Two former Durbanites are on an epic motorcycle trip that started in New York 15 months ago and is still far from finished
Gavin Foster
‘I was in New York, working on Wall Street, when Noah sent me an e-mail from London, where he was living,” remembers Trevor Sproat.
“He suggested that it was time to find out what life was really about.”
After a two-wheeled trip across Southern Africa Noah Maltz had been bitten by the adventuring bug and wanted more. “I hadn’t even sat on a bike for six or seven years before that,” he remembers, “but the seed was planted.”
Maltz proposed that he and Sproat buy motorcycles and ride through 50 countries on five continents, over a period of 18 months. Sproat didn’t hesitate – he started winding up his affairs in New York and six months later, on March 31 1999, the two young management consultants took delivery of brand new 640cc KTM motorcycles and the Globeriders were born.
“We’d bought these nice soft saddlebags and pillion bags, but once we tried to pack them we discovered we had far too much stuff,” says Maltz. “Half our things got left behind and for the first month we left a constant stream of unwanted possessions behind us.”
The two rolled south through Texas and across the border into Mexico, then through Guatemala and on to Costa Rica, where they were christened Gordo (Fatty) and Flacco (Skinny) by the friendly locals. Seven months and 25E000km later they arrived in Buenos Aires, the end of the American portion of their trip.
“We spent most of our time in Colombia and Bolivia, which were great, and Peru,” says Maltz. “Costa Rica I thought was overrated, but we found that every country has something good about it.”
The next leg of the Globeriders’ journey kicked off from Johannesburg and progressed up the African east coast through Mozambique, Tanzania (where they went scuba diving off Zanzibar and hot-air ballooning over the Serengeti), Uganda, Kenya (where they saw in the new millennium) and Ethiopia.
Then came the surprise highlight – and lowlight – of their trip so far: Sudan. There they slept on Melik – Field Marshal Kitchener’s century-old gunboat on the Nile – and visited the dozens of Pharaonic pyramids at Meroe, as well as had more than their fair share of problems. “I think Sudan is the country we’ve benefited from the most on this trip,” says Maltz, “because we’d never have got there otherwise. Everybody sees it as a place you simply pass through, but we’ve found it an incredible country that’s horribly misunderstood.”
The two motorcyclists found themselves spending more time – three months – in Sudan than any other country this year or last.
Just before they were due to leave Sproat’s motorcycle’s rear suspension collapsed, followed the day after the repair was finished by the front forks on Maltz’s machine. Each breakdown required that spares be ordered from Europe and then cleared through customs and by the time everything was ready for the next stage of the journey the two former Durbanites’ travel documents had expired, necessitating another delay.
Eventually they set off on the next leg of their journey only to be left with a five-hour trek through the desert when Maltz’s machine suffered a piston failure at El Obeid, a few hundred kilometres west of Khartoum. A month later they left Khartoum again, but the El Obeid jinx struck again when Maltz hit a train line buried under the sand near the village and came a cropper, suffering concussion, a broken arm and a dislocated shoulder.
After an interesting episode in a Khartoum hospital – the doctor, who failed to see the fractured humerus on the x-ray, removed his shoes and clambered on the operating table to place his foot in the hapless tourist’s armpit while he tried to wrench the broken arm back into its socket – the two motorcyclists flew back to Gauteng where Maltz received treatment at the Centre for Sports Medicine in Rosebank.
“But the people in Sudan were brilliant,” says Sproat. “They rallied around and organised airlifts and hospitalisation. They got our bikes back to town. They really stood by us.”
Now finally the Globeriders are on their way again. After picking up their motorcycles in Khartoum they’ll be setting of for Chad, Nigeria and Algeria, on their way to Europe.
Perhaps the country that’s impressed the travellers the most is the place they both left about seven years ago: South Africa.
“It’s difficult to sum up the changes,” says Maltz, “but my snapshot of what I see now compared with when I lived here is that it’s a country where the walls that gave many people financial wealth and opportunity but also limited them mentally have come down.
“They’re now faced with a set of opportunities and challenges that make it a far more interesting place than much of Western Europe and the [United] States right now.”
Follow the Globeriders’ journey by visiting their website at www.globeride.com/