on to the bike with one hand and our
exhaust with the other. After a few
hours, the fellows managed to bodge
it back together and we drove out into
the desert for another camp in the
wild.
The next couple of days were a
similar story of driving through
extreme heat and camping in the
wild yet they were interrupted with
some bizarre meetings.
The first of which was slap bang
in the middle of nowhere. We were
driving down an incredibly long
stretch of tarmac with nothing but
sand all around, when a weird shaped
object started coming towards us. As
it got closer, we started to think we
were hallucinating. It looked just
like a sidecar outfit. Fortunately, we
hadn’t gone crazy and it actually was
a Ural outfit with a German couple in
it.
We all took a double take and
screeched to a halt on opposite
sides of the road. We exchanged
photographs and notes on the road
ahead. The couple told us that we
should look out for a British girl
riding a Honda motorcycle north.
We pressed on to Karima and sure
enough, as we lived and breathed,
Steph Jeavons 1 appeared on her little
250cc – Rhonda the Honda.
We were completely star struck,
we had been following her progress
around the world for the last couple
of years and never expected to bump
into her.
Steph arrived just as we were
riding around a carpark, trying to
work out what was wrong with our
bike; it was making another funny
sound.
Steph had a listen and said she
had no idea what it was because she
didn’t know much about how to fix
bikes. We couldn’t believe that. How
could you rack up the miles Steph
had without being able to repair
your bike? At the time, we thought
it was good news for us; if Steph
could achieve everything she had on
Rhonda and not know how to repair
her bike then surely, we could whip
our sidecar around the world, no
problem!
In hindsight, maybe Steph could
have fixed it and just thought, “I need
to get away from these weirdos”. I
wouldn’t have blamed her. We must
have looked completely off the scale
nuts and from her point of view
the situation was that there are two
weird looking British blokes, driving
around in circles, in a random
Sudanese town, on a bright red
scooter and sidecar, they look a mess,
they completely stink and when
you say hi they turn around and go
completely fan girl on you as if they’d
just bumped in to David Beckham. I’d
have been running for the hills.
Again we screwed our exhaust
back together and headed out for the
desert again to look for somewhere
to camp. Bizarrely, we couldn’t
find anywhere at all. Each time we
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