My Ben 10 Challenge

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JonW

Grey Hound
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Location
Hilton KZN
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Boss Hoss (all models)
So New Years 2019 caught me alone at home, moping because my wife was up in Zimbabwe visiting her parents, my 2 boys were away at their respective girlfriends houses, and Highsider and a whole bunch of riding companions were away doing the Ben 10 Challenge in Rhodes and I couldn't go with because I had to stay home and look after the house and pets.

So I figured maybe I could join them for a day or two and take a quick solo ride to Rhodes like I have done in the past, I could manage at least one night away from home. So I spent more than a few hours poring over Google Earth and working out routes etc. While doing this I saw that old time WD member SGB had done the Ben 10 Challenge in a single day. I immediately thought, stuff it, that's what I am going to do. Only problem is that i didn't really want to ride all the way from Hilton to Rhodes on my own, do the challenge and then ride back again straight afterwards. So I had to think of someone I could ask to join me to go to Rhodes and attempt this 7 day challenge in a single day. I couldn't ask my current riding mate Highsider, he'd just got back from completing the challenge and wouldn't want to go do it all again.

Suddenly I had a brainwave, I would ask my old riding buddy Outthere who I hadn't seen for a while and hadn't ridden with for at least the last 2 years because of me being bikeless for a while and Outthere retiring his trusty old battered red GS and getting a shiny new 1200 GS Adv which he didn't want to damage by taking it on the types of riding that I enjoy doing. So out of the blue I called Kevin and told him of my hair-brained scheme to do the Ben 10 Challenge in a single day and asked him if he wanted to join me. Without a moments hesitation he said: "I'm in". I told him that I didn't have a date in mind for this ride, as in my opinion you couldn't just set a date at some time in the future and then just go do the Ben 10, because the weather in the area is so unpredictable and extreme that your chances of completing the challenge will be scuppered by rain making the passes un-rideable.

What we had to do was bide our time and watch the weather forecasts for the area, and when we saw 3 or 4 sunny days in a row we had to go on that 4th day and do it, because then the passes would be nice and dry. I had no idea how long this would take, I'm no Rhodes weather expert and for all I knew it could be weeks or months that we would have to wait. After just 2 days of watching the weather reports I saw some nice dry weather leading up to the weekend of the 12th, so I told Kevin that we had to go this weekend so we better get our ducks in a row. He was as laid back as ever and said that sounds great.

While looking at possible routes I had at first thought that we could start in Rhodes as Rhodes is the closest town to us, but then I realized that his would involve a huge amount of doubling back for both Lundeans Neck and Jouberts Pass and this would involve a lot of extra distance. I saw that starting on Jouberts Pass and finishing at Lundeans Neck made the most sense, so this is what we settled on.

We also decided that riding to Rhodes was not a great idea as we would need to make an early start for the challenge, so we decided to trailer our bikes there.

The other fairly major concern that I had was the range on my KTM520 is not great as I only have an 8.5 litre tank, and some of the distances between fuel stops were just too far. This is where Kevin's GS was a huge comfort with its 33l tank, so I took a piece of hose and a 2l coke bottle in my back pack which I was sure I would need at least twice. As it turned out I didn't need to siphon from Kev's bike once, I filled my pooratech long range coke bottle with petrol every time we stopped for fuel and that got me round the whole route.

The route I plotted on Google Earth:

 

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