Up-Country -- not exactly Sport-Touring....

[doc47]

11 June 2019 (Further adventures with Timpa Marong, 2001 F650GS!)

(For those who aren't familiar with my sordid past, all this takes place in The Gambia, West Africa. :-)
Up-country! Ebrima (WAME administrator) and I are headed to a medical clinic in the village of Dankunku, in the Central River Region, to answer a call for help with their falling-apart staff quarters. We had intended to go a week ago, but I came down with a nasty little bout of malaria. Now, with me self-assessing at 80%capacity, we decide to go. Contact! Chocks-away! 
Once out of the congested sprawl and bumper-pool-driving of the western Gambia, the riding is fun. The 2-lane blacktop is smooth and flat and you can motor along at 120 kph(74 mph) until...you hit the first checkpoint. And that is way too soon. And they are way too frequent. They come in four flavors: police, immigration, army and ECOMOG (Military units from other W. African countries invited to help stabilize The Gambia after the ouster of former dictator, Yahya Jammeh. They remain in The Gambiaand are welcome.) Under the Jammeh dictatorship there were far more army checkpoints. Now there are just an exasperating array of stops; sometimes there's a checkpoint a kilometer from another checkpoint. With Ebrima on pillion he is able to tell the police/immigration/etc.person something that gets us through in short order. When I'm by myself, I have to do more explaining. If I have the aluminum Hepco & Becker panniers on the bike I frequently get pulled over so they can look in them. The boxy aluminum must look like some sort of military container. So, I have to pull over, shut off, kickstand down, get off, open the panniers, let them look inside, close thepanniers, get back on the bike, kickstand up, start engine, pull away, only to repeat the same thing....
Actually, I'm exaggerating. I've learned that if I approach the officer with a salute (Gambian officers like saluting.), a smile, a friendly greeting, and tellhim/her right away where I'm going and that I represent a charitable organization off to do good for the Gambia they almost always are respectful, friendly and kind. 
They don't share my exasperation. They don't know that I've ridden from Savannah, Georgia, to Seattle,Washington, without ever encountering a checkpoint. No checkpoints isn't their norm, it's mine, and I'm in their country!
I keep having to tell myself that.
One officer wants to see my papers but by the time I fish them out Ebrima has talked him out of it and he waves us through.
The first hour-and-a-half of the trip is through lush, tall forest with lots of palm trees and huge, old trees of various sorts. Villages every 2-3 kilometers. Sand is the cover. Shallow, small valleys hold shallow, small, meandering creeks that flatten out as they approach the immense River Gambia. Zebu cattle graze in the swales. 
Gradually, the road acquires a roll, an undulation, and things dry out. The forest is drier, scrubbier, no more than 4 meters tall. Here and there are signs of recent brushfires. Hornbills loop tree to tree and a troupe of monkeys race breakneck across the road and dive into the undergrowth. The laterite bones of Africa start to show through the soil. A perfect place to sing, “Celia,you're breaking my heart...” at the top of my lungs inside myhelmet. 
Always on the lookout for cows, goats, sheep, chickens, donkeys, dogs and pigs on the road or appearingsuddenly from the verge. Traffic is sparse. Villages are less frequent.
Coming to the side road that leads to Dankunku I pull over and let air out of the tires. We learn later that this was largely unnecessary. The road proves to be scrubbed laterite, quite hard. 
At Dankunku, their staff quarters are a shambles. Ragged, ramshackle, depressing, with collapsing ceilings,bats in the rafters, mildew, crumbling plaster and paint from the Bronze Age.Serving in these remote clinics is hard enough. The staff should at least have a reasonable place to live.
Behind the women's quarters there's a two-unit toilet. On the right side most of the concrete floor is just a big hole. These are pit toilets, mind you. You squat over a hole and what you've just produced goes into the tank directly below. Youare squatting on the roof of the tank. Well, someone was squatting and the roof collapsed. I'll leave the details to your imagination,but, yes, the person was injured. I prefer not to think about it!
The toilet is unusable and the women have to go some distance to use the toilet in another building, something they don't like to do at night.
And the answer is, yes, we are going to fix this.
With the sun still on the ascendant, we mount up, head out. At the tarmac I use my small hand-pump to air the tires back up. Tedious but necessary. We stop at Pakaliba, half an hour down the highway, where, last year, we did a borehole, water tower, plumbing, made their staff quarters habitable, and had enough cement and tile left over to provide the clinic with a small lab.
Buba Jobe, the head nurse, is an old friend from years ago, when he was posted in Noo Kunda on the North Bank. He's a big, round-headed, broad-shouldered man who has been manning these remote outposts, far from his family, for years....al lfor about $80 a month. He appears a bit tired but we get a warm greeting. The place looks great. 
He asks us to check on another clinic further down the line, in Jalangbereh. We'd evaluated the clinic last year but the staff had seemed unmotivated and disorganized. We had decided to give it a pass. 
“There's a new head nurse,” Buba told us. “He's OK, and they need help.”
We do stop, find the new head nurse to be serious. 
What's your main priority, I ask. He tells me the outdoor shelter/waiting area where they do teaching is important but he's worried the roof will come off once the storms of the approaching rainy season come. We look. The corrugate's not bad but the wooden framework underneath and some of the concrete pillars holding it all up are pretty questionable. A builder is summoned. He shows up in five minutes with another man. Ebrima and the guys discuss the problem in Mandinka. We make promises. They make promises. We're on our way.
Back on the bike. I'm tired. It's hot, probably in the 90s. The low-fuel light is on. It turns out the next fuel, in Soma, is only 19 km, so we'll be ok. We get to Soma, a road-junction town, the one big “city” in the area– it's still all single-story buildings – and stop for food. Ebrima knows a woman opposite the bus garage who makes clean food. He has plassas. I have a delicious meat domoda (peanut sauce, my fave) and a bottle of Malta.
Water in us. Fuel in the bike, and we're outa here.
We make one more stop. Sibanor, our brother's wife's village, is on the main highway and I want to stop to say hi toher mom, Ahya, who is a dear. At the family compound we're told she'sout in the village somewhere, so we sit around for awhile and hydrate up. She finally shows up, we hug, she wants me to eat some “monoo” porridge, which I normally love, but we've just eaten and I beg off. She's disappointed. African mothers are like Jewish and Italian mothers. “Eat! Eat!”
On the way back I'm tired and hot and the checkpoints are even more exasperating...for me. Ebrima just accepts them as normal. Actually, I can't remember seeing Ebrima get worked up about anything. As soon as the bike gets some momentum we have to stop for another checkpoint. I'm just about ready to pop off and say something stupid at the next checkpoint when, as I pull up, I see the policewoman is an old friend who used to be posted at the border. She busts into a huge grin and so do I. She's now posted up here in the boonies. All OK. I am saved from my alligator-mouth. We move on.
Coming back to the Kombos, the heavily-populated littoral, the driving becomes its usual horror. It's like being inside a video game you play for keeps. Baddies pop up everywhere. You take nothing for granted and have to be at top alert 110% of the time. It is exhausting! 
Twice, cars pull out directly in front of me as though I wasn't there. Once past the Senegambia area, we're following two cars on a long, blind, curve with a solid white line, when a short-wheel-base Land Rover whips by, passes us and the two cars ahead. Suddenly, there's an oncoming car. Land Rover is in his lane. Ebrima and I are both holding our breaths when the oncoming car swerves over onto the shoulder to make way for the Land Rover. Exhale! It's been a 40-minute litany of stupid driving, but this is way over the top, even for The Gambia.  I'm outraged. When I can, I get around the two cars ahead, catch up to a few hundred meters behind, and keep the Land Rover in sight. I see it make two more really dangerous passes. Finally, we get to an intersection where there is is one of TheGambia's few motorcycle cops. I cross the road in front of the LandRover, which is stopped for a red light. A young man is driving witha young woman in the passenger seat. I pull over, tell the cop what we have witnessed, and give him a description and the license number. By this time the light has changed and the Land Rover is gone. I expect the policeman to chase off in hot pursuit. Instead, he whips out his cell phone and says he'll notify the next checkpoint.
After that, I don't know what happened.I hope they got the guy for something.
Part of the problem is the police don't have any vehicles or radios. There are no patrol cars, no radar, no traffic enforcement. Just the recent addition of a few motorcycles donated by the Chinese government. Lots of people get their licenses by paying off the police. Few know the rules of the road.
Libertarians, don't like government? Try driving in The Gambia!
We go home to Banjul. By now it's dark. I'm beat. It was 3 ½ hours each way. More than 500 km. We got a lot done and it was a good day. We'll get estimates, coordinate with the builders, and get the jobs done. In sha allah!

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[Marty Hill]

Hi Doc, good to hear from you!