Taking a trip back in time
RIDER FINDS OLD BIKE 50 YEARS LATER Adventurer tells of his travel odyssey from Cape Point to the edge of the Arctic.
‘Hey Paul!” said the owner of a Cape Town bike shop a few years ago, “go and see what’s lying in the back.” Paul Tops wasn’t keen to go rummaging around in a heap of old bike frames and parts because he “was nicely dressed”. But the owner was adamant.
“I went a bit further in and noted he had an old BMW but I still wasn’t that interested,” he says.
But the owner was even more insistent.
“I climbed over the junk to get a better look. It began to look familiar as I got closer... then I saw the old kink in its frame.”
It was the 1960 BMW R69S he’d ridden from Cape Point to the edge of the Arctic 50 years ago when he traversed 32 countries in a marathon road trip that lasted nine months and covered nearly 50 000km.
Paul sold the bike (11 317 were built in Bavaria between 1960 and 1969) soon after returning to SA and that was the last he saw of it until it was unearthed in the Mother City.
The bike was a bit the worse for wear mechanically and cosmetically but still in running order with 600 000km on its clock.
Agreement was reached between the two, R3 000 changed hands and Tops rode the old bike to George in the southern Cape.
“I was a 23-year-old motocross rider from Cape Town with a bee in my bonnet about visiting family in the Netherlands,” recalls the 80-year-old adventurer from his Garden Route home.
The year was 1967.
“My neighbour had driven down Africa in a Peugeot 403 and gave me the book, Trans-African Highways, which was brought out by the AA [Automobile Association]. It told you which roads to travel, their condition, distances between towns and listed petrol and possible rest stops.
“I had a small steel carrier above the rear mudguard and one on the front to carry two one-gallon [five litres] cans of petrol. I took ridiculous things; a sports coat, smart long pants, jerseys, nice shoes and a tie... I had no idea what to expect.” He also had a passenger riding pillion.
Unfortunately, the “highways” of the AA guide were so named because they bore heavy traffic; some were among the worst in Africa. Tops’ kidneys took a hammering from riding a sports-tourer on dirt tracks and potholed roads favoured by smugglers and sanctions-busters.
It wasn’t long before he started jettisoning stuff he didn’t need (including the passenger, who was complaining of a sore bum, just after they entered Zambia).
Paul might have had courage in buckets and impetuosity in spades but he was occasionally beset by bad luck and his timing regarding geopolitics was woeful.
Despite travelling on a Dutch passport, he was riding through what would later become the frontline states in the struggle against apartheid. His blond, blue-eyed appearance made him a target of suspicion.
“I was locked up on the Zambia-Tanzania border for a week because of a South African stamp in my passport.” Conditions were hellish and although physically debilitated, he was given just four days to transit Tanzania.
“I had a puncture straight away. I was too weak to change the wheel but two guys heading to the East African Safari Rally stopped to help. About five miles further, I had another... luckily they were still with me,” he says.
The two punctures were the only mechanical mishaps of the journey.
He picked up another passenger – “Jim, an American member of the Peace Corps”, at the Kenya-Sudan border post.
The pair reached Egypt and “found tanks everywhere”.
Paul decided it was “time to get out of Africa and we caught a ride on a tramp steamer heading up the Suez Canal. It wouldn’t stop to take us on board and we had to hoist the bike from the pilot boat as it manoeuvred alongside.”
They were in Syria when the 1967 Arab-Israeli conflict known as the Six-Day War broke out.
“Bombs started dropping at around 4.30 in the morning. We fled north to Turkey.
“We were told at the border that we could enter Turkey only on foot. Jim had dismounted but I was still on the bike when the gate between the two countries opened for a unit of soldiers. I saw the gap and took it.
“I waited for Jim till he came walking down the road a couple of days later.”
The two parted ways in Venice. Paul pointed the bike in the direction of Holland and put the hammer down.
“It took me 72 days from Cape Town to Den Haag,” he says.