EMPath2A 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.
The reserve, and the rim that gave out on the way from it
We were up before six thirty for a game drive, packing by flashlight through a power cut because the restaurant wasn't running yet. The animals mostly stayed hidden. We heard more than we saw: birds, baboons, a warm spring we were warned not to get too close to for the crocodiles.
“Unfortunately we didn't see many things,” Eddy said afterward. He left thinking the reserve had real potential and a long way to go before it could host the kind of tourism it clearly wanted.
Hungry and behind schedule, we pointed the bikes toward Gombe: eighty kilometres of connecting road before the main route properly began. Our escort's phone mount kept failing, and then he wasn't behind us anymore. We turned back to find a pothole had bent his rim and flattened the tyre outright.
We hammered back the rim.
There was no workshop for miles, so we made do without one. We hammered the rim back into a shape close enough to true, then used the pump from Max's bike to get the tyre holding enough air for a temporary seventy kilometres. It held.
The boundary, and a welcome we hadn't asked for
At the Gombe State boundary the tone of the whole day changed. The local motorcycle club had already paid for our guesthouse, before we'd arrived to check in ourselves.
King Mustafa Aliou Ibrahim, a former district head and chairman of the Superbike Clubs Association of Nigeria's board of trustees, opened his home for lunch. We tried fra de nono there for the first time: a sweetened, condensed milk-and-yoghurt dish with pieces of corn stirred through, the kind of thing eaten in the region's cattle-keeping villages rather than served to passing tourists.
Such an incredible gesture.
Afterward he drove us around the city himself, in a police car, past the Bubayero Central Mosque and Gombe State University. None of it had been arranged by us, or asked for.
What we could not repay
That evening, club members were direct about where it had all come from: not a sponsor, not a tourism board, just their own pooled contributions, because they wanted to host us properly. They gave us dried meat, shredded chicken and club T-shirts before we'd found a way to say no to any of it.
It didn't stop the next morning either. Riders paid for our fuel before we could reach for a wallet, and the king, who was only meant to escort us partway to Jimeta, decided to come the whole distance instead, stopping only to buy a toothbrush and a change of underwear.
Asked, near the end of it, what Nigeria would mean to them, Eddy's honest answer was that there wasn't really an answer. “You really don't have anything to give them,” he said, about the people who had spent two days giving them everything. “How can we forget Nigeria?”