After returning from a bicycle trip to the North Cape, I don’t want to stay in the Netherlands. Certainly not with such a healthy bank account, the merit of painting three wooden houses in Northern Norway. I want to go to Africa, but how? A motorbike would be ideal but I don’t have a driver’s license for that. Frustrated, I stare at a map of the huge continent. A continent where people travel with donkeys, bicycles, buses and mopeds … Of course! Why didn’t I think of that before: by moped!
Sound plan, only I don’t own a moped and I don’t know anything about mopeds either. That doesn’t matter as long as I consider trouble a part of the adventure. I don’t have much time to prepare anyway because it will soon be too cold in Europe.
I spend a day on the internet looking for a suitable moped. A 50cc Zündapp Sprinter from 1981 looks robust and well-maintained. The kind of moped that was too ‘cool’ for me in high school. That same evening I check out the moped in Epe.
“It’s fine, but I don’t know if you can get to Africa with it,” the seller says, a bit overwhelmed by my plan, “but if you bring him back from Africa, I’ll buy it back from you.” I can’t be more critical than ‘well, it does start’ and so I buy it. Full throttle I drive off. Yeehaa! But at the first traffic light, the engine stops. Oh yeah, are we going to start like this? Once I arrive at home, I attach a shelf on the luggage carrier on which my panniers can hang. In a moped shop I buy spark plugs, a spark plug wrench, lights and inner tubes. I have a strong feeling that I have forgotten something essential and that is why I drive past ‘Zündapp Harry’ on the first day of travel. With such a name he must be the right man for advice.
“You don’t need spare parts for a Zündapp,” says Harry, “they should be able to last 150,000 kilometers. That’s ten times to Africa. ”
I don’t find it very comforting. Okay, it may be a Zündapp, but it will still feel more comfortable to cross the Sahara with some spare parts.
“Do you have enough oil in the crankcase?” Harry asks.
“Uh, I don’t know. How can you see that? ”
Harry looks at me with admiration and pity at the same time. A look that would become more and more familiar to me this trip…
I drive into Brussels full of anger. With a lot of gas I barely keep it going. What a shitty moped! And yesterday, when I just crossed the Belgian border, the throttle cable also broke. In Brussels I want to buy a Mauritanian visa. Mauritania. Sure, as if I’m going to make it to Mauritania with my crappy moped. Depressed, I camp in a piece of public green between stolen handbags. Either I dump the moped at the seller’s place tomorrow or I give the scrap another chance at a mechanic.
The mechanic listens to my story with a smile; difficult to be taken seriously if you say you want to go to Africa and already are stranded. But he immediately sees what is wrong: the gasket is leaking. Hence all that oil on the block, very logical actually. Half an hour later my grave mood has completely disappeared due to the new gasket.
Every day I drive about one hundred and fifty numbing kilometers through drizzly Belgium and France. I’m really looking forward to the warmth of the south, because for now I can only warm myself on the engine. With the exception of an almost fatal incident (a tree falls exactly on my tent) it goes well until I cross the Spanish border. On the motorway (!) To San Sebastian, the Zündapp turns off more easily and starts more and more difficult. I only get it working with a cooled engine, which always takes fifteen minutes. Something with the ignition, I guess.
I enter a garage in San Sebastian. Dozens of high-tech racing monsters give me confidence that the mechanic will immediately discover the problem of my simple moped. “Carrrburrratorrr,” says the Basque mechanic after explaining the problem to him with ridiculous moped impersonations and a few English words. A few hours later I can pick up the moped, but in the test ride it soon comes to a stop again.
A week goes by in which I return from the test drives increasingly despondent. The problem cannot be found. The mechanic has checked everything except the capacitor, but that can never cause the problem, he says. That is the sad side of the situation, the nice side is that I am stranded in a very nice city. The old center is located directly behind an idyllic bay and every night I drink too many sangrias with backpackers. Not only mopeds can drown.
‘Hey!’ We shout simultaneously when suddenly power roars out of the Zündapp. It is long after closing time when I finally look hopefully at the mechanic. The contact points! Delighted I say goodbye to the mechanic who is also visibly relieved.
The next morning the moped fails again after twenty kilometers, right in front of a truck garage. Moped dead and I am also at the end of my patience. Before I give up definitively, I want to try to replace the capacitor with the one I received when I bought the moped. The only part that has not been checked. In the garage I can borrow some spanners to make my first repair attempt. After an hour of tinkering everything is off and put on. Nervously I kick the kickstarter. It starts!
The moped largely determines my mood and my contacts with helpful people. I get to know my moped the hard way. The newest problem is easy to identify: rattling crankshaft. I have to get to Portugal because Zündapp parts will be more available there, since they have been produced there for a number of years. I reach Portugal with ominous rattling, a policeman spontaneously raises his thumb: ‘Zündapp OK!’. Two days later, a mechanic shows me the worn crankshaft, clutch shaft and bearings. He has overhauled the whole block and replaced all cooked parts.
“Can I make it to Africa?”
“Sim,” says the mechanic firmly.
A month after my departure, I sail on the boat to Ceuta with a big smile. Africa!
“It’s not a motorbike, it’s a moped,” I sigh after another request for a registration certificate. It looks bad for me, but two hours later I have all the necessary stamps. After the encouraging words of a customs officer “People don’t respect mopeds in Morocco”, I drive into the Reef Mountains.
Culture shock! Suddenly cars have been replaced by donkeys. Suddenly I became a real tourist, even though I thought that my helmet and old moped would camouflage me. I might as well have been wearing a Hawaii shirt with goggles because everyone is trying to entice me to stop while making hash smoke gestures. I don’t even dare to pause anymore. A car driver forces me into the kerb and hopefully offers me hash. Like a prey animal I am chased through the beautiful landscape until I seek the protection of a campsite.
After a few days, the shock disappears when Morocco reveals itself as a fairyland with medieval medinas, green oases and sweetly scented figs and dates. I marvel at the landscapes and feel ecstatic simply because I’m on the road.
Hey, a little red bird! One more, and one more. Now I see it: they are grasshoppers. The first of billions to color the road red through Western Sahara. I have no choice but to drive through them. They swarm in front of me like a bow wave or crush against my helmet. Cars must stop to scrape the grasshopper goo from the grill and windows. The more grasshoppers are crushed, the more other grasshoppers that feed on them, untill they in turn are crushed. As if I’m in a horror movie.
For days I drive on a long straight road with the sea on the right, the desert on the left and bottles of urine on the roadside that have been thrown away by hurried drivers. This is transit country; 1500 kilometers without exits to the border of Mauritania. There is a constant north wind howling in my back and that is dangerous because the engine does not cool this way. So I have to turn around every now and then to ride against the wind. Pretty annoying if you don’t want to go that way.
Seven weeks after I thought about turning around in Brussels, I am in front of the Mauritanian border. There is 6600 kilometers on the clock. The world since than has become quite sandy and more hostile because the border is dotted with landmines. For the border crossing I have to join a column following a black veiled customs officer. Yet, I get more intimidated by the grim border soldiers. They are the kings of this piece of no man’s land, they control the fate of my journey. Stress about a stamp. In vain I try to provoke sympathy with my ‘cute moped’. A few hours later they let me go and I relive the thrill of driving into an unknown country – if only with a flat tire (I suspect the intrusive ‘borderline parasites’ of the three iron wires in my front tire because I refused their taxi offer) . I decide to drive to a campsite in Nouadhibou because it gets dark quickly. Car wrecks and donkeys slalom around me. I have really arrived in Africa, I realize shocked.
A real Dutch enclave is created at the campsite when a herd of cars from the barrel race enters the campsite. In three weeks they drive with ‘barrels’ (compared to the moving fossils here they are formula one cars) from Amsterdam to Dakar. We all face the same challenge: getting to Nouakchott. There are three options for this: through the soft sand, over the beach or with an iron ore train. The train seems to be the best option for me, even though it leads me to the east and after that I will have to slog through loose sand. Nouadhibou – Nouakchott is the most difficult part of the Sahara crossing because there is no road yet, but there will be one in the future. If this stretch of 120 kilometers is paved, you can even cross the Sahara with a caravan. It is thought to be good for tourism and trade in the south. The north believes that the asylum seekers’ problem will increase. An historical road.
Three hours later than expected, the world’s longest train (three kilometers long!) enters Nouadhibou station. The train has just unloaded iron ore in the harbor and now people are allowed in the empty ore wagons for free. With some help I lift the moped on a wagon and park it against a railing – that will do. I climb into an iron ore tank. Everyone is hiding underneath them for reasons unknown to me. With successive bangs one after the other wagon starts moving and we drive into the night, into the desert but especially into the dust. An empty spot in the moonlit desert is my end station. I knock off a centimeter thick layer of dust and want to get out of the wagon as soon as possible because the train only stops briefly. Painfully slow, the old women are “unloaded” first along the only stairs. That politeness will cost me my moped! Hastily I finally jump out of the wagon, throw my luggage on the ground and sprint to my moped. I pull the moped with all my might, but because of the colossal blows it is stuck between the bars. An African man comes to my rescue but to no avail. Then the train starts moving… NO! Rarely did I curse so earnestly. I have to choose: leave luggage or moped? I choose to loose my moped and jump off the train. The moped disappears into the night… until the train stops. It stops! In no time I am lashing my moped again, this time helped by four Africans. Suddenly the moped gives way and we put it on the ground like a feather. Gratefully I shake hands with my heroes and I am left exhausted in the surreal desert night. I try to get some sleep before the sun rises, but the adrenaline in my blood prevents that.
After thousands of kilometers of desert in Morocco, Western Sahara and Mauritania, the landscape in Senegal is finally getting greener and the people darker and more colorful. The Senegal border crossing is notorious for its corruption, but luckily I have no cash money when I pass, and then corruption ends. I have reached my intended destination but Accra in Ghana will be my new final destination. I can’t go any further because the routes to the south or east are not accessible due to civil unrest and civil wars.
Damn flies! As fast as possible, occasionally almost falling over, I ride on a narrow, sandy forest path in Senegal. When I stop in the soft sand I immediately get painful bites on my unprotected hands. Tsetse flies fly after large moving objects, usually large game – or mopeds. The Lonely Planet teaches me this, and that the first symptom of the deadly sleeping sickness (that Tsetse flies transmit) is a sore that shows after five days. The chance of infection is extremely small, but after five days a sore immediately starts to grow on my hand, exactly on the spot of a bite. Well, there must be some kind of cure for it, I think, I hope. A nurse from the regional hospital tells me to come back tomorrow when the specialist is there. How long I have to live is a pressing question; I need to know now, if only by self-diagnosis. I dive into an internet cafe. The blood flows from my head when I read the hard facts: half a million deaths in Africa every year. Can only be treated at an early stage, but the medicines are no longer made because it is an African disease and therefore it is not lucrative. I look back at my ulcer, which looks even bigger. My cycling travel buddies are trying to cheer me up but I they can’t. We visit a private clinic where the doctor tells me it’s just an allergic reaction. I find it hard to believe. The next morning, with uncertain joy, I notice that the ulcer has narrowed slightly. That is not in accordance with the clinical picture! I feel like I’m allowed to play an extension in a lost match. Ver happy, I drive on through the Senegalese savannah with its gigantic Baobab trees and mud villages. People shout ‘Toebab (white man)! “Ca va?” “Oui, ca va bien!” Now I understand why they always ask that, because it is not that obvious. The life lesson of a pimple.
The 700 kilometer long road to Bamako, the capital of Mali, consists alternately of washboard and loose sand. A great way to destroy your truck, but nevertheless they are racing at full speed to leave me in a red cloud of dust. I regularly pass a stranded truck with a broken axle. Typically African: keep going until things go wrong. Suddenly two small mopeds with a trailer appear out of a dust cloud. Huh? I look at the drivers and they look at me. Incredible, colleagues! We squeeze the brakes simultaneously to make a ‘professional talk’. But that is disappointing because they are monolingual French. They drove from the South of France to Dakar and one of them is – very handy – a mechanic. In the trailers they transport a complete spare moped. I find my minimal preparation more practical.
300 Kilometers before Bamako things go wrong: For the fifth time that morning the moped comes to a halt and for the first time in this trip I wave a truck to a halt. “J’ai panne avec mon moto,” I tell the driver hoping to get a lift to a mechanic. A bit of a crazy question because the truck load protrudes a meter on all sides. Indeed I get the answer I expected: no place. What now? Just try once more to adjust the contact points. But first I pick up some rocks against the lions. Of course I just stranded in such an area. Although they are rarely seen, they are there. The contact points no longer come apart, so the spark plug does not make a good spark. Cause localized, but inaccessible because the protective cover is stuck. All that remains is one last, blunt repair attempt. I bend the precision mechanism apart with a screwdriver. The umpteenth decisive moment of this journey. With a kick on the kick starter, the moped roars like I kick a lion on its tail! Fixed.
West Africa is poor, poor by Western standards. Standards that are not based on joie de vivre but on calculations. Mali and Burkina Faso are among the ‘poorest’ countries in the world, and yet I see no poverty but beautiful, smiling, proud people. Why do we mainly see images of famine and poverty in the West and so little about the African art of living? Perhaps the West needs this image to glorify itself.
In Benin my passport was stamped full, and I still have to enter Togo. Stupid? Maybe yes, but I also didn’t expect to get this far with the Zündapp. I was able to pluck the Chinese visa from my passport, but the sticker left a remarkably sticky page. The Togolese customs officer makes frantic attempts to write on it with a pen. After five minutes he gives up. I laugh at the incident as innocently as possible. Three more customs officers are gathering to study my sticky passport. “C’est curieux,” I hear them say, but luckily he doesn’t notice and eventually manages to write in my passport. Border crossings remain exciting.
I’m gonna make it! Only 300 kilometers to go to Accra, the ultimate goal. Only a mountain pass in Togo still separates me from Ghana. The pass is steep and passes through a damp rainforest with beautiful butterflies. Calmly I drive up in first gear. I keep an eye on the temperature of the engine with my hand. Everything under control. Suddenly the moped stops with a lifeless thud. After five months of driving I recognize most problems flawlessly by ear, but this plop is new to me. A Togolese man tries to help me, but his help quickly degenerates into a disagreement: “It’s not the spark plug,” I say for the umpteenth time. The smart guy ignores the fact that I already have made 12000 educational kilometers on it. But what else could it be? There is a spark, there is air and fuel supply and there is compression but no explosion. I decide to push the moped uphill for two kilometers to a small hotel. There I tinker for two days to my beloved moped, but the farewell inevitably presents itself. This tropical paradise must become the new home for him. I unscrew the number plate, give the moped and all unnecessary stuff to the hotel clerk and walk to the bus station. It immediately becomes clear to me how safe and free I was on my moped: I can no longer escape from pushy salesmen.
From tropical Accra I fly back to the Netherlands, which lies under a gray cloud cover. In seven hours I am back to square one. This was my best trip ever!
Steven's moped travels 