TWO WHEELS, A THOUSAND STORIES
RICH Jay and his motorbike Darkwing have seen more countries together than your average travelling couple.
In an eight month “dangerous” road trip across the planet and with fewer people riding from Cape Town to Cairo than have climbed Mt Everest, Mr Jay wanted to embark on an “epic adventure” to challenge himself.
The 32-year-old from Southport, who goes by the name of Freezer Bird, decided to take a motorbike trip from Cape Town to Berlin in June 2016 and continued towards Mozambique to South Africa and was planning to travel north from there.
Now, still in Moscow after the World Cup, he is planning to launch Spinner Yarn, a storytelling venture, on the Gold Coast.
But let’s backtrack a bit to get the full story.
It was in Johannesburg where he was hit by another motorbike rider and fractured his arm during a horrific accident.
“I couldn’t ride, so I left my bike with some friends and caught a bus to Tofo, Mozambique, with my arm in a sling,” he said.
“There, I healed for three months before returning to Johannesburg to start again.”
From there, Mr Jay visited Namibia, Botswana, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Malawi, Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda, Ethiopia and Sudan among other places.
It was an epic adventure for a Gold Coaster wanting to escape the city and experience the harsh African terrain.
But for this adventurer, the catalyst for his exploits was a relationship breakup with a girl who he had originally been travelling with.
“We had bought a car together and were driving around southern Africa,” he said.
“We broke up three months in, and pretty much days afterwards I decided to do the motorbike trip.
“Looking back, I see how it was almost a rebound relationship in a way.
“It was an attempt to see how I would go being solo for so long. I think people don’t spend enough time with themselves,” he said.
Mr Jay camped under the stars in Botswana, kayaked through the Okavango Delta with hippos, went on safari through Chobe National Park where he saw elephants, lions, giraffes and zebras, swam in Lake Malawi, white water rafted on the Nile River, visited orphanages and witnessed live volcanoes.
But perhaps the biggest event in his memory is when he had a gun stuck in his face over a minor traffic incident in Uganda.
“He probably wasn’t going to shoot me, but the point was made. That was crazy,” he said.
“I got hit by a truck in Kenya. He wasn’t paying attention and turned into me at a roundabout. I jumped off my bike and watched it get dragged under the wheels while he kept driving — it took a few days to be fixed.”
He also caught typhoid fever and blew a gasket in his motorbike engine in the same weekend.
“An elephant almost charged me when I stopped to check if he was OK in Botswana, I almost drowned in Mozambique, I burst a tyre in Uganda and the locals who tried to help just made it worse.
“I almost flew off my bike about a hundred times on the sand roads of Namibia.”
Despite the hurdles, he never wanted to quit.
“The only time I might have considered it was when I was in Ethiopia with typhoid fever and a broken down bike,” he said.
“But, even then, I was super committed to making it to Berlin. Failure was never an option. I knew that whatever happened I was going to ride into Berlin.”
Mr Jay has plans to launch Spinner Yarn on the Gold Coast in the coming months.
THE ONLY TIME I MIGHT HAVE CONSIDERED [QUITTING] WAS WHEN I WAS IN ETHIOPIA WITH TYPHOID FEVER AND A BROKEN DOWN BIKE RICH JAY