Daniel and Topher met each other on the Hibbdebach site of Frankfurt in 1998 via their common friend Benny and instantly became like two peas. They share many common interests like Football (they refuse to call it soccer. You play a ball with a foot, how else should you call it?) and here especially the “Diva of the Main” (Eintracht Frankfurt), drinking beer, hiking and camping and obviously motorcycling. Well they are both biologists, though they never visited the same school or university.

Both of them dreamed of doing a long motorcycling tour for a long time, definitely inspired by Charley Boorman and Ewan McGregor’s Long Way Round and Long Way Down, though without two 4×4’s and a team supporting them. At first this only let to the reading of a lot of travel blogs and sites on the internet and nothing really happened.

Then during an eventful night out in September 2013 (Hibbdebach, of course) Topher told Daniel that he definitely wants to travel Africa after he finished his PhD. That would be the right time to undertake such an endeavor. Daniel, without a blink of an eye said, “jup, count me in”. And so the planning started.

Why Africa you might wonder? Well both of them had their visits to this beautiful continent. Daniel lived some time with his mother and brother in Windhoek/Namibia and Topher lived as a very small child with his mother in pre-civil war Freetown/Sierra Leone. Later visits to the black continent included Guinea, Ghana, Zimbabwe and Sierra Leone again after the war.

They both feel the need to experience Africa again, and how better than on the back of a motorbike with all the smells around the nose and the engine thumping in the ears?