Today we didn’t do quite as much as previous days. We hung around Natalie’s apartment till 1:00 and then went out for lunch. On the way out we saw an army surplus store that had a confederate flag flying out side. Not what we expected to see in Eastern Europe.

So after lunch we walked around Prague for a bit and just took it in. One thing that caught our eye was how they tow vehicles. They don’t tow them, they just lift them off the ground and put them on the back of a truck and drive away with them. This is a little scary when you drive a 231lb Smart Car and they’re picking up a full size SUV.

Then Adam and I drove around the northern end of Prague looking for a shooting range we never found. That was kinda a bummer, and then we hit some horrible traffic trying to get back into town and got lost for a while.

After an hour we finally met back-up with Natalie. From there we had dinner at a great little place and then continued to tour Prague at night. We saw some really great squares and ended the night with a drink in a bar that was in some underground catacombs. It was way cool. On the walk home to the tram we got rained on and the temperature had dropped a little. I was very happy to get to wear my jacket for the first time since being stateside in November. I miss occasional cold weather.

We started out day 3 in Tuebingen, Germany. We had spent the night at the Globalscope Germany campus house. Chandler Creel was kind enough to show us around the town. In the morning he and some other fellow GT-CCF alumni were working on the walkway to the house, so to avoid hard work Adam and I grabbed some pastries and headed for Stuttgart.

In Stuttgart we tried to find the Mercedes museum, but it seemed to be too much work. I found a DHL office and mailed in a broken part from the X-ray machine in the dental clinic in Monrovia. This is how things get fixed in Africa. Someone takes them to Europe and mails them in from there. Right as we were leaving Stuttgart we saw a sign on an exit that said “Porsche” instantly Adam drove across traffic, and we were in heaven. We didn’t feel like paying to go in the museum, so we were quite happy to just walk around the show room. We picked out colors, trim, and rims. It was way cool. We then drove on to Prague.

Along the way we stopped at a Burger King on the side of the road. Adam was disappointed that were weren’t having a “cultural experience”, but I was happy to have a first world experience that reminded me of home. We also got a little scared when we saw signs to prepay for toll roads. We thought we were just flying through the electronic payment stations. Then we asked someone and they said it was only for lorries, so we were all right. Close call.

On the last stretch before Czech the inevitable happened, we got pulled over. It was so refreshingly pleasant. After spending the last year and a half dealing with law enforcement officers that only want bribes, and not justice, meeting two of Germany’s finest who were just checking a rental car from Belgium before it got to the Czech Republic was so nice. They were in an unmarked Audi and pulled up behind us and followed us for a while. Then they pulled in front of us and a little LED screen popped up from their trunk and told us to pull over. It was way slick. If the LNP only knew. They both spoke perfect English and were very nice. They just asked for passports and if we had any drugs or weapons. We laughed and said, “No.” They started to search our bags, but then just looked at them and said, “yeah it’s OK.” They asked how far we had come and where we were going, and then told us we needed a bigger car. No mention of us going 140kmh (86mph) when we passed them. And then we were off.

At around 7:00pm we pulled into Natalie’s place in Prague. Her place is way sweet. The man who owns the apartment complex is an architect, and the apartment she has the owner built for himself, so it’s way nice. Natalie and I went for a drink in Prague to get a sense of the city and Adam stayed home and researched BMW options for the drive home.

Today we left Huy, Belgium and headed south on some great back country roads to Luxembourg. Along the way we came across some old logging trails and tested out the off road capabilities of the smart car. Needless to say we got it stuck. It seems the wheel base of the smart car is the same as the stance of a regular car, so our ride got stuck perpendicular to the ruts in the road. Thankfully the car weights nothing, so Adam put a log under the car and just leveraged the back wheels off the ground so i could push it around till we got it out.

In Luxembourg I ate at a Tex-Mex restaurant. I was in heaven. Fajitas with sour cream. What more could you want? We also had some great ice cream and then hit the road. Luxembourg seemed really cool, and less touristy that Brussels. I’ve also been noticing that everyone in Europe has sweet motorcycles. It really makes me wana buy one in Liberia, but they’re way too expensive and hard to find. I finally checked off a life goal of driving on the autobahn today, but it was in a smart car that was electronically limited to 150kmh, so I’ll need to keep working on that.

We stopped in Bitche, France where we saw the Bitche fort, then we drove through Germany to Tuebingen where we’ll be staying the night. In Tuebingen is a campus ministry that affiliated with the campus ministry I went to at Georgia Tech. It’s so nice having friends in cool places.

When we woke on day 2 in Kortie Town we had another shower and breakfast and then walked over to Dougamai, the big village in the area. We saw the graves of chiefs and other great men in the middle of town, and met some palm wine tappers. Before getting back on the road I got to hold the youth chiefs “single barrel.” I finally realized that Liberian hunters use single barrel breach break shotguns and not hunting rifles. Needless to say I enjoyed this moment.

So we finally made it to Voinjama around 12pm. We were met by Johnny who was a professional surveyor and had done work for the Carter Center and other organizations to evaluate various things. He had even had experience with surveys on PDAs. Something I’ve had an interest in lately. Johnny was a really great, really sharp guy, and we had a lot of fun with him. First we took our bikes to a local mechanic, he was just a kid who didn’t speak English very well. Jeff’s bike needed a lot of fixing after the wreck, I wanted my kick stand fixed and a fender was starting to come loose so I wanted that taken care of before it got worse. After communicating our needs we had lunch and then just walked around Voinjama.

Voinjama was great. It had such a wonderful wild west frontier town feel. A few county seats in Liberia have at least one or two paved roads, but voinjama was all dust, and some of buildings even had facades that seemed sort of western. We drank tea, went to the top of “pak bat hill”, a hill overlooking all of Voinjama.

At the end of the day we went back to the mechanics place and picked up our bikes. We had a lot of ground to cover the next day so we wanted the bikes back before dark. To the left is Mohamed, the mechanic that worked on the bikes. He was a really nice kid.  And I really liked this photo of this kid posing by an engine that’s supposed to be in the process of being rebuilt.

Last year I was approached by Jeff Austin, a good friend who works for the Carter Center in Harper, he wanted to know if I’d be down with retracing the steps of Graham Greene as recorded in his book Journey Without Maps on motorcycles. Obviously, I said yes. It took us a little while to work out our schedules, but after a while we picked April 12th – 18th. Well, we actually picked the 11th-18th, but Jeff had some flight issues getting to Monrovia, so we pushed it back a day. I’m planning on writing this trip up day by day, and as always I’m like 3 weeks behind. So just bear with me. Days 2-7 will come, sooner or later, probably later. In the mean time enjoy the video and here’s a Google Earth file of our trip.

I was rolling on my Chinese made 150cc “jungle bike.” Jeff was riding an Indian 100cc TVS Star. Check out the sweet external fuel tank we rigged up. We started off at 7am from Monrovia. We stopped for gas at the last Total station on the way out of town. Unfortunately, I had a catastrophic kickstand failure while putting air in my front tire. It was kind of a bummer.  It seemed that a nut had fallen off the bolt that holds the kickstand in place. We also had to wait for all the fluids in the engine to drain back down before the engine would start again. But after 15 minutes of waiting the bike started, and before we drove through red light we found a place on the side of the road that had a replacement bolt, so we were off.

The road past red light was pretty good and I was quickly doing my bikes top speed, a whopping 85kmh. Things went pretty well, though I did manage to pull out the tube from my CamelBack causing me to have a very wet backside for a while. Thankfully, I was in Liberia and I dried off in about 20 minutes. Our first stop was the Booker Washington Institute (BWI). BWI is a technical school outside of Kakata, Margibi County. Jeff’s mom had a friend, who had a relative, who had a memorial at BWI. So we went there looking for the only white guy who had a memorial. As you can see, we found it. I should know the name of the buy, but I don’t. He was the first principal of BWI, and is also buried on the campus.

We next headed up to Gbanga,Bong County to the Carter Center office there. Jeff had already been in touch with the staff at that location so we could stop in for lunch. When we got there Nyan, the man in charge on the ground in Gbanga, met us and provided us with a wonderful lunch of rice and soup. We also saw Arthur who had driven Jeff, his mother, and I around Bong mines a year ago. To the right you see the group shot from lunch.

After Gbanga we wouldn’t see a paved road until Guinea. However, the road from Gbanga to Lofa was very good. We were able to reach the Lofa County border in very little time. Here‘s a shot of Jeff and I on the bridge over the Lofa River as we were crossing over. It was really pretty and very exciting for Jeff and I as this was the first time either of us had been to Lofa county.

From the border of Gbanga and Lofa we headed to Zorzor. There we fueled up inquired about the road condition and decided to press on and try and reach Voinjama by night fall. As a note I just want to say how awesome it is to have stop and asked about road conditions before traveling. It just feels so hardcore and exciting. I remember in college going on a road trip with friends from Atlanta to New Orleans, but we didn’t have to ask how I-20 was, did it get washed out, were all the bridges still there. Though I guess that still might not be true of New Orleans, so that’s a bad example. But you get the point. That element of adventure is lost in American Interstate based road trips
So we headed out. We were flying down and up some pretty bumpy and rocky roads. We had to balance finding smooth paths through the mine field of baseball size stones and wash outs, and staying on our side of the road. These dirt roads are one lane, and if some SUV comes flying over a hill, you had better be on your side of the road.

Jeff had been practicing off road driving in Harper and was riding pretty hard. I was impressed that I could barely keep up with him when he was on a bike with a smaller engine that wasn’t made for such off road conditions. I was thinking that all that practice was paying off. I was also thinking that I should ask him to slow it down a notch till I had my high speed off-road motorcycling down. Well before I could mention this to Jeff, I looked up and saw his back wheel buck-up into the air and then the whole bike went sideways as Jeff flew off. Jeff had hit a patch of loose gravel and lost control. Thankfully there was a wide enough distance between the two of us that I didn’t hit him. I pulled up and checked on him. He wasn’t hurt bad but was a little shaken up. He had scraped up his arm pretty bad, but no major injuries.  Luckily there was already a nurse at the village where the wreck took place. He was there helping someone who had had a machete accident. So he jumped over and took control of the situation. He was pretty cool. I love seeing old guys who have that confidence from years of experiences reign in a situation, “Get me some water. You two pick up the bike, put it there. You get some alcohol. You come with me. Where does it hurt? Can you bend your arm?” After 45 minutes or so we were back on the road. Jeff’s bike was rideable but the handle bars were bent a little bit and the instrument panel was damaged. We were now pretty late and night was coming so we continued on, but slower.

After a while it was getting dark and we could see and hear a storm coming in from the East. Jeff and I realized that we weren’t going to make Voinjama ahead of the storm, so we decided to ride to the next big village and ask for lodging. It was pitch black when we rolled up to the next village. We could barely see the huts in the moonlight as the storm crept over. I had to fight with my kick stand so Jeff made it to the village before I did. When I got there he was already drinking palm wine with the elders. I don’t think we ever asked for anything. They just talked to us about what we were doing and where we were going, and that we wouldn’t make it, then we were told to park our bikes inside a hut’s porch, then asked if we wanted hot water for a shower, and to wait a minute and rice would be coming. It was such a sweet hook-up. Everyone was so welcoming, kind and generous. My favorite thing was that no one spoke of money, let alone asked for anything. We needed a place to stay and they were just helping out. We ended up sleeping in one of the bedrooms of the village youth chief’s hut. It was really nice. We had a bed and mosquito net.  The picture at the top is me and one of the guys in the village with his “African head lamp.” After talking for a while we realized that we were in the home village of Mr. David Kortie, the Carter Center logistics officer who had arranged our paperwork for this trip. The name of the village was Kortie Town. What a small country.

Once again I’m super behind on my posting. I guess this is just how it’s going to be. So I apologize.

So after spending a few days in Liberia after returning from Sierra Leone I got right back on a plane and went the other direction to Ghana. I went to Ghana to do a little work with Busylab. They’re working on a mobile system for farmers in developing countries to get information on every part of the crop supply chain, from prices to shipping expenses and everything in between. They call the system eSoko, which is African for e-Market. I had the honor of working on the initial design of this ground breaking and ambitious project.

At Busy I was working with my long time friend David McCann. David and I have collaborated on some of the best computer science projects of all time. Notably the highly acclaimed networked Scorched Earth we made for CS2335 while undergrads at Georgia Tech. It was such an amazing piece of work that the TA’s had to make-up extra, extra credit to properly recognize the shear brilliance of the program.

Anyway, so for 10 days David and I, along with Xose and Andrea , worked on design, researching technologies and deciding how to handle key issues. It was a nice break from Monrovia. We spent all day in an air conditioned room with constant electricity. We even had not so slow internet. Though, after a while I did find myself getting restless from sitting behind a desk all day. I missed having to run errands in town or meet with people on things, but it was still nice to have a little break from Monrovia. One nice thing about the job was that I got to ride a Yamaha 250 to work. It was quite the upgrade from my Chinese 150. Not to mention riding on streets where you can go faster than 45mph.

Part of my break from Monrovia included watching lots of satellite TV, catching up on all the movies I haven’t seen, and watching the world’s economy crumble. On the weekend we went to Ada beach. It was really cool. It lacks the waves of Robertsport but it was still really a lot of fun. We took a 10 minute boat ride from a little resort hotel to a thin (200 yard) little peninsula between the Volta River and the Atlantic. We slept in little huts with country flags painted on the doors. David and I slept in the American flag hut.

In the morning the local fisherman stood on the beach and pulled in these huge nets that had the catch of the day. When they brought it all in we bought 4 cuttle fish fom them and made calamari. It was really good.

At the end of my stay in Ghana I joined Devine, one of the house keepers at the place where I was staying, for a peace march. We were marching to promote peace in Ghana with the upcoming elections. Already there had been some violence in the northern regions of Ghana. The march started an hour and a half late, but it was still cool, and fun to be a part of. I also got some way cool t-shirts from the event. Which is important, it’s hard to find a good t-shirt from a country here that’s not super touristy. So I was excited about that too.

Upon returning to Monrovia I met up with Guilhem, who I had gone surfing with in Sierra Leone, and we went to Robertsport for a day trip. The weather was terrible, but when we got to RP the conditions were perfect. It was great.

John

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