Ok, another Peace Corps story. The first mistake they made was giving me a motorcycle. Well, it probably wasn't the first mistake, but it was a big one. Of course I was going to have a little wreck or seven. And indeed, I did.

My first little mishap happened just a few weeks after I finished training and went to my village. My good buddy and fellow Peace Corps Volunteer Maria and I went to the nearby town of Kuk. Kuk was about an hour away, through some really steep mountains and across a wide, sort of deep (at least if you want to drive across it with a motorcycle) river.

We set off for Kuk pretty early in the morning, the road was insane. I could describe it all day and you guys would never really understand. I am going to try and get a photo for this page though. It was really, really steep and not made of dirt. It was either really dry, dusty clay or sharp rocks, about the size of softballs. Usually it was a horrible combination of the two. By the time we got to the river, my arms and shoulders were aching. I had Maria walk across on some rocks. I stood up on the pegs and gunned it across the river with no major problems. The bottom was large, round cantelope sized rocks. But I had enough momentum to just cruise it across. It was fairly wide, perhaps the width of your average, wide meandering, all American mid-Western river. The problems occured on the way back. It was a lot easier on the way over because there was a nice gentle, drop off to the deep water in the middle. But on the Kuk side of the river there was nothing gentle about the drop off, it immediately dropped down a foot. And I didn't really notice that on the way over. I sure noticed it on the way back though.

Maria started off making her way across the dry rocks sticking up out of the water. I turned the throttle, hit the water, wobbled a bit, kept it together until about the middle of the river, where the current caught me, I hit a huge round rock and then just gently toppled over and fell in the river. Maria was laughing so hard she almost fell in herself. She barely made it across to the other side. I just lay in the water cursing my luck and finally picked up the damn bike and pushed it across the rocks to the bank. Maria was crying by this point she was laughing so hard. I didn't say a word and just took off my boots and socks and wrung them out as well as I could. We then tried to start the bike. Nothing.

It never did start, or even come close so we had to push it. It was about a mile up an incredibly steep hill. We pushed and pushed and just basically exhausted ourselves. Let me remind you at this point that Africa is hot. Very hot. It was a miserable afternoon. We were sweating and grumpy and I think Maria was silently blaming me for not knowing how the hell to fix the thing. We finally got it to the top of the hill and I was re-motivated in my attempts to get that sucker running. I tried a while longer and got nowhere. So we kept pushing. A few more miles and it finally dried out enough to sort of soggily turn over. The thing ran awfully, but neither of us cared and we sputtered it back down to Weh. Finally got to the village and went straight to the nearest off-license (bar) for much needed alcoholic reinforcements.

I'm very embarrassed to say that the problem was that the air filter was full of water. I, in my newbie motorcycle state, had never even thought to check that. I must have dumped 4 cups of water out of that thing. Oh well. I never did tell Maria about that. (side note: Maria, if you're reading this now, sorry, Ashia, oh).

And that was really just the beginning of a beautiful relationship between me and the bike. The Yamaha DT-150. Oh yes, feel the power.