2wheels2africa

The KTM 640 Adventure has a 625 cc single cylinder engine, what this means in the real world is that it has huge amounts of low down torque and it vibrates everything to bits. No wonder these bikes area called big thumpers! The bike is really capable off road and on the dirt tracks that we will be facing in Africa, however the vibrations have a few disadvantages!

Last Saturday I went down to Bristol and back on the bike to see friends and get some stuff, on the way back I noticed that when the engine was at a certain amount of revs there was an almighty rattle and vibration in the whole bike coming from the bottom of the engine.

When I stopped to take a look I noticed that my rally bash plate was really loose and on closer inspection it seemed that the four screws that hold it in place under the engine had all come loose and fallen out! There were only two bolts on the front holding it on and the vibes had actually broken the bracket that these bolts were attached to!

The bracket that was broken.

Thankfully it held together the last few miles back, I just made sure I didn’t site anywhere near 3000 RPM!

For those of you that don’t know, the bash plate is there to protect the bike and engine from any bangs from underneath, mine is a rally bash plate which means it has two built in tool boxes on either side for handy access and to keep weight low down. I don’t think mine will be doing much protecting till I get it all fixed up though!

The pictures below show the bike with the bash plate on and then the engine without the bash plate as it is now while I wait for a new bracket from Germany!

So Friday was our last day of work, a bitter sweet thing for us both I think as we had worked pretty hard on the project and there was a great bunch of people that we were leaving behind. Still it was also great to be walking out the door knowing that in less than a month we will be on the road to Cape Town… and then who knows what adventures will happen.

For a bit of fun I’ve included parts of my leaving email and some of the funny responses I got from the office after the jump below. Enjoy the laughs at my expense!

People keep asking me why I’m doing this trip! For me it seems the most logical thing in the world, but I guess it is a little out of the ordinary and deserves a proper answer.

For me (Jeremy) it all really started about the same time I was getting into motorbikes, I started watching bits of the Dakar Rally in the Sahara desert which just captured my imagination. I could imagine myself riding along through desert dunes in the incredible heat experiencing nature in it’s rawest form, working with my machine to cover huge distances against the clock. What was even more exciting was that normal people could even enter this endurance race as amateurs! However as I researched the idea more I soon came to the realisation that they weren’t so much amateurs as very rich amateurs – the cost of a month in the Dakar as a privateer was just too much.

The seed had been planted though and coupled with my own wanderlust a plan started to form in my head. Inspired by a 4×4 trip with friends to the Arabian desert in Oman and the Emirates 2 years ago I started making my own hatchling of an idea into reality. My initial plan had been to ride across the Sahara from West to East, trying to spend as much time in the untouched and most remote parts as possible (limited by fuel and water) with the romantic idea of spending time with the Tuareg of the Sahara. But as I started looking into this idea politics started to get in the way. The problem with the Sahara is that it is just too wild and this seems to be reflected in a lot of the countries in the Sahara, even now as I write this Niger, Chad and Sudan all have some sort of conflict, Libya and Algeria have strict controls over where you go and you are forced to take guides with you (read megabucks!) and Egypt seems to be known as the most unfriendly country to take a bike into. Large parts of the Sahara just have too many restrictions or are simple unsafe because of rebels, smugglers and robbers.

So with a trans-Sahara expedition out of the question for the time being I started to look at the more traditional routes to Cape Town and settled on a route that would take me down the west coast of Africa through several of the western Saharan countries and then down through the interesting countries of the Congo and Angola before reaching the Cape. A slightly better trodden path will lead me up the east coast though I intend to fulfil a little more of my desert wanderings (if the Sahara hasn’t put paid to that) by heading across from Djibouti on the horn of Africa to Yemen and the Middle East before heading home overland through Iran.

It’s been a trip that has had a gestation period of over 2 years and has been at times hugely emotional as plans and dates have been changed and bikes have been stolen (yes – both my original bike and my existing one were nicked!). Still it is with both a sense of nervousness and excitement that I face this last few days of intense preparation before our estimated departure on or around the 6th/7th of January 2008.

It’s going to make for an interesting journey and I hope that all of you will join Keith and I as we travel through Africa. We will try and share as many of the people, sights, smells and sounds of Africa along with our reactions on this website for you to enjoy along the way.

This being my first blog post I feel I must highlight the fact. It’s actually my first blog post ever. Jeremy has been a bit more prolific in that regard he’s also been instrumental in making our online travel diary notions a reality. Very much appreciated Jez!

We’re going to keep this site updated with photos and stories from our trip as we make progress through it. For now we’re in preparation mode and gearing up for what will surely be the journey of a lifetime. The two of us took a trip to New York recently. We stayed with Chris, a friend of ours, in downtown Manhattan and had a really amazing weekend. Drinking Manhattans in Manhattan was pretty sweet if maybe not a little on the cheesy side but hey they’re a tasty number! It was my first time visiting New York. It’s everything everyone says it is and somehow more. For anyone who’s not been I’d highly recommend it.

While in New York we hooked up with Scott and the folks from Charity: Water. These people help communities in Africa build fresh water wells and teach them how to keep them up and running. They’re helping from a very basic level and doing fantastic work. Water is the source of life after all and without it or a quality supply of it a lot of people are dying unnecessarily. During this ensuing adventure we’re going to try and raise awareness for certain projects in Africa and hopefully do some good for ongoing aid work being carried out there. Together we know quite a few people and hopefully our online presence will get the message out to others.

I’ve added some pictures of my bike in the interim before I do a more complete write up about it. You can check out the pics here.