It had been a bad day at work for both Michael and Leanne when they headed off on what was to be a fateful walk along New Plymouth’s Coastal Walkway.
By the time they arrived back home they had decided to quit their jobs, rent out their house and go motorbiking around the world for a year.
Like all big adventures and grand plans, deciding to go was the easy part.
Then they had to decide exactly where they would go.
“A real first-world problem,” Michael wryly acknowledges.
After lots of discussion looking at overland routes the choice was between travelling from London to Cape Town, or USA to Ushuaia (bottom of Argentina).
They decided on the Americas trip and would kick things off with a 22 day group motorbike tour through Africa.
On May 2023 they flew to Pretoria and were pleasantly surprised that by chance they had booked the same trip as friends who had recommended the trip to them, along with five others from Taranaki.
“We realised later how easy the travel was as we had a guide to follow, all the accommodation booked, restaurants sorted and even had our luggage carried in a back-up van.”
The tour company provided the motorbikes (BMWs) and sorted all the documentation needed.
They both loved Africa, the undoubted highlights being the wild animals that they saw in the game reserves and on the sides of the roads.
“On one road we had to give way to elephants crossing the road in front of us,” says Leanne. “Sitting on the motorbike we certainly felt exposed — so different to cows crossing the road back here in Taranaki.”
Other highlights were Victoria Falls in Zimbabwe, Fish River Canyon and the Skeleton Coast in Namibia.
After Africa they had a stop-over in Switzerland — which was quite a culture shock. They were only there three days but appreciated how clean and perfect it was (and expensive).
Meanwhile, Michael’s Husqvarna Norden motorbike was being shipped from New Zealand to Los Angeles for the Americas part of their trip.
WELCOME TO AMERICA
It was June when they flew into New York, spending five days staying with a fellow motorbike couple in their downtown Broadway apartment.
“This was the start of the generosity shown by fellow bikers,” says Michael. “We made contact with this couple through an Adventure Rider website and they very quickly offered to share their apartment.”
Their hosts took them to Central Park, the Statue of Liberty, the Brooklyn Bridge and the 911 memorial. Then they navigated their way by subway to a baseball game (Yankees v the Chicago White Sox) at Yankee Stadium.
“One unexpected highlight was a couple sitting in front of us appearing on the big screen, while he got down on one knee and proposed to her, ring and all!” says Michael.
Then it was off to California for the real adventure to begin.
In Los Angeles another biker, again met through the Adventure Rider website, picked them up, drove them to collect their motorbike and had extra tools and a battery in case there were any issues with it (there weren’t).
There was one hiccup with loading the bike.
“We had too much stuff,” Michael recalls. “Travelling by motorcycle is like going tramping — you are limited to what you can carry.” Luckily a hotel maid was similar sizing to Leanne and was very happy to take the extra shoes and clothes.
“Going straight onto a busy Los Angeles freeway trying to remember to keep right, especially at intersections, was certainly memorable.”
With the exception of seeing the Space Shuttle at the Science Centre they did not enjoy Los Angeles and found it a big dirty city.
“And then we started riding.”
By June, it was starting to get quite hot and also the US dollar wasn’t as friendly to Kiwis as the currencies of South America, so they were keen to get to cooler temperatures and better exchange rates.
Over ten days they revelled in the freedom of travelling by bike across the USA, riding via Las Vegas and the Grand Canyon to Mexico.
MEXICO
“We knew very little about Central and South America,” says Leanne.
“At the start we didn’t realise how big it was. We couldn’t look to the end — there was just too much to comprehend. So we had to break the journey down into small chunks. While we knew roughly which way to head, it was only when we got to our destination each night that we would plan the route and stops to take the next day.”
They had two months in Mexico, including a week at a Spanish language school at Guadalajara (four hours a day). On their way they checked out temples and pyramids, and gradually immersed themselves into the culture. “Mexico is a wonderful country. We listened to all the warnings people gave us but at no stage did we feel unsafe. There are stunning beaches and jungles but the worst thing we found was the “topes” (speed humps) that are everywhere and very hard to see. We hit one early on at speed and I nearly launched Leanne off the bike!”
They stayed with another contact from the Adventure Rider website and he showed them around Mexico City. The city surprised them with many highlights, The Virgin of Guadalupe was just one.
“Millions of people go to that church each year. Some even crawl there from miles away and prostrate themselves in front of the virgin. The Pyramid of the Sun was amazing and the sheer wealth displayed by Mexico’s wealthiest man in his private museum (Museo Soumayo) was astounding.”
One highlight of Mexico was the Tequila Tasting trip they did.
“We were very much the older couple in a group of maybe ten others and at one stop you bend over backwards under a barrel while they turn the tap on and tequila pours in your mouth, the challenge was who could last the longest before having the tap turned off! We then ended up in a very big venue with all these Mariachi bands. At one stage one of the bands came over and encircled our group as they sang and it was just fantastic!” Michael enthuses.
“Mexicans love parties,” says Leanne, “and there’s noise everywhere all of the time. Because they live in their cities … we don’t. We live in our homes and socialise there. They sleep at home but they socialise out in the plazas or squares. In the middle of every square there is a cathedral or church, and that’s where everybody congregates once the sun’s gone down. And the place comes alive.”
“The routes we followed in most part weren’t tourist routes,” adds Michael. “We’d be in a town and we were the exceptions — there were no other tourists around or KFCs or McDonalds — it was almost all refried beans and tacos.”
So how was the food?
There’s a few seconds of silence.
“I am not a fan of Mexican food,” admits Michael, “but you eat what you’ve got to eat.”
“It was OK,” says Leanne. “The refried beans? They can have those, they’re disgusting.
“Breakfast consisted of eggs, scrambled or fried or whatever, and a soft cheese that looks like feta, but doesn’t taste like feta, and refried beans. They don’t have bread, as we know it, so everything is either like a pita bread or a wrap, or these other things called Arepa. Some of them taste like cardboard, some are made out of corn. The potato ones were much nicer.”
There was also yoghurt, and an abundance of fresh fruit.
On the whole Michael and Leanne enjoyed Mexico.
“Yes it was very hot, but we met the most wonderful people.”
“Americans seemed to have this perception that Mexico was this lawless country full of criminals,” Leanne comments.
They saw the infamous wall and the migrants walking towards the border.
“It took us a while to work out what was going on. They had nothing with them apart from their children.
“We got waved down once, by some young men,” says Michael. “They were desperate for some water and we gave them all we had. We’re so protected in New Zealand. You see these things on the news and it is so easy to just change the channel, but when you’re riding on the road, you see it first-hand and it’s heart-breaking.”
THE PRACTICAL STUFF
The heat certainly got to them.
“On a motorbike you’re so exposed — to the traffic, the weather — and at times we were riding in 40+ degree heat, with all our protective gear on.
“We’d pour cold water over our T-shirts before zipping up our jackets and had every vent open to try and keep cool,” says Leanne. “The hottest we had was 54c riding in rush hour traffic leaving Puerto Vallarta.”
Every night they needed to ensure the motorbike was secure.
“Some accommodation allowed us to put our bike inside, often in the reception area if they didn’t have a parking garage,” says Leanne.
Next on the list was air-conditioning, which they managed to get most of the time. A pool was also desired but not essential.
“The good thing about going through those countries is that there are some very big ‘What’s App’ groups of people who are either doing a similar route, or have done it. So all you had to do was ask.”
Another site they used a lot for reference was ioverlander.com
On that site people list places to stay, eat, get petrol, and warnings on the road conditions ahead. One route (the “road of 1000 topes”) had many warnings about hold ups etc.
“That was the only time we let family back home know exactly where we were travelling and we let them know when we had arrived safely. We did cross some rope barriers lying across the road but luckily weren’t stopped.”
Because their Spanish wasn’t great it was very hard to have a conversation with the locals, though occasionally they would come across someone who had some English.
“It was part of the adventure,” says Michael. “That waking up in a small town, and going ‘Where are we?’ Often we wouldn’t know where the next stop was going to be and we had to make sure that the routes we took didn’t exceed the range of the bike to fuel stops. That’s what’s so exciting.”
Often it was hard going.
It was hot and following the GPS maps was often frustrating and time-consuming.
“Often our accommodation would be kind of close to where it was marked on the GPS but it might be like two kilometres further up or down the road, or the next street over. We spent a lot of time walking up and down streets in the heat trying to find the place we were looking for.”
It was also Hurricane season in Mexico and Central America so they used a hurricane tracking app to make sure they didn’t run into any. But they also count themselves lucky.
“Another biker we met who was a week behind us, he got tear-gassed in among protests, and had to go through five road blocks.”
Michael and Leanne got stuck at one, for an environmental protest.
Initially, when they stopped in the queue of vehicles that had accumulated, they didn’t know why the road was blocked — maybe there had been an accident? Being on a motorbike they were able to get to the front of a long, long queue of vehicles.
“There were all these people with banners and I asked if we could go through,” Michael recounts. “No. Then a couple of ladies asked if they could take photos with the bike, and then sitting on the bike, which they did. Then one of the Guardia Nacional indicated we could put our bike in the shade. An older guy came over who could speak a little English and we asked him what the protest was about. He said ‘the environment’ and we commended them all for looking out for the planet and their children, then told him New Zealand leads the way in environmental law (“I’m not sure that we do,” asides Leanne) and ‘we support everything you do’ then asked if we could please push the bike through as it was getting very hot.”
After the older guy checked with other members of the protest and the Guardia, they were finally allowed through.
During their adventure Leanne and Michael had 20 border crossings and they, and the motorbike, had to have the correct documentation (immigration and customs) for each one.
Insurance for the bike also had to be arranged before riding in a new country. “We realised early on that often after a border there would be another checkpoint a few kilometres down the road, so we learned not to put all our documentation away.”
“Every one of the crossings was different,” Leanne comments. “None of them had any similarities whatsoever. The customs officials were there to do a job so they were very abrupt. New Zealand bike ownership papers and drivers’ licences caused delays as they were virtually unknown to them. And of course they don’t want to speak English to you … they’d just roll their eyes…”
SECURITY
They remained very aware of their surroundings the whole trip. If at any stage they felt uncomfortable while walking with maybe someone following them one would call “shoe lace” and without any questions they would stop together and let people pass and reassess their situation.
“All the guns. In Africa we went past a retirement village and I said to Leanne, ‘Look at all the rolls of barbed wire across the top of the fence’ and she said “that’s not to keep the old folk in, that’s to keep people out.”
“Whoever made razor wire will be a very rich person because it’s everywhere,” Leanne comments.
“Guards in front of like normal clothes shops, with guns. They’re there to protect the shops. All of the money machines have got armed guards. Petrol stations too. Any window at street level would have bars on it. But you just became used to it.”
In some countries they also got stopped on the roads by officials when crossing from one region or state to another. “They’d check our documents.” Often they would just get waved through when the officials saw they were on a (foreign) large bike, and if stopped they would pretend not to understand any Spanish.
“The officials just couldn’t be bothered.”
“Occasionally we got stopped by people wanting to know where we were from or wanting a photo with us. Most people wouldn’t know where New Zealand was … they’d think it was in Europe. The screensaver on my phone ended up being a map of Central America, with Australia and New Zealand so I could show people where we were from,” Michael explains.
In Belize, Michael became seriously ill.
He was sick for seven days and it turned out he had a yeast infection from some bread he ate.
“Yeast infections are very common in that part of the world. It’s something to do with the mould that grows on the bread.”
A dodgy hamburger they bought from a food shack on the beach was the suspected culprit.
While Michael was sick Leanne didn’t venture too far … “The Belizean men are not backward in coming forward.”
“You pick up bugs when you travel,” says Michael philosophically “luckily the hotel had Netflix.”
They also went to a wonderful zoo in Belize and saw pumas and ocelots.
“The Belizean food was really good,” Leanne comments, apart from the odd hamburger of course.
The Floral Route (The Route del Flores) into El Salvador was a real highlight — “the flowers were stunning.”
Independence Day in Guatemala was celebrated with a big parade.
“Just wall to wall people with bands and marching and everybody dressed up.”
A memorable experience in Guatemala was coming across a river where the bridge had been washed out. They stopped to figure out how to get across and the car behind them kept tooting.
“So I got off because I was going to wade out and see how deep the water was for Michael to ride through. Long story short the people in the car were tooting to let me know I could get a lift in their car to get across while Michael rode the bike over.”
“That’s part of the fun when you’re travelling by motorbike,” says Michael. “People can see you and talk to you. They want to know about the motorbike or where you’re from.
“A camaraderie is formed with other motorbike riders too, where you wave out to each other, or chat at petrol stations, or you see someone else carrying a helmet and suddenly you’re the best of friends for 20-25 minutes.
“You’re in the environment, not just driving through it in an air-conditioned vehicle. You can feel the weather change, the smell of grass, It’s a great way to travel.
“Leaving Bogota one morning I remember these guys on scooters coming by and giving us fist bumps. You’re not travelling through an area, you’re part of it.”
THE END OF THE ROAD
They came home earlier than planned, for a couple of reasons.
Leanne had a new grand baby arrive while they were away, who she was keen to meet, but also “we just got tired,” she states simply.
“The decisions you have to make (every day) … where are we going to go, where are we going to stay tonight, what route are we going to take, where are we going to eat? Now they sound trivial but they then become big things.
“We got to the stage where we asked ‘are we still enjoying this?’”
“Because you can have days you don’t enjoy, like when we rode through the capital of El Salvador by accident. We were stuck in rush hour traffic, it was hot, but we survived it and it was just a bad day.”
About half-way though their journey, they were clipped by a bus in Ecuador.
“We weren’t moving, which was a bonus, but we ended up pushed up against, and almost under, the bus next to us and we couldn’t extricate ourselves. Someone came off the footpath and lifted the bike off us and the bus that hit us, when the lights went green, he just carried on.”
Luckily the bike wasn’t damaged, just one of their storage boxes got a bit bent. Leanne and Michael also didn’t suffer any injuries apart from a couple of bruises and strains.
“But I think our confidence got knocked a little bit, so whenever we were around a little bit of traffic we started to get anxious.”
“I had my phone stolen in Colombia — snatched out of my hand,” says Michael. “We always held our phone in two hands, but one night I didn’t and as I went to check the GPS on a street corner this guy went past on a motorbike and grabbed it out of my hand.
“Then it was straight back to the hotel to change Facebook passwords and all the rest.”
Then they had a shocking incident in Peru that really put them off the entire country.
“It’s dirty with piles of rubbish everywhere and the traffic’s horrendous. At one hotel they told us that it was not safe to walk outside,” Leanne sums up.
“On the road, motorbikes are the lowest of the low. Buses, trucks and cars don’t care about you — might has right. They’re very arrogant drivers and it got extremely tiring, looking out all the time.”
To escape from some traffic they accidentally took a road around the coast and there they were stopped by police. Apparently it was a ‘truck-only’ road and motorbikes weren’t allowed.
“There were no signs or anything supporting this but we had to take him at his word,” says Michael. “Then he demanded some money. I asked for my driver’s licence back first but then had no choice but to give him money to keep him happy.”
After that experience Michael swapped his driver’s licence for a laminated copy and hid the original away. Just as well because the next morning they were stopped by another police officer while riding through Lima.
This time, apparently, they were speeding in an urban area — “and we were on a motorway!”
He said “I will take you to a money machine where you can get the money to pay the fine.”
After lots of google translate Michael asked, “What can we do now so that we can carry on with our trip?”
“How much money do you have on you?”
“So I gave him some money so we could carry on.”
But that whole experience left a bad taste for both of them and they couldn’t get out of Peru fast enough.
Crossing the border to Chile it was immediately noticeably very orderly and better resourced.
”Chile was amazing — the wide open desert landscapes were stunning.”
When Live first spoke to the couple they had been back in New Zealand for four weeks and Leanne admitted she was still struggling to get her brain into gear at times. She’s back at her old workplace and they are staying with Michael’s sister for a few weeks until their own home becomes available again.
Once they and their bank accounts have recovered from the trip they already have their thoughts on the next adventure.
HAS THE TRIP CHANGED THEM?
“It certainly has,” says Leanne. “We realise how lucky we are to live in a country as beautiful and as relaxed as New Zealand.”
Michael says that after all the border crossings they have experienced that he has learnt to be far more patient!
Number one of their list of must-dos when they got home was catch up with friends and family. Michael was also hanging out for Vogels and Marmite.
Would they do it again?
“In a heartbeat!! Life is short, you need to enjoy every moment while you are fit and healthy enough to still get out there and do it.”
THE NUMBERS
MILEAGE — a total of 29,000 kms in Africa and the Americas, with 121 stops.
DURATION — 10 months
BORDER CROSSINGS — 20
They had to use 18 different currencies and prior to the trip they were stuck with needles 8 times for various vaccinations.
For more information see their online blog at https://advrider.com/f/threads/1-bike-2-kiwis-3-continents.1639011
THE WEATHER
We got very little rain the whole time we were away. We used our wet weather gear maybe five times.
“There’s one unwritten rule about motorbike riding,” interjects Michael. “If it starts to rain and you stop to put all your wet weather gear on, you can guarantee it will stop after a couple of minutes. Happens every time. And if you don’t stop to put it on, it gets harder.”
THE BIKE
In Nov 2022 they traded Michael’s old adventure bike for a 2022 Husqvarna Norden 901 bought from Johnston’s in Inglewood. “Renny and his team, they’re the most wonderful people to deal with. All the advice they gave us, what spare parts they recommended we took, and then the emails we sent while away asking if we needed to worry about this or that and quickly an email would come back. I’m not a mechanic so my worry was always that the bike might stop.” The bike ran faultlessly.
TRAVEL AGENT
When the time came to head home they also got caught with the groundings of the 737 Max 9s .
“That really taught us the advantage of using a good travel agent,” says Michael. “Linda at Hello World in Strandon coped with all the language issues and very quickly rebooked us onto another carrier.”