For those who don’t know, I store my sense of humour in my paunch, and by the time I fell on it for the fourth time in an hour my well-developed boep and its contents were both feeling sorely battered. Especially my sense of humour. What kind of sadists would plan a route that included nearly two days of ploughing through soft sand when planning the launch of a 1 150cc 245kg motorcycle? The answer, of course, is the people who work at BMW’s headquarters in Midrand.
“Consider it my contribution towards elevating your general level of fitness,” BMW’s head honcho, Pieter de Waal, told me unsympathetically when I phoned to thank him afterwards. At the time he was lying in a high-care hospital ward with five broken ribs, nine broken bones in his hand and a collapsed lung. He’d hit a goat doing the same trip with a group of foreign journalists the week before. Next year I’m going to quietly enter him for the Comrades Marathon.
Our adventure began in Richards Bay on a bright Sunday morning, and the first 180km or so consisted of fast cruising on tar roads. At 180kph or so the bike felt a little loose on the long, sweeping Zululand bends leading towards Melmoth, and I began to have doubts about the grip provided by the chunky Continental off-road tyres fitted to the Adventure. A quick stop to adjust the rear suspension pre-load fixed that problem, and the bike instantly regained the taut handling I remembered from the normal version of the big BMW. As a bonus, the lower sixth gear of the Adventure meant that the top was a real working gear rather than a too-tall overdrive.
Just before Melmoth we took to the dirt, at Tatafalaza, and doubled back along a winding road offering a breathtaking view of the Goedetrou dam. Through Ekutuleni we rolled, before turning off on to a rutted track that took us to our overnight stop at Shakaland. This was motorcycling bliss — the extra 20mm suspension travel and knobbly tyres of the Adventure version made it much more off-road capable than the ordinary R1150 GS.
Bright and early on Monday we hit the trails again, this time up a couple of rocky hills and through a boulder-strewn river bed that made my kneecaps ache just by looking at them. Yet again all eight bikes made it through without any major mishaps, although we saw enough of them hit the deck on the way to convince us that the crashbars and aluminium panniers could do a laudable job of protecting the machines, if not the frail flesh and bone astride them.
Back on to the tar through Melmoth and Ulundi, and then off on to the district road that would take us to Mkuze. Cruising at a comfortable 130kph on the gravel with long distances between us to avoid the dust, we made good time before turning off through a private farm where the real fun began — footpaths just wide enough to allow us passage through thick brush, occasional mud holes and a warthog that held us up while it tried to charge its way through a boundary fence ahead of us. And a 50m long sandpit that claimed seven victims to give us a taste of what was to come — thank God for the recovery crew that followed us in a pair of BMW X5s.
Next came the Phongola river, where we sped across the slushy mud that lay under a couple of inches of water for a kilometre or so. After a lot less digging than we anticipated we were back on the gravel road again, where Simon Fourie of Bike SA crash-tested his BMW in truly spectacular fashion right in front of the TV crew who were filming his antics. The news that our medics had rolled their 4×4 20km further down the road made us decide that there was no point in waiting for Fourie to be checked out, so we kicked his limbs into alignment and set off for our overnight stop at Mvubu lodge in the Pongolapoort reserve.
Wednesday started well and went to hell from there on. The road to Jozini was grist to our Beemers’ mills, and Kosi Bay provided a welcome hamburger stop for lunch. The Mozambican border post was mildly entertaining, but the view beyond it was not — just two deep, rutted sand tracks leading off to the north, the left-hand one marked “Ponta Mamoli — 25 km”. No cattle. No goats. No people. Just sand — my nemesis. Nowhere to run, nowhere to hide. They say the road to hell is paved with good intentions, but there was no road here. Just miles and miles of sparse brush and those two threatening ruts. I began to wish for a few good intentions to throw over them, but there was nary a one in sight. I began to understand what the guys at BMW had meant when they told us that the whole trip was not about exploring the bikes’ limitations, but our own.
Riding in soft sand is easier than it looks. You have to stand on the footrests and keep up your speed.
Respond to emergencies by opening the throttle, and the kilometres simply fly by. It helps if you have a really lightweight motorcycle underneath you, because you have to wrestle with the beast a lot of the time, and it’s a good idea to be physically fit, which is where all the theory fell apart. The BMW weighs 245kg with a full 30-litre tank, and I’m the least fit person I know. You don’t fall as often when you’re going quickly, but you have so many close shaves that you end up too exhausted to react. When you fall you fall harder, and each time you do so the idea of getting back on the sonovabitch becomes less appealing.
The Mozambicans must have thought the war had started again, with riders crunching into the sand like unexploded mortar shells every couple of hundred metres. After 14km I lay down in the middle of the track and surrendered. Our short war was over. The sand had conquered me. I grinned at BMW’s national spares manager, Stephen Bestbier, as he reluctantly donned his riding gear, and I took his place in the 4×4. His seven falls in the next 2km of sand before the potholed tar road that took us to our cold Castles made me feel enormously better.
Wednesday’s return trip through the border post and around the sandy eastern shores of Lake Sibayi went much better after my fourth fall of the day — the one that finally KO’d what was left of my sense of humour. From the air-conditioned interior of the X5 I could watch the hippos frolicking in the water, and offer advice to the motorcyclists who were hitting the deck like shotgunned guineafowl all around us. I was soon joined by Deon Meyer, webmaster of BMW’s site, who’d suffered a mild concussion in his upteenth tumble of the day. From the end of the sand it was a short hop to our final overnight stay at the Falaza game park near Hluhluwe, and the next day’s ride back to Richards Bay was uneventful because it was all on tar.
All in all we covered 992km on the BMW R1150 GS Adventures, most of them on dirt and sand, and between us we must have dropped the eight bikes 150 times. Total damage, unbelievably, was virtually nil. A couple of pannier clips were broken, and one front mudguard was cracked. There were two slightly dented fuel tanks, but not a single mirror or flicker lens was broken. All of the launch bikes were equipped with ABS, of which two had stopped functioning by the end of the ride — probably because the wheel sensors were dirty or knocked skew.
The two best riders in our group — tour guide Jan du Toit and multiple South African champion Dave Petersen — fell off a lot less than the riff-raff and showed that a good, fit rider can take the GS virtually anywhere, while the rest of us learned a lot about sand riding and falling off. And, strangely enough, we had a ball doing it — up to a point.
For those who’re serious about getting off the beaten track the R1150 GS Adventure is a better machine than the ordinary GS. It’s far too heavy to be a proper trail bike — surprise, surprise — but it’s remarkably capable in the right hands. Without a support crew to pick it up time and again I’d avoid any but the shortest sections of thick sand like the plague, and even with helpers I’d rather find another route. But for fairly severe terrain its only limitations are the skill and fitness level of the rider.
Even with the knobbly tyres it handles very well on tar, and the normal enduro tyres fitted to the standard versions can be installed by those who stay mainly on the hard stuff. And finally, it can be crashed and crashed again without breaking. Trust me. I’ve been there. And, strangely, enjoyed it.