The first time I ever road a motorbike was in 2007. Ilana and I were living in Ghana, working at an NGO when our Director told us about the “largest Film Festival in Sub-Saharan West-Africa,” FESPACO. We took a 20-hour bus from Accra to Ouagadougou and found a place to stay with some people we met in a taxi crossing the boarder into Burkina Faso. It sounds insane now, three years later, to say that we quite literally hopped on a bus in Ghana with no set plans or preparation for lodging or the road home, but that's pretty much exactly how it happened.
In addition to the amazing food (Burkina Faso is a former French Colony) everyone owned a two-wheeled something or other. Bicycles, mopeds, motorbikes, motorcycles… it was dizzying to watch the traffic race by, Muslim garb dancing behind the riders.
Naturally, I had to get my hands on one. We found someone to loan me his bike for a few days in exchange for an absurdly small fee. With a top speed of forty or fifty miles an hour and a marijuana leaf sticker pealing off the front, you’d never guess that it had the heart of a Harley. Riding the bike, we explored all that the Film Festival had to offer: Films (obviously) cafés, West-African grub, and an enormous crafts market. At every outlet, there was hundreds and hundreds of bikes parked next to each other. It was paradise surrounded by the Sahara.
One night, on our way home, we decided to ride around a lake near the house we were staying in. I opened the throttle as wide as I could - racing us through cool air from the lake. A boy riding a motorbike with his girlfriend’s arms locked around his waste at midnight next to a lake in West Africa.
In love?
Last Saturday, at 7:30 a.m., I held the front brake of a Suzuki such-and-such 250 and swung my leg over the saddle. It had started pouring the day before and wasn't going to stop anytime soon. Worse than the rain, the wind lurched up in gusts strong enough to knock over the porto-potty at one end of the vacant lot. Although waterproof rain-gear covered my entire body, the water quickly soaked my hands and feet and then climbed my arms and legs towards my chest. Whenever we were lined up, I hunched over the gas tank and touched the engine block with my gloved-hands to keep them from going numb. We rode for about four hours, barely going above ten or twelve mph, learning how to manipulate the clutch, throttle and brakes.
In love.
No comments:
Post a Comment