The Bushpig

This was meant to be a triumphant blog. It was meant to be the update in which I introduced you to ‘the Bushpig’. I was supposed to amend title of this Blog and explain that this was inspired by my new love, a Suzuki DR650 RSE ’92. I would’ve told you that the Tik’iliko title was originally inspired by the East African Honeyguide, a fleeting and agreeable bird that interacted symbiotically with its companions. And then I would’ve informed you that it was far more apt to equate my new DR 650 to a Bushpig; a disagreeable, snuffly creature, whose free-spirit required a stern hand, a creature at home up to its hairy ears in filth.

But this is not that blog.

This is an update devoid of triumph. It is an obituary, it is mourning and it is catharsis. As I’m sure it will show, please forgive my anger and my bitterness, the whole episode is still raw.

The Search

The search for a motorbike began months before I even left Australia and by the time we arrived in Kampala, I had grown tired of being a passenger and impatient to get on two wheels. I had learnt that in Africa, the battle was as much finding the right place to buy a bike as it was the right bike to buy.

If you’ve not looked into travelling by vehicle overseas, then you may not appreciate how much red tape and rubbish there is to wade through before you can take a vehicle across borders. When you do so, you are essentially importing a valuable object into a country, a situation which countries (especially African countries) are invariably keen to take advantage of and tax (think of the box you tick on your Australian incoming arrival card about carrying goods purchased overseas exceeding AUD$900). However, the flipside is that when travelling, the chances are that you are going to export the vehicle shortly after. Therefore, to avoid having to pay import duties (which in some African counties exceed 200% of the value of the vehicle) every time you cross a border, there is a document called a Carnet. Technically speaking, the Carnet is a set of guarantees issued by a third party automobile association (and secured by a hefty bond) assuring X-Country that the Association will pay the duties if you do something that causes them to fall due (ie, you sell the vehicle or you don’t duly export it). However, it is probably easier to think of the Carnet as the vehicle’s passport, or visa. The practical difficulty this causes is that the vehicle needs to be registered in your name for the Carnet to be issued to you and for it to match your passport etc etc.

In most East/South African counties, it is a nightmare to get a vehicle registered in your name whilst on a tourist visa. But in Uganda, I discovered, you can get most things done… So, I decided to buy the bike there.

Whilst Uganda may be a good place to get a vehicle registered in your name, it is not known for its market in the sort of motorbikes that would be appropriate for this trip. However, I did happen upon the beautiful DR 65O featured below. Pre-loved by an Italian diplomat, its mileage was acceptable and its reputation for simple reliability attracted the approval of mates more knowledgeable about this sort of thing than me. The price was also right (bearing in mind that a 200% bond of its value needed to also be paid in order to get the Carnet) and the only downside was the likely unavailability of parts until South Africa. I soon also discovered that the DR 650’s nickname was the Bushpig. The apparent match in personality, age (and pure alliterative value) with the Badger became irresistible, and the fact we were staying at a hostel also named the Bushpig bestowed the decision with an almost pre-ordained status.

So, with a brown envelope stuffed thick of filthy Ugandan shillings, I bought it and rode it from the Italian embassy like I’d stolen it. I had spent two exhausting weeks battling the bureaucracy and bullshit of Kampala, but traversing its busy streets the boisterous thumping of the Bushpig promised that we would soon be on the road again. My heart soared and all was well, for a short while.

The ‘Service’

Early on in the search, the first hurdle to be overcome was whether or not I could register a bike in Uganda. The online forums and contacts suggested that this was possible, but a visit to the Ugandan Revenue Authority (URA) suggested otherwise. To register a bike, I would need to be registered for tax in Uganda and get a Taxation Identity Number (TIN). Eventually, a large Dutchman on a small motorbike told me that he had managed to get a TIN whilst on a tourist visa, with the help of a bike shop named Simba Automotives. Fatefully, we sought out Simba to see if I could do the same. My first meeting with the manager Tushar, went something like this:

“Hi, my name is Stuart and I would like to buy a motorbike.”

“Hi Stuart, I’m Tushar and we have.”

“The difficulty for me however is that I need to get the motorbike registered in my name but I don’t have a TIN. Can you help?”

“No, no, this can’t be done, we will register the bike in our name and you can ride it.”

“No, no, I need the bike to be registered in my name, to get a Carnet and ride it to Sth Africa [etc etc]”

“Oh, well if you NEED it, then we can help. But there will be a cost…”

Apart from the modest application fees, the quid pro quo was that I would get the bike serviced with Simba’s auto-shop.

So the same day I rode the Bushpig from the embassy, I dropped it at Simba for a service. The instructions were, “just a small service”. To the honest and the competent, a ‘small service’ means; changing the oil, filters and consumables, tightening the cables, lubrication, pumping the tyres, general diagnostics etc and these were the things that Tushar and I had discussed. Anything else, I had instructed, was to be run past me first so that I could be there to observe and learn. That afternoon, I received a message from Tushar that read, “Bike has a problem of piston rings, oil filter, timing chain, clutch plates, valve and seals”.

Before going further, I should note that from here on in, there will be lots of ‘mechanical’ jargon that I myself would not have understood a month ago. As such, I will endeavour to provide a plain English translation and a veterinary metaphor to assist with some of the technical aspects. ie; the message from Tushar read “the Bushpig has a problem with its lungs, liver, spinal cord, osteitis pubis/arthritis of the leg joints and heart”.

I was concerned by Tushar’s message, but strengthened by advice from my mate Andy Blanks that they were just trying to milk me. (Andy, you may recall from the previous update, is a mechanical genius and an absolute legend worth his weight in gold and Bundy Rum. Were it not for Andy, I would have probably melted down into a bawling wreck by now.) The issues claimed by Tushar would have been apparent from riding it and if they weren’t that bad, then the Bushpig should make it the 4,500km to South Africa where good mechanics and parts would await. The Bushpig had by no means ridden like a suckling piglet, but by the same token, she was not the decrepit sow described by Tushar’s message. I returned to Simba to clamp down on things and order what spare parts could be found.

At Simba, I found the Bushpig in a thousand pieces. In half a day, they had stripped her down completely and she was sitting in a grubby box in a darkened room. Shoved in my face were her piston rings (pleura), clutch plates (shoulder/hip cartilage), valves and seals (aorta and left/right ventricles) and I was told that they were all shot. This hadn’t been concluded by a compression test or riding (ECG, CT Scan, X-Ray), but rather by dismantling her to have a look (open heart surgery). Shocked, I got in a shouting match with the rat-faced head mechanic and was told by Tushar that the replacement parts would be hard to find and likely Chinese. When I told them to reinstate her with the same parts, the same parts that had been working just fine, I was informed that they would need to get a specialist contractor in, as for a bike like this, it was beyond their expertise (if you’re asking why the hell you would dismantle a bike that is beyond your expertise to reassemble, that’s a good question).

What followed over the coming weeks was intense study and deliberation (in constant consultation with Andy) and not much sleep. I read the service manual cover to cover, joined and scoured every DR 650 forum and Facebook group I could find and emailed parts dealerships from Sydney, to Stuttgart to South Africa. What little happened on the part of Simba, happened slowly.

Eventually, they gathered the ‘required’ parts and spares (most of which they claimed were Japanese) and despite earlier insistences from Tushar that he could not provide a quote, as “he could not predict the future”, the estimates and costings provided were going to be quite cheap. So, I went ahead with most of the rebuild, except for installing a new timing chain (spine/nervous system) which was apparently to be made from two smaller chains which had been broken and connected together (Frankenstein chain). My instructions were, “I don’t want a customised timing chain, put the old one back in as it was”.

Days that became a week went by. Each day I would walk up to Simba expecting work to happen and each day I was fed some excuse as to why the ‘expert’ contractor was not there. Oddly, amongst these excuses were both an Islamic holy day and a hangover…

When we had first arrived in Kampala, we made fairly expensive bookings to go Gorilla trekking at Bwindi National Park in the South-West of Uganda (near Rwanda), which was also the way we intended to leave the country. Gradually it became clear that all this stuffing around meant that the Bushpig would not be rebuilt in time to ride to the Gorillas. This would necessitate significant backtracking, but it’s not like we really had a choice.

The day we left for the Gorillas was the day the contractor finally showed up. I bought him smokes and a coke, made friends and implored him to do a good job before we left for a weekend at the Gorillas.

(The 'expert contractor', Tushar and an optimistic/naive me)

We intended to return on the Tuesday as the bike had been promised by Monday evening, but now wise to Tushar’s ‘optimistic’ timeframes, we called to receive a revised handover of Wednesday. Imagine our ‘surprise’ when we returned to a still fully dismantled Bushpig that evening, the engine missing and nothing substantial actually done.

I spent the following two days looking over the contractor’s shoulder, messaging Andy photos and videos every minute. I became part of the workshop furniture anxiously looking on and making sure that the timing chain that went back in was the original. Whilst I have never actually given birth or witnessed it, I’m sure it would basically be like this, though perhaps less stressful. I almost collapsed with relief when on Friday evening the Bushpig roared into life for the first time in 2.5 weeks. To celebrate and relax a little, Cam and I spent the weekend on Lake Victoria getting a bit of fishing done.

On the Monday, I went into Simba expecting to be handed the keys and a bill. Instead, the bike was missing and I was told I would get it back the following day…

The next day I went back in, helmet in hand and was informed by Tushar that:

“We have lost the ignition key and the bike has been impounded.”

How do you respond to this?

“OK. Why is it impounded?”

“Our best mechanic, he is a BMW mechanic, was test riding it to make sure bike was OK. He decided timing chain needed replacing, so he was on the way to his workshop when the police pulled him over. He didn’t have the papers, so it is impounded with URA [Ugandan Revenue Authority]. You will go get it tomorrow.”

Clinging to optimism, I chose to see this development as a positive, the mechanic had been foiled on his way to install the Frankenstein timing chain. You may recall I specifically forbade them from doing this. I reminded Tushar of this fact and sought an explanation as to why ‘BMW’ was going to do so anyway. Tushar explained that:

“The contractor removed a link from the old timing chain and [BMW] thought it sounded strange, so thought it better to put the ‘new’ one in.”

I was furious. Not only had they gotten the Bushpig impounded, they had butchered the original timing chain after I specifically told them to leave it alone. The nearest proper replacement would have to be found in South Africa or shipped over from Australia (thanks again Andy) to meet us somewhere on the road.

The following morning, I went to the URA headquarters (a loathsome place) to liberate the Bushpig. In a graveyard of rotting bikes, I found the Bushpig and was eventually able to get her released, astoundingly without further payment. Even more astoundingly, she started beautifully. I was meant to ride her back to Simba, but there was no way I was going to do that, so I gave their rep the slip in the hectic traffic. The Bushpig and I thumped around Kampala and for the first time in 2.5 weeks the weight in my stomach lifted. Back at the hostel, we met Cam and sat there in the carpark just starting and idling her like new parents.

Conscious that Simba had butchered the timing chain, I had my head right down by the engine block (chest) listening when disaster struck. A sickening crunch came from deep within the Bushpig and she painfully choked out. I immediately knew that something was seriously wrong and my mind went straight to the timing chain.

Simba sent out the ‘A-Team’ and I soon found myself explaining to the contractor what had happened. When he went to start the Bushpig I stopped him (picturing shards of timing chain churning through the Bushpig’s insides), only to see him try to start her again when I turned my back. Lashing him with some harsh words and cold fury, I resolved to never leave him alone with the Bushpig again.

We wheeled the Bushpig back up the hill to Simba for the biopsy. Examining more closely the Frankenstein chain they had wanted to put in, the week points and stiff joins were obvious and it looked like it had been squashed together with pliers. I was afraid that the original timing chain that had been butchered timing chain had had the same treatment. However, when they opened the Bushpig up again, the diagnosis was a rubbish Chinese oil filter (liver) that had blocked oil (blood) from getting to the head (heart). As a result, the cam shaft and tappets had ground down (ie the heart had suffered severe scarring) and caused the engine to overheat and shut down (suffer ischaemic/heart attack).

According to ‘BMW’ and the ‘expert contractor’, the problem could be resolved by polishing down the cam shaft and tappets (excising the scar tissue on the heart) and installing a new metal oil filter (prosthetic liver). Unconvinced, I agreed to this further work and tried not to replay the grinding sound in my head before the next major operation.

I was not surprised when the polished cam shaft and tappets fixed nothing. The contractor opened up the left side and the true extent of the problem was revealed. The magneto (stator/dyno/generator/alternator) (entire digestion system) was trashed. An internal bolt had fractured, wiggled free and churned the Bushpig’s innards. This was clearly a huge mechanical blunder and the bolt had either been incorrectly torqued, or just hit with a bloody hammer trying to take it apart.

With the Bushpig open in front of me, I was able to examine some more of the contractor’s handiwork (featured below). You don’t have to be a mechanic to pick it, he had treated the Bushpig with no respect and he had butchered her. What had been done to her was not mechanics, it was unsolicited violence and abuse. I couldn’t see a way to getting the Bushpig back on the road in under a month.

What followed was a free and frank exchange of opinions with Tushar, the key points of which can cleanly be summarised as follows:

• “I’m not paying for any of the work to fix this and if you want any payment for the circus that has been the last 2.5 weeks (including your actual disbursements) you had better find a solution quick smart.”

• “The contractor never touches the Bushpig again.”

Tushar assured me that a replacement magneto could be found in either Uganda or Kenya and if not, ‘a guy they knew’ could ‘make’ a new one (just like someone had ‘made’ a new timing chain). I wouldn’t be charged for any of this, but it would take a ‘couple of days’. After a further discussion about ‘optimistic representations’ (bullshit), he admitted that it would be more like a week. Frustrated and over it, Cam and I again forced ourselves to see the silver lining and headed bush to Ziwa Sanctuary and Murchison Falls to find Rhinos and Shoebills.

A week later, we returned to Kampala with a line in the sand. Unsurprisingly, a replacement magneto had not been found, but the makeshift replacement actually looked quite good. Typically, they had installed it in my absence (contrary to my express instructions and Tushar’s assurances) and I was summoned to the shop in the evening with 5 minutes notice, to come pick the Bushpig up for testing, “Now Now”.

On the darkest part of dusk and in the most steadfast of Kampala gridlock, I picked up the Bushpig and she ran awfully. In the 1.5 km ride back to the hostel she stalled 30-40 times, lurched against power issues at only 50km/hr and became insanely hot. In the morning, she would not start at all and gain the A-Team descended on the hostel car park. After several jump starts and a cloud of smoke, the awful question that had been slowly growing in the back of mind was looming large and I began to feel the despair creep in.

The rat-faced head mechanic determined that the problem was the sparkplugs (which I had been told had been replaced, but weren’t). I was deeply sceptical of this and it did nothing for my confidence when he measured the sparkplug clearances with a hacksaw blade that he claimed was 0.5mm thick (after dropping the sparkplug on the floor). Firstly, the clearance was meant to be 0.8mm (I showed him the relevant specification in the manual) and secondly, he was measuring it with a bloody hacksaw blade, not filler gauges. He scoffed and told me that on his bike, the clearance was meant to be 0.5mm. I responded that (Language Warning):

“Well since we are not working on your f$#$%ing bike and we are working on my bike, the clearance will be 0.8mm. So go get the f&*@#ing filler gauges.”

The filler gauges arrived shortly thereafter.

The other minor point of difference that had to be resolved before testing the Bushpig again was the new oil filter (prosthetic liver). Given that, as you may recall, a dodgy Chinese oil filter was a main cause of the major failure, I wanted this sorted properly. Below, the proposed filter is pictured and even the non-mechanic readers may have already picked a few problems.

Aside from the fact that the ‘new’ filter is made from what appears to be flywire, you will notice that it is held together by plastic zip ties. The oil which passes through the filter gets hot, very hot, and the purposes of the filter is to remove offending articles and clean the oil in circulation, not inject molten plastic into the internal organs of the Bushpig.

Unbelievably, this was the subject of a protracted argument between myself, Tushar and the rat-faced head mechanic. An argument that ended with me finding a pair of pliers and some copper wire, and altering the damned thing myself.

But against all expectations, the Bushpig then rode beautifully. I spent a morning terrorising the lush streets of Kollolo hill (uphill of Simba Automotives, should she break down again). Emboldened by this, I ventured into the outer suburbs to find Cam and plan our escape the following morning. The only outstanding issue was that the Bushpig’s horn (oink) wasn’t working. The Bushpig and I strode back into town to sort it out.

At the main intersection in Kampala, the Bushpig broke down again. Once more, Simba’s A-Team came and got me, and I was certain that the makeshift magneto was not doing its job. The battery had gone simply too many times. We limped her back to Simba where the rat-faced mechanic told me that it was only a matter of fuel… After explaining to him that an empty tank doesn’t make a sloshing sound and that his theory didn’t explain why I had been able to ride the 10km back to the workshop, the electrical mechanic went to work testing the magneto and other electricals. The readings he returned actually seemed alright, but after running it a couple of minutes disaster struck again. In defeat, the Bushpig started blowing smoke everywhere and choked to a halt, oil leaking from her engine black.

I will never know exactly what caused this final blow-up, or what was causing the heat, battery and stalling issues. In triaging this with Andy, we concluded that there were simply too many culprits, too many damaged and dodgy parts, and too much shoddy workmanship. Since handing the keys to Simba, I had not been able to keep the Bushpig on the road without issue, for more than a handful of K’s, or an hour or two. We realised, that there would continue to be serious issues, with only amateur bush mechanic fixes and that she would never be reliable until fully rebuilt by a competent mechanic. This could not happen until at least South Africa and we could barely get her 15 k’s, let alone 4,500. Also, god knows what this would cost, but probably at least the value of the bike. I gave them a good bike and they trashed it.

So, I made the decision that conceded the worst possible result to this whole sorry 5 week debacle.

With a heavy heart, I laid a gentle hand on my new love and whispered “that’ll do pig, that’ll do.

UPDATE

After all this, Cameron, the Badger and I left Kampala like bats out of hell. We drove 1,500km in three days to Moshi, Tanzania where we are about to climb Mount Kilimanjaro. This will mean at least a week without phones/internet and thinking about motorbikes. Bikewise, I don’t know what comes next. We have a lot of ground to make up and the time/money/patience budget for a new bike is running low.

Thanks for reading and I wish there were happier news.

Speak soon,

Stu