The Joy of the Unexpected

There is a particular kind of joy that only comes from not quite knowing what is around the next corner.

It is one of the reasons I love adventure motorcycling.

Not because everything always goes to plan. In fact, some of the best memories come from the exact opposite. A wrong turn. A dead end. A road that looked promising on the map but quietly decided it had other ideas. A mountain you thought you could cross, but couldn’t. A day that was meant to end back home in Cape Town, but somehow ended in Calvinia instead.

Years ago, Ant and I had one of those rides.

We had been exploring a section of the Karoo, coming off the R355 and following a long road that we hoped would eventually take us over the mountains and back south. In our heads, it made perfect sense. The line was there. The intention was there. The bikes were there. We had that familiar sense of curiosity that makes you say, “Let’s just see where this goes.”

And then, eventually, we couldn’t go any further.

Exploring the expanse of the Karoo desert in and not far from where we had to turn around.

The road simply stopped making sense as a way through. The mountain had won. There was no neat crossing. We had to turn around.

On paper, that sounds like failure.

On a motorcycle, it was anything but.

The only problem was fuel. We had planned to be back in Cape Town that evening, but we no longer had enough range to make the return journey. So instead of heading home, we had to ride further north, deeper into the Northern Cape, away from where we wanted to go, just to reach the nearest town. That town was Calvinia.

By then the weather had started to turn. The sky had gone dark and heavy over the desert. We rode into a thunderstorm, with lightning landing out across the empty country and those big, fat drops of rain beginning to hit our visors and jackets. The whole landscape seemed to change around us. The Karoo, which can feel so still and ancient, suddenly felt alive and electric. Booms echoing into our helmets with each strike.

It was dramatic. It was inconvenient. It was completely unplanned.

And it was awesome!

I still remember that ride into Calvinia. The smell of rain on dry earth. The strange beauty of being somewhere you were never meant to be. The feeling that the day had taken charge and we were no longer directing the story, just living inside it. Sometimes the road takes you for a ride. And, in Via Veritas!

We spent the night there.

The next day, we rode back south to head home the fastest way and we came over Van Rhyns Pass.

If you have ridden it, you will know the moment. You heading along a very straight desert road , and then suddenly the escarpment falls away beneath you. The world opens up. The view stretches out so far that your brain almost takes a second to catch up with what your eyes are seeing.

I remember coming over the pass and just shouting inside my helmet.

Not words, really. Just that ridiculous, involuntary whoop that comes from somewhere deep in your chest when the landscape completely overwhelms you.

That, for me, is one of the purest joys of riding.

The surprise of new terrain.

The sudden view.

The road that gives you more than you expected.

The moment the world drops away on Van Rhyn's Pass

The moment when you and the person riding next to you both see it at the same time, and you know, without needing to say anything, that you have just shared something you will remember for the rest of your life. That was 2011 and I can still feel that moment.

There is a particular pleasure in riding alone. I get that. There is silence in it. Space. A chance to disappear into your own thoughts and the rhythm of the machine.

But some moments are better shared.

Like this one above. Like when you come over a pass and the sea appears below you. When a gravel road drops into a valley you didn’t know existed. When the Karoo turns amber in the late sun. When rain moves across the mountains in front of you. When you stop at the top, take your helmet off, and everyone is grinning like children.

It turns scenery into memory.

And, sometimes, it turns a wrong turn into one of the best stories you have.

That is a big part of what we are trying to build with the Pangea Rally.

Of course, the route matters. The bikes matter. The logistics matter. The camps, the food, the support vehicles, the medical team, the mechanics, the planning - all of it matters. A rally like this has to be properly built.

But underneath all of that, there is something much simpler.

We want to create moments.

The kind where a rider crests a mountain pass and suddenly sees the ocean.

The kind where the road falls away into a valley and everyone instinctively slows down, not because they have to, but because the view demands it.

The kind where people who met only a day or two earlier are standing beside their bikes, laughing, pointing, taking photographs, and trying to explain what they just felt.

That is the magic.

Not just the riding.

The shared discovery.

South Africa gives us an extraordinary canvas for this. Sea. Berg. Karoo. These are not just words for us. They are the rhythm of the journey. They are the changing light, the changing surface, the changing smell of the air. Salt, dust, fynbos, rain, rock, heat, wind.

You can plan a route through that.

But you can’t fully predict what it will do to people.

The best rides leave room for surprise. They give you enough structure to feel held, but enough uncertainty to feel alive. They remind you that the world is still bigger than your plans, and that the best stories often begin when the road does something unexpected. Or as another riding buddy of mine likes to say: "The Adventure begins when things go Wrong."

That ride to Calvinia was not the ride we planned.

But all these years later, it is the one I remember.

The dead end. The low fuel. The thunderstorm. The night in a town we had not intended to visit. The next morning. Van Rhyns Pass. The escarpment opening up beneath us. The two of us whooping in our helmets like idiots.

That feeling is still there.

And on the Pangea, our riders will leave the final camp with a whole collection of moments like that.

Some planned.

Some unexpected.

Memories for life.

In Via Veritas.

Ant and I taking a photo at the top of Van Rhyns Pass in the Northern Cape back in 2011. Good times.