We got out of Burkina Mag. at around 6:15 a.m., which was nice because traffic was light. We found the National Road 2 and made our way a little out of town and stopped to gas up. I checked my oil just to make sure (I promised myself to give the bike a go-over everyday) and couldn't believe that it was a quart low. XR650's are tricky for oil checking, they have to be warmed up and checked sitting upright, not on their stands, so I checked it again and found the same results. All the trips I've taken on the bike in Togo have been short 100-300 mile trips and i've rarely ridden over 100kmh. Yesterday we rode 350 miles, and a 100 of it at high speeds. I took of the smog kit from the bike and think maybe the oil is being blown out through the crankcase breather or something like that. Nothing really I can do about it now, other than keep watching it. No smoke-no problem...right? I bought a bottle of oil for a spare and as I got on the bike JJ said I should take a look at my tire. If you've been keeping up with the posts, I'd been rather proud of my $25 Ching Shen tires that've worked fine putting around town and to villages. Apparently, however, going high speeds over blazing hot asphalt is not there thing. It had completely thrown two nobbies and was significantly cracked at others. We discussed for a minute whether to head north and find a used one or try to find something in town, knowing that if I was wrong we'd lose the trip. The problem was that even though I'd been planning the trip for months, and telling JJ about it and that it'd be 10 days, he was thinking 10 days for him, meaning he'd come up a half day to Kara on day 1 and then a half day down on day 10. I wished he'd read the schedule better... So, if we lost a day finding a tire that meant I didn't see Djenne, if I pushed on and lost the tire we could lose the whole trip. I decided to go back into Ouaga to see what we could find. By accident we ended up at a dead end street which had a "Honda" dealership next to it. Two guys were sitting outside it, looking like they might work there, so they told me that while they didn't have the tires they had a second shop that did. The older guy hopped on his bike and biked us down some alleys to a typical street side motorcycle-stuff shack. The ones there were used and in bad shape and finally the owner of several of these shacks showed up and presented us with a Ching Shen, and several other Chinese tires. I thought it'd be better to go to the Toyota dealership where they sell Yamaha bikes to see what they had. I told the old man to call a cab and tell him to lead us there and that I'd give him something for his help. He came back to say the cab would be $12...For 2 miles...I told him to remember I lived in Togo and that i'd pay $2, without asking he said "that's ok." Wonder where the other $10 would have gone huh. So we follow them through some alleys and end up at the Honda place instead of Toyota. He said he had some other people wanting to bring some for me to see. I'd had about enough at this moment and just before hauling off on the bike thought i'd go inside and ask the Honda guys what they had. It turns out that the old man didn't work there and was just hustling us, hoping to get a cut from a street side deal. He was a total lier. The Lebanese guy owning the shop however, was really cool. He called the Toyota dealer to see what they had, and then some other tire places. Turns out there's a Kenda dealer (a taiwanese brand) who had one and was bringing it over. I had fun changing the tire with the guys in the garage there, who had actual tools, and teaching them how to get the chain adjusted on a big bike like mine. I bought a can of chain lube, thanked the guys, and by 9:30 a.m. we were back on the bikes heading toward Ouahigouya, 190k away. We stopped in Ouahigouya to use their atm, gas up the bikes, and eat our meal of the trip, Kcliff bars. It was getting hotter already but I was excited about the dirt roads to come. From Ouahigouya it's about 100km to the next "big" town, Koro Mali. The road was dirt, packed with some loose sand on the top. For my bike, it was heaven. I'll just say it once, the BMW just couldn't hack it on anything dirt so every dirt road meant half speed ahead for me. We got to Koro around 2:30pm i'd say. The border crossing was easy and quick on the Burkina side (even though we never got stamped out) but the Mali side took a good bit of time. We ended up having a great conversation with the guys on the Lassez Passez side about faith, one guy was an animist who'd read the New Testament and had great recall and the other guy was an African Jew. Of course, that led to some great talks.
The road from Koro to Bankass looked like a war zone. We filled up in Koro and while only 55km in distance, it took us 2 hours to get to Bankass. The main road was really ratted, 1 meter deep holes a meter in diameter resulted in zig-zag madness. I was able to jump down onto side roads made of thick sand but JJ really suffered. That made for lots of u-turns fearing he'd fallen and lots of waiting and watching for the headlight in the distance. After quite a battle we made it to Hotel Nommo in Bankass. The best campement there in my opinion. We unloaded the bikes, set up our tents on the roof of the buildings for $6 a piece, ordered spaghetti for dinner, and enjoyed nice showers at dusk. I don't know why, but that was probably one of my better days of riding. Just plain fun challenging riding. That evening we tried to get a guide for our next day's treck across the Dogon cliffs, taking donkey paths to Doentza. The guide that showed up had a bike but wanted $150 to guide us to Douentza. He said the roads were rough and that was a good price. Not that we wanted to rip him off, but $150 was about half of what each of us planned to spend on the entire trip. I'd already bought Tracks4Africa which had gps waypoints on it for the route so we decided just to take our chances the next day. We were out by 8:30 with a 5:30 a.m. wake up the next day.
Pictures: The gazebo where we ate at Hotel Nommo and our bikes, notice the Ching Shen strapped on the back of mine.
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