Articles tv-bay 2008

London to Capetown by Bike (2)

(tv-bay August 2008)

Cameroon has a wonderful reputation... by comparison. The people tend to be more friendly and not as money hungry...remember I said "by comparison". I arrived in Cameroon at the beginning of the wet season and it had been raining contently for a week before I got there. The road was in a horrendous state. It was a two hundred kilometer long mud bath, in some places the mud holes were two meters below the normal road height.

My bike fully loaded weighs in at a little under a quarter of a tonne...and it's a one wheel drive. I was like Bambi on ice. The back wheel would go one way, the front wheel the opposite way. My right leg would slip forward, my left leg backwards and the whole thing would end in a heap in the mud, sometimes me on top sometimes underneath then slipping puffing and panting I would stand the mud encrusted monster back up and go again for maybe a hundred yards maybe only twenty and repeat the same process...laugh...I never laughed once.

I eventually got the bike on the back of a six wheel drive truck that was going to the next big town, Kimba, empty. Even then I was not out of the mud. It took twenty four hours to cover the two hundred odd kilometer's and driving into flooding rivers, carrieing down one bank and bouncing and bashing your way up the opposite bank in the middle of the night because the bridge has been washed out is a real bum clencher, and one hell of a buzz...when you do eventually make it.

I hate to say this, but it is a terrible truism. Try as you might it is impossible to film the most exciting and challenging parts of a trip like this, because you are just too busy doing it, and filming at the same time is often impossible, usually very dangerous..or at the very least, inconvenient.

I managed some shots of the truck tyres spinning in the mud and us digging it out..but none of the careering through rivers or perched precariously on tempery log bridges with only inches to spare and the bike and all I owned strapped down in the back and me squinting my eyes and biting my lip...none of these moments were captured for posterity...shame.

Filming torrential rain and water cascading down streets is important if you want to capture the mood but it doesn't tell a story and I left Cameroon without a story.

Gabon is French...really French, they even have Paris prices to prove it. I was servicing the bike, adjusting the chain, changing oil, all that sort of thing when I noticed that the throttle cable was just about frayed through at the carburettor end...it was a lucky find for I was going to be in some serious bush for the next couple of weeks. I took of the old cable and went to the market to find a replacement inner cable, once found I had to solder a new nipple on the end so I went to a mobile phone repair shop and asked if they could use their soldering iron to do it...or better still let me do it.

In fairness 'cable nipple soldering' is probably not part of the 'how to fix a phone' course, so in the end I did it myself with the assistance of the phone technician. But I had wanted to film the whole process from discovery to resolution so I had taken the Camera and filmed myself hunting for the inner cable in and out of various little hardware shops and bicycle repair shops and I wanted to film the soldering part also. But because I ended up doing it myself I had forgotten to film that part, so I asked the technician to pretend to Work on the Cable. I move the tripod and started to frame the shot, when all I could see in the view-finder was his boots and the cable I looked up at him and said what are you doing...he replied 'Walking on the Table ...'

The back roads from Gabon to the Congo are murderous, once you leave the silky smooth new main roads which have been put in place to facilitate the systematic rape of the rain forest, then you are on your own. You can ride for hours and see not a soul, or any human habitation, other than the occasional abandoned bush material hut. It's really lonely and just a little scary, the tracks wind through rain forest that is so thick that it forms a tunnel which seems to be in perpetual twilight even in the middle of the day. From that you emerge into sparsely covered savannah and hours later you wind your way up steep mountain tracks with towering cliffs on one side and cavanas drop-offs on the other, so all in all quite varied. But here again you are so concentrated on getting through that the last thing on your mind is to stop and capture fantastic panoramas and stunning scenery, what you would really like to take a picture of is a small town with a petrol station.

On days like these it is easy to get the feeling that you are really pushing the envelope, going the extra mile. It's at times like this that you wish you were schizophrenic just so that you had someone else there to share the experience with. when you feel that you really could be the last man left alive on earth, it's usually just about then that you here an engine in the distance, the faint hum of an engine working really hard and revving high, minutes later you hear the shrill of drums and guitar music from a cheap radio and then you see the battered old bus on it's way to drop off the waving shouting children after their hard day at school just ten kilometers further on down the road. The world isn't getting any smaller but it is getting harder to find a place to be alone.

In Gabon all I did was ride and sleep and ride and sleep, the place was expensive, but more annoyingly there was no value, all prices seemed to be randomly conjured out of the air. So I paid their silly prices for petrol and bread and hotel rooms and moved on as fast as I could. I rode for four days before getting to the border. There are lots of theories about taking the road less travelled...but usually there is a reason why a road is less travelled, and usually it is either because the road is crap or it leads nowhere. Off course that is not always the case...sometimes it because they have built a new road to the same destination and the road less travelled is the old shitty road. It is a good habit even if you have a good map (I didn't) to ask directions...just to be sure. I asked directions. "la route de Akou"...keep it simple, that's the best way when dealing with foreigners I find. So I said to various people "la route de Akou" and they would confirm that I was indeed on the right track as it were. So I was not overly concerned as the road narrowed and became more of a sandy track than a road, who knows maybe around the next bend it will turn into a good road again, stranger things happen in Africa. Needless to say the track just got more sandy and smaller and harder to ride...eventually I arrived at the border post. They were over joyed to see me..such a big bike, such a brave man...and so red and so sweaty too.

I sat down to rest, it was already two in the afternoon and I was exhausted I had been riding for five hours and only covered forty odd kilometers...but at least I had made it to the border and the worst part was behind me. I asked the post commander what I could expect on the Congo side. I knew that it would be alright because I could already see the lovely big new blacktop road that had just been constructed and that road would undoubtedly lead to a nice town with petrol stations and hotels ...probably with air conditioners and cold beer.

No, that road led directly to the place I had just come from....the little sandy bush track going off at a tangent lead to the place I was going...I could have cried, I would have, but didn't want to loose anymore water from my already dehydrated body.

The border guys recommended that I go back to Lekoni, where I had just come from, but this time take the new road ...total journey time forty minutes. There I should spend the night, fill up with petrol and get some spare in a container, buy more food, more water, and then leave very early the next morning...they would be sure to be there at post early to let me through. So that is what I did.

It's strange but the Immigration and Customs entry post into the Congo is nearly fifty kilometers inside the border. It is down a really small, really sandy road...with absolutely no traffic on it. You are in the back of beyond. It's called M'banza and in the four days I was there, camped behind the Police Post, six vehicles passed through. I was waiting for a truck or four wheel drive to see If I could put the bike on it just to get us out of the sand...the sand was murdering the bike, it was just too big and heavy for such poor sandy track and I was concerned about burning the clutch out or falling and breaking a leg on such an isolated stretch of road. I was going to play it safe and use brains over bravado...just this once.

So I camped up behind the Police Hut and started filming. I thought this time I would do a cookery special, something along the lines of Ready Steady Cook and using fresh termites as our main ingredients out of the shopping bag. The deal was that I would buy the beer and the four customs and Police/immigrations guys would supply the food and it worked well, the chicken was really nice, the bush meat was tasty but a little tough, the river fish was boney but nice, the canned sardines were...well, canned sardines, even the termites were quite palatable.

I thought that we were off to catch/hunt/trap termites, but we just went down to the village and bought them as you would.... say peas or something like that. We told the old guy how many bowls of termites we needed and he scooped them out of the bucket and charges accordingly. Then we took them over to an old lady with a wicker basket and she tossed them up and down in her basket to knock the wings off and then we were ready to go back to the Police Post and start cooking...basically you steam them in salty water for fifty minutes, then they are lovely and crunchy and salty and quite nice served with Melei (Maze dough) I filmed the whole process even with the obligatory oohing and aahhing...it was a nice little story.

Eventually a 4x4 did come along, and it was even going in my direction...it was loaded to the gunnels. That however was not going to stop the driver from loading up this rich prize. He had the other passengers unload the Toyota's back tray and then we lifted the bike on and repacked everything back around the bike. There is a little joke in Africa that goes like this. "How many passengers can you fit on an African bus"...the answer "ONE MORE", it's not particularly funny but it is undeniably true.

With the bike and all my bits loaded I hung on the back with all the other passengers as we speed along the sandy track never seeming to be completely in control of the vehicles course, but at least we were moving I had been at the border for four days and was happy to be on the move again.

We dropped off a few of the other passengers and I was upgraded to first class in the cab. we stopped regularly to pass through check points. from what I could work out I was the only one on the vehicle that was in the country legally. It seemed that all the other passengers had to pay little bribes in order to be allow to continue their journey. Occasionally I was asked for money but declined the opportunity to supplement various minor officials income...I mean I had already paid fifty pounds for the bloody visa.

The driver was perhaps the greatest entrepreneur that it has ever been my misfortune to meet. He insisted that we slow down as we passed through every collection of huts, minute settlement, or minor village and yell out Poisson sal'e, Petrole....salted fish and Kerosine. If anyone showed any interest we would stop in the middle of the road and open up shop. Ladleling out kerosene in to old plastic bottles that people would bring, or lining up fish for inspection...it made for a slow passage. I filmed bits and pieces of this..but my heart wasn't really in it. I just wanted to get on and get to a halfway decent road so I could get back on the bike and get to the capitol Brazzaville, there I could sort out the next leg of the journey.

However, I must share a funny moment with you. I unloaded the bike in a little town called Obanga, we did it in a back street as the driver did not want to go through the road block and pay the required bribes. I had checked in to the only little hotel in town and the driver said that he might come back and have a beer and maybe stay the night at the same hotel if he got finished in time.

About an hour later, just as it was getting dark the driver showed up accompanied by two burly gentlemen of unhumourous character. The driver introduced them as Policemen. They demanded my passport and asked why I had not checked in with them at the Police station. I told them that I would get them my passport once I had finished getting the bike into the reception area of the hotel. I got him to one side and asked the driver what it was all about..he said looking very unhappy, that they had caught him at a road block going out of town and he had be forced to give me up as an accomplice... as it were. I had to smile at this. I went and got a Copy of my passport and gave it to one of the officers...he started making notes. Then from out in the car park came the sound of a vehicle leaving at high speed...the driver had made a break for it. The two Police went rushing outside, but as they had come with the driver in his truck, they had no vehicle so they started running after the 4x4, then they stopped and came back to me and told me not to go anywhere, then took off again on foot...that was the last I saw of them...I would have loved to have filmed the 'Keystone Cops', African style.

Brazzaville was still five hundred kilometers away and the road was still a little on the rough side but not as sandy. What it lacked in sand however, it made up for in water. The road had develop the particularly unattractive habit of having huge water filled mud holes at any place where it was impossible to pass on either side. So there was no choice but to just ride right in and hope for the best. Hope that the water was less than three feet deep, hope that there was not another huge hole in the bottom of the hole, or just as bad, a huge rock. You don't want to drop a BMW fully loaded with Camera gear, passports, and the like in the middle of a huge hole full of muddy water. So up to my knees in water and trying to keep momentum I soldiered on, hoping that each hole was going to be my last...eventually one was, and I was back on 'la Bonne Route'. Looking back even now I shudder

Kinshasa and Brazzaville sit on opposite banks of the river Congo...they sort of glare at each other. Brazzaville is full of short avenues and large ostentatious roundabouts and is very French.

Kinshasa is a huge modern African city which is home to the biggest French speaking population in the world...and at the same time has almost nothing in it. If it isn't cheap and imported from China then it is doubtful if you will find it in Kinshasa. But the thing that strikes you immediately when you cross the river and entre the city is the phenomenal number of big white four wheel drive Toyotas belonging to the United Nations. There are over two hundred thousand UN staff in Kinshasa and scattered elsewhere around the country.

The writer Joseph Conrad set his classic adventure tail 'The Heart of Darkness' in the Congo, and you don't have to be there long before you come to understand where he got his title idea from. It has had one Banana Republic style military Dictator after another since gaining independence from Belgium and as it's resources have become more valuable and accessible the internal squabbling has increased expedientialy...that's why, what seems like half the worlds U.N forces are there, to try and keep a lid on the place, and stop it falling apart along tribal lines...which I think ultimately may not be such a bad thing, if done properly. I think the place is just too big, to be managed properly. But no one ever asks me about such things so I will keep that opinion to myself.

There wasn't much to film in Kinshasa...except Banobos. I went to the Banobo sanctuary a little way out of town and had a look around. I filmed these little cousins of the chimpanzee through the wire fences and thought that this might make a good story. I got in touch with the director of the sanctuary and asked about filming. I explained about my trip, about being a talentless, struggling young artist and broke, I emphasized my benevolent nature and my particular affinity to the natural world. She said "Two hundred US dollars take it or leave it"...I had to leave it.

It's horrible when something like that happens, mostly because you get so excited about maybe being able to do a little something to help a worthwhile cause...exposure, awareness, and also you might get a really interesting and entertaining segment out of it. Then some old French cow wants to squeeze you for every last penny. In this case it was about both the principle AND the money.

Angola is a country that has only recently emerged from a twenty five year long civil war. At this early stage of their post war development they are not really big on tourism, the truth is that they are just not ready for it, and they have the good sense to know it. In fact they do not even issue tourist visas. You can only get a work/business visa, or a transit visa. I applied for a transit visa which is normally issued for five days.

The country measure something like 1,600 kilometers north to south, that's about a thousand miles if you ride as the crow flies, so in theory that means that you only have to cover two hundred miles a day in order to make it through in time. That would be OK if they had any roads...but at this stage they don't, not really. They have roads under construction, they have small lengths of beautifully built dual carriageway. The road system has seen no maintenance in close to thirty years and it shows. I had spoken to several people and they had all sucked their teeth and made tut tutting sounds about the roads and said that I would have to be really lucky to make it through in five days. If there was no rain, no bridges out, no hold ups of any kind, then maybe, just maybe, I could make it.

Forearmed with this knowledge I went to the Angolan Embassy in Kinshasa. I dressed smartly. I resolved to be patient...I would even try to be nice. I filled out the form, I sat patiently, I read my book. When my time to be interviewed came I was charm itself. I explained about being alone on a motorcycle and the inherent hazards that that produced. I explained about possible weather problems. I mentioned the fact that I was old and scared to ride in the dark. All of this was keenly acknowledged..even the part about being old...bloody cheeck. Three days later I picked up my fifteen day transit visa....

I choose to make the crossing at Songololo, I liked the sound of the name and apparently the roads are better there. In fact the roads were not as bad as I had expected...but by this stage of the journey I was probably not much of a judge. I had been on some of West Africa's worst roads, so if it was passable at all, I would have thought it wasn't so bad. It turned out that roads were not going to be my problem this time. This time it was going to be fuel.

The bike is fuel injected through a carburettor, it has a special chip fitted so that it can burn fuel ranging from 82 octane up to 98 which is pretty good..where possible I run Super unleaded which is 94 octane or there abouts. In M'banza-Congo..which is the first major town in northern Angola I fully expected to find petrol. I had enough petrol in the bike to go another two hundred k's but the next big town was four hundred and fifty kilometers. There was petrol in M'banza-Congo but it was rubbish mixed with kerosene OK for little Chinese put-puts but not really suitable for a 650 BMW heading into the bush. I spent a whole day hunting around town for Super or something like it. I figured that someone must have a stash that they would be willing to sell for a price. I came up with a blank. It was the same story all over town. There will be Super here in four or five days...we think.

I managed to find a truck going to Luanda the capitol...we loaded the bike in the back and away we went..three days. The bike fell over in the back of the truck and broke it's side stand, mirror, and the luggage rack. we fixed all that, at the trucks main depot in Luanda and the owner of the trucking company put me up for a few days at his house. But the clock was ticking and I really didn't want to over stay my Visa ..so I moved on. Little thought was given to filming..I just wanted to make it to the border...I made it with six days to spare.

Southern Angola is quite beautiful and the start of Big Sky country, but when you get into Namibia, then you are in Massive sky country..I can not explain it but the sky takes up at least three quarter of any picture that you take ...it's inspirational.

I spent five days at Etosha National Park...I filmed everything. I was lucky enough to share a land cruiser with a German photographer and we would just sit at a water hole and wait and see what turned up..and eventually everything turned up..in one day I filmed eight different lions. It was yet another highlight in a long list of highlights.

From Etosha I moved south to Swakopmund, a town on Namibia's Skeleton Coast. I was looking for brake pads and went into a Yamaha dealers...there I meet a Danish guy who owned the dealership and an adventure tour company next door. He noticed the camera mount on my helmet and we got talking about filming.

He offered me as many free trips on his quads in the desert as I wanted if I would give him some Hi Def footage he could play on his flat screen in the store...deal.

I filmed quad Bikes roller coasting through the Namib desert's stunning rolling dunes, with a powder blue sky as a back drop...good stuff. A few days later I filmed a group of diamond miners having a team building day in a striking old river valley. They had six Rhino 4x4 vehicles and went into places that would make Indiana Jones think twice. The valley walls told the story of Africa itself..it's geological history laid bare for all to see. It was a nice canvas on which to place a group of big men having little boy fun ...and we had a fantastic Brie (BBQ) in a cave made by massive boulders... the film would be used to make a mini promo video for the adventure company Outback Orange.

From there I went up to Cape Cross to film the fur seal colony. It was pupping season and the carnage and smell was staggering. Black backed Jackals, Brown Hyenas and all manor of gull and skewer were there feeding on after birth and young seals..it was nature in the raw. Then south again with Cape Town in mind. But first I had to cross the Orange River which forms the frontier between Namibia and South Africa. I would have been mad not to get a Canoe and paddle down the river for a couple of days...I didn't want to be mad, so I hired a canoe and set off on the river with my tent and my Cameras...wonderful.

By the time I entered South Africa I had already been on the road a little over a year and had told my story many times. The thing that I really liked about South Africa was that if you were telling someone about the trip they never asked why...they new why, they just wanted to know How. In South Africa if you camp it doesn't mean that you are poor or a cheap skate, it means that you are doing it right, the way that it's supposed to be done, close to the land. With your senses on full gain, feeling the place, touching it, smelling it, but most of all seeing it.

Few people love their country with the sincerity that the South Africans do. All South Africans black, white, and colored, they all know its a special place. If you are sitting or standing looking at a map, it's guaranteed that someone will come up and ask you where you want to go. You may be in Somerset West and want to go to George or Wilderness, they will look at the map with you and the point out where you are and then point to where you want to go, and then draw a line between them and say that's the road there, you can pick it up at the next junction a few miles up the road, BUT If I were you I should go this way, this way you can see this, this, and this, and then you can stay here, here, and here. I have a friend there, he has a motorcycle, he would love to meet you. I can call him and you can stay with him there...I kid you not, that's what happened to me many times. It shows how pleased they are with their country...they love it.

I rode the coastal roads of South Africa all the way around to the east coast and then cut in and entered the mountain Kingdom of Lesotho. There, one day, I turned into a school photographer. I took a picture of each class and their teacher, some classes had as many as three students. I filmed this process as I had done on many occasions before, this was a thread that I had run through the whole trip I called it 'miles for smiles' the idea was to take a picture of someone with a 7.2 Megapixel Cybershot then print it out on the Canon mobile printer and then give it to them and film their reaction to seeing themselves or maybe there children. If you are lucky you can see a person, a mother, or a father, smile with their whole body...shoulders, hands, everything smiling...you would travel miles for those smiles.

After Lesotho I headed back to Cape Town...I rode through the Little Karoo. Whatever you do, don't die until you have ridden a motorcycle through the little Karoo, it is magical.

In Cape Town I boxed the bike up and put it on a ship to London. I boarded a plane ...Africa was over. Now all I had was memories and seventy four hours of H D footage. Some of that footage is junk, but some...in fact quite a lot is priceless. Because it's real, it documents an extraordinary trip done by an ordinary guy. It shows moments of frustration and despair. it shows moments of joy. But mostly it shows what it is like to ride a motorcycle through Africa.

Frank Butler is currently in London planning the next great adventure The Americas, he plans to ride his Camera through the USA filming the inhabitants interacting in strange ways with motorcycles. Then through Central America, and South America, please feel free to contact him on frank@global.net.pg especially if you run a Production Company or own a Brewery.