South From Gibraltar

In Western Sahara we encounter a Bedouin named Abideen, who has spent his life surrounded by sand, isolated from modern civilization. He lives in a hand-sewn jaima (tent) and cares for his adopted family of camels. 

We spend two nights with him, drinking Sahrawi tea, sharing laughter, and learning about a way of life foreign to us. At night, after eating tajine, he invites us to help him milk his camels. He explains that this is life in the Sahara—sustenance straight from an animal into our guts. 

The next morning we say goodbye and he points us in the direction of the sea. When we finally reach the coast we find a peeling right point, which we enjoy for two days, alone, until the swell disappears. These are memorable days in the desert.

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Eight years ago, my brother and I began a series of long-range surf expeditions through different parts of the world. Our aim was to interact with and learn from new cultures while exploring some of the most varied terrain on the planet, hoping to find new waves. 

While driving from California back to our home in Argentina, we explored the Pacific coastline of the Americas. Then, closer to home, we set out on foot through Patagonia and the Peninsula Mitre, one of the southernmost regions in the world. Africa has been on our minds for almost a decade—the second largest continent on Earth in terms of area and population, still considered one of the least explored for surf. 

Now we are here. Two friends have joined us in the expedition: Sergio Anselmino, who plans to accompany us from Spain to South Africa, and Jatyr Berasaluce, who is able to join us for a few of months, though not for the entire journey. While the world news is reporting stories of insurgents, kidnappings, and lootings in some of the impoverished parts of this continent, we plan to see for ourselves what is actually happening. 

Our vehicle is a 1985 Mercedes-Benz Unimog, which once served as an ambulance for the German army. In Spain, we spent six weeks gutting the truck and transforming it into our new home on wheels. It has the capacity to comfortably sleep four and allows us to cook—though it has no refrigerator, no toilet, and no shower. The transmission is only capable of speeds up to 40 miles per hour, and the interior has no air conditioning. But the Unimog is certainly strong and reliable. With its massive tires and four-wheel drive, it’s more than suited to carry us down Africa’s west coast.

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We’ve been told Mauritania is one of the most dangerous countries in Africa. Thus far, we’ve met nothing but kind people.

While crossing through the city of Nouadhibou, in the western area of the country, we stop to buy groceries and many locals gather around, curious about the truck and what we’re doing in this part of the country. We meet a man named Lemin and he invites us to visit his home, a brick house with no windows. He introduces us to his wife and two daughters, who greet us through their burqas.

The afternoon is hot. There is no wind and we are tired after a long day in the desert. We drink tea and eat couscous and spiced meat with our hands from a communal bowl with his family. We exchange small talk in French and Lemin gives us lessons in Arabic. After
the sun finally sets, he decides it’s time for an outdoor fire. We carry his couch outside and sit by the flames in the dust. 

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After three months in the Moroccan, Sahraouis, and Mauritanian deserts, we arrive in Dakar, Senegal’s capital city, where the term teranga (hospitality) seems to rule the land. We encounter a happy and colorful Arabic culture. The city is the westernmost point on the African mainland and is home to just over one million people.It’s also an extremely difficult location to park and camp with a Unimog truck.

Luckily, a group of fishermen welcome us into their bay, fronted on the beach by a beautiful mosque—and a nice left with a short barrel. We stay for a week, surfing all day and sharing the fishermen’s haul in the evenings. 

Eventually, we drive a few miles to a nearby restaurant and manage to further improve our situation. After scouting the nearby coast and seeing its potential, we ask the restaurant’s owner for permission to park and spend the night on his land. He tells us we can stay as long as we’d like. We enjoy two weeks of eating fresh fish, and surfing a series of overlapping north and south swells with howling offshore winds as the Atlantic switches from one season to another. 

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From the “Venice of Africa” in Ganvie to a Senegalese mosque and point setup to the deck of the Spinola Carneiro.

A trip by truck down Africa’s Atlantic Coast will generally enfold experiences and locales that range from harrowing to spellbinding, and sometimes wave rich.

We venture inland to Lac Rose, a lake known for its strange color. The water is said to be nearly 40 percent salt and produces an algae called Dunaliella salina, which turns it a brilliant pink. Many locals collect the salt from the area and sell it as a means to dry fish. Near the shore, we meet an amazingly talented musician named Muhammad, who stands atop a salt mount and plays his kora for us, a type of local harp.

As we drive south toward Guinea-Bissau, we watch women working under almost impossible conditions, drying and smoking fish. They dress in bright, colorful robes, which contrast with the conditions in which they work. They spend the day underneath the sun, burning fires to dry the meat. The flames cause the air temperature to rise to more than 120 degrees Fahrenheit. 

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We discover that the Guineas (Bissau and Conakry) are very difficult areas to hunt for surf. A huge archipelago shadows the swell and much of the shore is made up of mangroves and shallow swamps. It takes us three days to drive 25 miles, cutting through the jungle with a machete on an old road overgrown with trees and tall grass. 

Nightfall finds us caught along a section of the Conakry border. It is the rainy season and the ground is soft and difficult to navigate. The rivers have washed out the usual border crossing, so we divert to another. 

We sleep in the bush and continue at sunrise, but soon find the road comes to an end as we approach another section of the river. We wade in on foot to check the depth and discover it ranges from one foot to four and the current is heavy. We cross in the truck as women on the far shore wash clothing and cook pots, while upstream their children fish for breakfast.  

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Sierra Leone and Liberia share similarities: wonderful beaches, lots of setups for perfect lefts, and a handful of growing surf communities. Also, like many other countries in West Africa, they have been devastated by civil wars, corruption, and illness. 

This region is not the easiest place to travel, especially in the rainy season. In one area of Sierra Leone, we arrive on the scene of a huge traffic jam. We park and walk ahead on foot down the dirt road to see what’s happening.

We find a valley flooded with water. Several cars loaded with goods, most of them lashed to their roofs, are wallowing in the mud and blocking the only road south to Liberia. When we ask one of the drivers how long he’s been here, he explains that he was traveling from Guinea to Liberia to sell a load of clothing, which is still on the top of his car. Then it began to rain four days ago. He hasn’t been able to move since. 

As it begins to rain again, we explain that we have a winch on the Unimog. Over the course of several hours, the other drivers begin to move their vehicles to clear a path. We use the winch and a sling to free the vehicles. 

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In Ivory Coast, searching for a wave near the border with Liberia, we are detained by the military. The authorities want to know what we’re doing here and why we’ve been traveling in the region. We try to explain to them that we’re surfers, but they don’t seem to even know what surfing is. 

They take our names, our information, our parents’ names, our addresses, our professions, and other details. They leave us indoors with an army commander, who turns out to be friendly. We are kept in the compound overnight while they analyze our passports. The next morning, they tell us we are free to go as long as we report to the commander every day to let him know our location and our plans.

We set out again in search of a handful of possible pointbreaks, which we identified by satellite. Most of them turn out to be nothing, but a few have potential.

In one of the villages, we try to explain to the locals that we came looking for a wave nearby and that the road simply brought us to their beach. The language barrier is a problem, so we end up showing them a few surf photos to communicate what we’re up to.  Most of the children from the village join us in the shorebreak as others clap and shout from the rocks. We’ve found better waves to the north, but the next few hours in the water are among the best we’ve had so far. 

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When we enter Ghana, we come to a beach where a small river separates two villages connected by a long wooden bridge. A local fisherman named Steve shows us a beautiful bay five miles away through the jungle. It has a perfect wave on the western end and we stay as long as we can. 

Sometimes our movements from country to country are determined by swell. Most of the time, however, they’re dictated by visas and paperwork. We move on to Togo and Benin, visiting the markets in Lomé, Togo’s capital, where monkeys, snakes, bats, birds, and other bushmeat are for sale. In Benin, we pass through a place called Ganvie, near the capital, where escaped slaves established a city on Lake Nokoué in the 16th century. The town itself is built on the water, with a population of about 20,000. Everything is transported in small boats—some powered by engine, some by sail. 

In Benin’s capital, we finally secure visas for Nigeria. The paperwork process is the most difficult we’ve encountered thus far. They’ve given us a seven-day transit visa, which stipulates we can only enter the country in order to cross into Cameroon. 

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It takes us three days of driving from sunup to sundown to cross one of the most dangerous countries in Africa: Nigeria. Near the border, we discover the frontier has been closed—a civil war has begun in Cameroon between elements of the Anglophone and Francophone populations. This news never appears in the media. 

We are unable to cross into Cameroon and are stranded for 43 days along the border in Nigeria. Eventually, we negotiate our exit from the port of Calabar, lashing the truck to the deck of a cargo ship. The scow is 50 years old and rated for 400 tons. She now carries 600 tons, plus our truck on the bow. She’s so overloaded that she sits below the waterline and the ventilation system sucks water into the bilge. The crew bails her with rusted pumps.

The crossing is scheduled to take 18 hours, but lasts much longer. The captain’s chief concern is avoiding a group of pirates who have been operating in the Gulf of Guinea, near the Calabar River. They’re known for kidnapping crew and passengers for ransom. Fortunately, they never appear. 

The water, however, never ceases flooding into the hull. At sea, the swell increases and the leak threatens to overwhelm the pumps. After 48 hours we finally arrive in Douala, in the French section of Cameroon. We drive south out of the conflict zone as quickly as possible. The highway to Gabon is covered in roadkill.  

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Gabon is dense, humid, and beautifully green with jungle. Our first mission in the country is to charter a small boat to drop us off near a wave we’ve mapped. After disembarking, we hike for another six hours. We come across tracks and droppings from wild elephants, but don’t see them though the trees.  

We camp and surf a long left the following morning. The swell is too small and the tide eventually kills it, so we return to the Unimog. 

After ten months in Africa the truck is covered in dents and dings and they’re only getting worse. We scrape through 40 miles of bushes and thorns, looking for another wave. We blowout three tires, but eventually we find the place we’re looking for. The wave does a close impression of Skeleton Bay—draining and perfect. It lasts for one tide, then disappears entirely.

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In Africa, sooner or later, someone gets sick. I find myself in the Republic of the Congo, lying on the truck’s bed, wracked with fever as we cross hundreds of miles of dirt roads to Dolisie. Twelve hours later we come to a rudimentary hospital, where a blood test indicates I have malaria and typhus fever. 

I doubt the prognosis because, if I have both, I should already be dead. My temperature reads 104. I take Coartem pills, which give me nightmares. Who knows what’s happening inside my body. We meet a pair of doctors from Cuba at the marketplace and they suggest I might have a strong African Flu, surmising that the staff at the hospital diagnosed me with malaria and typhus as a way of simply covering their bases.

After two weeks I start to feel better. In the meantime, Julian has been surfing an overhead beachbreak in Point Noire at La Pyramide restaurant, where some new friends have allowed us to park the truck while I recover.

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The crossing from the Republic of the Congo into Cabinda is fast and easy. Entering the Democratic Republic of the Congo is a different story. An Ebola outbreak has officials busy. We decide we need to cross the country fast, but the road is destroyed and littered with corrupt policemen. 

We leave all this behind in Angola. Its new president, João Lourenço, is trying to bring more tourists into the country. The roads are very well maintained, the gas stations have cheap diesel, and we find great surf in abundance.

At a Mucubal tribal village, we meet a 75-year-old man named Tchecuteny, who has 44 wives and 165 children. His eldest, he explains, is 55 and his youngest is an infant. The whole family works the land in a valley in the Namib Desert, where there is a school, a church, and a small health center.

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Crossing into Namibia, we see private land to the horizon—fences, gates, and signposts. All this privatized acreage is a sharp contrast to many of the other countries we’ve visited. Along the dirt roads we pass ostriches, kudus, wildebeests, warthogs, and baboons, among other species. 

There are hidden jewels along this coast but access and conditions are difficult. Even Skeleton Bay is a fickle wave. During our 45 days in Namibia, we camp for 19 of them here, waiting. It’s very cold and windy. 

When there’s no surf, there isn’t much to do other than watch the seals. We have a handful very good sessions, but the wave never gets as good as it can be. We paddle out at a few beachbreaks and longboard a handful of other points in the area, then move on. 

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Heading for South Africa, our last leg down the Atlantic coastline of the continent, we pass the clay pans of Deadvlei. Some of the tallest dune systems in the world can be found here. The largest reach more than 1,000-feet high. Eight-hundred-year-old trees still stand in places, dead and preserved, scorched by the sun. In Cape Town, settling into our twentieth country in Africa, we find good surf, many braais, and new friends in the water. For now it’s a place to repair the truck and to rest before we continue north around the cape into the Indian Ocean.

A moment among brothers—Julian slotted, top left, while the author stares from the shoulder—offers an aquatic frame on a nine-month road odyssey, on and off the pavement.

[Feature image: Mobile command in Western Sahara.]