Road notes: 11/137

Dakar to St. Louis, Senegal

Took off this morning at the very early hour, for me, of 715am. Indeed, that’s the earliest I’ve ever started out by at least an hour. (I’m just not an early morning person anymore. I tell myself it’s just temporary as I always loved seeing the dawn and getting a jump on the day. But for the past couple of years, despite at least a dozen serious efforts to get back to a 10pm to 6am sleep schedule, I haven’t come close. )

A few things conspired to make the exit from Dakar an excruciatingly long 2 hours. First, my Google maps wouldn’t ‘speak’ the directions to me in my helmet mike’s ear. Needs to be reset or something but by not doing so, it forces me to stop frequently, pull out my phone, see where I am, and usually, adjust for any mistakes made. Second, due to messing up on the initial directions, I ended up deep in the vibrant slums of Dakar, choked with traffic, muddy dirt roads, gigantic puddles (it actually rained in the morning), and several times, roads that threaded such sketchy looking neighborhoods that I wasn’t going to go down even though Google said that was the way. Finally, gave up trying to go the ‘toll road/ express way’ that had been the initial plan as I couldn’t seem to reach it and so instead elected for the far funkier and local and longer, ‘old road to St. Louis’ that Google seemed insistent I take instead.

Road notes…

— A haze everywhere. Something I only notice after a few hours, after I realize its probably a permanent feature, after I realize its not water based. It’s dust in the air. Like a light smog that you see over major cities. Doesn’t affect at all your visibility , don’t even notice it close up. But when you look afar, you can only see a mile or so before the haze blocks out what’s beyond.

— Lots of small towns, one after the other, for an hour outside of Dakar, and then finally, almost none for the last 100 kilometers. I’m beginning to enter the ‘unpopulated zone’.

— Huge pond like puddles of accumulated stagnant water as I get closer to St. Louis,. Women with big plastic containers within them collecting something.

— Spot the ocean from time to time on my left side. Reassuring.

I kept waiting for the landscape to change into the image I have of the Sahara — rolling dunes of sand, with not a green plant in sight. But instead, to my surprise, it stayed vegetated and even sprinkled with tall trees that somehow found water by burrowing their roots deep enough into the dry soil. There were even some well-irrigated, lushly green small farms along the way. Finally, there were pockets of water here and there. What was going on?

Checking Wikipedia, I found out that one, I’m not yet within the Saharan desert. Instead, I’m in a Sahel region, a transition zone that separates the desert in the north from the tropical lush world south (ie the equatorial region). It’s a belt that crosses Africa and is hundreds of miles wide.

Also, the Senegal river, that flows through this region, overflows its banks annually — like the Nile river does — and that too contributes to the water availability.

In a town just outside of Dakar, a sport biker — what I call myself and others who ride motorcycles for pleasure and not transport or work — passed by waving at me, indicating I should follow him. He pulled up at a gas station full of other sport bikers, all of them on Rally ready KTMs. “Come join us! We’re going to be meeting for tea 2 kilometers from here.”

I recognized one of the guys in the group — a winner of 7 Africa rallies that I’d met a few weeks before at Mad Bikes. When I told him about my trip, coming up from Cape Town etc., he put out his fist to me: “Respect, Mon. Respect!” That was pretty cool. And then he said it again when I departed. Wow, to earn the “Respect” from this champion Rally rider — oh, if only my younger, insecure self could have been around to see that.

What an invitation — tea time with the greats! It would be so cool to meet these guys and hear their stories, some of the world’s best motorcycle riders. But… on the other hand, I had the sun and heat to contend with and if I went a few kilometers out of my way to have tea (yes, they meet for “tea time”), and spent an hour with them, I would be riding in the mid afternoon ferocious heat. So, I very regretfully declined the invitation, and after some fist bumps and hearty thumbs up by the group, I went on my way.

People walking along the roadside, within the tiny towns, seem oblivious of me as I ride through. They don’t take notice of my large bike, panniers, full body armor — like they do in much of the rest of Africa. I wondered why for a while and then realized that seeing guys on bikes like mine packed with panniers etc is actually a fairly common sight in these parts, ie due to all the sport riders that both come from Senegal, or come to race across the legendary desert routes. Even when I arrived at my hotel in St. Louis, I parked next to another Honda, an Africa Twin, decked out with panniers.

Where I do still raise eyebrows is when people find out I’m doing this solo. Than I get that “Respect, mon, Respect”.

I finally figured out a way to hold a water bottle within arm’s reach when seated on the bike. A bungee like cord that’s hooked on both sides and that comes across the front of my seat, where I then wedge in a water bottle. It took me over a 100 days to figure this out, such is the level of my mechanical ineptitude. And alas, the first bottle slipped out after just a few miles — too big. But then I tested 2 small bottles side by side and — Voila! — it worked well.

Invention idea: A portable device to convert salt water to fresh for emergency drinking. Small and light enough to take along on a backpacking trip.

Yet another bike issue. At about 95kph, my Honda begins to sway slightly from left to right. It’s hard to describe because it sounds worse than it is. Just imagine a normal bike speeding down the road… and now add to that this little sway from left to right to left to right etc.. It doesn’t affect the bike’s path at all — you keep on the same line. It just adds this odd extra movement to the bike as you go along. Not enough to worry that it’s going to cause you to crash. Nor do you feel any less in control of the bike. Ie, it’s not really a dangerous issue — it’s more of an annoyance. Fortunately, I know the cause of it.

Mamadou, owner of Mad Bikes, told me that my new back tire — that I bought in Addis Ababa to replace the old one whose tread had worn down — was a full ‘off road’ tire and not a mixed use one, ie for both highway and off-road, that ordinarily comes with this Honda. Nothing to worry about but “when you reach 95 to 100kph, the motorcycle will begin to shudder. That’s due to the tire. You can get tired very easily.”

Soooo… I’m not going to be going much faster than 95kph between here and Spain. It’s not such a loss really on these roads as I rarely get up past that speed anyways.