Post Script

When I was writing the stories for this book I got lost in the stacks of notes that I’ve made over the years. While I was searching for forgotten anecdotes and memories of my African trip, I found myself slowly wandering through tightly written pages as though they were a dusty museum of my life.

What I found was that over the years I hadn’t reflected on my experiences that much. What I had done didn’t seem that important, and like most people, I wasn’t interested in where I had been, but rather to where I was going.

When I set out to cross Africa by motorcycle in the early nineteen seventies, there weren’t any handbooks or guides to turn to for advice and I had never heard of anyone that had crossed the entire length of the Sahara, or explored the distant reaches of the Congo Basin on two wheels.

With only a broad outline of what to expect, Kersti and I packed my motorcycle and set out on a road trip that would take us twentyfive thousand kilometers through desert, steppe and jungle.

When we had come to the end of The Sahara’s vast wilderness of dunes and stone pistes, I thought that finally the trails would be easier, and that the most difficult and hazardous part of the trip was over. But in Central Africa, the problems and dangers were of a different nature.

Any good trip is as much a journey of personal discovery as it is travel to a destination. The accumulation of experiences that we get give us a chance to discover who we really are.

These stories are about a unique motorcycle adventure that took me through Europe, the Sahara, and the dense jungles of central Africa.

It wasn't a trip in the exotic land of Safaris and tourist destinations with trumpeting elephants and roaring lions, rather through the unexploited Africa of desert, river, and jungle.

Kersti and I traveled far from the beaten path through countries that in many ways were much different from what they are today.

Borders were open; many countries were still sparsely populated and their interior basically uncharted.

It would be years before GPS satellites would map the most distant corners of the planet. The internet with its superhighway of communication was science fiction.

The maps that we depended on in comparison to the satellite navigation of today, were just rough sketches of the tracks that we followed through the Sahara and the primitive trails that were carved through the Congo Basin’s pristine wilderness.

Telephone communication was only available in major cities and if I needed to make contact with the outside world, it was by letters that I posted wherever there was mail service.

The lesson that I learned on those difficult trails in the vastness of the Sahara and along the Congo River, was that a voyage through the African continent by motorcycle wasn’t for the faint of heart, or someone with a sensitive rump.

Nor was it for those who needed a couple of solid meals a day or dreaded mosquitoes, snakes, scorpions, or drinking fouled water.

If you couldn’t endure going for weeks without bathing or were afraid of sleeping in a tent in the isolation of the deep jungle, where every rustle in the undergrowth signaled potential danger, this was not a method of travel that I would recommend.

Travelling in one of the poorest and least developed areas in the world was a road trip where there were no comforts. There wasn’t a safety net to catch you if there were problems. You were on your own.

When it was possible, we left a description of our itineraries at the American consulate in the countries where we could find them and with the Gendarmerie National before we started the arduous crossing of the desert.

The warnings and unambiguous advice they gave us were always similar and sounded something like this.

“Travel in Central Africa is not recommended. Where you are going is too dangerous. The Counsel’s help will be limited or not available if you have health problems or go missing.”

In the Sahara I couldn’t imagine that a small cadre of desert police whose jurisdiction was a land area the size of the continental United States would have had the remotest chance of finding us if we had become lost or stranded.

Before you began a trip like we took, you had to realize that you would be totally cut off from the familiar securities that one found in developed countries. The warnings we got were warranted.

We were vulnerable and at times we were exhausted, insect bitten, had too little water, and just enough food to keep hunger at bay. A broken bone or a scorpion or snake bite, not to mention a highway robbery would not only have ended the trip, but might have cost us our lives.

One of the prerogatives of youth is the ability to accept uncertainty without the fear of making a mistake. Kersti and I were young, and looking back took quite a few risks, but we took them with a good measure of skill, ingenuity and luck.

Except for an injured shoulder we travelled without mishap, that is if I consider a bout of malaria nothing to take seriously.

At night in the desert, we crawled into our sleeping bags under a canopy of stars that shone so brightly and seemed so close that we could reach out and touch them. 

In the Congo we slept to the backdrop of the river and jungle, with the sound of drums from nearby villages breaking the stillness of night. If Africa was far away, inaccessible, and the height of adventure, it was those times that the reality of the trip converged with the dream I had of how it would be.

Nearly fifty years have passed since we left Algiers and headed into the Tel Atlas Mountains to cross 3 500 kilometers of desert and then continue into the depths of Central Africa.

There should have been a lot of what-ifs and maybes, but if we considered them all we’d be sitting at home staring at a map and dreaming about the trip we might have taken.