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:
