HARLEY on SAFARI 2007
Johannesburgissa 14.11.2004.
POSSE TOURING RIDE in SOUTHERN AFRICA
Rakkaat ystävät ja sukulaiset,
ROAD BOOK STORY (South Africa)
There was an unique African continental journey powered by Milwaukee
steel in March-April 2007. This BIG 5 touring ride was conducted in good
order in South Africa by Pretoria Chapter’s ex-director Mike Wood. An
international group of HOG members and bikes included mostly Harley
rental bikes together with local SA okes on their own Harleys. 45 people
from different nationalities: Australia, Canada, Brazil, Great Britain, Finland,
Germany, Malta, Poland, Turkey, U.S.A, and South Africa experienced
something extremely unique in sunny Africa. The Big 5 refers to the hunting
of big animals and the word “safari” originates from the Swahili language and
means a long journey. We did a BIG SAFARI as according to its original meaning and in the everlasting spirit of Africa.
Is there anything better than the expectation of a great journey? Doing it and
perhaps later even remembering some of those great moments come close
to it.
It was somewhere in Limpopo where a by-passer standing next to my bike
said to me that that’s an awesome way to see Africa. Although being such a
mean biker I had to agree with this oke who expressed our intentions with
such justification.
There is no hurry in Africa, therefore 6250 kilometres were covered in 3 weeks by Posse riders and HOG members
respectively. The tour covered Cape Town and Cape Agulhas, the most southern tip of Africa. After the southern coast
and Transvaal some new members joined the team in Durban and the trip continued to the Royal Kingdom of
Swaziland, Kruger National Park in Mpumalanga and the Drakensberg Mountains. An official Harley on Safari
weekend was spent in Sun City and the trip
continued to Zambia via Botswana. The tour
crossed the Zambesi River in Kasane
toward the Victoria Falls. Some potholes
were spotted on the way in northern
Botswana together with scenic sights where
ever we went. We got full approval from all
people everywhere, because people here
pay respect to beautiful bikes and they
definitely do want to express their joy to you
once seeing something this good, often for
the first time in their lives. This cheerful
attitude affected our team during the trip as
even I found myself greeting other bikers
than Harleys, which is quite an unusual
approach to me, a Harley rider for so many
years =)
The great African trip. Posse riders are
ready to take off back to South Africa
from the Great Zambesi river. Harleys
parked in front of the Royal Livingstone
Hotel.
In the mid 1990’s I met Merle Vandersluis from Michigan while we
were both working in Ethiopia and I found his attitude towards life
different from other bikers. He had a Harley back in the States and
we used to make off-road expeditions in the jungles close to Aira
Hospital looking for hippos and crocodiles. We rode tracks made by
men and elephants and crossed unnamed rivers. Once in Tulegit I
fell down in the middle of the rocky river getting blood poisoning due
to a minor scratch in my elbow. There were other bikers and Harley
riders in Ethiopia as well at that time, such as Jerry Giles from
Wichita and his father Ray Giles who considered bringing his Harley
into the country. We used motorbikes for explorations among the
Surma and Suri people, where Presbyterians John and Gwen Haspels were working among the forgotten tribes of
Africa close to the border of Sudan. Ladies of the tribe there wear earthen or wooden plates on their lower lips to show
the “value” of women. The bigger the lip plate is, the more cows and goats you have to pay to marry her. None of us
could get Harleys there and I wonder how many cows are equivalent to one Harley, but after having the privilege of
knowing these great people working there I promised to myself that when possible I will buy a Harley and see the rest
of the world as I have seen so little so far. That’s how Africa works. First you know everything and then maybe just a
little bit. Finally you have to admit that you know nothing yet.
The magic of old Africa may already be gone forever, but Cape Town has
always been a good place to start expeditions for a white man. This applies
to HOG and all the other expeditions and settlements in the history of Africa
including the Great Trek of the Dutch farmers called Boers, “Voortrekkers” in
the early 1800’s. It has been said that Cape Town is one of the most
beautiful cities on earth. The Table Mountain and Cape Town´s beaches are
world famous. Table Mountain is sometimes covered with clouds, but the
city is always surrounded by full time jazz. In contrast, Robben Island
reminds tourists about the past. To all HOG wine enthusiast, the
Stellenbosch and Robertson valleys are places to go on the way out from Cape by rental Harleys. Also worth seeing is
the Knysna lagoon on the way through Transkei to the south coast. Joseph and Corinne Gerada from Malta said that
they have 30 kms of tarmac in Malta if you travel one direction whereas our safari tour did ten times that on its Day
One. Moreover, I am sure Joe enjoyed his 50th birthday on the road riding his rental Harley in Africa since the road
conditions in the Republic of South Africa are excellent, places interesting and the views breathtaking.
In Cape Agulhas two Oceans meet. There is a stone at the most
southernmost tip of the continent of which the left hand side is on the
Indian Ocean and the right hand side is on the Atlantic Ocean. The
Indian Ocean is the warmer one and the Atlantic is the colder one. You
can almost feel the difference if you put your hand into one ocean after
the other. Beware of the whales. Last time I was there we saw whales
playing in the sea. The village there is a perfect location for a South
African Braai under the night skies of Africa and the billions of stars up in
space. A glass of good wine there in good company will make you quite
happy.
We had a day off in Durban and went to swim as it was a very hot day. Waves were bigger than I remembered, but I
swam anyway. After a while and several huge waves later I found myself landing on the shore of the beach in a
humiliating position and I thought that was enough and went to a tidal
pool where I was not able to swim against the stream in the pool.
However, it was good exercise. A day later we heard that in that area
they had had the most destructive high tide in living memory together
with storms destroying beaches and houses. No wonder the waves
looked a bit high to this posse highlander.
Team Poland did the Safari in Polish, thus riding and having fun. We
eventually learnt some polish like "nigdy nie zagasnie (pronounce:
neegdy kniee zagashkniee). I am not doing too much injustice to the
meaning of the phrase by saying that the same is shortly “cheers” in English. Well done Karpaczs. Apart from Polish
studies it looked like our pack leader Leslie De Kock occasionally needed a cigar even during the actual ride to relax
and to keep all riders on schedule and on the track. He also organized some “Leslies”, a maneuver to check that the
pack behind him is doing well and is thus following the common instructions of adequate pack riding.
Our friends Gunther and Ilona Kranz from Germany took pictures on the way for
the ABC Touring competition. Once, close to Pretoria, I was sweeping in the
back, stopped in front of him and waited for him to join the pack again. I must
have blinked my eyes, because we lost him completely and I couldn’t find him
until the next stop where we had a typical South African barbeque called a braai.
There we ate boerewors sausages and biltong wondering what really happened.
Folks, please keep an eye on this lad in Europe, because he may be well ahead
of you in entering into the European ABC Touring Championship if you blink your
eyes for a second.
It was an absolute pleasure to be part of a group where all the ladies always
looked as if they had stepped out of the pages of a fashion magazine, as HOG
Pretoria member Henri Raubenheimer said it quite diplomatically and therefore
most correctly. He is an expert and notably did not say anything about the men.
His other observations and comments in general along the expedition made the
rest of us see the most joyful aspects of this safari and we greatly enjoyed the
experience 100% every single day.
Somebody said we passed 70 000 elephants on the last third of the tour. We
definitely did not see them all, but we got undivided attention from all kinds of
local habitants on the route. Rhinos, elephants, giraffes, fish eagles, crocodiles
and hippos were spotted during the posse tour and specifically on the riverboat
cruise from Mowana Safari Lodge in Chobe National Park. Peace and quite was
short-lived for the unfortunate elephants on the banks of the river as a lightning
flash hit the trees next to the herd and scared the animals. They ran away in
panic and crashed down a few trees on their way to safety. Tropical weather
fronts and thunderstorms in Africa are different from those mild versions in the electrical cities back in our home
countries outside of Africa.
Our tour leader Mike Wood gave us some good advice prior to meeting
elephants on the Harley. One useful one was not to challenge them! Along the
road my wife spotted an elephant on the left hand side of the road and I went
back to see it again. It was huge and winged its ears in the midday heat as if it
was willing to take off and fly using that 100 kms straight road as a runway. I
thanked my wife by saying how good a spotter she was, but she said it wasn’t
that difficult since at least three other bikes in front of us pointed to the same
elephant. I must have been very busy avoiding those potholes at the time.
In the evenings we enjoyed several Boma barbeques (Braai) in fenced areas in
African style including presentations of traditional dancers as well as African
music. That was always a good end to another “lousy” day in Africa after
hundreds of kilometres of riding behind us and a wonderful time full of events
and new experiences. We did some out rides to Beautiful Pilgrim’s Rest, God’s
Window, The real big Pot Holes, Blyde River Canyon and other beautiful places
in the northern mountains of Drakensberg in South Africa.
I wondered why some posse riders came out of the helicopter flip around the
Victoria Falls hugging each other and looking so happy. Surely it wasn’t because
of the flight? It was later discovered that John Berardo, a global U.S. citizen
working in Saudi Arabia had proposed Anne Keats to marry him during the flight.
She had proudly carried an Australian flag during the posse ride and if I got it right
there were also occasional debates about cricket results with South Africans. At
the same time we tried to get inside information from Paulette Benning and Blair
Sharpe from Canada concerning the NHL ice hockey league and how the Montreal
Canadiens were doing. Most likely Anne had eventually said “yes” to John since I
saw a beautiful diamond ring on her finger. But the sightseeing was stunning too
as our Turkish HOG members Taner and Carol Celik witnessed with enthusiasm. I
immediately changed our flight to be 30 minutes instead of 15 minutes to cover the
gorges of Zambesi River as well. It was well worth it even though I am a pilot
myself and have flown in Africa for many years and I am used to this kind of stuff.
To my knowledge they haven’t found a vaccination against a good flying or riding
experience so far. And as our fellow explorer Dr. David Livingstone from
Edinburgh, Scotland wrote it years earlier: "No one can imagine the beauty of the view from anything witnessed in
England. It had never been seen before by European eyes; but scenes so lovely must have been gazed upon by
angels in their flight".
We also did several night, afternoon and morning game drives on the trip,
especially in Kruger National Park seeing a lot of African wild animals, but it
was later at night in the Royal Livingstone Hotel in Livingstone as I was coming
late from a party by foot that I really had a close encounter. I almost had a
head on collision with a giraffe next to the bungalow. It was quite surrealistic to
look at the black and white arch of legs and upwards at the body wondering if I
should go through. You see, these are
wild animals. The most dangerous
animals however, were buffalos and if you have ever stared at those animals
in their eyes you know precisely why. You can predict the behaviour patterns
of lions and crocodiles quite well, but the buffalo’s behaviour is unpredictable.
None of us had any real problems during the adventure. We had two back up
vehicles. One carrying a trailer full of luggage driven by Mike’s wife Marijke, an
experienced HOG touring lady herself, and another vehicle was driven by our
professional technicians from SA Gauteng Harley dealerships with a trailer and a spare bike. Thanks to you “back up
boyz” who proved to us that where ever we go, the nearest HD dealership is not far away.
It was probably the best moment ever for the local pizza delivery boy riding his
scooter as he joined our Harley pack on the busy streets of Gaborone in
Botswana where all of us were riding in a tight and perfect staggered
formation. He joined and kept his position in the pack in the midst of the dense
cloud of burning and smoking oil coming out from the pipe of his scooter all the
way to the outskirts of the city. It was definitely one of those moments when
you wished you had a camera with you. I have never seen any biker being as
precise and serious about riding as him riding with the Harleys. It must have
been a great honour and as a matter in fact he did it well. It was a once in a
lifetime experience for him such as this tour was for us.
Maybe one of the most meaningful memories for us was the stop somewhere in Zambia where my wife Saara gave
apples, among other things, to the local children as gifts and these little ones did not know what to do with them. We
only wished we had more apples stashed away to give to them. It must have been the same kind of feeling my mother
had when she was a child and got an “American parcel” from
Florida in which she found an orange, an exotic fruit you
wouldn’t be able to buy in Finland at that time, being a war torn
country during WW 2. Here in Africa we can never close our
eyes to poverty. It was an extraordinary event for the kids of
the village to see for the first time in their lives a shiny chrome
machine of Harley making a lot of noise not to mention the little
gifts they got. This extra stop in the village where the church
was made of sticks and mud and covered by a broken grass
roof should be seen in the context of hunger where children
suffer every day and poverty kills 6 million children a year.
Every minute of every day, somewhere in the world, 21
children die of malnutrition and curable diseases. Even when it doesn’t kill, chronic malnutrition can cause blindness,
deformities and brain damage. Recently a series of natural and man made factors have slashed food output and
availability across the region. A lot of African people are fighting
for survival, but on that day there was a smile on the faces of
these kids although their clothes were ragged.
At the same time there was a dress code of “formal casual” at the
hotel dinner. After weeks of riding most of us did not fit into that
code at all since the best we could find was a combination of a
clean T-shirt and a pair of less dirty jeans. I tried to find a Finnish
sauna from our astonishing five star hotels in Livingstone but with
no luck. Our personal butler introduced himself upon our arrival to
the rooms. The rooms and the entire hotel were decorated with the
classic colonial style in a good and positive way, but man, still
there was no sauna. Fortunately enough Romi and Frank Vogel
from Germany, who have been in Africa several times, confided in me that
their biker accredited guest house in Senftenberg, half way between
Dresden and Berlin, has less stars, but they have a sauna and I am
welcome to visit there. That sounds like our next mission the next time
we’re back in Europe. In other words after getting completely wet in the
streaming and showering waters of the Victoria Falls, “the smoke that
thunders” or “the end of the world” and after exploring Africa we still have
some more experiences waiting somewhere out there and places to go by
Harley. Naturally any reason to go somewhere by Harley is good enough
for HOG members. One reason could be to find a proper Finnish sauna
from somewhere and another could be to end poverty and fight hunger globally. There are still things to do and
reasons to ride, folks.
Finally we were on the highway back to the crowded streets of the
city of Johannesburg, also known by the name of “Egoli”, place of
gold. We left all the good moments behind us together with the
rain showers in Botswana where “pula”, which literally means rain,
is a blessing and also the name of the currency of the country. We
left our “pulas” into numerous fuel stations along our expedition
and gained much more than memories, fellowship and good
lifetime friends. We truly gained blessings from Africa through our
hard work and we will carry those blessings with us for the rest of
our lives as they undoubtedly belong to all brave 2007 Harley on
Safari Posse riders. We truly respect all those HOG family
members scattered all over the world who have shared the Harley on Safari Posse Ride, the great journey of a lifetime.
We have learnt something. If you have ever wanted to change anything in Africa you’d better forget it, because Africa
will change you.
Story and photos by Jarmo Korhonen – Road Marshal and Life Member of the
Johannesburg Chapter in South Africa
http://www.hog-sa.co.za/
http://www.harleyonsafari.com/