Motorcycle Sport & Leisure

When Sam Manicom met Birgit Schuenemann riding a bicycle up and down the mountains of New Zealand, he had no idea that within two years she’d be travelling with him around the world. When he asked to her to come with him to South America, she replied: “Yes, but on two conditions. I want to go to Africa first and I want to have my own motorcycle.” She swore that the latter thought was nothing to do with the number of accidents Sam had over the first four years of his round the world adventure...

Africa again? Why not? In spite of being shot at twice, arrested three times, in jail once and a 17-bone fracture accident crossing the desert in Namibia, Sam had developed a real passion for the continent as anyone who has read his first book ‘Into Africa’ will know. As for Birgit riding her own bike? He had no problem with that. He well understood the importance of being in as much control of your own destiny as possible. But he did say that Birgit would have to maintain her own bike. No problem. She’s actually now a better mechanic than he is! The twist in the tail? She’d only been riding a motorcycle for a couple of months by the time they hit Africa, and she’d never ridden a dirt road. Not planned, but how life happens sometimes.

This is an excerpt from Sam’s new book ‘Distant Suns’.

I was nervous, very nervous. We were riding a loop north from South Africa, through the stunning desert landscape of Namibia towards the Caprivi Strip. This finger of Namibia runs between Botswana and Angola until it reaches the border with Zambia. It contained the strip of desert road where, the first time through Africa, I’d hit a metre-deep pothole in a dust cloud and woken up four days later in hospital with 17 bone fractures. I knew that most of the track had now been Tarmaced, but I was still nervous. It was a demon from the past that I had to face. Besides that, I’d missed half of it, being unconscious at the time, and there was something rather nice about completing the job, even doing it from the ‘wrong’ direction. It was also the road from which Birgit and I wanted to get down into Botswana, skirting along the western side of the Okavango Delta.

The improved road was easy and in a perverse way I was glad I’d ridden it when it was still a hard thing to do. With the demon laid to rest, Birgit and I cut southwards just past Bagani, took a quick squint at the Popa falls, and then headed for Botswana. The Tarmac ran out at the border, and was replaced by glaringly white sand and gravel. I’d forgotten just how bright this stuff was and how easily it covered everything.

In spite of our dual purpose tyres, the gravel had the bikes' wheels skipping and sliding. The key when riding this stuff is to keep your speed up and to loosen off on the handlebars – let the bike go where it wants to go – within reason of course. Riding with this gently meandering technique is a far sight less tiring than fighting every directional demand the road gives the bike. It still needs total concentration though and particularly so when riding the white road the glare could hide some real ‘nasties’ such as an unnoticed section of softer sand.

Depending on how deep or soft the sand was, it could throw your front wheel towards the bush and if it was really thick it could slow you so rapidly that you’d come off over the handlebars, or fall off sideways as your bike suddenly lost momentum. The key was to keep that throttle open. Scary sometimes, especially for a beginner, but it always worked.



We suddenly found ourselves riding into a game park that wasn’t marked on our map. Weird. Bikes weren’t normally allowed in game parks but that was where the road was taking us. With no one around to stop us we rode on thinking, 'This is good, what a bonus! I wonder what wildlife we’ll see?' Not a thing, was the answer and that was a real shame, so we decided to go off and do a little exploring on a side road. The pale beige track was harder to ride it was rutted and sandy, with sharp twists that made it hard to keep our speed up. I felt a little like a naughty schoolboy doing something I knew I shouldn’t be, but the tingle of adrenaline and the anticipation of what we might see, spurred us on. I told Birgit that whatever happened, she should always keep her engine running. She might need to make a quick getaway, and an engine that wouldn’t start in a panic situation would have been pretty stupid. But I’d also been told that we were far more likely to see game without scaring them off if we kept the engines running. The sound, after initial suspicion, would become the norm, and whatever animal it was would happily carry on going about its business. The plan worked with a small cluster of antelope, but would it work with the large herd of elephants that stepped out of the bush into the road in front of us?

The lead elephant was highly suspicious and stood between us and her family. The old cow’s big ears were flapping furiously and she kept curling her trunk upwards, before letting out what sounded to me like shrieks of pure rage. I started to look for an escape route. There wasn’t one and a three-point turn on this loose stuff wasn’t going to be easy. All we could do was to sit there, not moving a muscle, keeping the engines ticking over we just had to be patient. Around us the bush seemed to have gone deathly still, as if everything was holding its breath, waiting to see what would happen next. If I hadn’t been so afraid of stalling the bike I’d have had my fingers firmly crossed.

Then, after a magnificent 10 minutes of swaying back and forth, stamping the ground, snorting and ear-flapping, she simply turned around, trumpeted again and she and her family crashed off into the bush. She left Birgit and me sitting in the silence on our bikes, sweating furiously. I was conscious then that it was no wonder the elephant had been so agitated. The smell of our fear, combined with the scents of hot oil, metal and rubber from the bikes, must have made a really offensive and worrying odour. I knew that the old cow probably associated these scents with poachers. The elephant population had been wiped almost to extinction in this region, within her lifetime.

We knew that we’d been very lucky and that we’d just seen something really special. Back at the main track, we looked at each other and grinned. The day was turning into a goodie. Then the track turned it into a baddie.

The gravel disappeared and soft sand took its place. This stuff is a nightmare to ride on with a loaded bike. If the road twists you simply can’t get enough speed up to hammer through and that means you have to resign yourself to paddling through. As I watched Birgit I thought about how much she had learned over the past months. Now there wasn’t anywhere I felt I couldn’t ride with her. She was more than competent, and no longer got so frustrated with ‘I can’t do it’ thoughts. Not that she’d ever let those thoughts beat her. I felt guilty though.

Libby, as I called my BMW R80GS, was a doddle to ride in comparison to Birgit’s bike, Sir Henry. The brakes were better, the larger front wheel made off-roading easier and the fact that she was a longer bike, with much better and more sophisticated suspension, helped her to soak up bumps rather than crash into them. The GS in ‘R80GS’ actually stands for ‘Gelände/Strasse’ or ‘on and off-road’ so it was designed with off-road use in mind; Sir Henry, as a 20-year-old BMW R60/5, certainly was not.



Birgit had also learnt that if she was about to drop her bike then it was better to get off the thing rather than risk getting trapped under it. She’d gone well past the stage of not wanting to scratch the bike, and that’s hard when it’s your pride and joy. Now, her sensible attitude was that damage to the bike could be fixed, but damage to her might be a different matter...

We paddled on. I could now smell my clutch burning and wondered how much damage this section of track alone was going to do to it. The clutch now had over 120,000 miles on it and most of those miles had been hard. I’d no idea how much longer the bike would keep going, and I just couldn’t get out of my mind the comments a mechanic had made just before we’d set off.

He’d listened to Libby’s life story and had said: “Take this thing to Africa again? I wouldn’t, the thing’s a wreck, bloody trashed it you have.” And then to add insult to injury, the mechanic kicked one of the tyres and said, “Yeah, heap of shit. You’d be better off dumping the thing.” Every mile we did gave me a sense of satisfaction. But I just couldn’t get his words out of the back of my mind when I was abusing her like this.

By the time we finally pulled into the camping spot right on the shore of the delta, I’d decided, again, that I don’t like winding sandy tracks. The deep sand of the track to the main road would have to be ridden to get back out again, but thankfully, just before the turn off, the conditions of the main road had changed to rideable. For now though, the lodge was a great place to be. Below us the delta waters flowed smoothly and deeply.

The Okavango Delta is a phenomenon, and a superb chance to see wildlife. It’s a geographical quirk of nature in that it’s one of the few river systems in the world that doesn’t flow to the sea. This river system flows inland and actually disappears into the desert. This is what makes it such a great place to see wildlife. In the rainy season the delta floods and the waters rush out into the desert. When this happens, vegetation that’s dormant during the dry season comes fully and vibrantly to life, and the animals spread themselves across the land as they feed on new shoots. But, as the season changes, the waters are swallowed up by the dry conditions and the delta begins to shrink. As it does so, the animals begin to corral themselves into a smaller and smaller area of land.

The delta is in fact at risk from global warming. The rainy seasons are getting shorter and the dry seasons longer and drier. This means that the delta is shrinking. As I sat watching the waters I had the feeling that I was watching something beautiful that was dying. It was a sad, but privileged moment – we had been some of the lucky ones. We’d seen this part of the delta as future generations perhaps would not. With this in mind we decided to ride on round to the town of Maun and from there to hire dug-out canoes and guides. We would use them to head as deep as we could into the delta. We wanted to see as much of it as we could.

Maun is a town on the edge of the desert and the Okavango. When we rode in I suddenly became aware of just how remote the roads we’d been on actually were. I begrudged being around people again. I didn’t enjoy the smells of diesel split in the sand, the stench of burning plastic from the bonfire in the scrubby wasteland behind the sprawl of the town, the malodorous scents of toilet areas and the heavy stink of greasy fried food. I didn’t like suddenly being around lots of people.

I didn’t like the stupidity of the goats and dogs that seemed to think that they owned the road – they obviously had no conscious recognition of the ‘I’m bigger than you are so I go first’ rule. I didn’t like the sight of so much litter, floating around on the breeze or hanging snagged on strands of rusting barbed wire. I didn’t like the sound of a mechanic bashing a truck wheel rim with a sledgehammer – it was an offensive jarring noise. I didn’t like the staring eyes that followed us wherever we went and I didn’t like the prices that were being charged now that we were back in ‘tourist land’.

I could only laugh at myself. These were the noises and smells of life on the edge – the sounds of survival in a harsh land. They were the smells of reality, and if we wanted to find some canoe guides we couldn’t avoid people. Our aim was to escape out onto the delta where the ebb and flow of life is not directly dictated by man on a minute-by-minute basis. Out on the delta we planned to just float and see what there was to see. We’d no intention of rushing around looking for the things we were supposed to see out there. It was an opportunity to slow life down and let the things that really matter become important again. I wanted to soak up the atmosphere, the sounds and scents of the place, in case I could never return, or the delta itself should cease to exist.

Our guides were called Peter and William. Peter was about five foot eleven, slim-waisted and broad-shouldered, with biceps that any teenager would be proud of. He was very black-skinned, wore his hair short and his grin wide. I guessed that he was about seventeen, though he didn’t know for sure himself. He had the makings of a ‘wheeler-dealer’ about him, but his eyes had the gleam of sincerity. I liked him. He introduced himself to us in a very formal manner: “I am Peter. I am a businessman. We are going to do business, yes?”

William was the perfect sidekick. He must have been about thirteen, with a round face, wide lips and eyes that sparkled with enthusiasm. And he was skinny – probably from doing all the running around that Peter demanded. Or perhaps it was just that he hadn’t reached manhood – he certainly didn’t have the athletic and coordinated way of moving that Peter had, but they made a good team.

We settled on a price to include the canoe, their time, food and a charcoal brazier. We parked the bikes safely in a backpackers’ hostel and set off down to the water’s edge. Making deep paddle-strokes into the dark, tannin-filled water, the young lads propelled the heavy wooden dugout towards the delta proper with apparent ease.

They took us gliding through channels in the reeds. The banks of reeds were often higher than Peter’s head. The stems were thick and green towards the water and grew ever more tan in colour toward the fluffy tops. The gently moving water felt strangely thick to touch. Perhaps it was full of sediment, yet it looked really clear. It was like looking down through a giant piece of very high quality amber.

In the distance we could hear the complaining ‘onk, onk, onk’ of hippos. The boys told us that we would be moving quite near to them and that we should keep our hands out of the water. They feared the hippos, but apparently nothing else.

That night we camped on a small island and it was almost as if the world was standing still and holding its breath as the sun went down behind the reeds. As soon as it had disappeared, the night came alive with the sounds of cicadas and the crackle and popping of our fire. I sat in its glow wondering what it is about the night that seems to amplify such sounds.

The next few days were perfect. We gently cruised the channels and Birgit had the chance to show off the skills she had learnt on Lake Malawi. Much to the delight of the boys, she poled or paddled the canoe along, meaning that for once the boys could become tourists in their own backyard. In spite of the fact that the day was nothing new for them, they too seemed to appreciate and almost revere the calm, mirrored beauty of the delta.

Too soon it was time to be on the move.

Distant Suns: ISBN 978-0-9556573-2-0
Paperback: 40 colour images, 77 line drawings, two maps, £13.99
Available from: www.sam-manicom.com and all good bookshops.

Sam will be book signing on the Touratech stand at London Excel Motorcycle Show from 29 January 2009.

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* MSL January 2009 - Issue no. 580

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