Toronto, Canada * September 27, 2008
Every now and then, someone stumbles across this blog and writes to inquire whether or not I made it to Tierra del Fuego.
I did. I arrived at Ushuaia, Argentina, on February 24, 2005, and emailed this message to friends and family:
Hola,
Greetings from the southernmost city in the world. I made it -- five months, 15,589 miles on a motorcycle, a heavily fortified Kawasaki KLR 650, thru 12 countries, to arrive here, at the cold and windswept tip of Tierra del Fuego, the end of the road, 700 miles from Antarctica, met by a large crowd of cheering penguins.
I rode with friends and I rode alone, before dawn and after dark, thru rain forest and across desert, at sea level along the Pacific coast and at 17,112 feet amid snow-capped Andean peaks, thru vast megapolises with insane traffic and tiny subsistence farming communities without electricity.
Much of it was pavement, ranging from good to bad to +You call this a road?!* I rode plenty of dirt tracks, too ... every now and then the ride spiced up with snow and sand and mud and river fordings (except the one in Bolivia so large the bikes had to cross in a bucket loader!) and hail and hangovers and fog and gravel and wind and corrugations and cowpies and friends what a heart-stopping jaw-dropping ass-busting adventure it has been.
Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Panama, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Chile, and Argentina, each weird and wonderful in its own way, and full of warm and welcoming people. Bolivia was the best ... rugged, remote, strongly indigenous with its Amyran and Quechan Indians, 95 percent of roads unpaved, and surreal landscapes that looked more like Jupiter than earth. Bolivia was a faraway land of unforgettable adventures -- lo mas mejor!
I'm riding north to Buenos Aires, Uruguay and Paraguay, to Rio de Janeiro and along the Brazilian Atlantic to the mouth of the Amazon, where bike and rider board a chicken boat for a six-day journey into the jungle (there is no road), to a city called Manaus, where the road resumes, north to Caracas, Venezuela, and a plane to Miami.
Back to S.F. in May, is the plan. How's everything with you?
From there, I did indeed highball it north – Buenos Aires, Rio de Janeiro, up to the highly entertaining Brazilian city of Belem on the Atlantic Coast. There I boarded a boat called the Amazon Star. We chugged along the Amazon River at average speed of 9 miles per hour for six days. I disembarked in Manaus, an improbably cultured city (with an opera house?!) in the center of the Amazon, relaxed for several days in the company of a sweet Brazilian girl I'd met on the boat, and tore up to Caracas, Venezuela.
In Caracas, I secured air passage for moto and myself to Miami and rode three more days to my hometown in upstate New York. The local newspaper ran a front-page story on my adventure. A week later, I headed out onto the U.S. superslab and made it to San Francisco in seven days. In all, the ride was eight months, 30,000 miles, and 15 countries.
That was in June 2005. Since then, I’ve been busy with freelance writing work and enjoying the abundance of culture and entertainment of San Francisco.
And daydreaming of another kick-ass adventure ride, the bittersweet addiction
***
Africa it is. 
I considered Siberia, Mongolia, and the Stans, but ultimately settled on Africa. Africa would be the most challenging, I reasoned. The greatest adventure – the farther from civilization, the better.
Africa would be wildest of rides. It’s all about the ride. That was my first line to this blog: It’s all about the ride.
The route starts in Morocco. On and off, I'll be riding with two or three or four other riders, from Britain, Germany, and Russia. I hooked up with these guys via Horizons Unlimited, a Web site and community for international motorcycling. From Morocco it's down to Dakar, Senegal, and east to Timbuktu in Mali. Then south again towards Nigeria and down to Cape Town, South Africa. I figure to arrive there in March 2009.
The motorbike is a Suzuki DR650 enduro. I bought it new at Golden Gate Cycles in San Francisco, the first new vehicle I have ever purchased. The Kawasaki KLR 650 I had ridden through Mexico and Central and South America had served me well and would have been a decent choice for Africa.
The Suzuki, though, is considerably lighter. Suzuki specs the bike at 324 pounds, whereas the pre-08 KLRs allegedly weigh 337. I say allegedly, as some independent testers have claimed the KLR weighs in maybe 30 pounds more than Kawasaki’s spec. That sounds right to me. The Suzuki feels about 40 pounds lighter.
Lighter is righter. With heavy aluminum panniers and too much gear, the KLR 650 proved to be a pig in the mud and sand of Bolivia and elsewhere. For Africa, I chose soft panniers from Wolfman Luggage and a lockable top box manufactured in Germany by SW Motech. It’s a compromise between weight and security. Lockable hard panniers will deter the majority of would-be thieves. Soft panniers can be sliced open in an instant while the rider is having lunch or getting a passport stamped.
I wrenched extensively to get the bike ready.
Thanks to Jesse Kientz of Kientech, Jeff of ProCycle, Perry of Advanced Motorcycle Products and Renazco Racing (a custom seat maker). These are all small shops that supply tough and cool stuff for Suzuki DRs. And thanks to the guys and gals at Thumpertalk.com and the Yahoo DR650 group.
I rode solo from San Francisco to my hometown in central New York in eight days. I had planned to ride with a fellow San Franciscan, but he backed out in early June for reasons that I won’t bother to outline. It was disappointing. I was disappointed for him more than anything else. He had purchased a new DR650 as well, and invested considerable time and money in aftermarket fortifications. In 2007, we had ridden together from San Francisco to Florida. We had spent probably a couple of hundred hours discussing motorcycling abroad. He had fastened up on a wall in his apartment a map of the world and purchased the Lonely Planet guide to Africa. I wonder if that map is still on his wall.
I spent 11 days in my hometown, enjoying the company of my parents, family and friends and putting the finishing touches on what has been many hundreds of hours of preparation. Now I sit in a shabby, cheap hotel above a strip club in downtown Toronto, awaiting the Air Transat flight that will take motorbike and me to Lisbon. The shipping was capably arranged by the Long Island-based Motorcycle Express for what I considered a decent price of $1500.
Next report from Europe or Africa. I hope to make the time to update the blog regularly, which I neglected in South America. I filled eight notebooks with ink while traveling, but on account of traveling with other riders, a busted computer, and the time needed to upload from Internet cafes the blog became, regrettably, an afterthought.
Thanks for reading.
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