In Botswana I got caught speeding. I drove through a village. I didn't see any buildings to the left and right for 500m already and so I thought I must have missed a sign and accelerated. A few 100m later I rode around a bend and saw a police officer with a tripod and behind him the sign I was looking for. They stopped me and took my documents and demanded around 80$ for going 80 in a 60 zone.(Little fuzzy on the exact numbers, bear with me)

I claimed to not have that much money so the chief who was waiting in in his car with the AC on told me to go back into the village to withdraw cash. I did so, with an old card that didn't work, made sure that the bank employees noticed me and had a quick chat with them in case they knew the police, headed back to the check point and told them my story ofter hiding my excess cash in my luggage.

In the meantime they caught a pair of tourists with the same problem and so we formed a little convoy and headed to the police station.

There the haggling started. I made it clear that I can't withdraw any cash, and hinted that I would be open to alternative solutions to this problem. The chief seemed to be very pleased to pardon me in exchange for a small contribution(15$ maybe?) gave me a receipt, which I wanted in case something would come up when leaving Botswana, and after a heartily handshake I headed towards ZA.

In hindsight it was a dick move from me. I was speeding, I had the cash and even if I hadn't I could have withdrawn enough.

But at this point I was already to fed up with officials wanting some form of favour or another that I didn't want to give any money if I didn't have to.


Points where I sat around for a long time where some exchange of currency could have accelerated things:

- Entering and exiting Mauritania. For the entry from Morocco I was with 5 other people on bikes and we hired a fixer, still took hours to get the paperwork done, but we paid around 5$ each and would have been utterly lost without the fixer so it wasn't that much of a loss. When leaving towards Senegal we sat around a lot at the Mauri and Senegal side. I think one of the others handed over 10$ but I remember the at Zebrabar better to be honest.

- All of Nigeria. It started at a traffic police roadblock 25km after the border, lost around 90min there because apparently I should have shipped my saddle bags to Abuja instead of overloading my bike. They even arranged a guy with a mobile ATM. Besides the charge being bogus, that seemed sketchy to me so I refused to pay 100$. After the 90min one guy said that I could leave because the chief pardoned me. I went to the chief and gave him a firm handshake and thanked him enthusiastically for the Nigerian generosity. Then there were multiple other roadblocks where the "officials"(don't know if they even were officials, most didn't wear uniforms because they would get dirty) made it quite clear that the process could be shortened. On the outskirts of Abuja I ran into a military roadblock, maybe the 10th that day, and grew quite impatient. Because of that I didn't lick any boots as I usually did which angered an officer and so I had to unpack my bike and had my whole luggage searched. I then travelled towards Cameroon with Argo, he did the talking. We arrived at the Cameroonian border quite late and the officers didn't want to let us pass despite me negotiating in French. Argo took over and, in his words, started "talking African". We left customs within 5min.

- The Cameroon RoC border was interesting. The Cameroonian side wanted to buy my bike, the Congolese side wanted money. First the police, then immigration and finally some health inspector. I played dumb, smiled a lot and spoke worse French with every minute. It took me 90min I think, but I left without paying. It's noteworthy that the police took the least time to get past and in both subsequent attempts intervened on my behalf.

- DRC was a mess with all kinds of institutions. I was handed a DGM form around 5 times, and was charged either 50 or 100$. Every time I claimed that the ambassador said the formalities would be free of charge, and the last DGM officer didn't charge anything anyway. It worked, but I lost at least 30min each time. This is where I finally lost my patience with officials and became bolder with my statements, which led to the situation in Botswana.

After that it was rather smooth sailing.