Dr. Gregory Frazier - Road Report

From Botswana - November 25, 1999 Friend Bob Higdon would have liked today. 160 k's of foot deep dust hiding potholes the size of bath tubs. In between these killer dust bowls were washboard sections. The washboard sections are fine at 40-60 mph, but that is too fast to slow down before your drop into one of these flour wallows filled with white dust. Hit one of those at 40 mph and for sure it is a leg breaker. So the rub is you have to run along at about 30 mph which means the washboard section rattles everything. The ends of the handlebars move up and down about 1 one inch, my wrists go numb and you are moving so slow the white dust keeps up with you. When I stopped and blew my nose some stuff came out that looked like wet flour. After that one time I quit looking after I blew my nose. The 160 k's took me four hours, at the end of which I really wished friend Higdon had been here with me, I can almost imagine what he would have been saying. I am in Botswana. For those of you who have not kept up, I am moving around Africa on my 1981 R80 GS, a pretty reliable ride if you know what to fix. Before I started off I had Motorrad Electric send me the "right stuff", like rebuilt rotor, new electric can, high output regulator, and some super coils. All of this stuff is junk on the original R80's so I carry the original stuff as spares. It's hot here, just like you see on the discovery channel. I am trying some body armour from ActionStations, Bohem stuff, advertised in BMW RA. Good stuff for these hot days. I feel much better than when it is so hot I take off the jacket and put in on the back. At least I have some arm, back and elbow protection. I got into a couple of good tank slappers yesterday on my Hell trip and was glad to have the body armour on. Luck saved me more than once until I learned to go slow and eat the bumps. I am in good health. The weather to get down here was the usual shit. Rain and snow in the Black Forest and what I left in the USA was cool fall. Down here it is like summer near Las Vegas. Some bad joss found me. Anyone who knows me knows I hate snakes. Yesterday two mongooses darted across the road in front of me, I think the second was a boy and the first was a girl. Anyway, it was a bad day for mongoose #2 as I nailed him. I even went back and tried to give him a little mouth to mouth, knowing that if he lived some snake would die. Bad joss for me and the mongoose, his light was snuffed. Camping here is about as exciting at it gets. Two nights ago I put my tent up in the dark and after it was up, I noticed several (like 20-30) huge piles of dung around my campsite. When I say huge I mean as big around as a manhole cover and a foot high. Now a Montana cow can leave a pretty good pile, but whatever left these was much bigger. A quick inspection of these foot hile piles found none to be steaming. That I thought was a good sign. Sometime in the middle of the night I felt the earth shake. It was as if someone had dropped a 50 lb. bag of potatoes from the 20th floor of a building. Something big, very big, was near my tent and I wondered it it could see my tent or tell it apart from a bush, which these big animals walk through like they were not there. My reaction? Well, I am not really a tough guy so I decided to stay right where I was, in my tent. It was either a rhino or elephant just outside and I was an easy mark for either trying to get away. Instead I turned on my flash light and did my best to sing "I Get High With A Little Help From My Friends" Joe Cocker style. The pile dropper outside decided either they did not like my singing or my light. I heard them walk through a few bushes and into the night. The nice thing about camping here is it is about 1/10th the price of a motel. I asked for the price of a room one night and was told $75.00 US, camping was $4.00 US. So I camped, but hung out at the hotel pool (the campground was behind the hotel, part of the complex), and had a $3.50 dinner in the restaurant. One day I took a "safari tour." The tourist office lady, "Botswana Sally," told me not to think about the money (about what a hotel room cost), and not to say "maybe I will come back later, just do it" and I did. It was one of my better decisions. 340 kilometers of very bad road, knee deep sand, ruts, and no pavement made me very glad someone else was driving. It was a great game day with elephants, hippos, a million impalas and even a few crocodiles. The highlight of the day was when we were returning. A large truck, going way too fast, came around a curve in the deep sand in our lane. My driver did right by slowing to a stop and pulling to the far left (here they drive on the wrong side of the road, the left side), but the truck driver made a second error by jamming on the brakes and running square into a tree. The tree gave way and fell on our open air truck and his truck. Great luck for us as none of the three of us was hurt. Bad luck for the truck drive as he smashed the front end of the truck, about 100 kilometers from town. I was a great experience for me watch this accident close up. About the only problem I have had with the bike is one of the cork gaskets above the float bowl died. On the side of the road, 100 k's from the nearest town and about 1,000,000 k's from the nearest BMW shop, I was able to make the repair with the spare cork gasket I just happened to have in my box of spare parts. Some days God smiles on Gregory and I guess this was one of them. Food here is good. People are friendly and little kids (and some big kids) along side the road wave and want you to stop if you are on a bike. In one village I thought was empty I stopped to take a photograph and out of nowhere about 20 people appeared to inspect me. I must have looked like a Martian to them, wearing a helmet, red enduro jacket, motocross boots (actually Combat Touring boots from Areostitch), and gloves in 100 degree heat. We talked, or tried to, them in their village language and me yelling and laughing right back at them. It was great fun. Their offer to come to dinner (I think it was to eat dinner, not be dinner) I turned down and spread some candy I had through the crowd. The next guy who pulls into this village on a bike better have some candy because I may have spoiled them. The only other motorcycle travelers I have seen in a week or 10 days have been two Brits traveling on a couple BMW R80 GS's. I ran into them in my campground and we started to exchange road information. The one guy, Mathew, said he thought it was me when he saw my bike (I was inside a building). Turns out he knew of me from my book, RIDING SOUTH. He and his buddy are just starting their world tour and he ordered my book, from Whitehorse Press, some months ago. It is a small world. It gets even smaller when he reminded me that after he got my book he emailed me to ask about getting his bike from Capetown to Argentine and I sent him an answer back. He and his buddy will meet up with me again in a month or so when we all collect in the Capetown area of South Africa for a Christmas/New Years Motorcycle Travelers Meeting. Right now there should be about 6-8 of us roaming around Africa who will be there. It should be a good party, much like the one fellow travelers had in Ushuaia three years ago. Everything else goes well. I have made it across all borders so far, have not read any USA news for a couple of weeks and the smell of smoke tells me they are starting to fry up dinner outside this rather rustic cybercafe. Gregory, on the road