EMPath2
Eddy and Max, and the long way round.
Two riders heading south from Tangier with no return date, filming as they go. This is the longer answer to who is behind EMPath2, and why everything written here comes from having gone rather than from having read about it.
Neither of them set out to make a travel channel.
Eddy, Danish, has been travelling for most of his adult life, nearly all of it long before there was a camera involved. Max, Filipina, came to it later and harder: her own account of the weeks before departure is that she wanted to see the world, not ride a motorcycle, and was frightened enough of the bike itself to lose her appetite before practice. She learned anyway, because the crossing was already being planned, with Eddy teaching her the slow manoeuvres and emergency braking on an empty road outside Lisbon. Both got their licences only months before they left.
The plan in January 2022 was to ride straight for Morocco and Africa. A closed border sent them through Turkey instead, and Africa waited the better part of two years. The channel exists because they filmed all of it from that first morning. Around five hundred videos later, this site is the written part of that record, starting with the Africa crossing: the routes, the mistakes, and the long version of the good days.
The name is about the part that is uncomfortable.
An empath to the world is not someone collecting countries. It is someone who lets a place change their mind about something. That mostly happens on the days you would not choose. Fifty kilometres of mud outside Louvakou, the eleven-day visa wait in Cotonou, the afternoon a Kalahari family taught them to hear four different clicks in one language.
Which is why the writing here is not only route notes. Practical guidance and the reason to go are the same subject seen from two ends, and a site that carries one without the other is either a spreadsheet or a postcard.
The countries that were hardest to ride through are, without exception, the ones we still talk about.
The route, in the order it happened.
Tangier → Dakhla
Down the Atlantic coast through Agadir, with a detour east to Midelt for the Blue City, where Max dropped her bike on the way down and rode it off anyway.
Dakhla → Dakar
The Mauritanian desert, then a Senegalese border that let Eddy through and turned Max back for a visa she couldn't get on arrival. He waited it out in Richard-Toll while she sorted it from Dakar.
Dakar → Accra
Four countries in six weeks: Guinea's police stops, a swing out to Yamoussoukro's basilica in Côte d'Ivoire, and Ghana's Mole National Park, reached from Damongo for the elephants.
Accra → Yaoundé
Togo, an eleven-day visa wait in Benin, and then Nigeria, where the country's motorcycle community met them at nearly every stop, right through Cameroon's potholed run south.
Yaoundé → Luanda
The worst mud of the crossing outside Louvakou in the Republic of Congo, a ferry into Angola through Cabinda, and Calandula Falls once they were through.
Luanda → Windhoek
South through Angola to Tundavala Gap's 2,200-metre drop near Lubango, then Namibia: Etosha, the dunes at Sossusvlei, an afternoon with a Kalahari family, and finally the decision in Windhoek to end the motorcycle crossing there rather than keep waiting on a South African visa that never came.
The best part has not happened yet.
The motorcycles stopped in Namibia. There is more travel planned after this, not necessarily on two wheels, and everything gets written down here as it goes.