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I had to link this one up that a friend sent me the other day. This is one of the funniest things I have seen in a long time…a little piglet that is afraid to get her feetsies dirty!

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1025428/Pig-Boots-The-worlds-porker-afraid-mud.html

We have been waiting for word on our Angolan visas now for nearly two weeks. That fact that this past Thursday, May 1st was May Day, or International Workers Day did not help our situation in the least bit. May Day is celebrated throughout the world, except in the United States where we honor workers with the Labor Day holiday in the fall. Depending on where you are, May Day shuts down the country from anywhere from a day, to over a week, as was the case when we were waiting for our paperwork in China.

Here in the Congo, the May Day festivities officially only last one day, however, because May Day fell on a Thursday this year, it effectively meant that everyone had a four day weekend, including the consular staff working on our visas. The two “official” days off from work, plus the reduction in productivity leading up to those off days means that we are relegated to waiting even longer for our visas. The current word at the consulate is “sometime this week,” although they are still reluctant to give us any exact days or timeframe estimates. Unfortunately, I am still reluctant to get too excited about this news, because they said the same thing last week.

Luckily one of our new friends from South Africa, Charles, is a budding professional angler and has all of his equipment here in the Congo with him along with some extra gear to spare. Since everyone who is in any capacity to help us get the hell out of the Congo has been out of the office for the past four or five days, we thought we might as well go fishing. Why not? Everyone else has. Unfortunately, our motivation to get up at 5 in the morning was not enough to impress the fish as we did not catch much of anything, but it was a chance to get in the car and go for a drive… something this trip is all about and something we have not really done in quite a while.

Charles knew of a nice quiet spot to set up and fish

Mark and Charles try and catch some breakfast

Still not feeling fully recovered from malaria, I caught some Z’s

On March 6, 2008 the Thundra and Little Pepe rumbled down the streets on our approach to Dakar, Senegal. I guess rumbling into town is a bit of an exaggeration because we literally crawled into town at a snail’s pace due to the intense Dakar traffic. It took 25 days to cover the 3,500 miles (5,600 km) from Lisbon to Dakar and although we were the only official participants in the unofficial 2008 Dakar Rally, it still feels good to say that we did it. The sections of the The World by Road Dakar Rally (TWBRDR) though Western Sahara, Mauritania and the Sahara Desert itself were a bit challenging from time to time, both physically and mentally… southern Morocco and Western Sahara officially take the blue ribbon to date for the highest number of police/military checkpoints crossed in a given stretch of road… but it actually was not all that bad.

Dakar is the end of the Rally but also represents the western-most point in Africa

We did drive under a few banners as we arrived in Dakar, but unfortunately, they were not for us. Instead, the banners were for the Organization of the Islamic Conference that was getting ready to commence in Dakar. The conference was being held at the Meridian Hotel in N’Gor which was about a 10 minute walk from where we were staying with Antoine, the friendly French fish biologist who rescued us at the Senegalese border and let us crash at his house in Dakar… another story. Dignitaries, heads of state, many of which are OPEC members, and other important people were arriving and being shuttled around this part of town, and as a result, the whole area was subject to somewhat predictable yet still seemingly random road closures and police checkpoints.

The official, unofficial 2008 Dakar Rally finish line

It was obvious when we arrived that Dakar was franticly trying to put the final touches on a citywide facelift. It was also obvious that Dakar had come nowhere close to meeting its goals for infrastructure improvements slated to be completed in time for the conference. In fact, people were still working on public works improvements even after the first conference panels began discussing what ever it was they were discussing. Apparently, and this is all hearsay mind you, Senegalese officials had been given quite a large sum of money from Gulf States that was to be directed towards citywide improvements. Unfortunately, a lot of that money ended up in people’s pockets and any money that did go towards improvements looks like it went to companies that should have no business being in construction.

Work continues even though the conference (sign in background) has already started

It will be amazing if the work that was actually completed in time for the conference lasts through the year to the next one. Case in point: they were going to lay concrete sidewalks along the main boulevard leading from the airport to the conference venue. Well, time ran out, so to show their benefactors that they had put the money to good use, workers were pouring concrete into forms that were simply set on top of uncompacted sand. No prep work, just pour it, paint it and move on. The job was done so poorly and hastily, that sections that had been poured only weeks before had already started to crumble from the weight of pedestrians and cars. Personally, I would have rather just spent the money to clean up the sand rather than pour a sidewalk that will consist of rubble in a few months, but hey, as long as it lasts long enough for the delegates to walk on it!

This sidewalk section is still being completed yet is already falling apart!

Anyway, I can sense that I have digressed from the main point of this entry which was to let you know that we won the TWBRDR and in a year when the official Dakar Rally was canceled, we blazed on!

Here at The World by Road, we have many different ways of saving money. From the full service kitchen we can setup out of the back of the truck or even sometimes bring with us into the hotel room for late night snacks to the faring we are working on to increase gas mileage, we have many ways to cuts costs across the board. The floorspace in hotel rooms many times is a sea of foam pads and sleeping bags filled with crew members and in some cases like our latest room in Agadir, Morocco, a 4 little bears setup keeps the four of us just an arms reach away all night long in our $22 per night room. We eat local food and sometimes just don’t eat at all. Coca Cola has enough calories to count as a meal, right?

At the end of the day we are still struggling for money and sometimes it is nice to treat ourselves to a top notch hotel to break up the monotony of our streamlined budgeting techniques. At place like the Hyatt or the Hilton, everything is taken care of, and there is something to be said for that. All of the backpackers and self-proclaimed hardcore travelers out there are probably scoffing as they read this, but from time to time it is nice to check into a hotel and when we ask the question of where we can park the cars the immediate answer is, “Where would you like the valet to park them, sir?” The truth is that I prefer to camp over staying in a hotel at all, but in a city where there are security concerns about the cars, a ton of work to do and enough grime caking everything you own to raise concerns with the local health department, a couple of nights on the other side of the tracks is welcome.

Since the beginning of the trip we have been honing our skills on getting everything discounted or free when possible. In Casablanca we may have gotten a little too confident in our skills of persuasion when we approached the Hyatt in the center of downtown with the grandiose idea of getting accommodation for the entire crew at a moments notice, but hey, how do you get better if you do not try for bigger fish?

 

 How not to get a free hotel [1:49m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (533)

As the The World by Road Dakar Rally (TWBRDR) enters its second week the route has us now in country number three on the way to Senegal. To be exact, we are currently in Fes, Morocco. We actually made it as far south as Casablanca, but have backtracked northeast through Rabat to get some more onward visas (Mali only took two hours - whoot, whoot!) and decided to drive further east to Fes to celebrate Shoppman’s 29th birthday on the 17th in true Moroccan style. Technically, in a rally of this nature you are forced to backtrack a bit in order to ensure that you take the best route possible and to keep the competition guessing and the last time we checked, we are still in the lead.

Fes is a pretty awesome place and the winding alleys of the Medina are a great place to get lost among spice vendors, vegetable stands and tanneries. Unfortunately, I do not think that you are allowed to drive through the Medina itself, but yesterday we somehow managed to do just that. In looking for a place to stay, we soon found ourselves in an alleyway that continued to get narrower and narrower the deeper we drove. We soon found ourselves past the point of no return. It would have been extremely difficult to back out given how far we had come and although the path in front of us looked impassable, the friendly local Moroccan, Abdul, who joined us for the ride reassured us that we would be able to make it through. As it turns out, Abdul knows quite a few people inside the Medina and one of them was kind enough to run point for the trucks as we drove through vegetable stands and fruit vendors. This guy was amazing. With a single swoop he cleared small children and the elderly from the path of the massive Toyotas rumbling down the Medina and made sure that not even one zucchini or stray mint leaf bushel was smashed under our tires. The whole event was kind of like watching Charlton Heston part the Red Sea in the Ten Commandments but in this case, we had a front row seat.

Are you sure we can drive through here?

This guy seems to think that otherwise

Little Pepe winds through the fruit stalls

People stand and stare in amazement… or disapproval

After about half and hour and another five to stop and buy a kilo of strawberries from the rear passenger window of Little Pepe, we made it out of the Medina and into wider streets. It was quite an experience and surprisingly enough, we did not manage to piss anybody off. In fact, we received a lot of complements about the trucks and even a few shouts of “viva le Paris-Dakar” after which we replied back “viva le TWBRDR (twiber-dee-are)!” We wound our way around the Medina once again and found out where we were headed but not before convincing Abdul that we were all truly nuts because we wanted to run the gauntlet of street stalls again. Some people in the Dakar Rally get bogged down in the sand… we got bogged down in people and vegetables. It just goes to show you that the TWBRDR requires just as much, if not more, skill behind the wheel. Next up on the rally, back to Rabat for some more visas, back to Casablanca to drop a few passengers off and then the wide open expanses of the western Sahara Desert.

Brook tries to film amid the chaos while business continues after we pass

Stopping to buy strawberries as the light at the end of the tunnel gets brighter