The five beds we still talk about

From Morocco to Namibia the nights we bring up again are almost never the comfortable ones. A hotel room that turned out to be a tent, a room the baboons let themselves into, and a breakfast in Windhoek that changed the rest of the trip.

Two places laid on a whitewashed wooden table, each with a bowl of thick yellow soup on a straw mat, two flat fried rounds beside it and a spoon resting on a folded white napkin, two glasses of white wine at the top of the frame. — Dinner was included. That was most of what we were paying for.

01The night the room was a tent

Eighteen days south of Tangier, on the coast just outside Dakhla where there is very little on either side of the road for a long time, we booked what was listed as a hotel room. It was a dome tent. We had not misread the listing. The tent was the room.

Meals came with it, which in practice meant a long whitewashed table under woven lampshades, soup and bread brought out while the light went off the sand, and a glass of white wine at the end of a riding day. It cost more than we wanted to pay. We paid it, and we have been bringing it up ever since.

Eddy and Max standing on bare red dirt in front of a painted wall mural of Nelson Mandela waving, his hand and face filling the background behind them. — An hour earlier neither of us was smiling.

02The Nelson Mandela in Kissidougou

The hotel in Kissidougou has Nelson Mandela painted on the wall beside the entrance, waving, South African flag colours behind him, the phone numbers underneath in the same white block lettering. We remember it entirely because of the day that ended there.

Max went down twice, both times in a crowded street, which is the worst place to drop a loaded bike because you have an audience before you have the bike upright. We were also stopped twice by police on the way in. The second stop was an accusation that we had ridden the wrong way up a one way street, and it was the stop where Eddy stopped being polite about it.

By the time we reached that mural there was nothing left in either of us. It is an ordinary hotel in an ordinary town. It is also the only hotel wall on this trip that either of us could still draw from memory.

A close selfie of Eddy on the right, wearing a black desert print shirt and a hydration pack, with Max beside him in a navy cap and white shirt, on a green lawn under trees with a red and white building behind them. — Kintampo. We came for one night and left with a guide.

03The receptionist in Kintampo

We found this one on iOverlander at the end of a 246 kilometre day out of Agnibilekrou, across the border and on through roads that were mostly potholes and dust behind slow trucks, having eaten nothing all day except some crunchy rolls with dry beans in them from a fuel stop. The hotel sorted us both SIM cards for about 50 cedis. We ate chicken and fried rice, watched television in English, and slept.

The man who sorted the SIM cards was called Prince, and he was on reception the next morning. He suggested he come with us to the waterfalls a few minutes outside town, and found a tricycle to take us. We paid the tourist rate, double the local one, plus a separate fee for the rope bridge across the river, which Max screamed her way over in both directions while Eddy and Prince enjoyed themselves enormously.

We got in under the falls and behind them. Then lunch, then a nap, then the same fried chicken and rice as the night before, because it had been good the first time.

Eddy and Max sitting back against the front bumper of a beige game viewing 4x4 on tarmac, with a stone building under a corrugated roof and a drained circular pool behind them. — Yankari. The pool by the car park has been closed for a while.

04The room the baboons let themselves into

We rode into Yankari Game Reserve to find a seminar in progress, were invited in, and were then asked to speak. Neither of us had any warning at all. We went with it, the way we had been going with most things by that point in Nigeria.

There is a warm spring at Yankari called Wikki, clear water at around 28 degrees, and it is genuinely lovely. The next morning we went out on a short game drive and saw a few antelope and a great many baboons. Baboons also live around the buildings you sleep in. Leave the door open and they come inside, which is exactly what they did to us.

The reserve is beautiful and badly run. The service was poor, the pool by the car park was drained and fenced, and the whole place felt like somewhere money was spent on once and not since. We would still go back.

A loaded orange and black KTM adventure motorcycle under a shade sail, a rider standing just behind it in a black full face helmet with the visor up, and a white pickup carrying a slide on camper body parked beyond them. — The bike and its replacement, in the same yard, in Windhoek.

05The breakfast in Windhoek

Five nights at Xenias Bed and Breakfast, back in Windhoek after Sossusvlei and the Kalahari. Breakfast came out onto a long table on the covered veranda, green window frames, potted succulents, jam jars and a bowl of bananas, two big patio umbrellas and the garden pressing in behind them. Xenia is Croatian, so breakfast was Croatian, and it was very good.

It is on this list because of what got decided at that table. Max's South African visa had been sitting online, unapproved, for more than a month. The South African embassy in Windhoek told us it would stay that way, because she had applied from the wrong country. She is allowed to apply online. She just had to do it from the Philippines. That was the end of South Africa.

So we rebuilt the plan over breakfast. We contacted the KTM dealership in Windhoek about getting both bikes prepared and shipped home to Denmark the following month, and rented a campervan for ten days to see the rest of Namibia instead. Both of us were oddly excited about the van.

What the five have in common

Not one of them is here for the bed. What fixes a place in your memory is nearly always something that arrived with you, or walked in after you. The nights neither of us can recall at all are almost without exception the ones where nothing went wrong and the room was fine.