license and we left on a one-month journey from Belgium to the south of Jordan and back .
Obviously , I lacked experience and after 11,000 km I was totally exhausted . But I had the time of my life . This was it . I had finally found my thing and had the taste for more . Over the next few years , we undertook trips to South Africa and Namibia , to Iran , to Iceland , to Morocco . I really got the hang of it . But the more we traveled , the more we struggled to go back home . We would finish one trip and immediately start planning the next one . Then , one day , on a sunny terrace in Lille , Tom popped the question : ‘ What would you think about leaving for a longer period ? Like … five years or so ?’ He was rather surprised by my answer : ‘ Now that ’ s a great idea ! When do you want to leave ?’
From that day on we started dreaming and planning , and the first stretch of our trip was the two-year adventure from 2016 to 2018 . Now we ’ re going to embark on the next three years of our five-year plan .”
FAILING TO PREPARE MEANS YOU ’ RE PREPARING TO FAIL . THIS IS A POPULAR SAYING , BUT DO YOU THINK IT IS TRUE ? IS PLANNING ESSENTIAL , OR CAN YOU PLAN TOO MUCH ?
“ Traveling like we do can be highly unpredictable . There is a lot that can happen on the road : you can crash , become ill , have a technical issue , equipment failure , you can get stopped by corrupt police or even get robbed . It ’ s a matter of simple statistics : the longer you travel , the higher the chances are that one day something will go wrong . Things have gone wrong for us in the past . We have both crashed our bikes , Tom broke his foot in Mali , Caroline had salmonella and Tom had malaria twice with an extra salmonella infection on top . Needless to say , those weren ’ t the best days of the trip .
We ’ ve had flat tires , snapped bolts , broken spokes and so on , all as a result of continuously pushing our fully loaded 701 Enduro machines to the limits . But when you know your equipment , you know which things are most likely to go wrong . There is no road assistance in the Sahara Desert , so you have to try and anticipate what you might require .
It is a matter of making informed choices , as we really prefer to travel light . It makes the ride so much more fun . So we carry a spare tube , tire patches and a few spokes , but we won ’ t carry tires or extra rims . In exceptional cases where these might need to be replaced , we have to wait a while for them to arrive from Europe .
We also try to calculate when things will wear out and have them ordered or shipped to a certain destination .
ON THE PEGS // PAGE 50