Congo: Spencer Conway’s African Motorcycle Diaries

A Bikers Market in Africa, Spencer Conway
A Bikers Market in Africa

Crossing Africa on a Motorcycle

By Andy Christian Castillo

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Spencer’s Yamaha in front of a police station.

On the back of a Yamaha XT660, Spencer Conway traveled over 37,000 miles and circumnavigated the continent of Africa.

His trip took him through deserts, jungles, and savannah. He endured grueling environmental conditions, was shot at by armed bandits in Kenya, and stoned by angry villagers in Egypt.
Spencer quit his job as a teacher, traveled unsupported, relied on donations, and raised about $40,000 for Save the Children during his trip. He wrote about the trek in his book, African Motorcycle Diaries.

An Excerpt from African Motorcycle Diaries: Democratic Republic of Congo: The Unknown Border

In Luanda, the capital, I once again found the Angolan people to be welcoming and had no problem wandering out at night to experience what the city had to offer. My biggest regret was my lack of Portuguese, but the sheer enthusiasm of the locals to try and break down this communication barrier, made this a very special experience for me and up to this point it is unequivocally my favorite country in Africa.

This was in sharp contrast to what I was going to find in Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo. The area was made famous by the exploits of Henry Morton Stanley to track the source of the Congo River which led to the manic interest of the insane King Leopold of Belgium and subsequently the Scramble for Africa in 1878.

From this point onwards DRC probably suffered more than any country in the world. But I still had to get there to see it for myself.

Instead of taking the “traditional” route to Kinshasa through the border of Matadi, I decided to take a gamble and test myself by taking a secondary road through such exotic-sounding villages as Maquela de Zombo, Banza Sosso, and Ngidinga.

My Michelin map (I had no GPS throughout the trip) marked it as a passable road but not in the rainy season. Unfortunately, my map was more than six years out of date and would prove to be not such a reliable friend.

However, it proved to be a remarkable decision, as I was thrown into the center of a tropical jungle with no cars, bicycles, people, electricity, or buildings of any kind and to be honest, no road.

His grueling trip was also a lonely one.
His grueling trip was also a lonely one.

Tracks Not Roads

What Michelin called a road turned out to be a track with ruts meters deep, rivers and puddles as high as my waist and bordering the path in a thick wall, the lushest tropical forest I had ever seen.

Tarzan would have been proud to hack through it but it was so dense there is no way he would have been able to swing from tree to tree. The sounds of the forest were deafening created by the monkeys, birds and God knows what other creatures lurked in the undergrowth.

It was a punishing ordeal for me and the bike and a test for the most experienced rider. I fell often, getting caught up in the dense undergrowth or slipping in the mud, and was drenched to the bone with sweat, my vest glued to my skin, and my bike trousers beginning to chafe and rub in uncomfortable places.

This was the hardest ride of my life and I had to change my maxim from border by border, to day by day, to kilometer by kilometer, and eventually to 100m by 100m.

30 Km in Eight Hours

The first day I covered 30 kilometers in eight hours, at times having to hack a path with a machete. This was totally draining as I had to park up the bike and cut through twenty meters of tangled branches, lianas and deadwood that had taken over the route. I then had to retrieve the bike and negotiate the track, paddling with my feet to stop myself from falling over.

Snagged on Branches

It must have been thirty degrees, but I had to keep my protective gear on to prevent myself from being cut to shreds. I kept slipping and getting snagged on branches until I eventually got the bike through.

I then had to repeat the process over and over again. Obviously, this was not the thoroughfare my optimistic mind had conjured up when studying, what I now realized, was a seriously out of date map.

Not Just a Tourist

On the road across Africa.
On the road across Africa.

On the second day, I managed 40 km in nine hours, and on the third, I completed a hundred and twenty. I felt incredibly proud of my achievements as I had to work really hard to gain ground.

For the first time, I really felt I deserved the rather pretentious title of Adventure Motorcyclist rather than just a tourer.

This was compounded by the fact that the border was really just a clearing in the jungle with three dilapidated huts, one of which I assumed to be the official hut, judging by the bent flagpole outside it, sporting a filthy half torn Democratic Republic of Congo flag.

I removed my helmet, wiped the sweat and flies off my face and out of my eyes, and approached the customs, reaching into my rucksack for my passport.

Sleepy Official

The official, in a ragged dirty, dark blue uniform with torn lapels, was asleep on a grey plastic school chair. When he woke and saw me, he nearly fell over backward and his eyes widened in astonishment. I queried, “Is this immigration?” In Pidgin English, he asked, “How do you come here, where are your friends? This road is finished. How do you come here?”

I pointed back in the direction I had come from and said, “I am traveling alone, from that direction”. He was astonished, stood up, looked me up and down, whistling at the same time, and told me, in French, that no foreigners had been here for four years.

He informed me that even the locals don’t use this route. “It is finished, this road bad road, no good.” I felt great. Loved that comment.

I think he may have been a bit out of touch with border procedures, not surprising really, considering the heavy traffic passing through, and he spent a full five minutes studying my passport upside down. When it came to getting an official stamp for my passport that was just wishful thinking on my part.

Stamp with a Flourish

The Border Guard stationed himself behind his desk and motioned to me to take a seat, pointing to an upturned breeze block with a piece of hardboard balanced on top of it. He made a futile attempt to appear organized, fiddling in the two broken drawers of his desk, and shuffling a few papers around. He eventually pulled out a stamp with a flourish, but it was not to be, as the ink had obviously dried up on the cracked pad many years earlier.

I eventually made do with some unintelligible scribblings by the official, but not before half-heartedly arguing that I would not be able to get into the next country without a stamp. I realized that it was futile and cut myself short.

I thanked him for his help, gave him some leftover corned beef and a handful of chilies. He shook my hand enthusiastically and said, “Merci beaucoup, Monsieur Le Blanc, et bon chance, bon journee.”

He followed me out to the bike, whistling again when he saw it, and proceeded to look at himself in the rearview mirror, pulling all sorts of, I presume, tough/sexy faces, while holding on to the handlebars. I drank a liter of water, trying not to cough it up through laughter, as I watched his poses.

Adventurer’s Heaven

Spencer on the road.
Spencer on the road.

I kitted up, shook the guard’s hand again, and headed off waving, and laughing to myself inside my helmet.

I wondered if he would still be sitting there, in four years’ time, still on the government payroll, patiently waiting for the next lunatic on a motorbike to pass through.

I was in adventurer’s heaven and I sang Bob Marley songs at the top of my voice until my tunelessness started annoying me.

After a tough couple of hours riding, where I had to maintain exhausting concentration, I finally emerged from the jungle and reached the junction that freed me from this punishing path, as it miraculously turned into the asphalt road leading to Kinshasa. I felt euphoric.

Hitting Unsafe Kinshasha

My mood changed completely as soon as I hit the outskirts of Kinshasa. It was undoubtedly the hottest, dirtiest, most unsafe, and least friendly place I have ever had the displeasure of driving in to. As the jungle gave way to sprawling shantytowns, I stopped at a scrappy, one pump petrol station, manned (or womanned, if it bothers you) by a large woman, in a torn Esso uniform which revealed half her grubby bra.

I asked for directions to the center of the city but was met with a blank expression, as though I was mad. No wonder, as I subsequently found out, it was going to take me two more grueling, boiling, traffic-jammed hours to get into the center and she had probably never ventured that far in her life.

Hard Going in DRC.
Hard Going in DRC.

Kinshasa has an estimated twelve million people and is incredibly poor. The majority of people survive by selling what they can on the streets, like small two hundred gram plastic bags of water.

Plastic Waste Everywhere

The whole city is covered layers deep in these bags (the inventor of plastic has a lot to answer for). Others mill around holding twenty pairs of sunglasses in each hand in some octopus imitating act, while others carry an exceptional number of baguettes on their heads and are armed with a knife and a tub of margarine.

Jostling for space are the food sellers: chicken in peanut sauce, fish wrapped in palm leaves and caterpillars and crocodile meat (the oysters and caviar of Kinshasa’s culinary scene), or chikwange- the leaf-wrapped blocks of fermenting cassava paste that to the uninitiated resembles warm carpet glue.

That is being overly polite and even my culturally adapted taste buds struggled to keep chikwangwe down when being watched enthusiastically for a reaction.

One-Eyed Sunglasses

Then there are the fruit, mobile phone, cigarette, and soft drink sellers, again balancing ridiculous numbers of products on their heads. Needless to say, all the brands are fake. (Raybon, George Amani, etc). Sellers have all sorts of demonstrations to show you how genuine they are; varying from displaying the “original” sunglasses case as proof, to burning the lens with a lighter to show you it is real glass etc.

Standards do drop though, believe you, me. One particularly enthusiastic salesman tried to sell me a pair of sunglasses with one arm missing. Do I look like Van Gogh?

Rucksack Thief

Spencer Conway
Spencer Conway

I also had a less than normal thief, halfway inside my rucksack, before I noticed a slight tugging on my shoulder. He had managed to completely open one of the zips on my rucksack and was just about to relieve me of my belongings when something must have got snagged.

I turned round to confront him and he just fell into the road and rolled around laughing maniacally. He had obviously lost a few marbles as he was filthy beyond normal standards and was dribbling.

There were three Algerian UN troops standing on a corner, smoking cigarettes and ordering coffee from a street seller standing behind his two-wheeled portable stall. They just looked over and shrugged. They had seen it all before and worse, I suppose. I transferred my rucksack from my back and strapped it to my front. That would be the last time I would ever have it on my back.

Street Kids Demanding Money

Adding to the mayhem are the ubiquitous yellow and blue taxis and minivans, careering around with their sweating human cargo, bouncing along the potholed roads. On every street corner are the Cheges, or street children (named after Che Guevara for some odd reason), who are feral and intimidating; demanding money and calling you “Le Blanc” or worse if you don’t oblige.

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