South African highlights 5 – 7 September 2011

Our Crossing Africa trip started on Monday 5 September 2011. We left our home at 18h00 and only had a short 45 kilometers to complete to spend our first night camping next to the pit straight at the Killarney Race Track. The next day we pushed through all the way to sleep at the Springbok Caravan Park and then entered Namibia the next day. Here is an overview of the route through SA:

To see the blog posts during this time, please click here.

Here are our highlights and lowlights based on the two days spent in South Africa.

Tania’s highlight: Sitting on the dark empty track that Monday evening with Francois eating our McDonald’s was definitely the highlight for me. We had the whole track to ourselves and after a hectic few days it was good to relax and reflect a bit on the journey that lay ahead, plus what a cool place to camp! I was super impressed with Francois for having organised this as it was such an awesome way to start out our adventure.

Tania’s lowlight: We were standing ready next to the track at Killarney waiting to tackle our first lap while journalist Dave Abrahams were taking a photo of us. Francois accidently pressed his backpack against my screen when he climbed off his bike and “crrrrrkkkk” a piece of my brand new screen broke off. Looking back it wasn’t really a big deal, but I was very proud of my new shiny Motomia. If I knew what the screen would have looked like anyways in a month’s time I would not have been so shocked back then.

The flowers were beautiful on the way to Springbok:

Francois’s highlight: This has to be sleeping on the grid straight at Killarney Raceway and doing a couple of laps around the track the following morning. When I asked Joy Hoskins a week or two before our departure date whether this would be possible, she and all the other officials and the board all agreed without any worries.  Paul Lehman (in charge of safety and security) and Gail met us at the clubhouse on our first evening and welcomed us with coffee.

I’ve always wanted to ride a bike around the track, but never thought my first time would be on a 200cc Motomia with three months’ luggage on the back.

Francois’s lowlight: Between Citrusdal and Clanwilliam we were held up by strings of cars, driving centimetres apart behind slow trucks

We both loved this shot on the track with Table Mountain in the background:

South Africa Trip Stats:

Distance: 692 km
Time: 1 day, 16 hours, 35 minutes, 58 seconds
Highest point: 1 000.4 m (after 660 km)
Lowest point: 1.7m (after 42 km)
Maximum speed: 107 km/h
Fuel consumption (Francois): 30.2 km/l
Fuel consumption (Tania): 35.9 km/l

A quick flashback at our diary cam recordings in Springbok:

COST