| A column for 2Wheels magazine South Africa | | Print | |
| Monday, 23 March 2009 | |
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Written by the MPASA Pica 2008 award winning Journalist Gavin Foster.
Being the adventurous types we are, motorcyclists often set ourselves personal challenges to tackle. For Ewan McGregor and Charlie Boorman the ultimate high came from riding their motorcycles 24000 km from John 0’Groats to Cape Town with a column of 4X4s containing film crew, medics, mechanics and sundry other supporters in tow. Then there was our own Carlo Gonzaga, founder of Scooters Pizza, who, along with three other riders on BMW adventure bikes rode 16400 km from Durban to Europe in 39 days to deliver a pizza to the Springbok World Cup rugby squad in 2007. Being a lazy, untalented sod on a perpetually small budget, my list of heroic two-wheeled past adventures is limited to conquering Sani Pass, first on a Vespa 150 about seven years ago, then on a PGO G-Max 125 scooter in 2005. Then today, my belief that you have to have a motorcycle to enjoy the ultimate adventure experience was abruptly shattered. I met a bloke I reckon has to take the cake for lunacy, courage or stubbornness, depending on your viewpoint. A travel-weary 30-year-old Swiss electrical engineer pitched up at my house looking for a place to sleep, having spent the last three years riding his bike from Bern to Durban. His feat made McGregor, Boorman, and Gonzaga’s African sagas look ridiculously simple, because Adrian Guggisberg‘s two-wheeler was a bicycle, with a trailer hitched astern to carry his tent and other paraphernalia. To make things even tougher, this extraordinarily energetic Alpine yodeler didn’t simply point the handlebars in the direction of Cape Point and start pedaling. He crisscrossed his way down the continent, taking a 400 km detour just to see what the mud city of Timbuktu in Mali had to offer. But his days weren’t only filled with sight seeing - survival was always an issue. Our hard-riding hero was stopped by a French Foreign Legion patrol in the Central African Republic, who warned him that if he continued on his chosen route he’d end up being devoured by Congolese rebels. He ignored the soldiers’ advice and eluded the cannibals, only to be chased, first by an elephant in Kenya and later by a mob of irate and no doubt starving peasants in Zimbabwe. It wasn’t just Adrian’s life that was at risk. He once found himself with no choice but to sleep in a double bed with a Cameroonian villager he’d met not two hours before, whose hospitable nature wouldn’t allow him to let a guest sleep on the floor. He also had the dubious pleasure of being invited into a surgical theatre in Benin to watch and photograph a local tribesman go under the knife to have an enormous abdominal swelling removed. He rode into the infamous Harmattan, a strong prevailing headwind, for 5000 km through West Africa (“I got used to it after a while”) spent two months trapped in Malawi awaiting the arrival of a $50 bicycle part that kept getting lost in the post, and, while waiting, had the dubious privilege of visiting the oddly- named “Rwandan Survivor’s Leisure Centre Restaurant Rest House Booze Den”. In Mozambique he found himself straffing agricultural pastures at dawn, squashed in front of the pilot of a single seater crop sprayer and, in the Kingdom of Mad Bob it took him two full days to find a shop that could sell him enough food to feed him for four. What stuns me the most about Adrian’s adventure is that, after all this, he still didn’t know when to stop. Upon arriving at the southernmost point in Africa he decided that, having come so far, he might as well see the rest of our country before going home, so he did what any other loony masochist would do. Instead of spending a couple of hundred bucks on a bus ticket to Durban, he hopped back on his bike and pedaled up the east coast, making an inland detour through the Baviaanskloof, and then on to the Transkei. There, he negotiated the length of the Wild Coast along the beach, pushing his bike and trailer for miles when the sand was too soft, and carrying the dismantled contraption across the numerous overflowing rivers he encountered en route. Not content with this mild torture, he then detoured through Matatiele into Lesotho and pedaled across that country to Sani Pass, which he descended into KwaZulu-Natal before setting off for Pinetown. There, 34 months and 43000 km after he left Switzerland, he arrived at my doorstep with an endless supply of fascinating stories of his escapades. All this leaves me in a bit of a pickle. Adrian doesn’t own a motorcycle. As a committed biker, I feel morally obliged to feed him my normal line about motorcycles giving you more adventure, more fun, more freedom and more bang for your buck than any other form of travel in the modern world. My problem is this: he’s an excellent photographer, and I’ve just finished looking at his pictures of some of the most stunning scenery and interesting people I’ve ever seen. What the hell could he do on a motorcycle that could possibly top what he’s just accomplished? I feel an urgent need to rush out right now to buy myself a bicycle. Nah. Just kidding. Adrian’s looking for a yacht sailing to Europe that needs crew, or a freighter that will get him and his bike back home without charging him an arm and a leg. Contact him on 031-7082410 or 083-6578241, or e-mail him on This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it if you can help. Visit www.to-adi.ch and click on the Union Jack for the English version of Adrian’s website. ENDS |
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