34 Reasons to Watch Spencer Conway Across Africa

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 Unfortunately my map was more than six years out of date and would prove to be not such a reliable friend.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 centre of a tropical jungle with no cars, bicycles, people, electricity or buildings of any kind and to be honest, no road.

What Michelin called a road turned out to be a track with ruts metres 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 kilometre by kilometre and eventually to a 100m by 100m.

The first day I covered thirty kilometres 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 metres of tangled branches, lianas and dead wood 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. It must have been thirty degrees, but I had to keep my protective gear on to prevent myself 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this was not the thoroughfare my optimistic mind had conjured up when studying, what I now realized, was a seriously out of date map. On the second day I managed fourty kms 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. 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 backwards 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 travelling 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.