travellingbennetts

Looking through some inspirational quotes on adventures the other day, I note that Roald Amundsen said: “Adventure is just bad planning”. Given that Roald actually put weight on while being first to the South Pole in 1911, he was clearly very good at planning and executing. As I’ve normally put weight on during our motorcycling trips, either we are also very good at planning or we’ve made up for mediocre planning with exuberant executing of innocent buffet tables.

The Cairo to Cape Town 80 day tour starts in mid-January 2017, and has been the subject of many months of reading and getting advice, buying stuff, realising the stuff is probably the wrong stuff, and going out again to hopefully buy the right stuff. Talking to people about their wild motorcycle travels has its drawbacks, hearing about their broken doohickie in a part of the world where it is illegal to sell or buy doohickies inevitably results in another trip to the shops to get more stuff. Then you talk to someone else who says that you won’t need a doohickie, because you can use a cheap widget and just attach it with a cable tie, it lasts years and can also be used to pull corks out of bottles. And you just went out and bought a Leatherman which was double the price of the standard one simply because it had a corkscrew.

The loss of “The Precious” nearly 3 months before the trip is traumatic. Sure the bikes have to go by sea, but with Perpetual Loyal averaging 23 knots in the 2016 Sydney to Hobart surely something with an engine should easily get it across the 8,000 nautical miles in under two weeks. A whole week in the trip schedule is allowed to get The Precious out of the dock in Alexandria, the last C2C took eight days to get the bikes so hopefully port officials are now far more aligned with customer satisfaction and outcomes rather than process.

The alignment of the loss of The Precious with Queensland Rail suburban train driver shortages meant that train travel was no longer a viable option, so the only possible way to get to work and to keep the riding skills up for the C2C was to buy a 1999 BMW R850R the next day. An obvious advantage of this was scenes of raw emotion at the next BMW Motorcycle Club Queensland monthly meeting as the recidivist Triumph owner could finally be welcomed into the fold.

The answer to planning confusion for a trip is lists. For a 3 month trip like the C2C, the more lists the better as they prove conclusively that you are planning. The first list was spares that had to go with The Precious, which includes levers, drive assemblies, brake pads, light bulbs, oil and air filter, sump plug, and spark plugs. Which practically guarantees that an incident will occur on day one such as an innocuous stick rising up to snap off the gear lever, for which you suddenly realise there is no spare. And the Leatherman that has a corkscrew is no use because it doesn’t have the vice grip pliers to lock onto the gear shaft. Luckily duct tape, electrical tape, wire, and cable ties are also on the spares list.

The next big list is clothes. This list is separated into two sub-lists; the riding gear list, and the African recreation, evening and night wear list. The riding gear list was supported by development of a day by day minimum and maximum temperature, average rainfall, and humidity profile across the past 8 years in each location. The profile really only managed to confirm that it will be hot and cold in various combinations with dry and wet, so a full set of riding gear suitable for a Melbourne day was the result. Reference was made to helpful texts such as Shirley and Brian Rix’s Two for the Road book which described their first major cross-content adventures through Europe and Asia, and conveniently included a list of recommended clothing for him and her. The clothing list has been worked over and trade-off studies between budgie smugglers and board shorts completed, but the real test always comes when packing actually takes place.

The final list is general equipment and accoutrement, broken down into several sub-lists of documentation, electrical gear, medications and unguents, and miscellaneous. This list requires the most thought, because a pair of shorts not making it onto the clothing list is inconvenient, but the corkscrew not making it onto the general list potentially means total disaster in the bottle shops of Ethiopia. Much of the content on this list is influenced by likely availability on the road, for example the assumption can safely be made that Africans get haircuts, so therefore taking the full home man-scaping kit is probably unnecessary.

Having the right electrical plugs is important when travelling anywhere, and luckily Africa seems to be limited to European, British, and the enormous South African plug. A trick was discovered with getting a single power board instead of heaps of adaptors, which means that only one plug adaptor is required. This will also prevent fights about whose piece of electrical equipment is higher on the recharge priority register (strangely Cindy’s gear always seems to win) in hotel rooms with only one power point.

For a trip to Africa, one must become reconciled to the fact that every truly frightening disease was developed there before reaching maximum horrible death capability and release into the passing adventure rider market. Luckily Cindy has been to PNG numerous times so was the proverbial pincushion, while I had recently been to the Congo so was reasonably equipped to ward off disease. The one disease to which we still presented an easy target was rabies, and having heard a nurse friend’s story of a little African girl with rabies which could have been written by Stephen King, the $360 for a course was handed over which at least gave some comfort to the travel doctor. On the topic of medication, and given the requirement to schedule riding and crisis visits to anything resembling a restroom as completely separate activities, plenty of extra pills which are the pharmaceutical equivalent of a wooden bung and a rubber mallet have been thrown in.

In conclusion and with less than two weeks to go as I write this, excitement and tension are rising. With regard to planning for the C2C, to borrow from Winston, it is not the end. It isn’t even the beginning of the end. But it is perhaps, the end of the beginning.