Tom and Caroline share their experience and hard-won lessons below. Get inspired and find out what you would need to pack to survive your own global adventure, and how to find your way around the globe.
For those who don't know what you did during your incredible two-year trip, can you give an overview of where you went, where you stayed and how the route evolved?
In 2016, we set out on a round-the-world trip. We closed up our house in Belgium, jumped on our 701 Enduros and started riding. Getting out of Europe quickly was our first priority as the weather forecast was pretty horrible. So we crossed France, Spain and Portugal and properly started our adventure in Morocco.
What an amazing country. Morocco is an ideal playground for offroaders and it allowed us to warm up and get used to our Husqvarnas. We headed south and passed through 14 countries in western Africa before entering Namibia. From there we headed east through Zambia, Malawi, Mozambique and Swaziland and finally reached Cape Town, South Africa. By that point we were 10 months into our trip.
After that we shipped the bikes to Uruguay. South America was amazing. We crossed the vineyards of Argentina, the Atacama Desert in Chile, Bolivia's Salar de Uyuni salt flats, saw Machu Picchu in Peru, got rained on in Ecuador and enjoyed the hospitality of the Colombians.”
We had to work our way around the Darien Gap, an 80km stretch of jungle between Colombia and Panama that cannot be crossed by motorbike. We crated the bikes again and shipped them in a container to Panama, a lengthy, expensive and difficult process. As we rode through all the small Central American countries, we hungered to get to Mexico, a place all other travellers we met were lyrical about. And boy, were they right! Because we spent a bit more time in this vibrant country, we had to rush to get to Alaska before the snow. While crossing a few western states of the US and the left side of the Canadian Rocky Mountains, people often asked us if we were going north or south.
