The border was the easy part. The river port was not.

Cameroon into the Republic of Congo in a morning, with a free passavant and a plate number written on a scrap of paper. Then no fuel in town, and an afternoon walk to the river that ended with a gate shut behind us.

Eddy on his loaded KTM in helmet and riding jacket looking back at the camera in a wet concrete courtyard, a green and cream building signed Forestiere Plaza behind him, banana palms alongside and Max further back on her own loaded bike. — Leaving La Forestiere Plaza in Ntam. The bikes were already full of bottled fuel.

A border that gave us no trouble at all

We had ridden down to Ntam the day before, 350 kilometres from Yaounde. Out through the capital's broken streets at quarter past six in the rain, and onto roads that turned exceptionally good about 150 kilometres in. Ntam is the Cameroonian village where the border post is around the next corner, and there is not much else to it. The guest house, La Forestiere Plaza, came off iOverlander. No running water in the bathroom, a generator for a few hours in the evening, and a clean room, which is rarer out here than it sounds. We ordered chicken, the kitchen went out into the village to buy one, and dinner arrived about three hours later.

We had topped both tanks in Ntam with bottled fuel from a roadside vendor, because the stations were getting further apart and some of them were dry. Other travellers told us Congo would be worse.

A tarmac road blocked by oil drums and a chain barrier at a frontier post, with a white kiosk painted Halte Douanes on the left, a building marked Stop Controle Frontiere on the right, tin roofed shacks alongside and freight trucks queued in the distance. — The kind of crossing that looks slower than it turns out to be.

Cameroonian customs took no time. We had no passavant for the bikes and it turned out not to matter. They wrote our plate numbers on a small piece of paper and that was that. We reached the Congolese post at 07:45 and it opened at eight. The Cameroonian side had opened at seven, which is worth knowing if you are trying to time the morning.

We got the stamp, and we got a passavant, and it was free. Eddy wrote that down with an exclamation mark. We stopped at Sembe for a break and picked up SIM cards at 1,500 CFA, with 4GB of data for another 6,000. After that it was a good road and no rain. Max spent a fair bit of it fighting to stay awake.

Eddy in a yellow and black riding jacket standing at the edge of a tarmac road beside two heavily loaded motorcycles, helmets and dry bags stacked on the seats, with dense green roadside vegetation and banana palms rising up the bank behind him. — Fuel conscious the whole way. Stations were getting further apart.

No fuel in Ouesso

The filling stations in Ouesso had nothing. A man at the Total station sent us across the road to a seller with bottles and jerrycans, the second time in two days we fuelled up that way.

We took 25 litres between both tanks and the smaller of our fuel bladders, which we had run dry on the road. The next day was 523 kilometres. We reckoned that would be enough.

We were at the hotel by half past two. It was 50,000 CFA for a basic room, the pool was out of service and the noise was not. We thought that earned us a discount. It did not.

Seen from behind, Max stands on a laterite outcrop at the edge of a wide mirror calm river, long wooden dugout canoes pulled up on the bank around her and more moored beyond, the forested far shore under a blue sky. — The walk down to the water.

The camera at the river port

After a late lunch we walked down to the river, a side channel of the Congo, filming as we went. It was a huge piece of water, with long wooden pirogues pulled up along the bank and more moored beyond them. We watched the small ferry come in from the far side, and Eddy walked down toward the landing to get a shot of it docked.

A selfie by Max in sunglasses filling the right of the frame, with Eddy behind her walking down the earth bank toward the water holding a small camera, long wooden boats moored along the shore and the wide river beyond. — Walking down to the boats with the camera, a few minutes before any of the rest of it.

A man in ordinary clothes started shouting. Eddy assumed it meant he had gone far enough and turned back. The man took hold of his arm and got angry. Eddy pushed him off, and the two of us carried on toward the gate. The man ran ahead and shut it.

By then it was clear he was some kind of officer at the port. He had no English, and a bystander came over and translated as best he could. What he wanted was the camera. We were not let out until Eddy had deleted the last file. Afterwards we checked along the outside of the gate for a sign saying no photography. We found none.

Eddy sits on the stepped plinth of a white obelisk monument painted green, yellow and red at its base, on a paved terrace overlooking the wide glassy river and its forested far shore. — The old A.E.F. marker on the Ouesso riverfront.

The part that does not make the ride report

What Eddy wrote in the diary that night was that he was tired. It had been a day that went almost entirely right, a smooth border, a free passavant, a good road, and it ended with a file deleted at a gate by a man he could not talk to.

Nothing about it was dangerous. Nobody was hurt and nothing was taken except the shot. What wears on you is the arithmetic underneath it, working out several times a day, and usually without a shared language, which ordinary thing is fine here and which one is not. Walking to a river with a camera is ordinary almost everywhere. At that gate it was not, and there was no sign on the fence that would have told us.

That is the cost that never shows up in a fuel log or a border timing, and it is why a day can go almost perfectly and still end with someone tired.

We stopped for the milk we needed for breakfast on the way back to the hotel and went to bed early. There were 523 kilometres to ride in the morning.