Road notes: Day 4 West Africa/ Day 130 Africa crossing
Dakar/ 0 miles
Strange intense dreams. Sometimes I’m much younger in these dreams. Sometimes my age. Often they’ll revolve around material security and the lack of it. Or efforts to pass a college course, or an internship, but at my age. I seem to always be falling behind, can’t keep up.
At one point, a half hour after I was asleep, around 1130pm, there was a knock on my door — “something something dejuener’. Breakfast. One of the few words I know in French. But its 1130pm. Opened the door and the young lady cook handed me a bag with chips, a canned fruit juice, other stuff. ‘Something something Demain’. Demain, the word for tomorrow. Another in my limited French quiver of vocabulary. Never have I received tomorrow’s breakfast the night before. Yet another novel experience.
Took the bike to Mad Mikes. I’d hoped for something really professional, upscale, like the Flying Brick in Cape Town… At first glance though it looked far from that. It wasn’t until I got in and saw the gleaming KTMs, all set for the next Rally, that I felt relieved that I was in the right.
The friendly owner, a Rally rider, gave me some sad news — ‘the something something clutch disc may need to be changed — and there’s no part in country so we’ll have to order it.” How long? “Maybe 10 days… or more”. Oh, God. There’s still a chance though come Monday when the owner’s going to check out some other Hondas he services to see if they might have a disc that fits (they are different models.)
Big bummer if I have to stay. I really really want to get on the road and see this trip through. I’m enjoying it, but it’s dragging on far beyond what I thought.
Went to a surfer’s restaurant for dinner, sat at a table with the ocean crashing below, a beautiful view, the whole place to myself. The City was watching the final of the Champions League, cheering for Real Madrid as a Senagalese player is a huge star on it. (They won!). I could hear the cheering floating over the beach and sea from bars far away.
