Everything we have written down so far

Some of it is practical and some of it is just what happened. All of it is written after the fact, from notes taken somewhere with no signal.

Latest

A whitewashed mosque built of mud and timber, its buttressed towers studded with protruding wooden beams, standing against a deep blue sky. Three people stand in the shade of the doorway.

Guide · Mole National Park, Ghana · 4 min read

We saw one elephant at Mole. The mosque was the day.

Mole is the safari on almost every northern Ghana itinerary. Ours came to one male elephant, a few bush deer, and baboons standing on the track in the distance. What we had not expected was that the better half of the day happened after we left the park, in the village we had driven in through.

Two loaded orange and black adventure motorcycles parked under a corrugated steel canopy at a border post, luggage and dry bags stacked to one side, Max standing between them in riding armour giving a thumbs up.

Story · Cotonou, Benin · 4 min read

Eleven days for a visa, and the part nobody told us about was at the town hall.

We rode into Benin to collect three visas and left more than a week later. The piece we had been missing on the Nigerian one was not something the embassy told us. We heard it from another applicant sitting in the same waiting room.

Two loaded KTM adventure motorcycles standing on a concrete quay in Cabinda, a white passenger catamaran moored behind them and a storm front sitting over the water.

Guide · Cabinda to Soyo, Angola · 4 min read

We had the tickets. What we didn't have was a crane.

Cabinda is cut off from the rest of Angola by a strip of the DRC, so the way south is either through the DRC or on a boat. The crossing to Soyo takes about two hours. Getting our two motorcycles onto it took three days, and none of that was the paperwork's fault.

A rider's view over the handlebars along a deeply rutted track of soft orange sand, dry grass and scrub to one side, churned dark mud and a concrete culvert to the other, under a hazy blue sky.

Story · Yola, Nigeria to Garoua, Cameroon · 6 min read

We planned for sixty kilometres of offroad. It was a hundred and thirty.

A dry season shortcut from Nigeria into Cameroon, ridden in one day. Seven river crossings, seven falls, an exit stamp we rode straight past, and a border stamp locked in a room whose key was two and a half hours away.

A wide aerial view of the Basilica of Our Lady of Peace in Yamoussoukro under a dramatic, storm-lit sky, with a lake and the city stretching to the horizon.

List · Ivory Coast, Ghana, Angola · 3 min read

Five detours worth stopping for

None of these five stops were the reason we planned this route. A church too big to photograph properly, an elephant that didn't care we were there, and free viewpoints in Angola that beat paid ones we'd seen elsewhere.

A wide waterfall drops in several channels over layered, moss-covered rock, framed by dense green jungle.

Guide · Calandula, Angola · 2 min read

Calandula Falls looked easy from the rim. It wasn't.

Often ranked as Africa's second largest waterfall by volume, and a five kilometre tricycle ride from town. Getting to the bottom cost us a slippery trail, knee deep water, and a real negotiation. Getting back up cost more.

Two cappuccinos with thick milk foam sit on a wooden tray at a cafe table in Dakar.

Story · Richard-Toll to Dakar, Senegal · 3 min read

We rode up to the border together. Only one of us got through.

A land crossing that worked for one passport and not the other, a flight neither of us had budgeted for, and the better part of a week not knowing exactly when we'd be a team of two again.

The view from the ridge of Big Daddy Dune, dune after dune stacked toward the mountains, with Deadvlei's white pan below.

Guide · Sossusvlei, Namibia · 4 min read

We'd only ever watched this on documentaries

Eddy turned Sossusvlei's tallest dune into a competition before his knee had a say in it. What we found at the top, and later in a canyon most visitors to Sossusvlei never see, stuck with us longer than the climb did.

A large crowd of people gathered closely around two loaded motorcycles in a village street on a bright day.

Story · Gombe State, Nigeria · 2 min read

The afternoon we owed Gombe State a debt we couldn't repay

A bent rim and a hammer got us to the Gombe State boundary two hours late. What was waiting there had nothing to do with the bike, and there was no way to pay it back before we crossed into Cameroon the next day.

A wide, sweeping view of the Sossusvlei dunes under a bright sky, ridgelines receding into haze.

List · Morocco to Namibia · 3 min read

Six detours worth losing a day for

A route south is mostly a line you have already drawn. These are six times we rubbed the line out, lost a day or more, and never once regretted it.

A loaded adventure motorcycle standing in a deeply rutted, churned red clay track, a person walking ahead down the same road.

Guide · Republic of Congo · 3 min read

What nobody tells you about the road that wasn't a road

The map showed fifty kilometres to Pointe-Noire. What it didn't show was that the road had been dug up for a construction project and never finished, and that it had been raining on the clay underneath it for weeks.

Three kinds of post, and what each one promises

Guides: What we wish we had known before riding into somewhere. Practical, checkable, and written after the fact rather than from a guidebook.
Lists: The short version. Places, detours and decisions ranked by whether we would do them again.
Stories: What actually happened on a given day, at the length it deserves, told with the photographs that came back with us.