Journey to Kenya
January/February 2025
My wife and I celebrate our 40th wedding anniversary during 2025 and have decided to make it an epic year of adventure and fun. As a start we swapped out our motorcycles for the BMW 40 Year GS Anniversary bikes to add to the fun of the experience. Hers is a 750 GS with a lowered suspension, and mine, the 1250 GS Adventure.
Combining our love of adventure with the need to raise funding to support the Gray Education Foundation, during January 2025 my wife and I intend to undertake an 8000km roundtrip on our motorcycles from Johannesburg to Diani Beach, just south of Mombasa in Kenya, where we hope to swim with whale sharks and dive with Manta Rays. All costs relating to the trip are paid personally with 100% of the funds raised going to the Gray Education Foundation. The impact of education is exponential. It has a generational impact on families, shaping a brighter future.
Part of the freedom of riding a motorcycle is not having a predetermined route with accommodation pre-booked forcing a military style journey with daily milestones to be achieved. There is no fun in that. This approach is not without its challenges as riding at night in Africa searching for accommodation is not an option. Animals wonder on to the roads and potholes become nigh invisible.
I will never forget my bike bucking like an enraged bull when I hit a pothole at night in Zambia while doing the Journey Through Africa charity ride. How the tyres didn’t burst I will never know. I was thrown up and sideways and up again as the wheels took their turn to plunge into the depths of the abyss lurking in the road.
We plan to leave around the 8th of January and head north from Johannesburg, through Botswana up to Livingstone and then into Malawi, Tanzania and Kenya. I want to avoid Mozambique as in the past I have had endless trouble with the police pulling me over and threatening me in an effort to extort bribes. Riding on edge in the fear of being pulled over for no reason spoils the joy of the journey. Monkey Bay on Lake Malawi is a must see and will provide good training for riding on dirt for my wife in preparation for the main event;- a 30 000km ride spanning the length of the Americas (see “take me to the next adventure”)
The distance that can be covered on any given day is largely a factor of the state of the roads, the weather and access to accommodation. We have pencilled in ten days to do the ride to allow for rain and other delays. This will be the first time that my wife undertakes a ride of this magnitude, so I have made sure that we have time to be cautious on difficult stretches of road.
