Watty
Race Dog
- Joined
- Jun 22, 2006
- Messages
- 3,954
- Reaction score
- 3
- Location
- Port Elizabeth
- Bike
- Suzuki Djebel 250XC
City tar roads, sand dunes, forest tracks, open grass veld, water crossings, mountain paths ? all in a day?s ride!
While partaking in a GPS Challenge event organised for 4x4 vehicles out of Port Elizabeth on Saturday 10 March 2007, I took my camera along and took some very nice pictures, and would like to share some of them in this short ride report. Although this may not have been a dual-sport biking event or trip, I was exposed to some excellent routes that is ideal territory for dual sport biking! Here are a few of the photos taken during the competition (I actually snapped about a 100 shots, phew!). Images has been resized for optimum downloading.
Early Saturday morning, my poor cage all dressed-up for the big event, ready to go ? a real bloody pimp mobile :evil4: Sponsors want everything to go there way ? you want to win a big price, you must first advertise.
Into the sand dunes of Drift Sands Reserve, heading south from Port Elizabeth?s airport.
First victim of the day ? you simply cannot go over sand with tyres at 2.5 Bar :evil: Nevertheless, we stopped and helped, loosing very valuable time.
An hour later and 30 km towards the west, at the Maitlands Mines Off-road Adventure site. Signing-in and getting instructions from site manager . A great place for riding. Motorcycles are also welcome and for R60/day you can have fun on the various tracks and paths from dawn till dusk.
The following photos give an overview of some of the places we had to traverse at Maitland Mines as part of the GPS route discovery process ? great variety of terrain, and all within a 5 km radius! Some lekker gradients - real low ratio gear stuff.
Now the sea breeze and spectacular views are left behind and the GPS waypoints are now located approximately 45 km to the east past St Albans and Greenbushes area, heading towards Bethelsdorp.
The topography has changed to open veld and grassland ? at least the gravel road is OK. One of our targets ? an old fencing poll standing solitary guard in the veld ? at least the decorations was a new addition
From here the little arrow in the GPS?s LCD window start pointing in a northerly direction ?and a forgotten ?twee spoor? track was used
But some muddy water crossing still had to be negotiated ? no problem for my mobile signboard
and the start of a decent along a path that was very rapidly becoming non-existent
After making a turn in Uitenhage, the route changed in a westerly direction and we had to start hauling ass ? 17h00 was approaching and time was starting to run out. 32 km later we once again had a drastic change of scenery ? the Elands River valley and mountains!
and mountain streams had to be negotiated before reaching the final waypoint.
And finally, some of the opposition
The total distance travel during the competition was 147 km. Number of waypoint 38. Number of participants were 25 vehicles and over 100 persons. It was also announced that this was the biggest GPS challenge event to date in South Africa! Sections were from easy tar roads to some really technical off-road stuff. However, any dual-sport motorcycle ridden by an experienced rider could easily have completed the whole route. I am convinced that events can also be successfully applied to dual-sport biking 8)
Unfortunately I did not end up in the top 5 (remember the &@d*0! individual that got stuck in the sand - cost me about an hour), nevertheless it was a most enjoyable day.
While partaking in a GPS Challenge event organised for 4x4 vehicles out of Port Elizabeth on Saturday 10 March 2007, I took my camera along and took some very nice pictures, and would like to share some of them in this short ride report. Although this may not have been a dual-sport biking event or trip, I was exposed to some excellent routes that is ideal territory for dual sport biking! Here are a few of the photos taken during the competition (I actually snapped about a 100 shots, phew!). Images has been resized for optimum downloading.
Early Saturday morning, my poor cage all dressed-up for the big event, ready to go ? a real bloody pimp mobile :evil4: Sponsors want everything to go there way ? you want to win a big price, you must first advertise.
Into the sand dunes of Drift Sands Reserve, heading south from Port Elizabeth?s airport.
First victim of the day ? you simply cannot go over sand with tyres at 2.5 Bar :evil: Nevertheless, we stopped and helped, loosing very valuable time.
An hour later and 30 km towards the west, at the Maitlands Mines Off-road Adventure site. Signing-in and getting instructions from site manager . A great place for riding. Motorcycles are also welcome and for R60/day you can have fun on the various tracks and paths from dawn till dusk.
The following photos give an overview of some of the places we had to traverse at Maitland Mines as part of the GPS route discovery process ? great variety of terrain, and all within a 5 km radius! Some lekker gradients - real low ratio gear stuff.
Now the sea breeze and spectacular views are left behind and the GPS waypoints are now located approximately 45 km to the east past St Albans and Greenbushes area, heading towards Bethelsdorp.
The topography has changed to open veld and grassland ? at least the gravel road is OK. One of our targets ? an old fencing poll standing solitary guard in the veld ? at least the decorations was a new addition
From here the little arrow in the GPS?s LCD window start pointing in a northerly direction ?and a forgotten ?twee spoor? track was used
But some muddy water crossing still had to be negotiated ? no problem for my mobile signboard
and the start of a decent along a path that was very rapidly becoming non-existent
After making a turn in Uitenhage, the route changed in a westerly direction and we had to start hauling ass ? 17h00 was approaching and time was starting to run out. 32 km later we once again had a drastic change of scenery ? the Elands River valley and mountains!
and mountain streams had to be negotiated before reaching the final waypoint.
And finally, some of the opposition
The total distance travel during the competition was 147 km. Number of waypoint 38. Number of participants were 25 vehicles and over 100 persons. It was also announced that this was the biggest GPS challenge event to date in South Africa! Sections were from easy tar roads to some really technical off-road stuff. However, any dual-sport motorcycle ridden by an experienced rider could easily have completed the whole route. I am convinced that events can also be successfully applied to dual-sport biking 8)
Unfortunately I did not end up in the top 5 (remember the &@d*0! individual that got stuck in the sand - cost me about an hour), nevertheless it was a most enjoyable day.
