Motorbike journey of grit and lots of laughs
Trio hit trail for 13 000km in South America
DON’T leave South Africa without blou draad and Pratley Putty if you want to survive an epic motorbike ride.
These odd items were listed by Eastern Cape roads engineer and avid adventure rider, Piet Maré, 51, who recently returned from a 13 000km ride up and down South America with Port St Johns photographer John Costello, 62, and East London photographic shop owner, Owen Saunders, 64.
Helmets filled with sand in dust storms, they leaned into windlashed rain for eight hours and had to gun the bikes through rivers swollen with snow melt.
Maré and Costello praised their Brazilian-assembled 250cc Honda Torrenado bikes. “They have good suspension, never failed to start and we only had three punctures, each in a town.”
Costello had never done a ride “of this magnitude” but was delighted to be a shoo-in for the 58day adventure after one of the original group fell ill. A Wild Coast specialist author, photographer, historian, gentle raconteur and tour operator, Costello said of spending six to eight hours in the saddle: “My arse felt 100% fine. I do yoga. I lost 12kg.”
Maré, on his sixth international enduro adventure, chirped that Costello struggled to ride on the right of the road. But there was relief when he told of how Costello met a bakkie head-on around a mountain corner.
“John was supposed to be riding in the middle, but he vanished. We asked the bakkie driver if he had seen him and he just pointed to down the mountain. We found John stuck in a huge tree fern which saved him.”
The guys had plenty of laughs as they marvelled at lakes with floating reed villages, glaciers, and Argentine mielie fields “as far as the eye could see”, said Maré.
They rode south from Santiago, Chile, to the “end of the earth”, Ushuaia in Tierra del Fuego, and up through Patagonia and across the Andes mountains to finish in Lima, Peru, in the north.
Costello said: “Tourism and travel pumps from north to south in Latin America. Why can’t we do it too?”
He said: “A lot of peripheral activities diminish when you are doing 250km to 500km a day in the saddle. We lived off those bikes.” Maré said: “It is tough boeta. You can’t over-romanticise it. You get hot and you get cold.” Camping was accessible and cheap “and we experienced incredible solitude”, he said.
Costello said: “We had to get on the plane in our riding gear which weighs 23kg. We washed it for the trip back.”
Maré said: “We looked like pack dogs.” Costello said: “We watched the condors fly and gauchos [horsemen] ride under the Argentine sky.” — mikel@dispatch.co.za