Technical Side of the Trip

For the more technically minded, we’re carrying more gizmos than a branch of Radio Shack. Let’s start from the head down, the pilot and then from front to back across the bike, then into the dive bag.

Click the images to enlarge.
 

Pilot

• Helmets are the Arai Tour X3. We have used many local helmets, which are fine for regular commuting and local travel but over such long distances you need something meaty. The Arai’s encircle the face like a nicely fitting hood and have ample padding and design to limit serious impact. That’s reason enough to spend the extra money. All-weather helmets that reduce over-heating or excess cold are a must in climates of various environmental extremes. The helmets minimise noise and wind allowing good communication between riders. There are six adjustable vents around the Tour X3 and it is inside that we place the microphone and ear-pieces. Ricardo from KTM Egypt Calling Dakar Off and On road Bike touring company has given us two EVS Neck Braces, which ease the weight of the helmet and further protect us from impact injury.
• Jackets and Pants. We chose these to suit a variety of weather and environmental conditions in both hot and cold climates. The items are KTM Rally wear and you’ll find them on the KTM site under Rally Pants and Rally Jackets. We just managed to scrape two full sets before they went out of stock. There will be new models out soon, no doubt. Inside are padding and insulation layers which are removable, such as a lining and a neck warmer. These are used in colder climates and further insulation can be added by just using extra under garments. This is one of the reasons we use O’Three drysuits as their under garments double perfectly for motorbike insulation clothing too. Now in Egypt, the water temperatures are still low compared to summer but on the road it’s starting to hot up. There are vents all over the KTM Rally clothing, which can be unzipped to allow several air flows inside the jackets and pants. A few people have commented, "don’t you get hot inside those big jackets?".  However, the design works, is a simple concept and quite staggering in practice. Recently, when testing them out, the sun was roasting in the Sinai, but on the road in full gear with the vents open a light breeze ran through providing perfect ventilation. The clothing has built in but removable padding to protect the rider in the event of a fall or a slide. These are found around the shoulders, elbows, hips and knees. Well just like the bikes…they’re bright alright!! The typical crazy orange of the KTM brand. Hopefully if we get lost in the desert or later in the snow, we’ll stick out like a sore thumb!
• Boots: Alpinestar are one of the leading motorcycle boot manufacturers in the world and the preferred choice of many long distant riders. The S-MX 5 Waterproof boots were chosen because in the later stages of the project we will be traveling through countries that experience heavy driving rain. They are flexible but also provide superior protection to calf, shin, toes and ankles. Most boots are water-resistant but over several hours at traveling speeds the water eventually works its way in. Wet motorcycling boots are like alcoholics…they take a long time to dry out! The S-MX 5 boots are padded and provide rigid protection in the key areas. We also looked at off-road boots, which being taller, harder and way more rigid would provide more support and protection. However, few are waterproof and they are very difficult to walk around in for more than a few meters. I tried a pair on at In-Moto KTM shop in Croydon, Surrey UK. They were great but felt like space boots. Luckily they had a large selection of boots and this is where we bought the Alpinestar, crash helmets and clothing. Thanks to Adrian of In-Moto, Croydon for his great knowledge and service.

Communications & Multimedia

• Cardo Scala Rider inter-bike communication system. This is a double unit allowing either two riders or a rider and a passenger to speak to each other, listen to music, take phone calls hands free or receive GPS messages from a separate device all independent from each other. Each set has a pre-tuned frequency to avoid clashing with other users. The system also has a priority setting so that music is interrupted to take a phone call or listen to the other rider. You don’t actually need to ‘hang up’ afterwards, the unit resets and the music returns to normal. Not bad at all! When we began training for the trip two years ago we just used hand signals and had to stop every now and then to check our mobiles. The beauty is that for regular numbers we can use the voice activated contact dialing on our microphones to make specific calls. So all we need to do now is yell ‘Pizza Delivery Shop’ and it rings that all-important number without compromising our safety at the controls.
• The GPS Unit is a Garmin Zumo 660. In the Sinai there is only really one main road so satnav is a bit of a luxury and often we just follow the thin white line going through the desert! Of course it has many other uses such as knowing where you are if you break down and acting as a secondary speedometer and milometer. One of our bikes temporarily had a damaged speedo cable recently and for a week the Garmin acted as a very workable replacement until KTM Sharm fitted a new one. Of course, for leaving the Sinai the units have been pre-loaded with maps and custom routes. The Garmins have their own re-chargeable batteries, now connected to the bike’s electrical wiring they are self charging. All we have to do each time is clip the unit onto a bracket and it charges itself. It’s easy to read even in the sunlight of the day and at night it glows like a small TV set.
• Go-Pro Hero HD Cameras. These add a new dimension to almost any sporting activity to you can think of. The four units are too versatile to be left on a shelf after the trip so we’re handing them over to the Sinai Blues who will use them for diving, water sports activities and mounting on the fast zodiacs to make short mini-films of the trips they run. It’s almost difficult to know where to start when describing these cameras as they have so many uses that the only thing limiting them is one’s imagination. The first outing for them was in the making of the Sinai Blues new website, which involved getting a birds eye shot of the dive centre. Being a no-fly zone and not having a remote operated kite, Yann had himself hoisted into the air from a parasailing boat and instructed the driver to broadside around near the beach. This action let the parachute drift momentarily over the beach where several shots could be taken of the centre, the reef and the boats. The Go-Pro’s have many settings such as wide or narrow angle, delayed timer, single shot photo, rapid succession or multiple shots. In other words they are both a video camera and a stills camera in one. They also go underwater and have a healthy depth rating of 60m, which is well beyond recreational depths and into tech diving. They come with an array of mounting systems allowing them to be placed on your helmet, a dashboard, side or back of a bike or almost anywhere you care to mount them. The main attribute is their quality of picture and footage and even at high speeds such as Kelvin Deacon’s record breaking zodiac ride to Thistlegorm or a burst down the Sharm/Dahab road there is almost zero movement of image. These hi-tech units are less than the size of a cigarette packet. They run for hours and we thought about mounting one inside the windscreen of a Sharm taxi for the day and then seeing how it got on! Later in Cairo we’ll be riding the notorious highways and ring-roads so perhaps we can stick one on our helmets!

Bike rig

The panniers are a side-mounted luggage system and extremely tough. They are each similar in size to a Sharm dive equipment crate (45 Litres, by the way!) which is just as well as that’s what we use one of them for. Dive gear in one, clothes, communication equipment and general traveling accessories in the other. The O’Three Drysuits sit nicely in their bag across the two allowing a good balance across the bikes. The Touratech panniers are detachable and after a long day’s riding can be quickly unhinged and carried like small suitcases into safe storage for the night. Ihab of Beyond Limits Dive Stores, Egypt, has kindly given us four handling straps to carry the panniers with. Nothing of any value is left on the bikes overnight. The casing is tough but made of light aluminum and when empty they are as light as a feather. It’s important to make sure the tightening screws and clamps are secure as the vibration of the engine can easily undo them if not correctly fixed. So, this is where we mostly place our sponsors colourful stickers! There’s something about the appearance of stickers on a pannier that really brings home the distance and scale of travel involved. You can spot a long distance rider from a long way off. Never mind the t-shirt, jeans and trainers for whizzing around town, their two-wheeled giants are loaded to the max with gear and the riders trussed up for the many days on the road. The panniers are also useful for transporting large amounts of groceries!

Into The Dive Bag

This site stops short of being a ‘learn to dive or bike’ source but we would like to share a few things with people who have never ridden or dived. Maybe you are new to both sports or experienced in one but not the other. Here’s an inside look at some of the dive gear we take on a trip of this type. The link below leads to an article featured in Diver Magazine this year, which describes each piece of scuba equipment and why we use it:

http://www.divernet.com/Diving_Gear/gear_features/717248/my_favourite_ki...

Attitude Keeps You Alive

Perhaps one of the reasons why so many divers like motorcycling is that it too is equipment based and opens up a world of freedom when mastered properly. You can go deep and you can go fast, but regular divers and riders will know that it takes time, training and experience before you should attempt either. TDI (Techncial Diving International) has a catchy little motto that used to appear on its agency’s T-shirts back in the 90’s, it read, ‘Attitude Keeps You Alive’, and the same is true on a bike. There is nothing dangerous about a bike or a piece of diving equipment, which happily sit by themselves, motionless, for hours on end minding their own business. It is their misuse that kills…in a less forgiving way than most other sports.

I grew up in the 70’s. There was a constant procession of motorcycle accident victims being wheeled into the casualty departments of our local hospitals. ‘Bikes are dangerous’ we were told at school. Therefore anyone with a bike was mad. As experienced dive professionals having progressed through a long ladder of qualifications and ratings, we’re amazed that when it comes to driving or riding there was only ‘one course for life’. In Egypt that ‘food chain’ is even shorter and the consequences of it are no less surprising.

The same ill-informed belief system that motorcycles are dangerous existed in scuba diving as recently as ten years ago. This was the result of a 30 year head start by Hollywood in manipulating the ignorance that occurred between entertaining the masses by any means possible and the reality of decent scuba diving training methods. Now that the masses have been exposed to dive training methods and the examples well accessed through a variety of media outlets, Hollywood is finding it a bit more difficult to make disaster movies out of scuba activities. Here’s an example: remember James Bond in ‘License to Kill’? He was down at 30 meters and baddies cut his air hoses and pulled off his mask. Any self-respecting diver would know that owing to the density of water on the visual senses he couldn’t see a thing. Yet he finds a harpoon gun and fires it square into the belly of an overhead water plane. The plane takes off and drags him to the surface in ten seconds, which would earn him a season ticket at the local Hyperbaric Recompression chamber for a healthy stint eliminating enough bubbles to float the Good Year Blimp. (Never go to the movies with me!)

Only Evel Knievel and Barry Sheen got away with it, everyone else on a motorbike was ‘dicing with death’ or a hell’s angel, or the Highway Police because they were the law, looked smart and had a popular TV program called ‘CHIP’s’ where they saved people and never fell off when anyone was looking.

We hope that this website and our trips will shatter the myths and misconceptions associated with these two wonderful sports. That is not to say that either are without risk, they aren’t, but what is important is in understanding those risks, meeting those risks and managing them with the respect, training and the equipment that they require.

In the meantime, please look out for the latest new Hollywood blockbuster called, ‘Killer Sharks on Death Bikes from Hell 3’ now showing at a cinema near you!

A small review on the things we packed after the preliminary trip by Yann.