Crazy Oyibo

By Ana Hogas & Ionut Florea

For John and Ana their 55,000km motorcycle ride around Africa was not a race. Sparked by two unexpected events, the nomadic adventure lasted for 14 months across 29 countries. Crazy Oyibo recounts the story of John and Ana journeying overland, being tested in some of the continent’s wildest places, and undergoing profound personal transformation while learning that Africa’s diversity is only matched by the kindness of its people.
Crazy Oyibo Part 1 – From Romania To Morocco tells how the expedition began. In January 2010 John was stuck in bed, recovering from an Achilles tendon rupture. The challenge of learning how to walk again became the daunting task of riding a motorbike in Africa. In October 2010 the expedition was primed to take off, but on departure day John was hit by a car. The motorbike was totaled and everything was reset by 9 more months. In June 2011 John and Ana finally left Into The World. The learning curve from the first month spent in Morocco sets the tone for an epic journey.

Read by author Nick Thorpe, adventurer Paddy Tyson and mountaineer Alex Găvan.

Ana Hogas and Ionut Florea are open-hearted, white-knuckle travellers with a passion for people and an uncanny nose for adventure. Their 55,000-kilometer journey took them off the grid and into the beating heart of Africa.
Nick Thorpe, author of "Urban Worrier" and "Eight Men and a Duck" (www.nickthorpe.co.uk)

About the authors
Ana Hogaş and Ionuţ (John) Florea are Romanian architects with a twist. From June 2011 to August 2012 they traveled by motorcycle around Africa. In an expedition of extremes, they worked as volunteers in the rainforest of Nigeria, crossed the Sahara in suffocating heat of over 54°C, climbed Mt. Cameroon, and explored the Okavango Delta in flood and the Congo basin during the rainy season. Crazy Oyibo is their first book.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ana Hogas & Ionut Florea
• Release date: Apr 27, 2013
• ISBN: 9789730148121

Ana Hogas & Ionut Florea

Ana Hogaş and Ionuţ (John) Florea are Romanian architects with a twist. From June 2011 to August 2012 they traveled by motorcycle around Africa. In an expedition of extremes, they worked as volunteers in the rainforest of Nigeria, crossed the Sahara in suffocating heat of over 54°C, climbed Mt. Cameroon, and explored the Okavango Delta in flood and the Congo basin during the rainy season. Crazy Oyibo is their first book.

Book preview

Chapter One

You came from Europe on this one? he says in pidjin (Nigerian slang; broken English). Eh! The Nigerian police officer shakes his head in disbelief and touches my motorbike, as if to make sure that he’s not imagining it. Crazy oyibo, he whispers. It’s not the first time that they say this in Africa. And frankly, not too long before this journey began, I was just as doubtful about it myself.

The Garage Of All Possibilities

The first clue that I was primed for adventure was finding out where I was born. In your grandfather’s car! my mother told me. That ’67 Ford Taunus was already centric to most stories from my childhood. Each summer, my grandparents loaded it with supplies and left on mysterious overland journeys for weeks. I, being six years younger than my brother, was never taken along.

They’re back from Zakopané! mum would suddenly announce at dinner, which meant the wait was over. I was anxious to hear over desert about my grandparents’ adventures to places that made my head spin. I had no idea where Zakopané was; it sounded like the end of the world to me, but one day - I used to say to myself -I’ll go there. Shortly after the trips ended, my grandfather was feeling restless again. His way of coping was to drive alone to the seaside, and just linger. Nomadism, I began to learn, was woven into my destiny.

Sandwiched between Europe and Asia, at a former crossroad of migrant tribes and commercial routes, my country is a peculiar place. The largest population of wolves and bears in Europe roam our forests. We entertain our children with stories of werewolves, vampires, goblins, ghosts and other members of the undead. Even the Dacians, our mythologized ancestors, were believed lycanthropes, their warriors said to ride into battle under the standard of a snarling wolf-head, which trailed a tube of fabric that roared an unearthly howl as they charged. Not few are the people clinging still to a deeper consciousness of the wild. My family history is full of them: pilgrims, beachcombers, accidental drifters, sheep herders stuck in the city between transhumance runs, and now this temporary nomad – my grandfather, a mechanic.

As a kid I spent most of my time lurking around him and in his garage, which during the communist era became an extension of my grandfather’s workplace. People used to bring their broken Dacia cars here to be fixed, and what couldn’t be bought, was fabricated from scrap. Even today it’s every bit the space of a consumed petrol-head, the perfect place to prepare for my motorbike trip to Africa.

A Motorbike On The Danube

I caught the travel bug at young age. There's a picture of us somewhere: my mother in her sultry summer dress, my older sister and I in painfully cute fluff, sitting on my uncle’s Mobra, all of us excited about our first motorcycle voyage. We were just pretending, of course - I was barely five months old - but it was by motorbike how I eventually traveled with John around Africa.

Long before our journey began, I was just a girl living in a quiet industrial town in eastern Romania. To me it was the most boring place in the world. All provincial towns are dull in their own way; in Galaţi there was an elemental boredom, which depleted the imagination. My mother used to tell mouthwatering stories from her childhood, when Jewish and Turkish vendors pushed their carts with fruit and sweets along cobbled streets. It sounded nothing like the Cartesian urbanism of the town that I knew, where the streetscape consisted in a variation of brown or grey. Only the weekend shacks were left, selling sesame bagels, balls of puffed rice smothered in multicolor sugar syrup and braga. The place to go for these ephemeral treats was the Danube falaise. This long strip of manicured paradise was our chance to escape boredom. The entire town would congregate along: to walk, jog, play, fish, and eat.

Danube’s windswept banks and wide, murky waters flowing silently towards the Black Sea have always had a soothing effect on me. Our family would often spend weekends to the wetlands and beaches across. I used to bring along a favorite book, and kept it shut while I stared vacantly at the Danube, daydreaming. There was Jules Verne’s round-the-world in 80 days saga, or Ulysses ‘quest, or Joshua Slocum’s old-fashioned voyage, or even the catcher in the rye. There were those bigger, untamed rivers that flowed along bigger, uncharted banks, where wild animals roamed and where nobody had blue eyes or blond hair like me. Would I ever go there?

In time I grew to believe that moving to the capital city of Bucharest was of theological importance. To travel there from Galaţi – which we did every couple of months for a theatre play or to visit relatives - was to move from lukewarm stasis to sudden consciousness. Exiting the train in the Central Station always jolted me into another dimension. The art-deco building curved a slender steel skeleton above a crowd that felt like the entire population of Galaţi. Faces and bodies mingled and jostled, each fighting to hastily carve their way to some mysterious meeting that appeared to suffer no postponement. I couldn’t wait to escape the conservative left-winged safety of my hometown, and because I liked drawing and geometry, I enrolled in Architecture school. But I spent all my bursaries on backpacking, which reduced the furniture in my room to cardboard boxes and a mattress. Luckily I met John, who shared my interests, so after we hooked up our travels became more daring. Then Romania joined the EU, friends became emigrants and university gang scattered. Eventually the real estate bubble popped, taking down the development industry along with our independence.

We are now living in his late grandfather’s house, sort of a temporary arrangement we think. We cannot find our place. We’ve been simmering in this state of procrastination since too long, disillusioned with the idea of a career, of becoming a statistic. Something has to give.

We’re both in need of a change, of a kick in the arse. And out of all things, it finally comes from football.

Beckham’s Heel

In 1986, at the prude age that allows the regular American lad their first legal pint and long before Romanian grandmothers would carry groceries in plastic bags branded with his face, Hagi was scoring in the finals of the UEFA Super Cup the only goal of the match and arguably the most important in Romanian football. The win of the coveted trophy led to a shift in the national psyche. Denied of their freedom by the Communists and forced to content with impotent humor scolding their political status quo, Romanians had finally something to believe in. They called Hagi The King, and football became Romania’s underground religion.

It was not by accident that my aunt’s wedding was booked during Romania’s group stage match against Colombia at the 1994 World Cup. Nor the bride or the groom was the leading act of the night. The guests had a far more serious reason to stampede