Road Notes: Day 1 West Africa/ Day 127 Africa Crossing
Dakar, Senegal / 0 miles /
Finally, finally, finally… escaped Addis Ababa. I’d been there around 15, maybe 20 days, when originally it was to be 3 days tops. That’s the way these journeys go and why, if you’re going long and without much itinerary building or planning, as I am, it helps enormously to have the huge advantage of extra time. Weeks/months of it. Very lucky in that way, I am.
Jayne, my wife, joined me there thankfully for at least part of the time so the dullness and heaviness of Addis, was mitigated for at least part of the time. We’d planned to see the country while she was there but we hadn’t taken sufficiently into account that it’s in the midst of a Civil War, with at least 4 separate highly militarized groups, involved. Tens of thousands killed already and a million people under seige in the Tigray region, on the edge of starvation. Not smart to wander out of Addis, even though I’d ridden up through the southern part of it when I rode in from Kenya.
As for Addis itself, it’s a concrete jungle with a top ten score for the world’s worst traffic, and with almost no green areas where one can walk safely. Most egregious are the aggressive pickpockets that fill the streets, even, and especially, in the ‘upscale area’ of Bolle, where we were staying. I had my iPhone stolen by 2 guys who came alonside me on a busy street — distracted by one, the other took my phone. When we walked out of our hotel, the nice but too costly for our budget (as we hadn’t expected to be there that long), the Jupiter International hotel, we could see the teenage thieves checking us out. Nothing hidden about it. So, we ended up spending much of our time in our gilded cage, as we thought of our hotel.
Instead of going on thru Sudan and Egypt as planned, I instead decided to air freight my bike to Dakar. Reasons for this included: it would give me a taste of West Africa, especially Morocco… I’d be crossing the Sahara thru some of the most desolate land in the world (the coast of Mauritania and Western Sahara), which seemed a fitting end to this African adventure… I’d have a chance to play the CSNY tune, Marrakech, as I rode into the town. As for the significant cost of air freighting the bike, I was already planning to do so from Cairo so it was already in the budget.
It took 5 FULL working days to get my bike approved by Customs for shipment, and to wind through the byzantine cargo procedures required by Ethiopian airlines. It would have been faster admittedly if one of my motorcycle documents hadn’t been off by ONE DIGIT — the Chassis number, 15 or so digits long, ended in 194… but on one of the docs it had been entered as 1904. That extra 0 added on several days and the huge cost of additional lodging.
But now, finally, I’m in a window seat, flying almost straight West, across this huge continent. I’m near the end of the flight and as I look down, I can see the green of the Sahel, of the more temperate tropical region of Africa, give way to the brown sand of the Sahara. There’s a very definite line in the sand where that happens and it boggles the mind to think that it this border cuts clear across the entire continent. I feel a touch of foreboding and a bit of dread when I see that stark, dry landscape. It occurs to me for the first time that I’ll need to pack in a lot more extra water than I usually carry.
