At the end of November I attended the Global Conference for Cyber Resilience in Accra, Ghana. I was on a tight schedule with work expectations so I flew in and out in the same week, but had I the time and resources I would have ridden out. Mapping a route out of the African west coast to Europe is interesting. I got my Ghana visa quickly as part of the conference, but had I ridden out I would have had to do some legwork to get the other countries in order. To ride from Accra to Europe out of Africa would have also needed visas for Ivory Coast, Mali, Mauritania, Western Sahara and Morocco.
A problem with the Mercator map projection that we typically see the world map on is that it shows areas around the equator at scale but then distorts regions as they approach the poles, which is why many people think that Canada is about the same size as Africa when in fact three Canada's would fit comfortably inside it. This was made plain to me as we passed over Dakar in Senegal and then flew on for nearly another three hours to get to Accra (it's about the same distance as Toronto to Saskatoon).
Mercator projections were designed to provide true course headings for ships, and they do it well, but they were never designed to show the entire world. This is a Robinson Projection which shows the scale of things much more precisely.
Keeping those African sizes in mind and at an optimistic 400kms per day which includes five border crossings known to eat entire days by themselves, the African portion of this trip is just shy of six thousand kilometres, much of it across the Sahara.
I thought I was the first in my family to get out Ghana way, but my Grandad was dropped off there by the Royal Navy in 1940 and then proceeded to support his Hurricane squadron as they drove and flew across the Sahara to get into the war in Libya. They landed at Takoradi, so day one would be a sunrise departure into the equatorial heat (that needs to be felt to be believed) and a six hour ride up the coast to stand on the dock he landed on 83 years ago.
Of course that already puts me behind the 400kms/day average I was aiming at, but after experiencing 'Ghana Time' first hand, I suspect that trying to keep to a strict schedule is a sure source of madness in this neck of the woods.
It's fifteen and a half days at 400kms per to get to the crossing at Gibraltar and I wrapped up the conference on November 30th. If I left December 1st, I could apply twenty days to the Africa portion of the trip and give myself some time for surprises. That's still a tight schedule though when you consider the borders and terrain I'd be crossing.
If I could be on a ferry on the 20th, I'd be in Spain on the 21st and up in Evora in Portugal at that farm house we stayed at last year in time to meet up with the fam for the solstice. We could put our feet up over the holidays, but I'd eventually push on to Sheringham where I'd have a cottage rented for the rest of the winter and spring. A winter two wheeled insertion into England might require some patience as I'd have to wait for a weather window, though hanging out in Portugal for several weeks during the darkest days wouldn't be a hardship.
What to do it on? Yamaha has a dealer in Accra, and riding across the Ténéré on a Ténéré has a certain appeal. If I rode a Tiger all I'd be thinking about is the Monty Python sketch the whole time. The Ténéré 700 has an explorer edition for 2024 which has a bigger tank and comes with luggage and such. It's not the ideal machine for long overland treks, but it could certainly handle any surprises well enough.
If I were to give into my Tiger fixation, the new 900 Rally Pro model does the trick and would handle the days of making distance better.
Of course, given a choice I'd rather get my unsupported old Tiger sorted out and then take it!
I've said it before and I'll say it again, if I had money I'd be dangerous.
My son, Max, got handy with dirt bikes at SMART Adventures last week and now I'm dreaming of some options that would let us explore trails together on two wheels. If I had half a million dollars sitting around we could get ourselves into a winterized house/cottage on Lake Benoir on the south edge of Algonquin Park. The only reason I'm even thinking about that is because of COVID. In any other situation I'd rather travel than own more property but well over a year into this pandemic it doesn't look like travel as normal will return any time soon. That'd be a couple of acres in the woods in a small, simple house (electricity but mainly heated by wood burning stove) that comes with a good sized workshop. They have some nice resorts on the lake so this isn't as rough of some of Northern Ontario and it's right in the heart of the Canadian Shield. Off-road trails abound in the area as well as some of the best riding roads in Ontario. We'd immediately get ourselves Ontario Federation of Trail Rider memberships and then get into the woods!
Back in the real world where half a million bucks and doubling down on real estate isn't in the cards, getting off-road could happen in a number of different ways. Here's the most to least expensive in order:
A capable off-roader that can get us to the trail head while carrying the bikes. It'd make a great base from which to ride from and then would be able to get us out of the bush at the end of a long day of riding. There are a lot of camping options that let you leverage the vehicle to make camping a bit less mucky including truck bed mounted tent systems and proper bedding.
I took one of these out for the day at SMART Adventures and really got along with it. I'd buy an Ontario used dirt bike but the prices are absurd. Broken 20 year old bikes are asking ridiculous money! New dirt bikes aren't madly expensive and this one, being a Honda, would last as long as I'd ever need it to. I'd get two of the same thing to make maintenance more straightforward and then my son and I could ride together.
It's got 90k on it, a 5 speed stick and a V6. It looks in good shape and comes with the towing cubbins I'd need to tow bikes to where we could use them. The Wrangler has a pile of camping related gear for it that isn't crazy expensive. The tent off the back is three hundred bucks and the rear air mattress less than a hundred. The whole shebang would come in under $37,000 and would be good to go pretty much anywhere while still doing Jeepy things like taking roofs and doors off.
Used Dirt Bike: ridiculous prices
Here's a random selection of used dirt bikes online in Ontario in 2021. People are asking nearly four grand for sticker festooned, brutalized and rebuilt bikes covered in replacement cheap plastics because the OEM ones were smashed off. Four grand for these POSes! I don't know that there is a cost effective alternative to dirt biking, at least in price crazy Ontario.
Here's another example of the insanity complete with questionable literacy skills: 1998 ktm exc 250 2 stroke, Needs a crank seal, witch (sic) I have. ( don’t half to split the case) it’s a 40 min Job if that, it does run but I wouldn’t without doing that seal first as it pulls tranny oil in other than that it needs the front breaks bled and a few small things like bolts for a couple plastics and such, I have the ownership, full gasket kit for the motor, all the paper work on the bike. $2,500OBO That'd be a sticker festooned, broken and abused 23 year old (!!!) KTM for two and a half grand! I just can't make sense of Ontario's used dirt bike market. By the time you've sorted one of these wrecks out you'd have dropped over five grand on it anyway, which would get you a new bike.
But then there are some Chinese manufacturer option:
Here's a 31 horsepower, 300cc, 286lb well specified off-roader that undercuts the Japanese equivalents by almost a grand. Of course, the 'Japanese' bikes aren't made in Japan either so everyone is spending a lot extra on brand and dealership accessibility. I'd have headaches finding parts for beaten up old Japanese brands anyway, so worries about parts don't really matter. For a couple of grand less than two new Hondas we could still have new bikes, just without the branding.
Based on Honda tech, these 250cc bikes have disc brakes and other modern tech and weigh in under 300lbs as well. They're not quite as big and powerful as the SSR above but they're capable, new and feature a lot of recently updated tech. The two of them together would cost almost what one CRF250F ($5800 for two vs $5650 for one CRF250F). They're probably built in the same factory. Isn't globalism fun?
If I could find a couple of used but serviceable 250cc trail bikes for a couple of grand each I'd happily take that on as a winter project, but they simply don't exist in Ontario and with the Chinese options, why buy terrible, expensive and used?
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A Jeep would open up camping and off-roading options beyond what the bikes could do and it's something I'd like to get into in any case. There are dirt bike hitch trailers for the Wrangler and it could tow a trailer too.
There are a lot of ways to get off-road and out into the wilderness, I just have to figure out the one that works for us.
I came across Overland Journal in Indigo that other day and the combination of reasonable price ($12CAD) and very high quality (it compared favourably with magazine-book combos asking $25+) had me picking it up. It isn't motorcycle specific but does include off road and adventure bikes along with pretty much any vehicle you might go off the beaten path with.
I usually do that kind of off-roading with completely inappropriate vehicles. In the early noughties my wife and I beat a rented Toyota Camry to within an inch of its life on the the logging roads in the interior of Vancouver Island. Another time we were in a rented Citroen mini-van in Iceland watching arctic foxes run across the empty landscape. In both cases we got deep into the wilderness in rental two-wheel drive vehicles, but then we got a Jeep Wrangler as a rental car last year and it started giving me ideas.
I put myself through university working as a service manager for Quaker State's Q-Lube and whenever a Jeep came in you needed an umbrella when you walked under it for all the fluids leaking down on you. That negative experience put me off the brand for years but last year we got a Wrangler as an insurance rental after and accident and it changed my perception.
It was a 2019 Jeep Wrangler four dour with about 20k kilometres on the clock and it was tight! Everything worked and felt quality and it did something that no car has done for me in the past decade; it felt like an event driving it.
Since bikes set in I've fallen out of love with cars (trucks, whatever), but the Jeep made driving feel special again. Performance cars seem kind of pointless when I have two bikes in the garage that are faster than anything but apex million-dollar plus super-cars, but the Jeep came at it from another angle. The big tires made it a challenge to manage on pavement and the big V6 in this one was a stark contrast to the sub-two-litre mileage focused appliances I've been driving, but maybe that's what made it feel special.
There was a point where we could have taken the other car (a Mazda2) down to Toronto but took the Jeep instead and it made the whole experience less like a long, difficult winter drive and more like an adventure. Being higher up off the road meant I wasn't looking through other people's road spray all the time and if I wasn't heavy on the gas the thing was getting mid-high-twenties miles-per-gallon.
Another time we were out in it and my brother-in-law (a former Jeep owner) and our sons went out for a ride and I shifted it into 4wd and drove right over the snow mound in the Canadian Tire parking lot, much to everyone's amazement. This was a ten-foot plus high mound of snow and the Jeep went right over it - with road tires on! Deeply impressed with the vehicle's capabilities and character is where I was when we handed it back.
I also used it to take a thousand plus pound of ewaste to recycling from work and the heavy duty suspension and utility of the thing made this an easy job when the little hatchback would have been blowing shocks and wallowing under the weight. Having a vehicle that takes on larger utility tasks makes sense when you have a lot of them to do. It also makes sense if you want to go deep into the wilderness while being self-sufficient.
I'm getting to the age now where things seem strangely expensive. My first car cost me $400 and took me a hundred thousand kilometres. A Honda Civic hatchback I had in the early noughties took me over a quarter of a million kilometres for less than seven grand. The only new car I've ever purchased (that Mazda2 that has been flawless for over 120k over ten years of ownership) cost me $17k new, all in. My wife's Buick cost an eye-watering forty-grand back in 2016 new and I'm not interested in double car payments so won't be looking until we finally pay that one off (which seems like it's taking forever with our strange new world of 7-9 year finance schemes). When that debt finally gets cleared I'll be looking at a Jeep Wrangler, but not just any old Wrangler, I want the one from the future.
From an 'overlander' point of view a dependable long distance vehicle capable of going off the beaten path means my wife and I can do what we've always done, but more so. In the pre-covid times we drove from Ontario to the West Coast in 2018:
In 2019 we took the same tiny Buick to the East Coast of Canada, but the vehicle we drove limited our ability to go off the beaten path (or even off pavement). What a Jeep would do is enable us to do the things we defer to (in rental cars) in something designed for that kind of nonsense.
This has me encouraging my lovely wife to join us at SMART Adventures this year to learn some off road driving in a side-by-side while we dirt bike. Which brings the overlanding vehicle back to bikes again. You can go deep in a Jeep but you can get places on a dirt bike that you can't in any other way. Jeep's new 4xe hybrid Wrangler would be a fantastic platform for all manner of biking shenanigans from a tread lightly/minimal emissions angle. Overland Journal had an editorial about not abusing the remote places they feature. A good place to start with that would be to minimize the amount of emissions you're putting out while enjoying nature.
If a Wrangler'll carry a full on dirt bike, it'll handle a Freeride (or 2 without batteries in 'em).
Whether it's taking a dirt bike to a trail or a trials bike to an event, the Jeep 4xe would be capable of doing it efficiently and effectively. With some canny rear mounted racks it wouldn't even require a trailer.
The next-level green expedition option would be to pick up a KTM Freeride and put it on the Wrangler 4xe and then work out how to charge the bike from the hybrid Jeep's electrical system.
Overland Journal has a lot of advertisers who specialize in making vehicles long distance ready, including many that specialize in prepping Jeeps for the long haul. A Wrangler 4xe would make an efficient, green platform from which to launch wilderness riding on KTM's Freeride that barely leaves a trace.
The Jeep Wrangler 4xe is the most powerful Wrangler yet, has astonishing mileage and would also offer some interesting electrical generation options when off the beaten track.
The electric bike and the hybrid Wrangler would cost less than a base model BMW mid-sized SUV, so it isn't even crazy expensive (well it is, but that's just because I'm old - everything's expensive!). This zero emissions expeditions thing is something KTM and Jeep should join forces on. Two legendary off-road brands working together to produce an environmentally responsible off-roading experience? Betcha it wouldn't take too much to have the Jeep's hybrid system juice up the Freeride while off piste either.
I'm glad I stumbled across Overland Journal. I'm enjoying it so much I think I'm going to pick up a subscription. Then it's time to start thinking about the Jeep/KTM green/dream team combination.
