I have found out that there ain't no surer way to find out whether you like people or hate them than to travel with them. - Mark Twain

8 August 2019, Ndjole to Mevang, 68.6km
Auberge 5,000CFA (R125)

Although Charl was not feeling 100%, we got back on the bikes this morning with no clear idea of where we might spend the night. We followed the Ogooue River for around 40km, climbing upstream against the flow, the water not always visible to us. The Ogooue flows through Ndjole and Lambaréné on its way to the Atlantic south of Libreville. It was an easier ride than anticipated, though still slow work, hilly through lovely forest on a cool and cloudy day.
Not only are online maps getting the distances wrong, but increasingly the roads shown are wrongly located. When we turn on a map app to locate ourselves, GPS often places us in a blank and roadless area. It becomes then a bit of a guessing game, though of course one is on a real road going somewhere real.
At an intersection east of Ndjole we came across a small restaurant that served us omelets and baguettes and coffee for breakfast. Nearby was tethered a sad-seeming goat, while a happy dog gamboled free. Later in the day we passed a man with a blue-faced monkey, obviously a pet, draped across his shoulders. And later still we crossed the equator, barely alerted to it by a dilapidated sign hanging battered from a pole. We took the obligatory photos, feeling the sense of accomplishment brought on by a formal marker, and stood with our legs parted, one foot in the summer of the northern hemisphere, one in the winter of the southern.
Shortly after crossing the equator, I had a silly fall. Seeing a car coming toward me, I checked my rearview mirror and was surprised to find two vehicles behind me, one overtaking the other. This put the four of us on a possible collision course, so I pulled as far to the edge of the narrow, shoulderless road as possible, intending to simply stand there astride my bike while the three vehicles sorted themselves out. But the grassy verge fooled me, the grasses masking the fact that the ground was around 20cm lower than the road surface. As my right foot sunk into the grass, I simply toppled with my bike into the bush, falling onto both hands in slow-mo. By a stroke of luck, where I fell was low grasses with no stumps or branches on which to do damage.
We had been told by our Ndjole host that there was an auberge somewhere “avant” (before) Lalara. Though others confirmed this, no-one could say exactly where it might be. By the time we reached Mevang a little before 17:00, I was anxious to call it quits before we found ourselves cycling in the dark. We had seen signs for the “chef du village” and the “chef du canton”, and pulled into the latter to enquire about a “place de dormir” (a place to sleep). And so we found ourselves in a perfectly adequate room, one of four in an unadvertised row. Our host, Joseph, told us he had no spare water for bathing, so we bought bottled water for a honed-down bucket bath in an empty room, and used the village pit toilet down a grassy path behind a patch of bush.
We met two people today who had met Blanca: cyclist David en route Cape Town and undecided points beyond from his home in Spain; and Mevang’s chef du village who with two or three other men joined us for drinks in the evening. Blanca had been a guest in his home on her way north.

For today's route see below photos
For overview route, click on ROUTE tab above…