Until recently, insurance guru and adventurer John Harrison knew very little about motorbikes. His experience on two wheels, he admits, stretched no further than whizzing across the border to Gibraltar on a moped.

But for a man who has canoed down African rivers and walked to the North Pole, it made perfect sense to hatch a plan for an expedition involving large-cylinder BMW off road motorbikes.

And if you’re going to go for a ride, it may as well be a long one: all the way from Cape Town in South Africa to Cairo in Egypt, nearly 20,000 km in all.

Harrison enlisted a handful of business colleagues as companions for the trip, all of them with links to the Rock. They included Nick Keeling, Glenn Harris, Martin Edwards and Matthew Lawrence.

As they hatched the dream, the five pored over books and maps of Africa and spent hours doing research on the internet.

They knew, roughly, where they were planning to stop en route, but that was about as organised as their itinerary was. This was to be a step into the unknown. They prepared their bikes and roped in an old Africa hand to drive their support vehicle and guide them through the intricacies of local customs.

Before they knew it they found themselves in Cape Town, about to embark on this incredible expedition.

“By day three, I think it was, we were off plan,” Harrison says of their shaky start. “We had atrocious weather, we couldn’t go anywhere on the roads, the bikes were all over the place.”

“I was the first person to fall off my bike,” he adds, smiling.

It was a challenge to keep going at first and Harrison says that after just a few days, he was unsure that they would make it past South Africa, let alone all the way to Cairo.

But they persevered and got into the daily rhythm, riding through isolated parts of Africa that are rarely visited by outsiders.

“None of us are motorcyclists and this is quite an experience for all of us.”

“We’ve probably done more off road riding in six weeks than people do in a lifetime.”

To do the whole trip in one go would have taken about three months, time that none of them could take off work. To get around this hitch, they split the journey into two.

The first stage, which they recently completed, was a sixweek ride from Cape Town to Nairobi, in Kenya. On the way they passed through several countries including Namibia, Zambia and Tanzania.

They stopped to raft down the rapids of the Zambezi river and witness the migration of animals on the plains of the Serengeti. They got arrested at border posts and had their bikes impounded. They met friendly locals and spent days riding through wild, untouched African landscapes.

“Half the time was off road, and when I say off road, I really mean no road,” Harrison says. “You go wherever you can find a track.”

“And as for the roads themselves, they are absolutely diabolical.”

Being on bikes brought them into close proximity with their surroundings and with the local communities as they rode through stunning scenery.

In Namibia, Harrison recalled vast red sand dunes in the middle of nowhere that rose up hundreds of feet high and then eventually end up down on the Skeleton Coast.

Elsewhere he says he was surprised at how green and lush some of these countries are.

“Zambia and Tanzania are as lush as anywhere in the United Kingdom,” he says. “You could grow any number of crops probably two or three times a year.”

The five men and their support team travelled 8,500 km through very poor areas, through countries where Aids is rife and life is short.

It was sometimes tough to take this in. On leaving Zambia, for example, something dawned on them, a glaring and stark reality.

“There were no old people,” Harrison says. “The life expectancy there is 34. People die.”

Harrison says he was also struck by the absence of aid workers in the countries they travelled through.

“The only evidence of aid we saw was in Zambia, food aid being sold in the markets,” he explains.

“We only saw aid vehicles in the capitals, we never saw them out and about.”

“Give the amount of aid that we understand is going to Africa, I would’ve expected to see far more evidence of it than we did see.”

“It didn’t seem to be getting to where it was needed.”

As he recounts his tale, it quickly becomes apparent that border crossings figured prominently on this trip, and not always for good reasons.

Take the border between Zambia and Tanzania. It took the riders a full day to cross that one and they had to work through a small mountain of paperwork before they were allowed through.

“It was bureaucracy gone mad,” Harrison says.

Later, when they were crossing from Tanzania into Kenya, they were arrested at a place called Namanga and their bikes were impounded. Apparently they had the wrong paperwork. It was ten days before they could get the bikes back.

“We had quite a runaround on some of the borders,” Harrison says, in typically understated fashion. “Mind you, it was a nice break sometimes. It meant we didn’t have much riding to do.”

Although some of the countries are notoriously difficult for travellers, Harrison and the bikers encountered no trouble on – or off - the road.

The next stage of the trip is set for January next year and will take the riders through perhaps more challenging countries, including Sudan and Ethiopia.

There are trouble spots in some of these countries, but largely these are localised problem areas. With care and attention, it is possible to travel safely.

Harrison says that a key element of a safe trip is an awareness that you are travelling through someone else’s country.

“You have to adopt their way of doing things, their rules, their lifestyle,” he says. “That’s the way it is in order to get by.”

Read more about the trip on www.cape2gib.com