african raid

The Benin border formalities were a breeze......so much so that we mistakenly didn't even get a tourist visa at Immigration on the way in! We'd been riding around the dusty border town zipping in and out of Nigeria and Benin (there is no sign of an actual border, let alone some sort of barrier) just trying to find both Immigration and Customs when we finally found what we thought was the Benin Immigration office. They stamped our passports but when I queried them on the validity of the visa (there were no dates written down) an Immigration Officer just replied, "Don't worry, you're a tourist." Not everybody was so relaxed in Benin and there was of course an element of bribery there. At highway toll gates we've seen in West Africa so far you do not ... read more

"It's all part of the trip" people say about breaking down.......but why did it have to be in the middle of a two day jungle crossing between Cameroon and Nigeria?....... Flying into Douala on the west coast of Cameroon reminded me of the Apocalypse Now movie - the wooded and thatch huts surrounded by flooded jungle and a dense thick humid air. Not really the type of scene that wants to make you leap out of the plane and jump straight down the throats of bribing French speaking customs officials, but it was going to have to be that way. One of the initial things I noticed about being in West Africa for the first time was that people were more traditionally dressed than what I had seen in East Africa and that their dress was ... read more

EAST COAST IS THE MOST Well, not exactly the east coast but more like East Africa that has an abundant supply of activities for the unsuspecting tourist to spend their hard earned money on! Not that this is a bad thing, it’s just hard to justify spending US$ 400 per day per vehicle to cross through the Ngorogoro Crater National Park for example! Well, this blog begins much further south than the famous National Parks of Tanzania like Ngorogoro Crater N.P and Serengeti N.P so our wallets were bulging for the time being anyway. We found the Tanzanian Immigration officer and talked fast to explain how we hadn’t gone through the border crossing at the Mozambique border and couldn’t remember the name of the Dhow we arrived on and anything about the previous day - sorry ... read more

We had a quick taste of African-Portuguese crossing northern Mozambique for two days en route to Malawi, our proposed chill-out destination. It was a beautiful ride through Tete region in Mozambique, and trying to speak Portuguese (Mozambique's national language) really wetted my appetite for more of this Latin influenced - almost flirty by nature - country. After spending time in Zimbabwe there seemed to be a more vibrant feel in Mozambique (not surprisingly!) with people dressed-up to go out on a Sunday night - I later discovered Sunday to be the biggest day for Mozambicans to party! After four border-crossings in two days with the usual rigmarole of paper-work and being whisked-off to the side-room for "compulsory insurance and taxes" we arrived in Malawi. The focus of 'beach-life' propelled us to travel in the dark until ... read more

Walking out of the Quach's Nek border-post I tilted my head against the gale-force winds, to see orange pieces of plastic on the ground...strikingly similar in colour to the bikes indicators. Yep, the wind was strong alright, and had blown the bike over, much to the bemusement of onlookers. Battling against the wind, we rode through the beautiful landscape Lesotho provides to Sehlabatebe National Park. It was a long ride, and tiredness prevailed. After looking up the loose-bouldery track, and ranting that I wasn't Alfie Cox (three times Paris-Dakar motorbike champion that I met in Bulungula), we carried on. In retrospect we shouldn't have. With an approximate combined weight of 400kg, we slid going through a muddy-waterhole, badly spraining Gwen's ankle which was caught under the pannier of the bike. Two days of R'n'R followed ... read more