2muppets.com

Good Times and Bad in the Congos

Posted on April 20th, 2008 by 2muppets.
Categories: 14. DRC, 13. Congo
Post Location: GPS Map

Hello everybody! This post was originally written in Kinshasa about a week ago, but unfortunately when we published it the damn thing disappeared, and the backup was deleted… Grr. Anyway, it’s been ages since you’ve heard anything from us, so this will bring you about up to the time just before we left for Angola.

In our last post we mentioned that we were in Brazzaville, waiting for parts to arrive so that we could fix Josh’s clutch. Well, the parts arrived more or less on time, the bike was promptly reassembled by Josh and me, and Bob’s your uncle the TransAlp was back and running again! Hooray, Josh’s sleepless nights were over!!!

Saturday 5th May saw us chaffing at the bit to get back on the road again. Fuelled up, cashed up, and primed for the delights of the DRC (yeah you know me) we arrived at the ferry buzzing. The ride to the other side of the Congo (Brazzaville and Kinshasa are within site of each other on opposite sides of the Congo River) was a bit frenetic with the usual African crowds, but nothing we couldn’t handle, and within an hour we were disembarking the ferry, and being greeted by the DRC immigration officials.

Our approach with any officials is always to be overwhelmingly friendly and positive. To get in their faces with smiles and handshakes before any of the questions start. True to form the tactic seemed to be a good one here as well – smiles were returned, and our Carnet documentation was quickly and efficiently processed. Then the fun started…

We waited about 20 minutes for the immigration officials to return with our passports, and when they did, there was an obvious change in mood. We were asked to move our bikes, but it quickly became obvious that they didn’t simply want them moved, but rather they wanted them, and us, back on the ferry and out of the DRC, all without any explanation being offered! Much shouting and raised tempers followed, as we tried to explain that we had a valid visa for the DRC, but now that we had officially left the Congo, no visa for there. Bribes were offered, the head of Immigration demanded, but all to no avail. We were physically manhandled back on to the boat, perhaps somewhat aggravating matters a little when I started riding around in circles when being pushed by some of the policemen! We did however find out the reason we were being deported – we had no visas for our next destination country, Angola. A bit of a catch 22 situation this, as the only place that issued visas for Angola in less than 3 weeks is the Angolan Consulate in Matadi, which is in the DRC!

After a miserable ride back in the midday sun, with the added bonus of having to weather regular boxing matches between groups of Congolese men pissed up on palm wine on their payday, we arrived back at the Brazzaville side of the river thoroughly dejected. Quick talking from Ed got our exit from the country that morning annulled, buying us a little more time to sort something out, but when the Congo Immigration officials called Kinshasa to find out what was going on, the official word back was “Those guys are never coming into this country!”. Rock bottom right there. Worst moment of the trip so far.

After a quick discussion of options we decided that we needed to get in touch with someone with some clout in this part of the world. Unfortunately the only contact that we’d had with the big hitters of the Congo was through watching a steady stream of Government Ministers and aides that had rented rooms by the hour, along with the lady of their choice, in the knock shop auberge that we’d been staying in for the last week… Not going to be that much use to us eh?

Fortunately I remembered that Shaun, the South African who had done this trip a couple of months before us, had spent some time in Brazzaville, and that he’d been cruising around the streets with a guy he’d met who drives a Hummer. That was the sort of guy we needed!

A quick text message to Shaun later and before we knew it we were sitting in the O’Sympathetic restaurant with a group of French expats who had just returned from riding their self built motocross track, and being treated to a beautiful meal of Steak avec Frites, free of charge by the owner Jean François! The discussion was around the strings that could be pulled, and the people that would need to be involved to transition us through the border as quickly as possible. All agreed that it would be no problem, and that Monday would be the day, leaving Sunday free for us to enjoy ourselves, and holdon, Sunday was waterskiing and wakeboarding day on the Congo River, and we must join them!

There was nothing for it but for us to get outrageously drunk to celebrate! We went out with a young expat couple Fred and Marina, drank obscene amounts of vodka redbulls, and even showed off the oldskool tequila stuntman party trick! (Snort the salt, shoot the tequila and squirt the lemon in your eye for the uninitiated. Best performed when old 80’s songs start to sound good again!).

 

Sunday saw us bleary eyed after about four hours sleep, but still pinching ourselves over the turn of events. We packed up all our gear from the hotel, then moved in with another expat couple, Daniel and François (aka Chou Chou) Monnet for “just one night”, before heading down to the river for the day of skiing.

There was something truly surreal about sitting on a sandbank on the Congo river, drinking Ricard pastis, eating foie gras on baguette and “Marseilles Salad”, all through the charity of a group of absolutely amazing people who’d been strangers only the day before! We had a blast, waterskiing with Jack, and wakeboarding with Fred and Marina. That night we went to bed exhausted, but happy in the knowledge that these guys could get anything done for us, and that we’d be back on track the next day…

 

Well, things just weren’t going to be that easy for us. It seemed that either we were being used as pawns in some sort of wrangle between the two countries, or that we’d really pissed somebody off over in Kinshasa, but regardless, the easy job that the expats had envisaged turned out to be an absolute nightmare. Our one night with Daniel and Chou Chou stretched to two, then to three, as more and more people got involved in our problem. Jack had the UN logistics guys involved, Daniel had his construction company, Jody had the SA’n Embassy, Ed had the UK Consulate (bloody useless!), and we also had contact with people from the Angolan Consulates in both Brazzaville and Point Noire, as well as the DRC Consulate, and Congo Immigration in Brazzaville!!!

This time was incredibly stressful, each night we came up with new plans and avenues to try, only to have them ultimately end in crushing disappointment as time and time again the answers came back as no’s, or impractical options like waiting another 3 weeks for an Angolan visa. Josh in particular had a very tight timeframe, as he needed to be in Durban on the 4th of May in order to start his advanced pilot’s course financed by the owner of the American super yacht he works on.

Conversely, with new plans each evening our hopes were renewed, and each night became a leaving party. We had dinners out with Fred and Marina, Daniel and Chou Chou. We played marathon tennis games against the Monnet “Davis Cup Pairing” at their lovely tennis club. We enjoyed the fantastic lunches that Michelle, the Monnet’s houseboy cooked for us. On Friday we went enduro riding with Fred, Jack and Jean François down sandy rutted out roads to see a Mig Fighter that crashed here back in the 60’s. On Saturday we rode the motocross track on borrowed quads and motocross bikes, and bugger me if we haven’t stayed a whole week and it’s Sunday waterski day again!

 

While we were having the time of our lives living the good life in Brazzaville, it was becoming increasingly unlikely that we were going to be able to realise our dream of riding across Africa. A kind of dull resignation had set in, and we had started to investigate how we could get us and the bikes out of the Congo, and somewhere further south. But you can’t keep a good Frenchman down (as the All Blacks have learnt on more than one occasion), and Daniel’s persistence, and quite frankly astounding dedication to our cause, paid off. Daniel was able to offer the DRC Consul a bribe in a way much more subtle than we were capable of, and within a couple of days we had the all clear to pass through the border! Woo Hoo! Leaving party!

On the 15th of April we finally got back across the Congo river and through the border into Kinshasa. A full 10 days after our original attempt, and after just shy of 3 weeks in Brazzaville. It was with a real sadness that we said our final goodbyes to our new friends in Brazzaville, particularly Daniel and Chou Chou, and Fred and Marina, who had all shown us so much hospitality, generosity and just the most amazingly good time! Our time with them was definitely a top highlight of the trip for me.

The ride down to Matadi was relatively uneventful, save for being awoken from our tents by armed military, after making the deliberately naïve decision to camp by a gas pipeline supplying Kinshasa. We were promptly ordered to pack up and follow them, but when they saw how long it was taking us to break camp, they lost interest, told us that as long as we moved on early in the morning we were OK to camp there, and buggered off!

In following the theme of this post, all good things must come to an end. On the ride to Matadi Jody’s bike began to have problems starting that were getting progressively worse. By the time we arrived the bike wasn’t starting on the starter motor, and had also just given up the ghost for kick starting. The only way we could get it to run was with some very aggressive bump starting, not really the ideal situation when we were due to enter Angola, famous for the terrible state of its roads in the north of the country…

Optimistically we pushed on, obtaining visas in Matadi on the same day as we arrived, allowing the four of us to theoretically enter Angola the following day. Realistically though, Jody and I had grave doubts about his bike, and both of us felt that until we established what the problem was and repaired it, we weren’t going anywhere.

We had a stressful afternoon of tearing the bike apart, testing electrics, studying the wiring diagrams, and reading the workshop manual trouble shooter guides, but without much real hope of actually stumbling upon what was wrong. Enter another saviour, the “Master Mechanic”, Paul at Bracken Bikes, who right away put his finger on the problem. The pulser coil, or igniter, which tells the coil when to send the spark, was buggered. It turns out that the starter motor had sheared a tooth off the gear it drives, which had then entered the flywheel housing and badly damaged the igniter. We pulled a broken piece of magnet from the igniter, hoping to improve its poor functioning, but unfortunately, the end result was that we stuffed it completely! Jody’s bike wouldn’t run at all! The poor fella was as wound up as a slinky coil! When we pulled the igniter from my bike and fitted it to his and it fired back to life the relief was massive all round, and Jody even shed a little tear!

With solving the problem of the badly running bike, came the realisation that this was the end of our partnership with Ed and Josh, or “The Renegade Super Mega Cops from the Future to the Max” as we sometimes liked to call ourselves (guess you had to be there). Josh simply didn’t have time to wait for us to fix the bike, and neither Ed nor us wanted him to have to ride by himself.

On Thursday 17th we said our second set of goodbyes to new friends in 2 days. We’d formed a real bond with Josh and Ed and we were sad not to continue to ride with them. We said our goodbyes and best wishes, and while they continued south into Angola, we turned back around and headed back to Kinshasa, riding the 350kms two up on Jody’s bike. The bike it turned out was still running like an absolute dog at low revs, surging and refusing to idle, which I strongly suspected (and hoped) was due to a very worn carb needle, fortunately included in our parts order. When we left Matadi, neither of us actually thought that his bike was going to make it all the way to Kinshasa! Shit, why is this never easy for more than about 2 days at a time!

The final group of people that came to our rescue were the “Parts Crew”. We want to thank Rod Forrester for organising the parts, Carey Forrester for getting them to the SA offices, the pilot who flew them out to Kinshasa for us (not the first pilot who forgot them on the Friday though!), and especially the team at Maritzburg KTM, Rod Gray and Brandon Suttie, who we believe actually tore a showroom bike down in order to get us the parts faster than the week wait that KTM South Africa have for seemingly everything but stickers! We owe you guys a few beers, whiskeys, or brandys – whatever it is you drink!

So that’s where my post finished more or less. We’d made it to Kinshasa and were still waiting for the parts to arrive, we had no idea whether fitting the carb needle was going to sort Jody’s bike out, and we had no idea where we stood in terms of our Angolan visa, which was due to expire the day we were due to arrive in the country…

Read on with Jody’s post to find out how things turned out. All photos are up in the gallery too!

Cheers,

Dan

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Mud, Sweat and No Gears

Posted on April 1st, 2008 by 2muppets.
Categories: 13. Congo
Post Location: GPS Map

Whenever we travel to a new country we hold certain preconceptions of what a place will be like, and aspirations for the experiences we’ll have, and people we’ll meet. Since our last post back in Yaounde, Cameroon our trip has gotten a whole lot more hardcore. It’s become the experience we hoped it would be, the imagined camping in wild places, dancing with drunken locals, battling corrupt African beaurocracy – these are all now an accepted parts of our everyday life on the road. It’s thrilling, it’s hilarious, it’s frightening, it’s absolutely exhausting… It’s Africa baby!!!

Firstly, let’s introduce our two co-conspirators. That’s right, the 2 Muppets have become 4! Turns out that these boys were a day or two behind us through Morocco and Mauritania, and kept hearing about us from people we’d met. When we went from Mauritania to Senegal, they took a different route, opting to go directly into Mali, before heading south, travelling through many of the coastal countries, including the Delta region in Nigeria. You should already be building up a picture of them eh?!

When we rolled into Yaounde’s Catholic Mission to find two English bikers busy entertaining 2 German and 1 Korean girls we were a bit gutted that they’d stolen our thunder. Little did we know that within a couple of weeks we’d know more about each other than we know about many of our friends we’ve known for years…

Age before beauty;

 

Name: Josh Phillip Conquest
Age: 25
From: Kingsbridge, Devon, England
Occupation: Co-Pilot on an American Superyacht
Rides: Honda Transalp. Yep, he needs a pilot’s license to ride this thing
Other Interests: American Bird life, wakeboarding and piking (muscle tensing whenever a camera is anywhere nearby)
Trip Nickname: Toto, after a small chimp we met with an uncanny resemblance
Trip quotes: “Is anyone else hungry?” “If you can’t beat em, join em” (on corruption)

 

Name: Edward Charles Henry Orr (full name for Matt Charles Edward Orr’s sake!)
Age: 24
From: Bantham, Devon, England
Occupation: Allsorts. Recently taught English as a Second Language in China for 2 years, but was managing a poncy gastro pub in Battersea, London prior to the trip.
Rides: Yamaha Tenere very recklessly! How this thing has so few problems is a mystery to us all!
Other Interests: Dominating Germans, Impersonating Ray Mears
Trip Nicknames: Fast Eddy, Ray Mears, or Ginger Beard
Trip Quote: “It’s Chammy time!”

Together we’ve now travelled the south of Cameroon, Gabon and the Congo. The adventures we’ve had are too numerous to list, but here are a few of the highlights, that we thought might brighten your day:

o We’ve been thrown out of the Congo Consulate in Gabon without visas for pointing out to the Ambassador that his definition of a transit visa was “bullshit man”!
o Thrown out (or asked to leave) of two hotels for various indiscretions including washing clothes and tents in bathrooms, having bikes knocked over onto cars by hookers, and general drunkenness. We’re really not that bad, but after a week in the bush it’s nice to unwind a little!
o Finding an amazing fully stocked bike shop in Libreville, who let us have the run of the place for our bike maintenance, and charged us nothing for all labour including full bike cleaning!

o Crossing the equator, pausing only to pull wheelies, and strip down to our muscle bound best for the obligatory photos on the very scenic blind corner.

o Having Jody’s sister fly in our spares from SA, before we loaded her back onto the plane several hours later and after numerous drinks from the local beachside shack. Thanks again sooo much Carey!
o Nightly natural pyrotechnic displays – lightening striking frighteningly close as we camp out on iron rich stone ground.
o Camping under mobile phone towers. There’s even a chap with a very old shotgun to protect our gear, just need to buy him off with a bit of gin!

o Bush Banoffi Pie – take two tins of very slightly caramelised condensed milk, burnt plantain, stale strawberry cream biscuits and 7 day old, non refrigerated apricot yogurt; add all to pot, stir and serve… Mmmmm! Cough!

o On a more delicious note, 3 course bush meals of soup and baguette starters, pork or beef stews, followed by pineapple, chocolate mousse and custard desert!

o Jody crashing his bike at a petrol station at 3km/h, he claims oil on the forecourt!

o Josh repeatedly dropping his bike on the road into the Congo, I mean repeatedly; without getting upset, or losing his sense of humour.

o Jody’s bike pouring fuel out of the carb overflow, and being surrounded by around 200 locals, including the army demanding to see passports as we did roadside repairs!
o “Fixing” Jody’s carb later in the trip and the following sleepless night after rebuilding it and realising that a critical choke part had been lost! We found it the next morning though!

o Dan being rocketed into the bush after taking a single track too quickly and catching his pannier box on a protruding log. The pannier box tore off, but was beaten back into shape with furious hammering in record time!

o Ed being rocketed into the bush after attempting a driveby splashing of Jody, and hitting a 1 foot high submerged face of a bridge. Woo Hoo, Airborn!
o Becoming human dartboards as we were eaten alive in our sweltering tents by angry midgets!

Enough of the bullet point highlights – clearly we are taking our consultant training too far and are taking shortcuts in passing on the true flavour of just what it’s been like! Two adventures that really stand out for us were our trip through the Campo National Park, and the long ride from the Congo Border, down to Dolisie, and then across to Brazzaville.

After our rest break in the coastal town of Kribi, Cameroon our plan was to continue south to the Parc National de Campo, then cut through the park to hook up with the main road on the easterly border. After speaking to numerous locals who assured us that this route was possible we arrived at the WWF offices and negotiated the prices for out mandatory guide and ranger. Both of these fella’s would be transported through the park on a 125cc bike ridden by a local moto taxi driver. That’s right – 3 up on a 125! The park is roughly 120km wide and we were assured by the guide that we could make it through in 1 day as the ‘bad section’ is only 60km long.

On setting off we assumed that the bad section would entail badly potholed dirt roads and some sketchy bridges, after all surely other 4×4’s and bikers would have done this route in the past. No so, the ‘easy’ section consisted of over grown jeep tracks that were now no longer passable by 4×4, even so on the bikes we made reasonable progress and even stopped to take a stroll along the track looking for elephant, buffalo, and apparently gorilla’s. None of these were spotted but signs of their inhabitancy were very evident and full credit to the WWF for taking the effort to conserve this piece of lush rainforest.

By this stage we had hit the midday heat, and in the rainforest’s searing humidity it is unbelievably claustrophobic. The ‘bad section’ did not suddenly appear but rather the jeep track dwindled into a single track that at times was barely visible from the bike. The local boys on the bike would ride ahead and on meeting the numerous trees that had fallen across the track would cut a path using machetes or drag the logs out of the path. This procedure took place every 2km’s or so! Often the logs were too large to cut or drag so all 7 of us would be needed to man-handle the bikes around the obstacles, often resulting in bike and rider taking a tumble. When we weren’t dealing with fallen trees, we were dealing with riding through 8ft high forest undergrowth, vines would catch your feet and footpegs pulling you into the bush, tall grass and twigs catching in the face and neck – standing up on the pegs was an option however not being able to see the track you were riding often meant that you lost the front wheel and took a detour into the shrubbery.

Riding 60km on a dirt road should take in the region of 1hr if taking things very easy – we were stuck doing this section for over 5hrs, on top of the 3hrs it took to cover the earlier 60kms of jeep track. Through all of this there was a great sense of camaraderie with as much banter as the heat would allow us (check out the videos to attest to this). Finally we cleared the track and made it to the park exit – much to the relief of the ranger, driver, and guide who had to ride the full 120km back that evening. Their skills at riding 3 up on a small bike through that vegetation was unbelievable. Before saying our goodbyes we asked if other bikers had done this route, the answer “No, you are the first!” Only in Africa will the locals blatantly tell you its possible without any first hand knowledge themselves, and only in Africa will you get local WWF guides willing to chop down trees and drag three 220kg bikes through the jungle for a sum total 48 Pounds Stirling !!

The fun however did not stop there, as it was getting dark we decided to set up camp as soon as possible. The locals who run the park border post were very keen for us to camp on their front lawn as “We are all African brothers, and God has blessed all of us”. The evening rapidly descended into us being coerced into buying meat (deer) and veg for a dinner that we were ‘invited’ to. The preparation of this dinner took hours, only when we sat at the table did we realise why – the locals on the chance of a free meal had been celebrating for some time in the kitchen with an alcoholic drink made of sugar cane! There were slurred speeches from the chief followed by some crazy dancing by the villagers, including an 80yr old women who gyrated like a teenager (god bless cane spirits). We obviously joined in for while but as things started getting rowdy and the requests for free stuff too frequent we took our leave and snuck off to our tents. One hell of a day I tell you, one hell of a day !!!

 

On to our Congolese escapades; As we’ve already mentioned, we’d royally pissed off the Congolese Ambassador in Libreville. Bearing this in mind, it was with no small amount of trepidation that we approached the Congolese border after exiting Gabon. We weren’t even sure if they issued visas at the border, as local information is flakey at best, and after all this is the CONGO! Were we going to be greeted by a group of bored soldiers, only too excited at the prospect of terrorising a few puny white boys for their amusement or profit?

Not so! We were greeted by open smiles and handshakes, and ushered across the road for a cool drink whilst we waited for our documents to be processed!

The first day or so on our route south to Dolisie were relatively uneventful, though were some of the hardest days riding that we’d had so far. We made poor progress on abysmal, rutted, waterlogged roads, generally not making the miles that we hoped to make, but grafting on as best we could, and having a ball doing it! We all dropped our bikes in the water at some point, and finished the day with waterlogged boots, smelling like a fish factory.

None of us had much experience of riding in these conditions, but everyone helped each other out; lifting out stranded bikes, untrapping various limbs, but usually ensuring photos were taken first! The camaraderie we formed as a group was fantastic – I don’t think either twosome would have wanted to undertake this track alone! Some of the problem we encountered were clogged fenders on Ed & Josh’s bikes (our high fender conversion worked a treat), damp HT leads causing the bikes to splutter, Dan’s carb vent hose getting clogged, Josh having a 80km/h tyre blowout, and goggles getting constantly splattered with mud. All in all the bikes and riders were handling well up to this point, and with an anticipated easy day through to Brazzaville, we celebrated by staying in a local knock shop Auberge along with a few quiet beers and a marathon Tekken session on the PSPs!

  

Unfortunately, just when we thought we had this mud malarky waxed, things cranked up a notch. The route we were riding is the main transport link between Point Noire and the capital but the anticipated tarmac road and beers in the Brazza ended up being a pipe dream. The road (?) was absolutely stuffed, countless trucks stuck axle deep in mud with CFA scrounging locals covered head to toe in mud doing their best to dig them free. Some of these guys had been stuck here for 3 days, enduring the nightly downpours, in the vain hope that the rains would relent enough to free the trucks.

Our first piece of misfortune however was not due to the road, but rather came through our first encounter with the “Ninjas”, a local rebel group, who the government can’t, or won’t control.

These guys are sometimes heavily armed, as we discovered when we hit a group of them armed with AK47’s. Ed had blasted through, and Josh was surrounded by around 10 armed rebels. He played it cool, and slowly u-turned, and drove back to where Jody and Dan were stopped on the road, watching goggle eyed, hearts racing at the whole proceedings. After a brief stand off we were flagged through, assumedly because we were tourists, and they didn’t want an international incident on their hands. At least we hoped they were smart (or unstoned) enough to think that. This immediately put a strain on the day, the anxiety souring our feeling for this road from the onset. Unfortunately this was not to the last run with the Ninja’s…

When we hit the mud proper, we soon learnt that the proceeding 2 days had just been a warmup! In some places the road was so poor that a detour through a churchyard and ploughed fields, where we could escape the worst, was the only viable route; thank God for motorbikes! For the most part however it meant paddling the bikes through thigh deep ravines of saturated clay. This went on for a full day with us getting more and more spent, as we approached nightfall it got significantly worse – the clutch on Josh’s bike began slipping then gave up the ghost completely. The decision was made to get clear of the local village, and use the satellite phone to contact friends in England to aide with troubleshooting and repairs. The verdict came back as expected… it was stuffed, but we regained a very small amount of drive, and the promise of better road over the next ridge meant that we pushed on, towing the bike for stretches, or giving pushes either by hand or whilst riding alongside.

Things were getting rapidly out of hand, we were physically and emotionally drained. Dan was experiencing bouts of diarrhoea, we’d had very little to eat or drink all day, and we were riding the most difficult road that we’d ever ridden, at night, nursing a broken bike. All in the hope of making it 40 kms to the nearest town, where we hoped to get Josh’s bike on a truck to Brazzaville. There was bugger all left in the tank – we were all exhausted.

  

   

By this stage it was going on 9pm and the promise of a better road hadn’t materialized. We’d all dropped our bikes numerous times, and Josh’s bike was more or less immobile. The clogged low fenders had turned Ed and Josh’s bikes into unsteerable sleds. Time to call it quits was agreed by all, with a night camping on the roadside the only sensible choice. The gods were clearly not with us that day (may have been all the blasphemy) and as we began the usual rig moral of setting up camp the heavens opened, and I mean opened, this was aggressive moisture to the max! It was simply impossible to set up the tent without getting 3 inches of water inside, every single article of clothing and gear was drenched. Whilst we were all scurrying around like mad men Ed decided this was an opportune time to strip kit and treat himself to a shower ea natural!! So the end result was every man to himself, firstly drying out the tent floor then crawling onto the only dry space on the Thermarest, donning raincoats in bed, and doing our best to get some kip without food or water on some pretty uneven ground whilst the rain continues to lash down. What a fukin mad day!!

Come the next morning the rain had mercifully stopped, and the task of getting Josh’s bike out of this bloody place could begin in earnest. Fortified by porridge, we at first continued in the same vane as the night before, soon realising that this was going to be hopeless! There was no way we were going to stay in the bush one more day! Jody and Josh set up camp on the side of the road, while Ed and Dan rode on to get help; firstly trying the Red Cross, where they were served Espressos and then the local Catholic Mission, where they were received by the Pere with whisky and a 3 course lunch! He agreed to help, and they soon left with a couple of local lads, the Mission driver aboard a Landcruiser pickup! Hi ho, the rescue party returns! (Admittedly some hours later, and a little drunker!)

Whilst waiting on the side of the road, in the heat, without water, the boys had had a little luck of their own. A hell of a nice bunch of chaps had arrived, and agreed to take them to Brazzaville for nix! The two rescue parties crossed paths en route, and soon both parties were back on the road to Brazzaville.

The next piece of the adventure was one of the most scary… at least for our Mums: Whilst Ed and Dan swung back to the mission to pick up their bikes, Jody and Josh boshed on, Josh riding in the pick-up with his bike ‘loosely’ secured on the back with Jody following in hot pursuit on his bike, dodging potholes and the anticipated jettisoned motorcycle.

The relief was palpable from both lads when fresh new tarmac was reached, however 5km down the road the pick-up suddenly comes to a stop and 2 locals in plain clothes force their way into the back seat of the truck and makes the driver to reverse up the road to a now apparent Ninja roadblock. Inside the cab all hell is breaking loose with the local boys getting a massive going over for running the checkpoint, huge demands of cash are being issued and Josh is being manhandled for his money and watch. Jody manoeuvres his bike to a safe distance behind the truck and is joined by Josh as our rescuers are pleading with the Ninja’s to let them pass, after having already given over all the money Josh had on him (11 000 CFA).

There is definitely an air of fear in the air and you can tell the locals genuinely fear these people, for good reason, as whilst we are stopped up a taxi driver runs the roadblock in the opposite direction and promptly pursued by the rebel ‘enforcer’ pretending to brandish a pistol stashed behind his back. Jody and Josh are now also surrounded by some of the rebels but they seem to have a friendlier demeanour toward us. Upon seeing the weaponless charade Jody cannot but help bursting out laughing and the rebels who realise he is in on the charade find this equally amusing.

Flo, the driver of our rescue truck is having no joy with the Ninja’s so Jody wanders over with our tried and tested big smiles and even bigger handshakes, explaining in pigeon English that we are riding motorbikes to South Africa and that Flo and his team are very good Congolese men to be helping us. Surprisingly the head honcho buys it and waves us all on, not before Jody, who can’t resist himself, pulls the old fake gun routine on the enforcer himself. The camp of Ninja’s cracks up as we are waved on our way with Flo and co. not really understanding how they got off and why everyone is now in stitches of laughter!

The remainder of the stops (there were 3 more) were run by Flo and co., with tensions very high in the 4wd – the good news was that Ed and Dan, who were rapidly catching up to the others, were blissfully unaware of all of this, and were running Ninja roadblocks, police roadblocks, and army checkpoints with their usual carefree abandon! (We don’t usually stop, just wave and keep riding. Stop at them all and you’d never get anywhere!)

It’s really hard to do justice to these last few days in a post. We’d like to edit and re-edit but it’s just too time consuming. Let me just say that we are lucky to have two great lads like Ed and Josh with us, and that you should ask us to give you the full rendition in a pub sometime - it’s much more exciting after we’ve had a few beers!

To bring you right up to date we’ve now spent almost a week in Brazzaville, waiting for Josh’s clutch kit to arrive from the UK, living it up at a posh hotel, funnily enough opposite a compound of South African pilots and air hostesses. Or at least we were, until we were thrown out of the hotel… No, we’re not joking. We’ve cried wolf before, but this is for real. They’re even coming over tonight for a Braai! You’ll have to ask Jody for the intimate details however…

That’s it for now, keep the guestbook posts rolling. Even though we don’t often have the time for full posts we often make time to check the guestbook. All the photos are up already in the gallery.

Ps Jon, we promise to post some pics of wheelies soon!

Jody and Dan

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Updates En-route: 24th March 2008

Posted on March 24th, 2008 by 2muppets.
Categories: 13. Congo, 12. Gabon
Post Location: GPS Map

Date: 24th March 2008

Location: Nyanga – Congo.

Distance travelled since last update: 375 kms.

Muppets say: Worries over getting the Congolese visas at the border were unfounded – we were ushered across the road by the official to enjoy a beer whilst they processed the documents.The roads are extremely muddy and the humidity is close on 100 percent but we are being treated to an amazing lightening show this evening!!

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