Under African Skies: Jo and Gareth Morgan's Epic Ride from Cape Town to London

hink of Africa and what do you see?

If your impressions from afar are anything like ours were, you see a continent of contrasts. You see vistas of a swollen sun sinking behind the silhouettes of fever trees. You see desert, savannah, ancient rock, mighty rivers, steaming jungle. You see elephants swinging their heads and lazily flapping their ears, lions in sphinx pose on the plain, assorted herds of zebra, wildebeest, giraffes in the grassland, gorillas in the mist, baboons on the prowl, crocodiles cruising and hippos hiccupping.

And this is where you’ll likely prefer to dwell, because alongside the picture postcard images, hovering at the periphery and refusing to be ignored, you’ll have another set of indelible associations: swollen-bellied children with flies crowding about the corners of their eyes, mouths and nostrils; men and women crammed together in makeshift refugee camps, their hands extended without real expectation or even hope. Guerillas in the mist: soldiers — as likely prepubescent boys as men — in camouflage gear and brandishing bush knives or the international symbol of political unrest, the AK-47. Drought, famine, disease, horrendous intertribal warfare, corruption — Africa’s got the lot, and they appear by rotation on the TV news. It was once called the Dark Continent, which neatly sums up its ability to attract and repel — the name conjures mystery and romance, curiosity and fascination, fear and loathing in equal measures.

It is pretty much universally believed — outside church circles, anyway — that the cradle of humanity lies in Africa. The fossil remains of our earliest ancestors — Homo habilis and Homo erectus — have been found in the Great Rift Valley area. It’s here that the whole story began; the epic ascent of man from the ancestor we share with the apes to the modern biker. Yet the African continent has also seen probably more graphic examples of man’s inhumanity to man than any other part of the world. When the nation states of Europe began competing to project their power and influence around the world, much of their rivalry was played out in Africa, where the race was on to grab bits of it and strip the resources. And much of the work that was done in constructing imperial outposts elsewhere on the planet was accomplished with the forced labour of indigenous Africans, kidnapped from their homelands and taken into permanent exile by European slavers.

Various African countries had differing experiences of colonialism, ranging from the extremely brutal — the Germans in South West Africa, the Belgians in the Congo or the French in Algeria — to the relatively benign — the English in Rhodesia or the Portuguese in Mozambique. But all the vanquished were thoroughly sick of foreign domination by the beginning of the twentieth century. Sadly, though, the decolonisation process — which was certainly a feature of the news from Africa over the years we were growing up — has triggered a whole new wave of power struggles, civil wars and revolutions, many of which are still simmering away today. And even in those countries that are between upheavals, the legacy lives on in their calamitous lack of any reliable systems of production and distribution, depriving most of the population of Africa of any of the benefits from the abundant natural resources and such economic development as has occurred there. The regimes in many African countries are just so unfair, the gap between rich and poor the widest in the world. More often than not, to get rich you have to walk all over your fellow man to achieve it. Add to this misery produced by human agency the periodic natural scourges of flood, drought and pestilence, and you have a complete explanation for the heart-rending images popping up recurrently on the six o’clock news.

So what the hell were we doing planning to ride motorcycles up through Africa? Shouldn’t we just be contented, stay-at-home grandparents? We had two motivations for going. One was the logic of the World By Bike venture that we’d first conceived in 2005, when we were nearing the end of our motorcycle traverse of the Silk Road between Europe and the Far East. If we were planning on leaving our tyre tracks on every continent on the globe, then that entailed riding the bikes through the red dust of Africa. And Africa appealed as the perfect context for the kind of adventure motorcycling that we prefer to do — off the beaten track, in contact with people who might as well inhabit a different planet for all they have in common with the folks you’d meet on a cappuccino canter from Wellington to Wanaka. It would be a tough enterprise, but that promised to be half the fun.

Perhaps more importantly — and less self-indulgently — we’d lately acquired a personal stake in the way the developed world assists the beleaguered and poverty-stricken peoples of Africa. In 2006, our son Sam sold TradeMe, the New Zealand online auction business that he’d built up from scratch over a decade, to one of the media giants for a cool $700 million. We’d believed in Sam and his venture from the outset, and had taken a foundation stake in the business. Now our faith in both had paid off, to the tune of $47 million, give or take. It’s a strange feeling, landing a sum like that, especially when you’ve already reached the age and stage where you have pretty much everything you want. And lately Gareth had been reading and thinking about the economic research that proves, with maths and graphs, that money doesn’t buy happiness — or at least, that satisfaction and fulfilment are only partially achieved by having more money, and once a certain saturation point is reached, no amount of additional moolah will make your life better.

‘What,’ we asked one another, bearing this in mind, ‘are we going to do with it all?’

Gareth settled the matter in a television interview a couple of nights later, when news of our windfall broke.

‘What are you going to do with the money?’ the interviewer asked.

‘Oh, we’ll give it away, I suppose,’ Gareth replied.

Of course, as Jo pointed out to him when he got home flushed with his own largesse, he hadn’t troubled to ask what she intended to do with her share.

Well, now we were prisoners of Gareth’s rhetoric, and we began looking around for worthy recipients. Charitable donation, we reasoned, was just another way of spending money, and it ought to be carried out with the same care with which you’d use money to buy or invest. You ought to be just as concerned to get a quality return for your outlay in this context as in any shopping spree or investment decision. So we started researching the business of aid and development.

The first thing we discovered was that giving away such a large sum of money in a way that does anyone any good is not as easy as you might think. We’re all familiar with charitable organisations that specialise in accepting donations from the rich and distributing them to the poor, and there’s no shortage of them: you only need look at the list of 0800 numbers scrolling down the screen in the wake of news stories about the latest disaster in Africa or elsewhere. But we weren’t convinced that simply handing over our money to one of these outfits was going to give us the biggest humanitarian bang for our buck. On the contrary, there seemed every reason to believe that an unacceptable proportion of the power of donated money is lost in the operation of these organisations; that too much is frittered away in administration and in the inefficiencies you find in every large organisation, including those in the voluntary sector. We’d also seen too many examples of aid organisations backing projects that were just not appropriate responses to the problems they were trying to solve. So, suspicious that too little of the generosity of well-intentioned donors reaches the spot where the rubber actually meets the right road, we decided against simply handing over our money to one of the aid organisations or some other agency. Instead, we decided it would be better to get into the business ourselves, identifying individuals or organisations who could demonstrate their effectiveness in producing humanitarian outcomes from the money invested in them.

This promised to provide the second dimension to our trip — to have a look at the way aid is administered in the countries to which it floods, and to see what good it does among the people for whom it is intended.

Riding up Africa would be an undertaking, all right. It would have elements in common with our previous trips: like the Silk Road, it would take us through a number of countries and across several borders, with all the bureaucratic and linguistic convolutions and frustrations that this entails. Like our trips to India, South America, Mexico, parts of Europe and Central Asia, it would take us through areas of upheaval, unrest and underprivilege. As in Central Asia, it would take us far away from the trappings of civilisation — First World health providers and authorised motorcycle mechanics. And we’d heard some of the roads would make the difficulties we’d struck elsewhere pale in significance. As with our previous trips, but perhaps to an even greater degree, the secret to a successful trip would lie in the planning.

So Gareth opened his atlas, raised a spreadsheet, and we began to construct various itineraries, trying to weave in the best of Africa — the geographical attractions, the iconic landscapes, the wildlife — while avoiding the worst. The latter was the greater challenge, as hot spots come and go in Africa. It was a matter of keeping a few alternative routes open and not getting too committed to any particular one. The main trouble with starting the planning 18 months out was that the conditions within some of the countries en route were bound to change and we had to always have available a ‘Plan B’. Our range of options also had to have regard for road conditions, the distances between stops and the services available — both for man and machine — along the way. Our preferred route had us beginning in South Africa at the Cape of Good Hope, a symbolic southerly landmark for the start of our trek up the continent. From there, we planned to head northwest until we hit the Zambezi River atop Botswana, and then swing east to Malawi and out to Zanzibar, then circumnavigate Lake Victoria before heading north through Kenya and Ethiopia to the Sudan. Here we knew it would get hard. We’d been invited to visit an aid project in Eritrea but difficulties on that border soon ruled that out. To get across to West Africa and rip through all those countries facing the Atlantic until we hit Morocco, we’d need to pass through Darfur or Chad — trouble spots at the time. We were optimistic that by the time we set off those flare-ups would be over.

They were not and we had to change course. Getting to West Africa would not be possible this trip: we’d stick to the east and get to the Mediterranean by riding through Egypt, across Libya to Tunisia before catching the exit ferry to Sicily. West Africa would have to wait for another day.

Now that we knew where we were going, we needed to know how we were going. Each time we’ve contemplated a trip, we’ve given a lot of thought to what kind of motorcycle would suit the conditions on the ground. Because of the distances involved, it was tempting to go for a big bike, like the 1200s we had ridden around North America, with the reliability and lower maintenance entailed by shaft drive. But the consensus among the sources that we read was that we’d be covering quite a bit of the distance in soft stuff — dirt, sand and gravel. That meant it was likely there’d be some involuntary dismounts along the way, and in those circumstances a lighter bike, easier to recover let alone keep upright when momentum threatens a can-out, becomes desirable. That brought us back to the kind of cross bike we’d used on the Silk Road, and to a familiar range of choices. BMW had been good to us on previous trips, both in terms of making bikes and gear available to us on favourable terms and, of course, in providing a robust product that could take the knocks, the heat, the cold, the dust and the crap fuel the bikes would be forced to imbibe at times. The Dakars we’d ridden on the Silk Road (and the lower-slung F 650 GS version Jo had ridden there and taken to North America) had impressed us. We recalled — how could we forget — that we’d had trouble with this bike’s electrics on the Silk Road, and we’d have to take steps to avert any repeat. But in the absence of any compelling reason to change, it looked like BMW 650 Dakars all round for the boys, and the trusty 650 GS for Joanne, albeit with a larger front wheel fitted. It was felt that a 21-inch instead of the factory 19-inch front wheel would help stop her front end digging into soft sand and Jo doing more than her fair share of face-plants.

Just as important as knowing where and how we were going, was knowing who we were taking with us. The North America experience — four months on the road with four people plus a couple more for shorter periods — had convinced us that we needed a constant of six riders. One issue was accommodation, which is widely arranged the world over on a share twin basis: in America, the two of us shared a room, and the other three or four either shared or bore the burden of paying for a single room on a rotational basis. The second half of this equation proved less than ideal, and it seemed highly desirable to have an even number of punters along so that the accommodation arrangements were settled from the outset. That could mean four, or six, or more. Eight is too many (you try getting agreement between two motorcyclists on anything, let alone eight!), and four is too few, as assuming we shared a room, the other pair would be stuck with each other for the duration. Better to have two pairs who can mix and match and provide a safety valve for the tensions that can arise. Jo also suggested on one ride that we draw straws for room mates each night but, to her bemusement, Gareth vetoed this.

It’s also a major benefit on an expedition ride, especially where the terrain and conditions to be traversed are challenging, to take along a group whose skill sets complement one another. So the search was on.

Top of the list besides ourselves — and even then, each of us might hesitate if asked to rate the three of us — is Dave Wallace, the Tauranga cow cockie we see most often, especially on our offshore expedition rides. Dave is the perfect player for a team sport such as this, totally reliable and unflappable as far as temperament goes, and highly capable when it comes to maintenance and repair of the bikes. And if you come across a bunch of kids who need winning over and rides on the bikes, Dave’s the man to have along. What’s more, somewhere along the way in our association, he seems to have appointed himself to the not undemanding position of Joanne’s minder, and we had precious little chance of going to Africa without him tagging along anyway.

Another World By Bike veteran was keen to join us for Africa too. Brendan Keogh is the owner of Motorad Wellington, our local BMW dealership, and was our companion on both the Silk Road and our month-long ride through South Korea on Hyosung bikes. Brendan had proved himself a loyal and very capable team player, though he and Gareth had clashed from time to time, especially toward the end of the Silk Road traverse when everyone was tired and trifling differences of opinion assumed disproportionate significance. Jo knew that the main source of friction was the essential similarity between their personalities — they both like to be boss. Perhaps they could get their way by turns — we’d work it out. That left two places to fill. Where do you go to find two durable, personable, sufficiently financial bikers with the necessary latitude in their business and matrimonial affairs to spend four months gadding about the wilds of Africa on a bike? The classified ads?

That, in fact, is not too far off the mark. Ever since the Silk Road expedition, with the extensive publicity that surrounded it and our subsequent trips to Korea and North America, we’d been receiving emails asking, imploring, begging or, in some presumptuous instances, instructing us to take the writer along. One of those who received Gareth’s standard reply of ‘What would you add?’ was Paul Swift. He wasn’t fazed by the question, and indeed, was able to make a compelling case. He was a strong rider, having ridden competitively in the Enduro scene with both national and international success. And, since he had owned his own Nelson motorcycle dealership for 24 years, he knew bikes backwards.

It turned out that Brendan had ridden with Paul in the New Zealand Enduro team that competed in Wales, and they knew each other as colleagues in the bike business. On the strength of Brendan’s recommendation, we got in touch with Paul and asked if he’d care to join us for Africa.

Brendan was also the connection with the sixth member of the team, Tony ‘Armpit’ Armstrong. The two of them are fishing buddies, spending lots of their spare time bobbing about in Tony’s gin palace on Cook Strait or riding trail bikes on Terawhiti Station on Wellington’s south coast. Tony had talked wistfully about going along on an expedition ride such as ours. Whether he would have joined up of his own accord is debatable, but it happened that his wife Robyn thought it high time he stepped back from the business they run together, Power Systems Consultants Ltd. She could see him destroying himself if he didn’t do something to live a more balanced and healthy lifestyle than the one sitting getting pudgy and stressed behind his desk could provide. With Robyn’s prompting, and with Brendan putting in a good word for him, he approached us to come along. He looked pretty good on paper too: a highly competent individual and rider, with lots of off-road experience.

In fact, as it turned out when we went on a shakedown trip from Wellington up to Tony’s bach on Lake Taupo, the disproportionate period of time he’d spent off-road looked like being the drawback. We chose a route that offered a mix of sealed highways and gravel byways, with the odd dirt forestry track thrown in for good measure. Tony had no problems on the rough stuff, but where you’d usually expect everyone to speed up on the tarseal, we found that Tony actually slowed down. You could see him steering around corners rather than leaning into them, and by the end of the day’s ride, he was knackered. He simply wasn’t that used to riding a bike on civilised roads! No matter: there would be more call for strength in the rough where we were going.

You can check out a rider’s prowess and proficiency pretty easily, and get a good idea of who’s going to be up to it and who isn’t. It’s far harder to gauge how the interpersonal side of things is going to go. We’d discovered this in America. We arrived Stateside and were a few days into our Backblocks tour when we learned that Roger Clausen, whom we’d recruited in a very similar way to Paul and Tony, was a devout Christian and part-time preacher. On the scale of things you’d probably want to know before committing to spending three months continuously in the company of a bloke, this was a biggie — especially for Gareth, who has little time or patience for religion and the religious. It naturally caused an amount of friction, and there were times when it seemed as though the robust theological disputation might escalate into some sort of religious war, but we agreed in retrospect that part of the charm of this kind of travelling was the parallel voyage of discovery you embarked upon as you learned about one another. We finished the American tour on the best possible terms with Roger, even if both sides had given little ground on matters religious. When we go on our ride through northern and eastern Europe at the end of 2008, Roger will be along and no doubt the theological discussions will continue.

That experience was a lesson for us: afterwards, we were less concerned about trying to discover every conceivable foible or difference that a riding mate might be concealing before we left. It was inevitable there would be bones of contention on the road together, but part of expedition riding is getting used to one another and adapting, as you would your riding style to different terrain.

Still, several people took Joanne aside in the weeks leading up to our departure and warned her about Paul. He was, they confided, wagging their heads, an unreconstructed sexist, and the kind who tended to be nitro to Jo’s glycerine. Taking him along could only lead to … trouble.

Funnily enough, the major reservation over Tony’s involvement came from his mate Brendan. He was reluctant to recommend anyone for inclusion, he told us, in case things turned to custard.

‘I don’t want you looking at me and saying he’s the one who invited that prick along,’ he said. Jo assured Gareth that anyone who could be a scuba dive master had to be a team player. So it was settled: Tony comes.

Hence, at Taupo, Jo was as interested to see how the new boys went as she was in the performance of her big front wheel. After the first night at Tony’s bach, Gareth announced he was leaving to meet a prior commitment, namely a school reunion elsewhere in the country. Tony and Paul shook his hand, and then went to give Jo a farewell peck on the cheek.

‘What are you doing?’ she asked. ‘Gareth’s off, but I’m not going anywhere.’

It was their first inkling of how independently we operate from one another. It was also their first test at Jo’s hands, too, and there were more to come. She told them that if they meant to come along on the trip, they had to pull their weight. You, she told Paul, can be laundry boy. And Tony, quick as a flash, assured her he could cook and proved it by producing a gourmet breakfast. Paul managed to hold his tongue — something he would prove to be good at — but there was a sequel. Some weeks after we’d finished the Africa trip, we were riding up around Hawke’s Bay when we were recognised by another couple of bikers who, it turned out, were acquaintances of Paul’s. They asked about the trip and one of them, turning to Jo, asked: ‘So is it true that you did Paul’s washing all the way around Africa?’

We were fortunate once again with our sponsors. Besides bikes and riding gear from BMW, we were again blessed with the support of Icebreaker, whose clothing we’d become totally addicted to on earlier rides. Our lubrication anxieties were greatly eased by the fitting of Scottoilers to do their magic chain-oiling thing along the way. John Baker Insurance tackled the