20 years, both are Montbell and both have seen many miles.


Surfing

Board



Bringing a surfboard on an extended overland trip is always a compromise between what you’d like to have in the water and what you are willing to drag around. Most surfers aren’t willing to tote a full quiver of 4-5 boards that would cover virtually any wave-riding situation imaginable. Instead, we pick 1 or 2 that will cover most conditions pretty well. I resolved to only bring a single board along for the ride. I needed something that would be fun to ride in big waves and small, flat faced and tubing waves alike, and also convenient to carry on the bike. Those criteria called for a board with more volume than a traditional high performance shortboard, but with that extra foam distributed over it’s with, rather than its length.





We’re spoiled for choices for surfboard creation in a place like Santa Cruz, with numerous legends of the craft quietly conducting their foam mowing alchemy in dusty shops all about town. One of these master craftsmen is Ward Coffee, who has been shaping boards in Santa Cruz for more than 30 years. I skateboarded down to his shop to chat about a new board, and as always, he performed the translation of what I said that I needed into design specifications for my surfcraft. We came up with a 5’ll’’ quad fin, with a gentle entry rocker and the volume that I would ride in a board a step up in size from my standard shortboard. I brought along two sets of fins with different profiles and surface areas, which helped stretch the board’s versatility. The board turned out to be a blast to ride, a very good compromise for most conditions I encountered, it stayed in one piece, and gave me some rides that I’ll replay in my memory for a long time to come.


The shaper's job is to build a craft that helps you have fun sliding on waves, and the good ones, like Ward, sit down and listen to what you’re after, look at what you’re riding, and make it their mission to find your magic shape in a block of foam. I for one am very grateful to have them in our community. Check out www.wardcoffeeshapes.com to see some of the diverse array of surfcraft that he puts into the water.

Surf Gear



I carried an Oneil Psycho 3/2 mm fullsuit which was just right for the trip, but I was cold in Namibia and around Cape Town. The rest of the time I just wore boardshorts and had a neoprene top for chilly mornings. The Excel Drylock boots were the perfect choice of footwear since they have a tight gusset at the top of the boot that allows you to use them with a wetsuit or as reef boots with boardshorts without them filling up with water.




My surf rack was a modified from Carver Racks in Hawaii. I used an extra mounting plate to splay the arms wider and hold the board closer to the ends. I really like the simple design of the rack and only having it mounted to the rear rack, which keeps it out of the way of my feet. The combination with soft saddlebags situates a bag between the board and the bike, cushioning the blow when the bike is dropped. It's is a good design, but the aluminum rack simply isn’t strong enough for a long overland journey – I broke it 4 times and I ended up fabricating replacement pieces from steel along the way. The steel is much heavier than the aluminum, but at least it can be welded nearly anywhere. Aluminum may work if thicker walled tubing was used and the welds to the mounting plate were reinforced, as I had done in Morocco.
Clothing

You don’t really need anything for a year that you don’t need for a week. 3 t-shirts, 3 socks, 3 underwear, 1 pair shorts, light insulating jacket, rain jacket, and rain pants will do it. Anything 100% polyester dries quicker but stinks like hell pretty quickly. I like 50/50 cotton polyester/cotton t-shirts, and Smartwool socks are the business. Come to think of it, a dog ate one pair of socks in Botswana, so it seems you really only need two pairs. Just pretend you’re a member of the Fellowship of the Ring scampering across the rocky hilltops of Gondor. I’m pretty sure Legolas didn’t pack many extra t-shirts.
Electronics



Every word written and photo processed is done with my MacBook Air 11’’. Before I left on this trip I tried out a netbook that cost about 1/3 the price of the MacBook, but found it utterly frustrating to use mostly due to very slow processor and a small, poor quality keyboard. I’d never had a Mac before this and found the adjustment only mildly painful and the solid state drive with no moving parts should weather life on the bike alright. After two years of use I now find that the battery drains pretty quickly. The other downside of the tiny Air model is limited storage – only 128 gb, so video clips have to live on a 1 TB external drive.

The Kindle is well worth the cost for the space saving convenience of being able to carry scores of books on the tiny device, though it is just another thing to charge up.

An Iphone 4 in a weatherproof/shockproof case running the MapsWithMe app is the only navigation tool I’ve used on this trip and it works great.




My trusty Panasonic TS-3 waterproof/shockproof camera has been a good camera to keep always in the pocket and use go-pro style. My higher quality camera – the Panasonic GF-3 w/14 mm lens died in Botswana, but the timing was good, since Jamie had brought along the newest model Panasonic GX-7 with a 20mm lens. The GX-7 has the highest quality image sensor used in a micro 4/3 format camera and the manual controls have been helpful for working on basic photography skills. We currently have the 20mm and 14mm pancake lenses (28mm and 40mm full frame equivalents) and while a massive zoom lens would be nice, we’ve yet to give us the precious cargo space for one.

That's about all the gear talk I can fit in this space folks. I hope that you've found it helpful in some way, and please feel free to leave a comment or ask a question about any of the bits and bobs that inhabit our saddlebags.

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bugsonmyboard.org
two wheeled wave hunting dispatches

Excellent reports as always, even when you haven't gone anywhere! I have never ridden for any significant distance, but I am definitely with you on the minimalist approach. Here on Horizons and Advrider, there seem to be quite a few different approaches for motorcycle travel, but taking less 'stuff' than more 'stuff' seems to be just plain, old, good common sense. Seeing some of the roads you posted, I couldn't imagine a fully loaded massive adventure bike realistically making it through.

Heck, as an owner of a cheap Chinese enduro, I was most impressed by your friend Mike on the underdog bike getting 6k miles out of his Chinese bike--obviously not carrying a ton of extra 'stuff' factored in. If the doubters are to be believed, his bike should have fallen apart within a few hundred miles of Cape Town! He 'should' have been on nothing 'less' than a BMW or KTM loaded down with a ton 'o crap!

Thanks much. It does take a bit of luck, but sometimes poor planning results in a good story or two...

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bugsonmyboard.org
two wheeled wave hunting dispatches

hey dudes - wild west African motosurf adventures in the current issue of the Aussie surf mag White Horses: White Horses | Issue Ten Available Now. These guys really put out a beautiful publication and I'm honored to be amongst the contributors this month. Thanks to Matt for connecting me with the White Horses crew (afewsketchymoments on ADVrider)

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bugsonmyboard.org
two wheeled wave hunting dispatches