The February Club Night saw a presentation by Sam Manicom, Motorcycle Traveller and author of two excellent books “Into Africa” and “Under Asian Skies”.

With is trusty BMW R80GS named “Lilly” at his side in the hall Sam told of his wanting to do something completely different so he learned to ride a motorcycle, sold his house and 3 months later set off to ride the length of Africa. This one-year trip turned into an eight-year epic across 55 countries around the world.

Sam met his partner Birgit in New Zealand in year two of the trip, and she joined him for the latter four years across Africa (again), South, Central and Northern America. She was travelling by bicycle when they met but transferred steeds to ride her own motorcycle, a 1971 BMW R60/5.

Since 1996 Sam has been writing for Motorcycle Sport and Leisure, Motorcycle Voyager and various other motorcycle magazines and newspapers around the world. He is a keen advocate of motorcycle travel. “The travel bug bites hard, but motorcycle travel bites deep and doing a long trip by bike is the stuff of dreams. I started to write because I wanted to share the fun”.

He spoke of some of his early mistakes and of his horrendous crash in Namibia, and about being arrested for a simple act of taking a photo of children… 

The bike was bought new and by the time he visited SAM it had 240,000 miles on the clock.  Mind you, Sam only spoke to us about his trip to Africa; if you want to know more about his adventures in Asia then you will have to read his second book or wait until he returns to give another presentation…

Many thanks to Sam for his visit and I am sure we will meet again, and if I go out for a pint of milk and don’t come back – I just may well be doing a bit of adventure motorcycling myself….

www.sam-manicom.com – visit the site to read about Sam, order his books and see the photos used during the presentation