Max's rear wheel bearings were destroyed by the time we understood what the noise was, and a bolt at that wheel had been loose for three days of riding before it. What we remember about Benguela is not the workshop. It is the stranger who spent two days getting us out of it.

Grease pushed out past the seal, on the hub we had just got a look at.

A bolt we had been riding on for 1,225 kilometres

It started as a slack chain. We noticed it on 29 December, tightened it, and in hindsight tightened it too much. The next morning Max said she could hear something. We stopped, let the chain back off a little, rode a few hundred metres, and she stopped again with exactly the same noise.

Then we looked properly and saw the rear wheel was out of line, and Eddy could not get the nut off the shaft that runs through it. That was the point it stopped being something we could fix at the roadside.

What we had also found the day before, when we first went to tighten the chain, was that the bolt holding that shaft at the rear wheel was loose. Not loose that morning. Loose for the three days of riding before it, which were 365, 460 and 400 kilometres. Twelve hundred and twenty five kilometres on a bolt that was not doing its job.

When the mechanics finally got the shaft out, the wheel bearings were destroyed.

Max's bike leaving on somebody else's truck.

Getting it off the road

We could not get the shaft out with what we were carrying, which settled the question of whether this was a roadside job. The bike went to Benguela on the back of a flatbed.

Domingos, sorting something out. He spent two days doing this.

The man who kept turning up

Somewhere in that day we met Domingos. He ran a business in Benguela, he understood the problem, and he took it on.

He drove us back and forth. He picked things up. He arranged what needed arranging. At the end of the day he loaded all our luggage into his car and took us to the hotel so we could come back for the bike later. The next day Max's motorcycle was finished, but Eddy's rear tyre had been leaking air at the spoke connections since the tyre change in Luanda, so we left that one at the workshop instead and Domingos drove us out to Baia Azul and on to Lobito, and showed us his coast.

We had planned one night in Benguela and asked the hotel for two more. Three nights, because the mechanics needed the time and because the list of things wrong with our two motorcycles kept getting longer.

We took him to dinner.

What we could actually give back

We took him to dinner, back in Benguela after the drive along the coast. That was what we had to give.

We rode out for Lubango the next morning with both bikes back. Most of what went right in Benguela was not down to us. It was down to a man who decided, for no reason we could see, that our bad day was worth two of his.