Hotel ?

 Our trip was trial by motorcycle, not knowing what we would encounter, riding day after day through vast swathes of nothing with a minimum of food water and fuel.

We avoided cities if we could.  If it was necessary to visit one to acquire visas or travel permits, we found a place to camp on the outskirts and left as quickly as possible.  With the exception of a few really high-end places, African hotels at the time were mostly sleezy dumps priced like the Hilton.

We travelled light. We pooled our money and scraped by on a lean budget. Most of our major expenses were petrol or visas.

In any event, there was nothing extra to buy. Sometimes there were a few onions in a market stall that we used to spice up our sardine-based tomato sauce, or if we were lucky, we could find rice and a little pasta, or occasionally a bunch of bananas or a papaya.

We always had enough money to cover what we needed, and funds in reserve for emergencies, but excesses like a hotel weren’t included.

We slept in the mountains, in deserts, jungles, police stations and camps with armed guards. We were always exhausted and it didn’t seem to matter where or on what we slept.

There were nights when we just rolled out our sleeping bags in the desert sand because we wanted to lay on our backs looking up at the Milky Way’s unbroken band of light.

When we slept in the jungle, we were always cautious but mostly too tired to be afraid of anything human or animal.

Still, we tried not to imagine what could be lurking in the darkness, or crawling through the thick underbrush, knowing that it could conceal any number of unpleasant surprises. We had no other choice when we heard a crackling sound or an imagined rustling in the undergrowth outside the tent, to ignore it and go back to sleep.

In Nigeria when there was a serious threat from highway robbers, we slept in camps or compounds that were protected by armed guards, and when we laid out our sleeping bags on the beach in Lagos, locals warned us that we could be mugged and robbed, and that there had even been murders there. With kindness and concern for our safety, they took us to a police compound where we slept until we could find somewhere that was safe.