Africa all the way round!

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It looks fantastic, I did a trip down to western sahara last year on my motorbike and next year I'm riding from London to Bangkok. Theres nothing like an epic road trip I love them. Full respect to you for doing it on your own. :)
 
kev1nlm said:
It looks fantastic, I did a trip down to western sahara last year on my motorbike and next year I'm riding from London to Bangkok. Theres nothing like an epic road trip I love them. Full respect to you for doing it on your own. :)
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Thanks Kevin,

London to Bangkok must be great adventure. Enjoy the preps!

Ride safe,

Gee
 
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Fishermen preparing their boat. Kokrobite, Ghana

The veterinary inspector
After spending some days at the beach at Ivory Coast’s Grand Bassam, near Abidjan, I headed for Ghana. The road from Grand Bassam is good with heavy traffic and suicidal drivers. I’m taking it easy and stay behind a truck as much as possible.
The Ivory Coast border formalities begin surprisingly easy. The place is crowded with people, coaches have just unloaded their passengers to cross into Ghana. Everywhere people sit with their luggage, a lot of shouting, the beginning of a fight in a small group of men (why is it always men?). A policeman almost literally takes me by the hand and guides me along the desks to stamp my passport and Carnet. What a great service, especially since you wouldn’t know where to start looking. The immigration officer is sitting outside, with just a small desk, a chair and his stamp. The douane colonel (it says so on his impressive uniform) is two floors up in an AC room, and the policeman gently knocks on the door and salutes when he enters. Easy and efficient procedure.
And then they see Thimba in the car!

More on: Travels with Thimba
 
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Siësta, Grand Popo, Benin

“Is this Nigeria?”
From Big Milly’s in Accra it’s only a three to four hours drive to Lomé in Togo. Good roads, it’s Saturday so less traffic, and the Ghana-Togo border crossing should be a walk in the park! And with this mood I put Thimba in the front of the car, lower her window, open the ventilations flaps, turn on her fan, and hit the road. She lies down as soon we start off and looks at me as if to say “It’s a breeze!”. To get out of Accra takes me more than an hour in heavy traffic. After Tema there’s a complete stand still and it takes me three hours to cover 35 km. Not a good start of the day. At Segakofe, just before the border, a checkpoint. Now, It’s not my intention to give you a full account of all checkpoints; that would be very boring. However, some of them stand out in the way you are shamelessly extorted.

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Baby chimp. Afi Mountain Reserve, Niugeria

In 2006 the BBC reported that Nigerian politicians had syphoned off or wasted $ 380 billion, more than the combined aid given to the whole of Africa in the last 40 years (from blog Indlovu). And it is with mixed feelings of anticipation that I leave Abomey for the Nigerian border. Too many negative travellers’ accounts, too many checkpoints, too much hassle and extortion. I have stocked up on diesel (sometimes hard to get in oil-rich Nigeria!?) and dollars. And I’m taking a quiet border crossing from Ketou in Benin to Abeokuta in Nigeria.

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Bogged down truck blocking the road, Congo

Some serious off-road driving in Congo
After the border at Ndendé the piste offers new off-road challenges: mud and very deep waterholes, filled to the brim after heavy rainfall. It’s impossible to know the depth of these holes, and in some of them the Land Rover nose-dives so deep that the water flows over the bonnet and reaches the front window. It’s incredible how capable the car is in these circumstances (and with an experienced driver, of course, ahum..).

And then I make a beginner’s mistake. I stay in some ruts too long, they get deeper and deeper. I know I should stop, reverse, and continue on the shoulders, but I think I can just make it, accellerate some more to keep momentum, and the rear differential buries itself deeply in the hard, crusted earth. Complete standstill. All four wheels are free and I try to see if I can negotiate myself out of this, but there is no way out of this but the dirty way: jacking and shovelling. I use the Hi-Lift to jack up one side of the car when a young man on a moped stops and starts to dig out the differential, lying under the car in the mud. After half an hour he has removed enough earth, I lower the car and manage to reverse the car out of the ruts.

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The guides handsignal lefts and rights and – most frequently – slow! Deadslow! The brakes squeek as we very gradually make our way down the hill. I brake too much and the engine stalls. No problem. I start again, release the clutch and brake, and brake some more. I hear Steven’s “Oh, my god!”, and “Madness!” holding on to the rear ladder and trying to shoot some video at the same time. He will later tell me that he and Stergios were ready to jump off the car at the scariest moments. I know that I can remain very calm in a situation like this. There’s a slightly faster heartbeat, just enough to get some extra blood to the brains, no sweat, no panic. I mean I can tremble like a twig in an autumn storm when it’s over, but not during the action itself. Must be instinctive, from the time that we were hunter-gatherers roaming the savannahs thousands of years ago. Anyway, I divert.

More on: Travels with Thimba
 
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Near Spitzkoppe

After the adventures in West and Central Africa, Namibia is a vacation. I picked up Mees from Windhoek airport two weeks ago, and we bushcamped, stayed at some very comfortable and some very basic campsites, had oryx and zebra steak for dinner, spotted lots of zebra, giraffe, warthog, baboons, kudu, springbok, oryx (gemsbok), and even a brown hyena. In the wild, because we can't enter parks with Thimba. But the experience seeing these animals beside the road is even more thrilling!
We have almost completed a northern loop (went all the way to Epupa falls, at the Angolan border), and are now staying at Oppi Koppi campsite in Kamanjab, run by a Dutch-Belgian couple. For free, because we are overlanders.
Namibia is a visual treat, a veritable feast for the eyes. The skies are blue, landscapes vary every day, the colours are intense, the people photogenic. So I'll just let the photographs tell the story.

More on: Travels with Thimba
 
:D:I did something similar to your adventure 40 years ago if I want to see people with dark skins now , I visit Birmingham once a year, the very best of luck , a money belt is a good idea.
 
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