So you’ve probably all been wondering if this trip would ever begin. So had we. 3 days travelling, two days messing around with broken clutches and general foolishness. And still we hadn’t started riding.
Time for that to change. All aboard! High spirits, packed and fueled bikes and one times beautiful off-road track beckons. Next stop Ruacana!
That ‘road’ on Garmin is actually a disused service track for electricity pylons. The 4x4 club of Pofadder would give their back teeth to get stuck into a challenge as glorious as this. Dongas, ravines, washed away tracks, rocks. Everything a dual-sport biker dreams of, and more!
I was worried about Gaza. The last time I’d taken him riding (on his first ever motorbike ride) I’d led him up the old postal route between the Tankwa and Cederberg on a borrowed 80‘s Tenere... which should have been fine, except the sand was particularly thick that time of year, and we got lost. Proper, dehydrated, knackered lost. And the Tenere has no happy button and after he’d dropped it fourteen hundred times and flooded it repeatedly, he then stripped the clutch and had to abandon it there. Best and worst weekend of his life.
So I was supposed to let him in gently this time... but look at this track! My fears were completely unfounded. He was styling! Tom on the other hand...
Three of us had - probably foolishly - bought new bikes before this trip. You know the saying “If it’s not orange, it’s a lemon”? Well, this WAS orange, AND a lemon. Broken clutch, buckled wheels, punctures, and now a broken side stand switch.
I found the KTM was stranded on the side of the road, cutting out every time it was put in gear. Little did we know that 690 sidestand switches have nasty little pieces of electronics buried in the switch which will derail any attempt to isolate the switch by cutting the wires and simply wiring them together. We were stuck!
While we took turns poking around with a circuit tester, Tom say forlornly under a tree, wondering what was becoming of his Angola trip.
We were surrounded by Himba. Amused little ones. And some slightly bigger ones with very perky breasts. Since our route between Opuwo and Ruacana was only supposed to be 150km and we supposedly had loads of spare water, Mike was amusing himself giving the young’uns a shower.
Dusk was coming and we were no closer to getting the 690 running. The decision made itself - we were towing back to where we started. No easy task, as every few hundred metres there was a massive donga which was challenge enough on a running motorcycle.
We made a few km’s before the light was gone and it was time to set up camp for the first time. Which was when we realised we really did need that water that had been so generously shared with the Himba.
Still, camp is a happy place on any bike trail, and here is Tom putting up the new bivvy he made for this very adventure.
The morning brought a sense of disquiet in all of us. Were we going to be able to get the stricken KTM running? More worrying was the realisation that the bike was in pretty poor condition all round.
We spent most of the morning towing back to the lodge, and the next few hours on Google. That pesky switch needs a 2.2k ohm resister inline between two of the wires, and after a day scouring Opuwo we realised we weren’t finding one of those anywhere within a few hundred km.
More importantly, we’d lost faith in the bike. Angola is a wild country, recently emerged from civil war, with limited services, terrible roads and certainly no KTM mechanics. To make matters worse, we were heading for the most remote, inaccessible corner of the country. A bike that broke in Angola might well be a bike that stayed in Angola.
I guess the less I say about what followed the better. Losing a trip member at the very beginning of your ride, I can safely tell you, is a terrible experience. Especially when that person is as outrageous, funny, and just plain unconventional as Tom. None of us were going to enjoy Angola quite as much as Tom would have. And we were all going to be much the worse off for not having him enliven our experience of it.
But there wasn’t anything for it. Windhoek - and even the faintest glimmer of hope - was 900km away. We’d already lost a few days and if we were going to Angola, we were going today. This is that moment where you put on a brave face, say what needs to be said, stiff upper lip and all that.
We left Tom with a laptop, an Audi wagon and the wish that he found some gorgeous, badly behaved Scandinavian back-packer to tend to his loss and told him we’d see him in two weeks. What the hell!!!!
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