SA bikers journey to ‘Earth’s end’
DON’T leave South Africa without bloudraad 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 58-day, 13 000km ride up and down South America with Port St John’s photographer John Costello, 62, and East London photographic shop owner Owen Saunders, 64.
Helmets filled with sand in dust storms, they leaned into wind and lashing rain for eight hours at a stretch and gunned their 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.”
A Wild Coast specialist author, photographer, historian, raconteur and tour operator, Costello said of spending six to eight hours in the saddle: “My [bottom] felt 100% fine. I do yoga. I lost 12kg.”
Maré, on his sixth international enduro adventure, claimed Costello struggled to ride on the right side of the road. He told of how Costello met a bakkie head-on coming 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 down the mountain. We found John stuck in a huge tree fern which saved him. We had to haul him up with a rope.”
They had plenty of laughs as they marvelled at lakes with floating reed villages, glaciers, and Argentine mealie fields “as far as the eye could see”.
They rode south from Santiago, Chile, to the “end of the Earth”, Ushuaia in Tiera del Fuego, up through Patagonia and across the Andes mountains to finish in Lima, Peru, in the north.
The looked “like packdogs” by the end but relished an incredible experience. “We watched the condors fly and gauchos (horsemen) ride under the Argentine sky.” — mikel@dispatch.co.za