2K5 Africa Charity Motorcycle Ride

Here is a story for all adventure nuts interested in a trans Africa motorcycle trip. In an earlier posting I wrote about Mark Kirby a seasoned adventure rider who is about to embark on another ambitious journey the Enfields to India Challenge.

In 2005 Mark & Jason managed to ride from London to Cape Town in just over 4 months. I have been lucky enough to get my hands on the journal for their Africa adventure. Over the next few weeks I will be posting a day to day rundown of what went on in his own words. I will be starting out a day before they were due to depart.



Friday 01/04/05 London, England

The day before we are due to depart and the day started with 3 very excited guys frantically trying to get all our paperwork sorted and the final few things that we needed all in order. At about midday we got a phone call from Overland Solutions (the company modifying the bikes) saying that Doug’s bike, the XL600, had a perished oil seal at the output shaft and that the bike probably wasn’t in good enough condition to go to Africa. The advice was that it might make a couple of thousand miles, but that it wouldn’t go all the way as it was leaking oil at a rapid rate. Major panic from all sides as we are just about at the final hurdle and now one of us may be in deep water. Not to be daunted, we made a few frantic phone calls to various mechanics and suppliers and ordered a part which was due to arrive on Tuesday from the Honda parts department in Brussels. This of course meant that we had to wait for this part and postpone our departure. At 23:30 Friday night, we got the call that the 2 Africa Twins (AT’s) were ready for collection and that the XL600 could be collected, but that it was advisable to replace the part.


Watch out for my next post to find out what happened next:)