Red Tape and White Knuckles

Author/Guide: Lois Pryce

Why a Booktrail?

2006: One Woman’s Motorcycle Adventure through Africa

ISBN: 978-0099513599
Genre: Adventure, Travelogue

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What you need to know before your trail

Unafraid of a challenge, Lois Pryce began the kind of adventure most of us could only ever dream of. She put on her sparkly crash helmet, armed herself with maps and a baffling array of visas, and got on her bike. Destination: Cape Town – and the small matter of tackling the Sahara, war-torn Angola and the Congo Basin along the way – this feisty independent woman’s grand trek through the Dark Continent of Africa is the definitive motorcycling adventure.

Locations

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Travel Guide

Africa

10,000 miles through Tunisia, Algeria, Niger, Nigeria, Cameroon, Gabon, Congo, Democratic Republic of Congo (Zaire), Angola, Namibia and South Africa.

Brazzaville

In Brazzaville port the usual hoo-hah involving small men with big rubber stamps was particularly drawn out and painful, requiring a constant stream of cash and an industrial scale of photocopying. By the end of it even Ricky, my self-appointed helper was starting to look a bit stressed, and we lost his friend Kevin somewhere along the way when he got roughed up and thrown out of an office by angry hulk of a man in a grey uniform. Eventually Ricky beckoned me to follow him on board the ferry, and I rode up the rickety gangplank, clanking my way on to the boat. It was a rusting old iron heap that comprised no more than a covered deck and a few rows of seats for passengers. I parked my bike facing out towards Kinshasa and stared over the water, feeling more apprehensive than ever before on my journey.

Caconda

Emerging from the forest under a black sky, I was met with a storm howling across the desolate plateau. The thunder moved nearer with every clap and the rain was ceaseless, coming down in sheets but the ground could no longer absorb it quickly enough and torrents of muddy water flowed past my wheels while huge chunks of the dirt road were disintegrating before my eyes. Overhanging trees and thorn bushes dangled in my path, scratching my face and ripping my waterproofs, allowing yet more rain to soak me quite literally, to the skin. This was wild, high, open country with not a glimmer of civilisation in sight; there were no people living here now, long since driven out in the civil war’s slashing and burning of the villages. I longed to see some evidence of the human hand at work, just a hut or a farmhouse, a truck or car. But the only signs of man’s existence were grim and sinister, in the shape of rusting tanks at the roadside and the crumbling concrete of improvised roadblocks.

South Africa – Cape Town

The delight when Lois arrives at the destination and takes a picture of her and her bike at the famous sign is palpable. “Africa’s very own Meditteranean style melting pot, the perfect mirror image of Marseille”