Sahara Saga
Sahara SAGA
A DESERT RIDE FOR DIE-HARDS
THE SIGNPOSTS, SUNfaded and handlettered, said it all. Sable, they announced officially-French for sand. Not that Dave and Nanci Bramsen
needed the reminder.
They were quite literally sinking in a sea of the gritty stuff this mid-December day of 1989. With the mercury pushing 100 and a blazing sun straight overhead, the Bramsens were trying to cross the Sahara Desert on a motorcycle.
At this particular moment, however, they weren’t getting very far.
Spinning wildly, the back wheel of their BMW struggled to grab hold of firm ground, only to dig in deeper and deeper. Dave and Nanci squinted east and then west to see...only more sable.
This seemingly never-ending stretch
of desert was a long way from home, but the couple had few regrets about leaving mild Orange Country, California, for the less-than-temperate Sahara. This journey-just one leg of a two-year, 32-country tour-represented the realization of a long-held dream to travel around the world.
Sure, they could have flown Air Afrique and missed all the sweaty, sandy frustration of the Sahara. But Nanci and Dave had two reasons for riding a bike across the desert: “First, our love of motorcycles (particularly Twins with shafts) and second, our love of adventure,” explains Dave, a 41 -year-old illustrator.
Of course, the Bramsens had been warned that such a Sahara crossing would be difficult at best. One couple who had tried to make the trip described raids by bandits who shot their victims and left them to rot among the carcasses of decaying vehicles.
But warnings weren’t going to keep Nanci and Dave from the trip of their lives. They had already braved the steamy swamps of Indonesia and the heart-pumping hills of New Zealand-not on the relative luxury of a motorcycle, but instead, on a tandem bicycle.
By the time they reached Europe, however, the joys of self-propelled travel had worn thin and the Bramsens were ready for a “real” bike. In Germany, they found one: a used 1986 BMW R80G/S with 13,500 miles on the clock, a dead bat-
tery, water in the fork tubes, a fly in the float bowl, and a $4000 price
tag. (Remember that these two like challenges.) After christening the Beemer “Einfahrt” (German for entrance), they
headed south in search of the Sahara and a span of unpaved desert road about 375 miles long.
Of course, it wasn’t just sable that they found there. Nanci and Dave say the sense of space and solitude, as well as a dramatic desert landscape made the trip worthwhile. On their first night camping in the Sahara, Dave wrote in his journal of “bloody red sunsets, pink sunrises and stars almost as innumerable as sand. Two hours after sunset, all was bathed in bright white desert moonlight.”
In the end, the Bramsens liked the trip so much that, after a few months visiting relatives working as missionaries in Benin, they decided to turn right around and “do” the Sahara again. But this time, only one of them could travel by bike-it was already May, one of the hottest months of the year, and Einfahrt couldn’t carry enough gas and water for both the Bramsens. So Nanci boarded a flight to Paris, where she waited for her husband, and Dave linked up with three fellow travelers who were crazy enough to want to cross the Sahara on the cusp of summer.
This is their story-snippets from the sketchbook that Dave Bramsen carried across the Sahara, a whimsical look at the ultimate desert ride. Brenda Buttner
