After a 3 day staying at my friends Graham Maclachan’s house in Bloemfontein, I had managed to get my bike serviced, fit a set of new tyres, spend a day Enduro riding in the hills outside Bloemfontein, send the luggage I would not require on this part of the trip ahead to Cape Town and of course have several Bri’s (BBQ’s) whilst consuming copious amounts of alcohol. (The South African way!) So a pretty busy 3 days.
Monday morning soon came around and my fellow riding partners arrived bright and early. Peter and Barney were riding new KTM 790 Adventurers and Graham wold be on his trusted 990 Adventurer. We finally left the comfort of Graham’’s house at 7.30am and headed out of Bloemfontein to the first of the gravel roads.
It was soon evident that my riding partners had ‘no fear’ when it came to riding open off road tracks, regularly reaching over 70mph. The tracks were a mixture of gravel, sand and mud so the bike felt like it was constantly moving around beneath me, so being the less experienced adventure rider, I decided that traveling at around 55mph on these tracks was more sensible for mY ability. Unfortunately this meant that my colleagues had to stop regulalrly to wait for me to catch up but that was probably good news for Barney who did like to have a regular cigarette break!
The route Initially took us from Bloemfontein towards Lesotho were the tracks followed the Lesotho border south towards Barkley East.
It wasn’t long before we had to stop and readjust my rear suspension, as the tracks were extremely uneven in places and my suspension had been originally set to take fully loaded side panniers, which I now didn’t have.
With my rear suspension adjusted we got back on the bikes and continued along the tracks towards the mountain. They went on for miles and miles with no sign of a tarmac road.
The tracks varied on our first day, from fast open gravel tracks to farm tracks...
and then there were some excellent water crossings..
By lunchtime on our first day we were well and truly in the mountains and the scenery became far more dramatic by the time we started riding up to the Lundeans Nek pass.
When we arrived at the top of Lundeans Nek, Graham had managed to make some new friends....
It wasn’t long after completing the Lundeans Nek Pass that we reached our first overnight accomodation, a cottage located deep in the mountains, owned by Chris, who was a great host. Cold bears were available on arrival and after traveling over 240 miles off road were very welcome. We were then taken on a tour of the farm on a all terrain vehicle....great fun!
The farm tour included showing us how the farm machinery planted the animal feed.
And this was of course followed by the obligatory Bri (BBQ) to finish the day off...
Needless to say after a few beers came some artistic photos...
A great days riding but it was extremely tiring,so an early night was had by all.