South Africa to Africa
with Frank Butler
Here I sit on a rainy day in Stockholm, in the Ikea apartment “keep reading you’ll see” mulling over the trip so far … I left England a little less than a month ago and have been on the move ever since. It has been a race against the Nordic weather … to get to Stockholm before the winter snow came.
Well, the good news is that I have achieved my goal … I am in Sweden, home of Volvo, Saab, Ikea and the Nobel Prize … oh and lets not forget ABBA, and what’s more it is Viking great.
But let’s start at the beginning. I left dear old Mum’s house on a sunny Autumn morning in late October and rode the bike down to Kent, to visit a couple of PNG friends Andy and Laka Boardman, who are living down there now. We had a fairly quiet night by Papua New Guinea Standards … three or four bottles of wine and a roast lamb dinner … obviously not in that order. Then, not so early, the next morning I set off down the road to Dover on a drizzly English morning; the bike was feeling top heavy with all the camera gear and the wet roads made it feel uncomfortable and unwieldy but it’s a fairly short trip and I arrived safe and sound.
I went straight to one of the little travel agent, come money changer shops, along the water front and asked for a cheap ticket on the next available boat. The guy came back with 'fifteen pound and leaving in thirty minutes' … I bit his hand off.
I did some filming around the ferry terminal and was on the boat before I had a chance to say a proper farewell to dear Blighty. I got a couple of shots of the white cliffs of Dover as we sailed away and that was that … I was OFF.
Calais is a nice enough town, but I had no time for duty free shopping so I passed straight through and headed north. First towards Dunkerque (where the Germans gave the English a kicking during WW 2) and then for Ooustende where I was going to sleep for the night.
In Ooustende I found a hostel for twenty five Euros. It was run by two brothers. One was mad on BMW motorcycles and the other was a part-time diving instructor, so they were happy to see me, and I them. That night in the bar they call up a bunch of their mates and we had a whale of a time trying to out-do each others stories. I must have won, because they paid my bar bill.
Next day I went filming around town and stumbled on a little chocolate shop. I asked if I could take a couple of close ups of some of the chocolates and before I knew it I was in the middle of a mini documentary about chocolate making…great.
Next, off to Amsterdam … four hours of motorway riding and you are there. Because the bike is so loaded up and Amsterdam is so busy on the weekends I didn’t want to do a lot of price checking around the hotels and hostels, so I went to an agent and described my perfect hotel. She said that was great but you don’t get all that for twenty Euros, you would need to spend two hundred. So she suggested a little hotel café near the Dam Square, typically Dutch … narrow stairs and lots of them, all for forty Euro plus a one time commission of seven Euros … job done. I went around town with the Camera, filmed all things Dutch, canals, house gables, pushbikes, and smiley faces … but no tulips. I even went on the scariest ride of my life in order to film. It was called the ball buster or something like that … I could hardly stand up when I got off. All this so the viewers at home could get a thrill, and the sad part is that it looks like nothing at all through the lens of a camera … because you don’t get the feeling of having all the blood in your body drained into your ankles. But that’s life in the film business.
Then, when I got back to my hotel I realised that the whole Amsterdam story was right there, so I spent the rest of the afternoon drinking and filming in the bar … yippee.
Into Germany
On the road to Hamburg Germany, I took a wrong turn on the motorway and ended up going the way that I had first wanted to go … does that make sense? Well I had wanted to ride along the large sea wall that keeps Holland from becoming part of the North Sea, but everyone I spoke too said go the inland way…it’s quicker and easier. But the travel gods sent me via the sea wall and I had a lovely, if somewhat breezy, ride along the Dam. But it did slow me down a little so I ended up stopping before I reached Hamburg. I pulled into a town called Oldenburg, which is the sort of town that you probably wouldn’t stop in unless you had a reason…my reason was that I was cold and tired.
Now here’s a life lesson for you…shop around. I know that your mother has probably told you this before, but I never saw such an acute example as I experienced in Oldenburg. I picked up a local hotel brochure from one of the more expensive hotels. I sat on a bench and pick out three or four possibles, based mostly on price. I went to the cheapest first, it was something like twenty seven Euros for a single, without shower or toilet. I had a look at that, but it reminded me too much of my time in the monastery, so I asked to see the next option. This room was forty seven Euros and was just like the first room, but with a shower and toilet stuck on the side. I asked if a discount was possible…she said she would take off the price of breakfast…three Euros off, and not give me breakfast. I tried to explain that this was not really a discount in the traditional sense of the word. Needless to say I lost the argument and left. I rode around the corner to the nicest little hotel you could imagine and got a fantastic room for fifty Euros…including a mouth watering breakfast. The Spanza in Oldenburg, in case you are ever that way. It pays to shop around.
Through the Horizons unlimited website I got in touch with Heiko Burmister who lives just outside Hamburg, in a little village called Hamfeldem and he invited me to come and stay if I was passing that way…which I was.
Leaving the hotel the next morning the receptionist came running out into the rain to give me a little bag that was to be my picnic lunch…I was deeply touched. That morning I had filmed the buffet breakfast for the Doco…and complemented them on a lovely spread…which had brought a smile to the waitresses faces…they must have done this packed lunch for me.
So, with that nice sunny thought in mind, I rode off into the rain…and it kept raining all morning. Really dirty, spray kind of rain that gets inside the elbows of your jacket and then runs down into your gloves, or under the helmet chin piece and into your mouth. The kind of rain that trucks love to mix with the dirt and grease and diesel on the road and then throw up onto your visor, the kind of rain that prevents you from going fast enough to have the wind blow the drops from the eye shield, a real bastard kind of rain.
I rode on thinking that I must pass through this weather if I keep on riding….and eventually I did, it took five hours, but it did happen. Then I was into the sunshine…and the wind, the kind of wind that makes you want to pull the handlebars off your bike, the kind of wind that makes it easy to visualise yourself blown off the bike and run over by a truck that is now fast approaching in the rear view mirrors. But it’s too dangerous to go any faster, and the truck driver seems to think that he is helping by almost touching your rear tyre with his bumper….the bastards.
Anyway enough about the trials and tribulations of being the first man in the world ever to ride a motorcycle in less than perfect conditions… and on with the story.
I stayed on the motorway and by-passed Hamburg and went straight to Tritau the town near Heiko Burmisters village of Hamfelde.
Heiko (right) is with the Horizons community in Hamburg and offered to put me up for a couple of nights while I had a look around Hamburg…very nice of him …don’t you think. He has a nice place in a quiet little village and loves to ride his BMW and do trips…so we got on like a house on fire.Hamburg was nice enough, but nothing really special, so two days there was plenty. Heiko suggested that I go to the ferry at Putengarten as It would save a lot of cold motorway riding…did I mention the rain and the wind ? He said…”it is what a German would do” and as I have always admired the Germans…that’s what I did too.
Denmark
So now I was in Denmark and it was snowing, that was OK. The roads were clear and it wasn’t really that cold, but…I was heading north…in the general direction of the Artic circle, and this was not a good sign. Well, as luck would have it I was headed back down to sea level…mainly because that’s where they put most of the worlds port towns, and Copenhagen is no exception, there it was right where the land meets the water. I did lots of STUFF in Copenhagen, but the most memorable was a visit to Christiania where the Hippies took over an army base…once the soldiers had already fucked off…of course. Now it is this run down area of old sheds and factories covered in Graffiti. But somehow it’s really “Cool” to use the local vernacular, I really liked it. I got some great film of the place…but no stills. So that doesn’t help you…does it ?
Across to Sweden
After Copenhagen I went to catch the ferry at Hilsinger to go to Sweden….it pissed rain all the way there. I met a Norwegian guy on the ferry; he was from Oslo, a bit older, driving a big old Mercedes, in nice nick. I asked how far it was to Gothenburg he said about 300 kilometres…I said that that was further that I had thought. I asked him what he thought the weather might do…It will snow. What about the wind…Oh this area between here and Gothenburg is very exposed…gets a lot of wind. I asked about my chances of being raped by a Viking Goddess…not a prayer. So all in all, the news wasn’t good.
But I was soon to find out that his forecasts with the exception of the Viking Goddess would be hopelessly wrong. It was only 220 kilometres to Gothenburg. The sun was shining, and there was no wind. Local knowledge my arse.
I was to stay with a friend of my sister in Gothenburg…her name was Rigmor; she is a lot cuter than her name would imply. But as usual I was late getting there, so she was on her way to the Caribbean as I was arriving; she gave me the keys, a kiss on the cheek, and the number of her friend that would show me around.
Clara was rather attractive …for a girl, lean and leggy with great eyes….I asked if she was a Viking Goddess…she answered…”not a prayer”.
We had a few laughs, went for a look around town a couple of times, and I visited the Volvo Museum. Oh and we went for a boat trip to an Island, which was nice. If I had come in the Summer there would have been hundreds of blonde people lying around naked, so I was lucky to have arrived when I did.
During this part of the trip I would wake up early each morning and check the weather. I was shit scared that it would have snowed overnight. It had happened to me once before in Iran and even though I didn’t think that the Swedish, or any other secret police, would need to be involved this time, I still thought that being stuck in a log cabin, snow bound for months with only five hours of daylight and a Viking Goddess for company would be no good for me. So I felt a strong urge to keep moving. I wanted to get up to Stockholm and then head south as soon as possible; I mean it was coming up to December.
Stockholm
I had been swapping emails with a couple of guys from the Stockholm Horizons Community. They actually lived outside Stockholm in the “Chirpings”. For those of you whose Swedish is not as fluent as my own, a Chirping is a market town. But I am sure that most of you knew that, and that my frenetic English spelling is only there to help the less travelled amongst you, which am sure there is only one or two…and you know who you are. That’s right…I am talking to you, you with the map of the world above your computer…get out there and see the Chirpings and all the other great stuff.Anyway, Linkorping and Norkorping are the homes of Gary and Mattius respectively and they looked after me magnificently. We arranged to meet at the Library (or as we say in Swedish ‘Bibleotec’) and then we would go to Gary’s house, catch up, have a few beers, a bite to eat, and then go down the Pub. They were great; they introduced me to Henrik, who due to circumstances beyond their control was the only one who had a bike at the moment, so he was elected to take me for a look at the Swedish Bush. He lives south of Linkoping and we went to some lovely lake and forest areas, he kept saying “this is lovely in the summer”. It was lovely in the late Autumn/Winter, it’s not his fault that I cannot read a calendar and go to Scandinavia when Santa Claus is just about to start work.
Again the snow was on my mind so I had to push on…up to Stockholm. Now Stockholm is a nice town. Very solid and clean and lots of big buildings and Museums for everything…oh and bloody expensive. Henrik's brother Patrick was my contact in the Venice of the North, as some call it. He had asked his staff if one of them wanted an all expenses paid holiday to the Caribbean (or wherever PNG is) just to put me up for a couple of nights. Now this special offer was given at short notice, and without my knowledge…I mean I wasn’t there to beg for anything, but Michael saw the funny side of it and got me the use of the guest flat at his apartment building…it was just like living in an Ikea showroom. They are fantastic at design, the blonde tribe are.
Johanas who also works for Patrick got the job of guide for the day and he showed me around, again there was a lot of talk about in the Summer and I was starting to feel bad about arriving when they were still decorating, as it were. But I thought the place looked fine, and that as they have such a defined winter, that this was as good a time to see the place as the few short months in the middle of the year that they call Summer. So I was happy and I liked to see Stockholm the way that it is for most of the year…a little bit grey and a little bit cold.
Johanas was from Gotland and when I mentioned that I was headed that way he called his Dad who lives on the Northern tip of the Island, in a remote little town call Farosund, and asked if he would like a visitor from Papua New Guinea. He even knew where that was. He said he would put a heater in one of the holiday cottages and I could camp there for a couple of days.
Jan …that’s the Dad didn’t really know what to do with me when I arrived so he showed me to the cottage, and then legged it. So I had a wander around town before it got dark, at three thirty, and then bought some things to make sandwiches at the super market…no cafes or restaurants open at this time of year. But I did spot a flyer saying there was music in the next village that night, so I put on the old Disco gear that I had brought for just such an occasion…i.e. jeans and a jumper, which also serves as my formal wear, my casual, hang around the Café wear, and my fix-the-bike wear. It turned out to be a three-mile walk…I mean…at my age ?The band was a keyboard and an accordion, they were good fun and had everyone singing along, they even played a couple of English songs and shamed me into singing along too…bet you are glad you weren’t there.
Gotland is south of Stockholm so I had made the turn. I was headed back down to warmer climes, mind you there was still a fair-few kilometres of cold ahead…so I ploughed on.
Back to Germany
The next big stop was to be Berlin to see the BMW factory and get a look at how the bike was made…is that too much to ask after sitting on one of the bastards for 57,000 kilometres…well the answer is yes. I could never bring myself to dislike the bike…Mr Beem had been great…but those wankers at the factory…talk about fucking attitude, it is as if they are all inbred or something. They were unable to accommodate me due to technical difficulties with the line…I tried for three months ahead to arrange this visit. I don’t know what they were trying to hide now. But I got a distinct felt that they could not give a shit about promoting the 1-cylinder, as they like to call the 650 c.c. It’s shame, because it’s a great bike, but they are still a bunch of wankers. I feel better now, thanks for listening.
Anyway, I left Berlin after three days of trying, having wasted hundreds of Euro in hotel bills at Spandau. It’s not the principle ....it’s the fucking money…I could have had a balloon ride across the Serengeti with that money…the fascist bastards.
Dresden next, to catch up with a girl I met in Bangkok….NO …It’s not that kind of a story. Katharine was a Bikey babe, who rode her Suzuki 350 from Dresden to Thailand, and then wanted to ride it back through Russia and a whole bunch of countries with STAN stuck on the end of them. Anyway, time, weather, and bureaucratic bulls poo had made the return trip impossible and she had to fly the bike back. Still the Dresden to Bangkok trip was quite an accomplishment, so I wanted to talk to her for my little Doco. 
When I arrived outside her apartment building I was really touched. Her little Suzuki was parked outside still looking as if it had seen more roads, than it had seen spanners or polish, so I parked Beem up along side to grab a couple of photos. These two bikes had not been together since they were parked up in the ‘Bamboo Gardens Guesthouse’ in the middle of Bangkok a lifetime and a million memories ago…or more accurately, about three years ago.I will forgive you if you don’t believe what I an about to say next…I was late. That’s right, I was late. I had emailed Katharine to say that I would be there on Friday afternoon. So when I arrived on Saturday afternoon she was quite surprised…not half as much as I was, I thought it was Friday afternoon. See, that’s the problem with being on the road full-time…you lose track of time.
Anyway Katharine forgave me my inability to count or read a watch and we all went off to a birthday party that night. When I say we, Katharine had picked up a young man on her travels and Tim turned out to be a charming American chappie. So off we went to the party which was being held in a friends apartment. This is when it really struck me that I was in the former East Germany. This apartment, unlike Katharine and Tim’s was not renovated. Which meant that it was badly in need of a coat of paint and that the toilet was out on the landing, and it had a wood fired heating system, it was a big step back in time…on the other hand it was very homely and only cost 200 Euros a month.The party was something of a quiet affair with family, close friends, and me, but I was made to feel very welcome and found a keen interpreter in Karen. She was fourteen and desperate to show her family, who only spoke German, her complete mastery of the English language. So in order to make that happen, there was a fair bit of bluffing and a lot of nodding and thoughtful expressions on both sides, but I think we pulled it off…they seemed very proud of her and so was I. Her desire to succeed in their eyes was heart warming. Then I made the mistake of giving her the film Camera, so now I have the party video that your drunk uncle Denis would have shot, but it was worth it to see the families faces when they played it back.
The next day Katharine and I went into Dresden to film some shots of her for the Doco, then we had a Kebab and an early night, as I was off to Paris the next day.
Dresden to Paris
Paris wasn’t really part of the plan, but my cousin Celine lives in Paris and she made it quite plain that I would be off the Christmas card list if I didn’t at least show my face. So now I had a three-day ride across Europe just so a cousin would not slander my name at the next family get-together.
Leaving Dresden the weather was quite nice, but in the late afternoon as I started to get into the foothills of the northern Alps the low cloud set in and caused the roads to fog. Now, if you think you have been scared…I want you to image what it’s like to sit on a motorcycle in a cold damp fog going at about sixty kilometres an hour, while bastards in BMW’s and Audi shoot by you, at one hundred and twenty kilometres an hour, while talking on their mobile phones and doing double takes of you as if you are an apparition. That’s when you know what fear is.
So due to this inclement weather I was also late arriving in Paris…oh come on, be fair, better late than dead. Celine didn’t think so, so she made me wait outside her apartment for five hours.
I had a lovely time for the first three hours watching Parisians at play then it got dark and cold, so I went to a little café on the corner… but the prices soon drove me out of there, and I was back standing outside Celine’s place with all my bags piled up on the pavement, feeling sorry for myself and promising that I would give Celine a bad write up on the website. It’s impossible to give Celine a bad write up, when she looks at you, she just lights up and makes you feel so welcome, in that special way that the Irish are famous for. Her apartment is right in the middle of town and you can spend all day looking out of her windows watching the world go by and listening to the Police sirens and laughing at old people fighting with their little dogs.
But that in itself does not a great documentary make. So I had to go off and film the sights.
I also had to get in touch with a couple of Horizons boys from Paris to see what was going on in the Paris biking world. I had two contacts and funnily enough they did not know each other.
John Wooton was a Brit who had been working in Paris for the last four years and Robert was big in the corporate world and originally from the Middle East. John loved whizzing around Paris on his Tenere which Robert thought was a death sentence. He tried to take his big FJ Suzuki on long hauls, he had just been to Morocco (that’s handy) and in the summer he went to Cape Norde, the most northerly bit of Europe. I was particularly interested in hearing about Morocco.
John came around to Celine’s flat to see me. As he was a little the worse for wear from the night before we had several cups of coffee and a long old chat about the life of an Englishman in Paris. John, by his own admission had not really integrated, he liked the place well enough but did not feel a part of it … something that I was to come across very often later in Spain. He had English friends, an English girlfriend, he worked and socialised with English people and where possible he would eat English food … so off we went for the all-day English breakfast at his local … a Scottish pub called the old Alliance, where his young lady was the Barmaid.
On the way we stopped off at the Bercy railway station and asked about a Train-to-Spain-to-avoid-the-Rain. Yes, an overnight sleeper would be able to get me as far as Narbonne, which is less than a hundred kilometres from the Spanish border. For me and Mr Beem … or should that be for Mr Beem and I, the cost was one hundred and ninety Euros, about the same cost as using the French toll roads … they really are thieving bastards when it comes to toll charges. I nearly jumped over the counter to accept the offer, the thought of not having to ride mile after mile down a French motorway in the rain, stopping every five minutes to pay a toll, was such a relief. Then we went on a filming tour of Paris, it was a great day … an Anglo-French day.
We had arranged to meet up with Robert a.k.a 'Hara' so we could have that chat about Morocco. He arrived at Celine’s just as John had to leave so they only got to speak briefly, but made arrangements to get in touch later… for some reason I was very happy that I had been the catalyst for this … I like to see people making friends.
Hara was an Encyclopaedia of knowledge on Morocco; he had brought books and maps and was able to recount his trip, step by step. I found his enthusiasm very reassuring, and his commonsense tips insightful, especially the haggling one … I willexplain that one when I get to Morocco and see if it works.
I knocked about Paris for the weekend with John … who was a wonderful host and seemed to understand what it was I was trying to achieve with the Documentary … which is always nice. He came to see me off at the Railway station which is always nice too.
The trip from Paris to Narbonne was not quite as simple as it may sound … or indeed as I had hoped. Firstly, the bike is not actually transported on the same train … in the summertime it is, but due to lack of demand in the winter, it’s not.
This is how it works … I won’t bother with the station names as it would only confuse you … and I can’t remember them. Firstly you take the bike to the rail transport station near the Gare de Lyon … you book the bike in … unload all the bits that are not bolted on and then get on a bus that takes you to the Passenger Sleeper Station, about ten minutes away. Then you wait there for the boarding time, and then you carry your bags, helmet, camera, and tripod along a mile of narrow railway corridors and arrive at a cabin with bunks for six people and nowhere to stash your luggage. This is also when you find that none of your fellow travellers speak a common language.
A lot of miming later everyone is settled. When you arrive in Narbonne nine hours later it is not yet daylight and they don’t tell you how long you have to disembark. So the girl in the bunk above you jumps up screaming and grabs her cloths as if her boyfriend's wife has just come home and heads for the door. This action in turn makes you think that you must have only five seconds to get off the train yourself … so you look as if the husband has just come home, one boot on, and hands full of cloths and helmet.
Then you take a bus to another station and pick up the bike … simple as that.
If I hadn’t already come up through France then I would have ridden down because it is actually a really nice country, even from the motorway, but the weather and the cost made the train a good option even with all the messing around.
If you are leaving France en route to Spain, don’t fill your tank with petrol; it's about 25% cheaper in Spain … why didn’t anyone tell meeeee ?
Into Spain
In Spain I had arranged to meet my sister Sheila and her husband John (John is the one who actually looks after this site). Sheila and John arrived and we settled down to the serious business of planning a menu and a shopping list. The big Sis is a seriously good cooker. So with all that out of the way, we went through the tapes that I had shot since leaving England six or seven weeks before.
I am under no illusion that I have been fortunate; to be able to travel as I do is a great privilege. To have the desire, the health, the time, and the funds is rare and when you get around a bit as I have, you see just how very lucky you really are. But I must confess sometimes I forget this. When we were looking at those tapes I had such mixed emotions. I was pleased to be able to share some of the highlights with my sister who has always been very supportive of my interest in travel … she was always telling me to go away when we were younger. But looking at the un-edited tapes it was glaringly obvious that I did not have a story, it was just a collection of mildly interesting clips … very short on rhyme or reason.
I had the horrible nagging feeling that I was wasting my time … something that I had never felt before. John and Sheila were trying their best to make me feel better, but I could see that they were not convinced either. We may return to this subject later.
John and Sheila took the tapes back to the UK for safe keeping and a couple of days later I set off for Barcelona. Through the Horizons site I had been invited to stay at Santiago Castro’s apartment in Corinella (pronounced Corenyah) I mention this only, because if you travel to foreign climes it is advisable to write things down.
When I am organised I get a piece of cardboard and then with the map laid out on the table I write down the main towns that I must pass through en route to my final destination. That way, if I need to I can get it out of my top pocket and show it to the guy standing on the side of the road and he can see the full story … where I started, the route that I hope to follow and the place that I might end up. If you approach a guy on the side of the road and start shrugging your shoulders and mispronouncing a name to a town, he may direct you to a chemist shop for some strange lotion and you don’t need that ... do you ?
Anyway, I had arranged to meet Santi at 13.30, that’s about half past one to the rest of us, and yes, I was late … right street wrong suburb. So when I got to his place at 14.45 he was on his way out the door, back to work … and not in the best frame of mind, “here’s the key…there’s your lunch … get on with it”, was pretty much the gist of it.
Well, as you probably know, there are no excuses for unpunctuality … well actually there are, about a thousand … but next to none of them work. The person who has been kept waiting is not really interested in your old bollocks about the traffic, or road works, or flat tyres. All they know is that they have sat there looking at the door… looking at their watch and unable to get on with their lives. So it is never a good start to a relationship … and sometimes a bad start is worse than no start at all … but luckily, that was not the case here.
After Santi went to work I was in the square at the front of the apartment, getting the VIBE of the neighbourhood and thinking where best to park old Beem for the night, when a young lady with a warm smile and contented expression asked if I was Frank. It was Judith … Santi’s wife … she was lovely and sat down to talk. She had just finished work and had come home to have a late lunch before picking up their son Yago from kindergarten. Santi came home around seven and apologised for the short welcome. I apologised for being late. I didn’t think it wise to mention the traffic, the roadworks, and that Spanish people don’t know how to spell things right. How the fuck does double LL spell YAH.
I stayed with Santi, Judith, and Yago for five or six days … we went riding in the hills. I serviced the bike, I went to Castellio for paella, 700 kilometres round trip. I had a tour of Barcelona and I just happened to bump into two old friends from PNG. One was Garry Skinner, he had come to PNG to build my house in 1996 and we had become great friends, the other was some girl. The way it happened was this (try and work out the odds). I was filming in a square just off the Rambla when this girl grabs my arm and says “Hello Frank”. Now as you can probably imagine I am quite used to that kind of inappropriate informalities from members of the opposite sex, so I was not a greatly surprised. I was shocked however to find that this particular girl had got on to my website, and put herself in a photo of me riding with some girl standing up on the back of my bike in the Frank Profile section … the cheeky bitch.
They were on a yacht in the Harbour and thought it wise that I should stay the night on that yacht also. The less said about that the better.
My next stop was Valencia, Santi had been in touch with a friend of his who had spoken to a friend, and this friend was going to help me get a job as an orange picker. I called Juan (pronounced Whan…don’t get me started) and said that I had been given his number by a friend…he was just a little surprised…but did admit that he had been told about some Gingo orange picker. He said to meet him at the campo de Football Valencia at 20:00 hour… guess what … I was early … he was late ... that’s the trouble with being punctual … there is never anybody there to appreciate it.
Juan … like so many Spaniards turned out to be a complete charmer. He was just starting a Motorcycle Travel Magazine, can’t mention the name here because he refused to sponsor me for the remainder of my trip, and to fund an Old Motorcycle Home for Mr Beem when he retires. Ah, what the hell, who needs them anyway… the name is Pingu. I can always pick oranges and Mr Beem shows no sign of wanting to retire any time soon … so we will just carry on as usual, living on our good looks, wits and Visa card.Juan was perhaps the closest thing to a professional actor/director that I have come across to date on my travels. He would point out good views and angles, and when I pointed the camera at him he hammed it up a treat. What else would you expect from a graphic designer who loves bikes, travel, and his town. We did a tour of Valencia had some nice meals and met up with a guy who had videoed a trip he did from Valencia to Jordan in the Middle East, his name was Javier Cordero and he has a website. He had a pathological disdain for Ewen Mc Gregor and his mate Charlie, which I thought a little harsh. As a couple of actors, acting the part of round the world travellers, I thought their performances were really quite good, though I thought he was more believable as a Jedi Knight.
When it came time to leave Valencia, Juan and Javier rode with me out of town and in fact Juan took me all the way to Oliva along the back roads. He was a hell of a host. I stayed there for a while at a great guesthouse.
I had arranged to meet my cousin Diane’s husband John (pronounced Whan) at a petrol station in Oliva. Their house was much too hard to find as it was near the top of the hill in the old town, and the old town was built for donkeys and arts to pass through. A bit of a maze. Anyway Whan-one from Valencia knew the petrol station and we went straight there, where we meet Whan-two and I was safely delivered into his care. There is Whan hell of a joke in there somewhere…I just don’t know where.
I stayed with cousin Diane for a couple of weeks over Christmas and the New Year. We ate too much, we drank too much. It was just like Christmas. I hadn’t seen cousin Diane for forty years, but we got on like a house on fire…and her old man Whan wasn’t hard to get along with either. Holly their daughter is a talented artist and a bit of a glamour girl, so all in all it was a lovely Christmas…and that coming from a bloke who hates Christmas (humbug). The best part is that in Spain it is not the big commercial huha that it is elsewhere.
 Christmas, Oliva |
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| You'll find some more great pictures of MrBeem and his gear on Juan's site , otherwise known as Pingu |  |
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Leaving Oliva after Christmas I had a great old ride down the windy roads of the Mediterranean coast to Malaga, to catch up with the Dakar.  
Far too extreme for someone with my delicate sensibilities…and then obviously there is the sand, and I think that sand and machinery don’t go well together. I could get stuck in a child’s sandpit. Which means that I have the greatest respect for anyone who can make a bike fly across the Sahara. The “Dakar” had started in Lisbon two days before, so they had done one leg to a town in southern Portugal called Palomera. The next leg was from there to Malaga where I was all-set to film the arrival and to watch them board the ships for Morocco and if I waslucky go across with them. It was like the Circus coming to town. I had the hair on the back of my neck standing up for eight hours. From the first truck when it came rolling in, horn blaring and blowing black smoke, to the last bike coming through, it was fantastic. 
At one stage I rode out of town to come in along the route with some of the first bikes. I was filming with the helmet Cam and dodging around the bikes trying to get some interesting shots, anyway I ended up in the middle of a group of five or six bikes as they were coming into the finish line by the docks.This is the place where the crowds gather to cheer the participants and the atmosphere is electric. I pulled over a little to let the bikes go through and to film the reaction of the crowd. It’s a long avenue with people lined up on either side and the Dakar roars down the middle beeping their horns and revving their engines, this whips the crowd into a frenzy. I followed the bikes down the Avenue and the crowd saw the helmet cam and went even wilder, everyone taking pictures and jumping up and down and trying to get their face on film…I felt as though I had won the Dakar…it was fantastic. There was no one that I could even ask about getting a place on the boat…and to be quite honest I was knackered just filming for the one day…so I called it quits for the Dakar…one of the greatest shows on earth…if you like that kind of thing…and I do. 
My next stop was Gaucin a little village in the mountains about seventy kilometres north of Algecira. There I was to stay with some relations of Johno’s (the bloke who looks after this site).Brian and Jane Horton were their names and they had moved here from England decades ago. When I first met Brian I was going the wrong way up a one-way street when he stopped me and said in Spanish that it was a one-way street. I already knew that it was a one-way street, so was not overly grateful for the information. Then he told me in German, again I already knew so was less than impressed with this grumpy old geezer yelling out of his car window. At about this time it dawned on me that this was probably my host giving me a bollocking… he read the Dakar motif on the side of old Beem and realised that I was probably the bloke John had mentioned. He said, “are you Frank Butler” in perfect BBC English.
He turned out to be quite a charming guy and not a bad cook. Jane has a small farm just outside the village and has horses and chickens and geese and peacocks and all sort of other good stuff. I had my own granny flat which was great, but I spent most of my time with the Hortons'. They were wonderful company, even if Brian was apt to ask your views on female circumcision without any prior warning…he liked a good debate. I did a few odd jobs around their house and did a little sight seeing around the village. It is really quite a lovely spot stuck up there in the Mountains…if you get the chance go and have a look. I filmed lots of it but took no stills….I have a lot to think about you know…. I had made a plan to meet my brother-in-law John in Marrakech (Morocco). He was going to be there on the 15th January to pick-up the film that I had shot and to bring me some summer cloths and my Carnet for the bike. So I had to leave the Hortons' warm hospitality and head to Algeciras to catch the ferry across to Tangiers. I find riding down mountains is more fun than riding up; you just seem to be able to corner better and are seldom in the wrong gear half way around a bend…so I had a lovely ride down to the coast. Brian had said be careful in Algeciras, unofficially you are already in Africa…and that is exactly how it felt. I parked the bike outside the ticket terminal and went inside and straight away people started shouting at me “cheap ticket…where you go” or “here is very good price” it was not like Spain any longer. I checked around and the best price I could get was 66 Euros one way…which I thought was dear enough for a one-hour crossing. | |
