Summary June 5, 2003 The trip 24.000 kilometers and five months later we are back in our old cold Sweden again. Sure, we've had some minor problems, but overall everything has worked out better than we had expected. The biggest failure of the trip was probably that we never managed to get the visas to Sudan. According to our original plan, the "vacation trip" down to Cape Town should have begun when we reached Ethiopia. But as you already know we never got the visas to Sudan, so the final leg of our trip never turned out to be the vacation we had hoped for. We have met a lot of interesting, nice and crazy people, (many of them probably thought we were crazy as well)... We can talk about the African people for hours, but all in all most of them are very kind and helpful (with the exception of Chad, where the people were somewhat more aggressive). Many of you probably think that we haven't written enough about the culture, nature, people and traditions, but our main goal never was to report about the beautiful nature and animal life, how the people live or about Africa's problems... There are many others who do this so much better than us. Our goal was to ride our motorcycles, and that's what we've done. The motorcycles There isn't much to write about the bikes since they've basically worked as a charm. We served them every now and them, and changed the oil, oil filters and air filters every 6.000 kilometer. We changed chains and chainwheels in Chad (try saying that quickly ten times!) after approximately 15.000 kilometers. The reason for this was not because they were worn out, but simply because we didn't want to carry the extra weight of our spare parts. After about 1.700 kilometers the rear brakes on one of our bikes needed to be replaced. We had a total of 6 punctures, 3 on the front wheels and 3 on the rear. The punctures on the rear tyres were all caused by nails, and the ones on the front tyres by thorns and sharp sticks from the trees. The tyres we used were Continental TKC 80 and they worked perfectly. The rear tyres were good for about 12.000 kilometers before the treads had been worn out. The front tyres had to be changed after about 30.000 kilometers. And then there's the aluminium boxes which were quite dented after a crash or two. Well well... The future We will continue to give you reports from our trips, with or without bikes, on this site. Next thing in line is a trip to Iceland in August. We'll be riding two KTM 640 Adventures among waterfalls, geysers, lava fields and volcanoes... You'll find more information about this trip here shortly. To those of you considering... ...a similar trip by motorcycle (or any other means of transportation) we can only quote Nike - Just do it! David & Johan