Back in traveling mode. “only” for about half a year and I’m not underway yet… but I will be in a couple of month / half a year. On my first RTW trip in ’09/10,  I met a German guy, riding his BMW motorbike with German license plates in Asia. Since then I had a wish to “ride around the world”. As I’m pretty much always happy when on bike, and pretty much always happy when traveling I started thinking about combining the two to see what I could come up with. I didn’t need a long time to figure out what to do…  I want to ride a motorbike south through Africa. My first thoughts were to ride about the same route as Charley Boorman and Ewan Mc Gregor rode in “The long way down“, this because I assumed the west route would be too dangerous and difficult.  Also if you look at the visa requirements for Dutch passport holders it’s easy to see that the east route has VOA (visa on arrival) in a lot of countries and the west route does not. But with the conflicts in North-east Africa, especially Syria I had to look at other possibilities. I searched for weblogs of travelers who had traveled through west Africa. And more I read, more I got enthusiastic about riding around in west Africa. This probably does mean I need more time off from work because one thing I find important while there… I may be on a schedule, but I will not rush my way south.  I would like to discover new places, change plans while traveling, and go to places people in that area advise me to visit, instead of making a plan from a desk in Europe.  So now the plan is to take the west route and see where I end up.  The bike I will be using has changed with the change of routes. First I planned to ride my ’91 Honda Transalp south, but with exploring west Africa in mind (deserts, rain, muddy roads, who knows what else!?), and with a bit of research on the net I ended up with two bikes best suitable for the trip, A Yamaha XT600E and a Suzuki DR-Z400. My Honda would just have too much weight, not enough ground clearance and just be less ideal when riding mountain mud roads, sand dunes, etc. For various reasons I had already figured out I did not want to travel with aluminium panniers and went back to the basics of travel, I quote: “He who would travel happily must travel light.”. After test riding both  bikes I bought a 2005 Suzuki DR-Z400S. This bike should get me to all those difficult to reach, beautiful and interesting places. So far I think this travel is a more adventurous than anything I’ve done before, and I read quite a lot about different aspects of the travel. I’m very much looking forward to it, and will keep you updated about when and where and all of that.