paris-dakar for dummies

[Thomas Keener]

> Date: Fri, 16 Jun 2000 00:51:06 -0700 (PDT) > From: Tumu Rock > I don't have the legs or the money - yet - but I do have an unhealthy >dose of ambition and an even unhealthier dose of balls. > >As far as the motorcycle gods go, well I can only pray for a smile at the >right time. Maybe that's why they've been so mean to me lately, so they can >feel ok about giving me the thumb's up in 2005. > >Don't know if you have what it takes til you give it all you've got.

I crossed the Sahara in 1978/79 and was near In Guezzam (on the Algeria/Niger border) when the P-D came through. (I think that was the 2nd or 3rd race.) D.J. Rogers suggested: Lets' do it the KLR way, though. No fancy support trucks or crews to work on the bikes while we sleep. Just a gas card and a saddlebag full of spares. That's a funny one. I can just picture pulling out a gas card in the middle of the Sahara or in backwater Senegal. Imagine a mud hut with an arab wearing a djellabah and a turban standing next to a rusty 50-gal-drum with a mechanical hand pump. No electricity, no phone for hundreds of miles. "Ya take plastic?" Doing the P-D without a support crew would be a tremendous feat, but I think it would doom you to being just another DNF. There are _sooo_ many challenges just to complete the trip, much less compete. The desert is littered with vehicle carcasses. Some of the images that stick in my mind: Vast hardpan plains that go forever in every direction. The road is as wide as it is long. You see giant circles in the sand where people have carved huge donuts over and over. The tracks go everywhere. The road is delineated by tall poles stuck in the ground at several mile intervals. You drive towards one and when you reach it, you look on the horizon for the next. Other places, the road narrows down to a single route through deep sand. You pass a bunch of vehicles digging out, only to get caught yourself down the road. It gets old after a dozen times. In Niger, I remember hours and hours of heavy washboard, gut-busting teeth-rattling stuff. And that was when you had the rhythm of the bumps. It would be an awesome experience, bum. Keep the goal in sight and it will come true. TomK