Field Testing

This weekend here was another long weekend and I went for a ride out into the Karoo (arid region North of Cape Town) with Dave and Angela for some "Field Testing" of the new bike...

The country started out quite green and then we rode up a mountain pass and onto a higher plateau and things suddenly got very brown and arid.

 Dave and Angela and friends are mostly KLR riders so the planned route was virtually all dirt roads of varying qualities... The first day was the "approach" so the dirt roads were very good quality and we had no problem running at speeds upto 120Kmh ( I was very happy with the feel of the new bike... the long travel suspension and the 21" front wheel made easy work of the corrugations and potholes.)

I took my full luggage load to see how the bike would handle and how the new racks that I just had welded up for the side boxes would work... They were great... barely moved even with the worst of the rough roads...

... They are about 10cm wider than need be which makes for a very wide load but it was gonna cost me way too much to have the welding shop spend the time to "adjust" everything, so we got what we got and Im happy with it as is.

We camped at a place appropriately called Oasis and early next morning we took off the bike luggage and went of to explore the very rough back roads in the area for the day... More testing for me with the new bike...

 

 At breakfast I had a mishap with the toast... which side do you think it landed... Yep, Butter-side-down of course !

The back roads were quite technical but again, even though the bike is more than 200Kg, it was significantly easier than it would have been with my old VSTROM 650.... Im really sold on long travel suspension and the big front wheel :)

We even had a full-on river crossing...It was about 75m across and was about mid thigh deep for most of the width and had quite a few big boulders in the water, which of course we couldn't see at all and just had to ride ahead :)

Then it was more dusty gravel roads back to camp for about a 400Km day which we managed to complete right on sunset.

The next day we rode back to the city all quite tired out but well pleased with our efforts.

As for me and my bike, Im now feeling very happy with it for off-road adventures that will no doubt come up as I ride North.

For the moment Im back in the city till next weekend while I get a few bits and pieces for the bike and wait for a Carne d' Passage (effectively a passport for the motorbike)... Hopefully I get it by Friday.

Cape Town Capers

There are of course lots of other things to do here in Cape Town, from Wine tours to the local Vineyards to bus and walking tours of the town sights, and more adventurous options like sky-diving, paragliding, abseiling and rock climbing... and there are plenty of beautiful beaches too.

I chose a couple of other mundane things to do in between working on the bike and trying to recover from jet lag.

I went out to Cape Point to look at the legendary coastline that has brought so many ships to grief over the centuries. Its not the South-most point of Africa nor is it the West-most point... Its the most South-Westerly and is the point where ships make the turn to go around the African continent and for me its a good "start" point for my ride North.

The drive out from Cape Town is only about 40Km but it can be slow going ... especially on a long weekend because there is so much traffic along the very resorty coastline... Lots of beaches and holiday cottages etc.

 Little holiday cottage type resorts all along the coast from Cape town to Cape Point.

Lots and lots of kite surfing... and man do they have the wind for it :)))

 

After all the developed area there is a large National Park area at the end of the peninsula with Cape Point.

 

The light-house is on the top of a very precipitous peak where the land meets the ocean... No need for a big tower for the light to sit on. 

The cliffs of Cape Point fall precipitously into the Southern Ocean

The light-house is on the top of a very precipitous peak where the land meets the ocean... No need for a big tower for the light to sit on. 

This is an appropriate "start" point for my journey North :)

And on the way back home from my visit to Cape Point, I stopped off at a little village along the way and went to see some of the local Natives... The African Black footed Penguins that live here in burrows along the beaches here :)

 As many of you know, I used to work with penguins when I lived in Tasmania for a few years and worked for the Australian Antarctic division... Ever since, Ive had a bit of an affinity for the little fellows and I like to visit different types of penguins when I get the opportunity.

These ones are the African Black Footed Penguins and they are very closely related (and visually similar to) to the Magellanic Penguins of Patagonia in South America and the Galapagos penguins of the Galapagos islands.

 It seems these guys are happy to nest out in the open as well as in burrows... interesting.

 The viewing areas are on raised walkways and people are rightly restricted from walking in amongst the penguins... But you do get very close to them and they seem very unperturbed by human presence...though these ones must be thoroughly habituated to the we gawking tourists :)

 

 

 

Toothy Critters

Its been Easter long-weekend here and Ive been mostly unable to prep the motorbike while all the shops have been closed. Instead Ive done a few touristy activities to amuse my-self while I wait.

Toothy Critters:
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The most popular item on the young hostel tourist list of things to do in Cape Town is to go Cage Diving with Great White Sharks!
A couple of hours drive from here is the undisputed world capital for Great White Shark watching... Its where Nature Channel and National Geographic etc all come to get those amazing shots of sharks leaping out of the water as they hunt seals or under-water pictures of huge sharks flashing rows of razor sharp teeth.

Well, Im a tourist and Ive got some time, and like everyone else it seems , I too find these "men in the grey suits" (a very Australian euphemism for sharks) fascinating creatures... So, off I went and spent a day with the Great Whites of South Africa.

It takes a coupe of hours to drive to the little town where the sharks hang out. The shuttle bus pick-up is routine other than its often at 5am (moves around depending on the tides) and the bus drives from hostel to hotel collecting bleary eyed tourists in ones and twos till its full... then we head off along a highway toward our destination.
Once there we are given a reasonable breakfast, given a bit of a chat by the tour people, watch an instructional video and of course asked to sign the standard "blood sheet" waiver form (the same stuff with any tourist activity). Then we are trooped outside and assigned wet-suits, life jackets and heavy vinyl wet-weather jackets for protection from wind, spray, and rain (Its a grey day today but no sign of rain). Then we head down to the dock and load up onto the waiting boat...
Its about 10m long aluminium "shark-cat" style boat with two decks and a thousand horsepower of outboard engines arranged across the back of the boat. The boat then heads out into the cold looking ocean for about 20 minutes or so and we then drop anchor surprisingly close to the shore (only about 300-400m off the beach).
Its a grey sort of day and there is a fair wind blowing but they arrange the anchor ropes to hold the boat sideways to the wind to create a calmer area alongside the leeward side of the boat. Then while all of us tourists are fitting ourselves into unfamiliar wetsuits (with plenty of rye comments about being bait and "I wonder how this wet-suit got this big tear across the leg?" etc drifting among us), the crew drop the steel cage off the back of the boat and bring it along-side ready for the first "clients".
The cage is long and thin... Its about 3m tall, 5m long and 1m wide. It has a steel mesh covering with 10cmx20cm openings and a few rails along the front inside the cage for hands and feet to grip... Note it would be a very bad idea to stick hands feet or arms through this mesh, so stroking, petting and teeth cleaning for the sharks is "discouraged...Rats! and I even brought my spare tooth brush along just to show the sharks I care. The cage has multiple floats and is firmly tied to the side of the boat at all times.
Into this cage they fit 8 tourists at a time which is rather a squeeze I must say.

Meanwhile the crew have also been "chumming" the water but its not with "blood and gore" as you may imagine... Its fish waste with lots of fish oils and while it no doubt stinks to high heaven as far as the sharks are concerned, its pretty mild looking as far as the tourists are concerned.
Once all is in readiness, the first 8 tourists are lined up and a weight belt is slung over their shoulder, a pair of goggles fitted to their face (no need for a snorkel), and they are summarily instructed to climb down into the cage.
...
And while that is easy enough, its certainly the most uncomfortable part of the whole experience... The Atlantic water is BLOODY COLD... Its about 13degC and you have a 7mm full wet-suit with hood and booties but I tell you, as that water seeps into the suit it really takes your breath away... Im a bit of a "cold water woos" but there was not a person amongst us who was not glad to get out of the water once our 30 min session in the cage was up.
While we were all getting dressed, the sharks had started to come to see what the smell was all about... Id seen a couple of the big fish briefly surface alongside the boat and they were indeed BIG sharks... Just like they advertised and just as you see them in those Nature Channel documentaries ... Wow!

So, now you are shoulder to shoulder with the person next to you in a rather small cage with very large fish somewhere near-by. First you are just trying to deal with the FREEZING cold water and forget all about the sharks for a few minutes. Then it takes a bit of jostling to ensure someone else doesn't have their hands/arms in front of your viewing space :)
And then one of the crew on the boat shouts "down in front" or "down left" etc to let you know that a shark is coming close.... So then you take a big breath and duck down in the cage and hold yourself under with the rails in the cage, and peer into the murky water looking for the fish.
That's not metaphor, the water really is very murky and visibility is only about 2m which means you cant see anything at all more than 4m away and things are very blurry in to 1m or so. (Apparently its usually not great but it changes day to day and you basically get what you get).
Anyway, out of the murk comes a shadow that rapidly gets VERY big and is completely unmistakably a great white shark... It swims past the cage very close and you find you have no problem holding your breath as long as the beast is in view, which in fact is only 5-10 seconds at most. then the shark swims off again for a few minutes. And then of course there is the magnifying effect of looking through water... Things appear to be about a third bigger than they really are for human eyes, and when you are looking at the mouth of a shark over 4m long and its less than 1m from you...well, You get to see an awful lot of large white teeth! :)
We saw about 8 sharks between 3m and 4.5m in length in the time we were there and we had about a dozen close passes by the sharks while I was in the cage. The sharks are being lured to come close to the cage with a seal decoy and a baited line being pulled past the cage by the boat crew, so you are pretty much guaranteed to get some slashing and thrashing right up in front of the cage. And when the thrashing is right there in front of you, and a shark fin or tail sweeps past you and brushes you through the cage openings, well, lets say there were more than a few people squeeling away :))

But I have to say that the whole "in cage" experience was something of a disappointment for me!
That was because I felt absolutely no fear at all while I was in the cage... it was more like standing in front of a big screen TV watching a video while soaked in cold water... It felt really remote and I just didn't think that was the right feeling for being in the very immediate company of these amazing creatures.
Not that I can think of any way of making it any more "real" without making it dangerous... The danger is the real point and its a pretty much black-and-white type thing... You are either in the cage or out of it... In the cage is completely safe and out of it is completely dead!

 Tourists all loaded into the cage.

 A little one swims by

 Getting bigger.

 Some biting and thrashing near the cage.

 

 

Unfortunately I didn't manage to get any good close pictures cos I didn't bring my good camera and didn't have a polarizing filter to take out the water glare. the weather was also grey so that didn't help either but I did have fun and I did see the big fish Up Close and Personal :)

 

 

Our Digital Greed

Ive been here a week now and have had quite a busy time of it... But Ive only posted on my blog once which has probably left some of my friends a bit worried... Sorry.
Its not that Ive been so busy that Ive not had time to post. Indeed, the early mornings and evenings have had time for posts, and that's normally when Id have spent time writing down my thoughts...
But the problem has been internet access.

Cape Town of course has lots of internet access (thoroughly modern city of course) and the hostel where I have been staying has a good "fat" bandwidth internet connection and multiple WiFi nodes.
But it also has lots of people staying there, and it seems that absolutely everyone who is staying here is pretty much permanently skyping and video chatting with friends and family these days.
Ive gone on these long voyages four times now in the last 7 years and Ive been seeing how mobile digital access has been changing in that short time-frame... Its truly amazing.
On the first trip it was about 10-20% of people who had some sort of mobile digital device with them and used it frequently. This time it is absolutely 100% and people are glued to their little screens virtually all the time now.
Likewise, at hostels and cafes during those morning and evening hours it used to be that there would be little groupings of travelers chatting  quietly (or noisily) over coffee or breakfast, but these days, breakfast is a pretty much silent and individual affair as everyone is fully engaged with their mobile device! And even when things to get chattier in the evenings when travelers return to their accommodations after the days adventures and have a beer or two, its only because people are multi-tasking and are using their data device as well as interacting with others.

...And that has been the problem... There has simply not been enough band-width to cope with the enormous volume of streaming traffic... and Im pretty sure that if the hostel doubled its available bandwidth it would likewise be soaked up immediately by the travelers staying there... We are insatiable!
So, all Ive really been able to do for the past week is check my emails and send off a few short responses to important questions from friends.

Its early days in this trip but the tone is I think pretty much set... The mobile data revolution is pretty much over... and it is a huge change to all of our styles of personal interaction.
I think its a good thing but I also think we are yet to deal with many of the consequences of this very sudden change to our society.

South Africa - Naturalization Processes

Well, the trip is officially on!... And that is essentially because I find myself here in South Africa :)

It effectively took two full days from departing Vancouver Canada till I arrived here in CapeTown South Africa.  there were four flights totalling 24hr, three connection waits totalling 15hr, and then there was the time zone difference of about 9hr.

And as usual throughout the whole transit escapade I managed to get a total of only about 2hr of sleep.

But my body clock is pretty messed up anyway so the fact the sleep deprivation is only part of the issue :)

 

Day 1:

I arrived in Cape Town at about 1pm and was of course immediately accosted at the airport by dozens of touts offering me taxis and shuttles and hotels and hostels etc... I opted for a generic shuttle to take me directly to the hostel that Id pre-booked about a month ago... I rarely do the pre-booking thing but this time since I was arriving just before the Easter long weekend I thought it would be wise to reserve myself a place to avoid having difficulty finding a place to sleep.

The hostel is a very well established place with a good reputation and has lots of energetic young travelers from all over the place. I checked in and tried to get some sleep but even though I was completely exhausted, sleep eluded me. Not to worry because at six that evening I had a meeting planned with the motorbike owner...

At the duly appointed hour, David, the owner of the motorbike I had committed to buy by email showed up. And we then drove out to his place in the suburbs and I met his wife Angela as well as a daughter, four small dogs, two chickens and  not least of course my new motorbike :)))

 

Yes, I was happy to confirm that David was exactly the kind of person I had inferred him to be through our email correspondence. In fact I had been so sure he would be that I had already transferred over US$4000 to him before I even got on my flight with nothing more than a couple of pictures of the bike and our email "commitments" to bind the deal.

David and Angela treated me to a lovely roast dinner and there was assorted banter about past present and future bike trips and then an inspection of my new moto,, and then I was driven all the wy back to my hostel where I promptly went to bed and had another go at catching up on sleep.


Day 2:

David and I had agreed to meet today at 9am at his work and do the official transfer of the vehicle registration. So, I got myself a taxi over there and then David sent me off to have the bike inspected for a road-worthy certificate... This was no problem for the bike, and it was also my first opportunity to ride the machine... It immediately felt quite comfortable to ride and I was back at Davids work within about half an hour with the necessary papers in hand. We then headed out to a government liscence/rego office and waited about half an hour or a bit more in a line-up... But, more or less as expected, it was found that we didn't have what we needed to do the job...

This was not due to any real lack of diligence on either of our parts but was more likely due to changing government processes for foreign owner transfers... So we were "rejected" at the first attempt! 

It seems that we have a couple of options at the moment. The first option and the one we were trying to do was to change the registration to my name... Apparently this is no-longer possible even with everyones official IDs and letter of sale etc... The problem is that to do this, I need to apply to the Transportation ministry for permission to have vehicles registyered to my name here in South Africa... And this application takes a few weeks (no definite dates) and even then once I got this then after I have left SA and taken the bike, the government would ever after keep sending lisencing requests to my address here in SA... So this option looks infeasible from two fronts, 1 that I don't have weeks to spend waiting for the government to "maybe" issue me this permission, and 2, I don't want the bike generating "junk mail" and potential official enquiries etc ad-infinitum for the address I use while here in SA.

So, option 2 is to officially export the bike... In fact what I think we will do is have David export the bike just before I head off North. This will clear the bike off the books for the SA government (the only other way to do this is to "write the bike off" which is a different but equally official exercise that requires the bike VIN number to be reported as "written off" by someone with the authority to do so... At this stage it looks like the export option will be best but this too require a police sign-off that there are no outstanding violations or theft notices etc against the bike VIN number. So whichever way we go from here it will take some more effort than we had expected. Bit of a bummer but Im sure we will sort it out.

Im going to make a few phone calls to a couple of people who may know what the best approach is and how to work efficiently through the beaurocracies but at this stage it will not be happening till after the Easter weekend.

In the mean time Ive got quite a bit of work to do on the bike and there are plenty of touristy activities to do here in cape Town as well :)

For today, I managed to find a couple of motorbike shops, get chain lube and WD40, buy a key blank from Honda and have it cut so I now have a spare. I also removed the bikes old "open-ended" hand guards and fit my new closed-ended bark busters (more substantial and in my experience needed for when I inevitably drop the bike on hard ground with some forward speed - stops the hand controls being snapped off). and I also managed to glue the spare keys under a removable panel on the bike in case I lose my main set of keys at some point.

 And now its time for dinner and a couple of beers ... Not a completely successful day, but pretty good for a first effort :))

Day 3:

Today I managed to bolt on the new Crash-Bars for the bike (the only major missing hardware for the bike) which took pretty much the whole morning, and I also bolted on the mounting plate for the top-box that came with the bike. I also did a mechanical inspection of the brakes and chain and sprockets which are all in very good condition.
After that I took my-self on a bit of a local tour to see the city... and I have to say that its a very nice city indeed. Cape Town is on a small narrow peninsula and is effectively surrounded by ocean on three sides, while the land is dominated by a mountain ridge (Table mountain, Signal Hill, and  "The Twelve Apostles" are features of this range) that results in steep slopes and excellent views from almost anywhere in the city. And there is plenty of old Victorian architecture mixed with lots of quite good contemporary architecture as well.
In short, I like the city a lot and could probably live here quite happily :)