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

Sand, ruts, and no road at all

Some of it was deep sand. Some of it was rutted single and double track. Some of it was not a road in any sense we would use the word at home, just the direction other people had gone.

Max went down early, turning onto the track, and then kept going down. She had told Eddy her rear brake felt soft not long after we started, and there was nowhere out there to do anything about it. Our average speed dropped to something like ten or fifteen kilometres an hour, in about 37 degrees. Where the sand was worst, Eddy took her bike through the bad patch first and then walked back for his own. At ten or fifteen kilometres an hour, that was the arrangement for the rest of the morning. “This is the worst road ever,” Max said, somewhere in the middle of it. She had already dropped the bike three times.

We were also not alone out there, which is the part we had not pictured. People stopped us constantly. Not to help, at first, just to look, and to take photographs, and to hear Eddy tell them that Max was riding through West Africa on her own motorcycle and was, as he put it to everyone who stopped us, the first Filipina to do it. In one village we came out of a rutted section into a crowd standing right around the bikes.

Seven rivers

We crossed seven of them. Most were small. One was wide and shallow, around sixty to seventy centimetres, which was enough to be a real decision on a loaded bike. A car came through one of them while we were sitting there, which was reassuring right up until we watched it pick its own line and understood that nobody had marked the good one.

By the first big crossing Max needed a break, so we asked around and found a man willing to ride her bike over. He sat on it, worked out where the gears were, and took it across. Eddy pulled his boots off and walked his own through. That became the shape of the rest of the day, and we would not have got across on our own.

One stamp we rode past, one locked in a room

Somewhere along the river the road disappeared and we were asking villagers which way Cameroon was. What we did not see, because it was small and we were watching the sand, was the Nigerian immigration office. We rode straight past it.

We found out at a police checkpoint further on, where we had no exit stamps and were told to go back five kilometres. We left Max's bike at the checkpoint, she took a motorcycle taxi, and we rode back. We knocked at the wrong house first. Then we found the right one, and we got the stamps. We did say, on the way out, that a sign anyone could actually see would save them doing this again. The motorcycle taxi rider who had brought Max stayed with us afterwards and led the next stretch, to within about ten kilometres of the Cameroonian side. We paid him and filled his tank.

We reached Cameroonian immigration at about half two. The stamp was in a room, the room was locked, and the person with the key was in Garoua, a two and a half hour drive away. So we sat and waited for two hours. We left at half four with 49 kilometres still to go and the light already going. We asked whether the road improved after the border. We were told yes. It did not.

The last 49 kilometres

Four kilometres past the border Max went down again. She went into thorny scrub at one of them, unable to get a foot down in time, and by then the impacts had shaken her mirrors loose. By the end of the day she had fallen seven times, every one of them in that heat, every one followed by getting a loaded adventure bike back upright.

She was right to say it, and Eddy did not argue. Riding on in that state, into sand, in the dark, was how the day went from bad to something we would not have recovered from. So we hired a local rider to take her bike on to Garoua, and left Max at the roadside with people from the village to find a lift, because Eddy and the borrowed rider had to move before dark. The driver of the car she found turned out to be a former commissioner in Garoua, and drove that road at fifty kilometres an hour, which impressed and alarmed her in roughly equal measure.

The thing we got wrong was the passports. Eddy handed Max his so she could check into the hotel, which was booked in his name, and then spent the rest of the ride explaining at checkpoints why he was riding across Cameroon at night carrying no document at all. Behind an unfamiliar rider who braked without warning, in the dark, in sand.

We reached the hotel at half seven. Max arrived ten minutes later.

Would we send anyone else this way. Not without real offroad experience, and not on a heavily loaded bike. That was Eddy's conclusion the night we arrived. The route was not impossible. It was that the sand, the rivers, the missed stamp, the locked room and the last hour in the dark all landed on the same day, and by the time we understood how long that day was going to be we were already too far in to turn around. It also did not rain, and the route only existed at all because it was the dry season.

We spent the next day in bed in Garoua, went out at four to get cash and buy laundry powder, and let the hotel security guard wash the bikes, because we were not going to. And we did not get across on our own. A man learned Max's gearbox to take her bike over a river. A taxi rider stayed with us for a stretch nobody asked him to ride. Somebody found her a car. We rode into Cameroon owing that day to a string of people whose names we mostly never got.