A redhead with a self-deprecating sense of humour, Lois Pryce is a sort of bike-borne Bridget Jones; nearly intrepid despite herself. Why is she undertaking this exhausting 10,000-mile ride through 11 countries — from Tunisia to Cape Town — when she could happily swoon in the arms of Austin, her “wonderful companion and favourite person in the world”? And isn’t she woefully unprepared for the African sun, being as she is, white as a “Romanian vampire”? While she leaves the first question unanswered, she bravely tackles the second by taking a trip to a sun-bed.
Armed with her sparkly crash helmet, 225cc trail bike and newly basted complexion, Pryce begins her journey in Tunis. She slogs across the Sahara with a troop of rally racers and across Algeria, Niger and Nigeria with a Belgian couple and their “gap-year philosopher” cousin. With quite remarkable courage, she then takes on the rest by herself. As she feared, her conspicuous status as ‘La Blanche’ leads to her being preyed on by Africans with big dreams and meagre means, and assaulted by an assortment of unsavoury men, including a drunk fisherman, an albino tramp with open sores, and a one-legged Congolese custom officer who, upon luring her into a darkened hangar, dispenses her a leery invitation to sit on his stump.
Pryce’s narrative reads like an interminable dinnertime anecdote, recounted with an eager sense of humour and peppered with entertaining pop culture references. Lit-up sheep carcasses in Tunisia resemble a Damien Hirst installation, predatory Cameroonian girls sport skimpy outfits that’d embarrass Jodie Marsh…
The book pays attention to the tiniest details — like the upholstery and churlish staff of numerous embassies. Some passages — such as how she was forced to surrender her packet of chocolate biscuits to a stoned, Kalashnikov-waving Congolese soldier thrum with fear and adrenaline. But much of the rest, alas, echoes her appraisal of a Niger truck driver, who was “more than happy to have a good moan in the ear of a stranger”.