Boat trip

Place: The Baltic Sea

Tunes: The Cult, Armin van Buuren

The first bit of driving is now done. 644 km through Holland and Germany. Should have bought some stickers I guess as this is a thing that you do on these trips. I am now in the ferry from Travemunde to Helsinki.

Going to a ferry on a car is easy, but with a bike you need to haul all of your luggage away and strap the bike onto the boat. This is ovbious now but it just did not occur to me before now.

The route for today.

Bikes at the terminal just before boarding.

Bikes strapped on to the boat.

Clearly, not doing any serious driving with all that shit strapped on the bike was a good decision. I now need to figure out how the hell all this stuff fits on the bike – in some kind of a sensible way. Ideally with me also sitting on the bike and being able to get on and off it somehow. There will be zero chance of doing it in a cool and casual way, like just swinging your leg over the bike. It will be bad performance art.

A random photo of a lorry.

On this ferry you can do two things. Sleep and eat. Three meals a day with nothing to do in between. Surprisingly, there were quite a few bikes waiting for the ferry when I got to the terminal. Some big Goldwings with trailers, sidecars and all the bells and whistles. There were also other people on normal road bikes coming from the Nurburgring. They agreed that it is completely unnecessary to have off-road experience in Africa, especially with a bike so big, heavy and overloaded, so I grow more and more confident. How hard can it be?

One thing I have failed to mention, but you might have noticed. I am actually going further away from Capetown than towards it (yes, I have seen a map). I live in Belgium, but we kick the big trip off with the whole group in Ivalo, which is in Northern Finland. So, I need to drive there first.