A well-worn weapon
The end of the road in Liberia is close. Another 20km from here and a river divides the country from it's francophone neighbour - Cote d' Ivoire.
Stretching to either side of me are two long palm-fringed beaches and I'm surrounded by the ghostly remains of large war-ravaged buildings. The town of Harper here in the far south of Liberia is now a sad shadow of what before the war must have been a prosperous place, for a minority anyhow.
Getting here wasn't easy. Impassable roads as the guidebook warned - no. Mud-slick slopes, crevasse-sized gullies and knee-deep trenches of water - yes. Plenty of them. Coupled with the rain, biting mango flies between downpours and unidentifiable bush-meat lunches in villages and towns that don't appear on my map has altogether made the last 300km a memorable and challenging one. I slept in a mud-hut on stilts in the jungle one night and pitched my tent in a police station to hear stories of ritual killings that involved hacking off body parts on another.
The front tyre replacement thankfully survived, but my attention has now been drawn to other parts of the bike.
A few blog posts ago I described how my trojan of a Thorn was coping admirably after its first 10,000km. It still is, although all that mud, sand and water in Guinea, Sierra Leone and now Liberia have done a good job in creating a deadly weapon out of the rear sprocket.
There I was thinking I could ride most of the way to Cape Town and not have to worry about parts of the bike I have a limited knowledge of fixing. How very wrong. Had I known more, apparently I could have reversed this sprocket to prolong its life. Next time.
On their way to me in Abidjan, Cote d' Ivoire is a new rear sprocket, sprocket removal tool, chain whip, chain, front chain-ring, Rohloff gear cables, Rohofff hub oil, chain protector and tyres. My confidence in removing and replacing the rear sprocket isn't great.
Interestingly another trans-African cyclist, whom I hoped to catch up at one stage, (unlikely now) has suffered almost identical problems, although she managed a few thousand more kilometres. I personally think my rear sprocket is more deadly in appearance than hers.
I can still ride the bicycle. Abidjan is 450km away on what I hope are better roads than those that brought me here. Time to unearth that French dictionary and phrasebook from the bottom of one of the panniers. I'm not sure how to ask a mechanic for an adjustable spanner.
