Adventure traveler Sinje Gottwald has just finished traversing the African continent by electric motorcycle, reaching Cape Town today at the end of a three-month journey.
去ttwald accomplished her journey on a CAKE Kalk AP, which makes sense when you find out she’s a CAKE employee. The company gave her a few weeks off work so she could complete her journey, and she made good use of the time, leaving Morocco in late October, covering thousands of kilometers, battling the intricacies of border crossings along with bad weather, hard terrain sickness and other difficulties. She had no chase truck or support team.
Of course, battery range was an issue, even with a spare battery onboard. At the start of her trip, Gottwald said “My current rhythm is to go for roughly 50km, then change the batteries, go another 50km and then find a place to charge both at the same time.” With a three-hour wait to bring the batteries to 100 percent charge, or two hours to 80 percent, When everything went well, Gottwald was able to bang out roughly 200 kilometers a day as long as she was able to manage a mid-day charge, then an overnight charge. Finding charging points was often challenging, requiring a zig-zag route to find towns with electricity. At one point she was forced to put it on a truck for a while, to haul it closer to the next opportunity to recharge. However, she was able to overcome all this and complete her journey, often recharging from generators in remote villages—and often not even being charged for the electricity.
She posted this message to social media today, as she ended her journey:
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If you want to learn more about her trip, check out her Instagram page for a long string of from-the-road updates!
