A Brit and a Bremen Fraülein go globe-trotting on a pair of BMW Boxers
By Paul N. Blezard

From novice biker to veteran in a few weeks….then on around the world for the next eight years!

Sam Manicom had two problems when he decided to go around the world by motorcycle – he didn’t have a bike, and he didn’t actually know how to ride one either! But these were only minor obstacles which he soon overcame. Within three months he’d bought a brand new BMW R80GS, quit his boring retail job in St Helier (capital of Jersey, in the Channel Islands) and set off across Europe en route to Egypt and points south.

That was back in 1991 but it was not his first time in Africa, nor his first adventure alone. Sam was born in the Belgian Congo and his parents worked and lived through two rebellions there before the West African country became Zaire. They brought the family home to England when he was ten.

His first big foreign trip was a backpacking ‘seat of the pants’ voyage of discovery across Europe, India and Australia. He was often down to his last $10 but he earned as he went and it all added up to “A great learning experience. That three-year back-packing trip taught me that the world is an amazing place full of amazing people. I suspect that without it the subsequent journey by bike would have been a far less rich experience. My biggest lessons were “attitude” and “priorities”. 

But as he battled with dirt roads on his over-loaded BMW in the Sudan he was on a very steep learning curve and things took a nightmare turn for the worse in Tanzania when a pedestrian stepped right under his front wheel and he found himself locked up in a local police cell. However, the first of many guardian angels who were to ‘save his bacon’ over the next few years emerged from the crowd to help him out of his predicament and he was eventually able to resume his journey south.         

Sam had an even closer shave in Namibia when a passing 4x4 blinded him with dust and he hit a huge pothole about three feet deep and crashed heavily. He woke up in hospital with 17 bone fractures and later discovered that he’d been rescued by a passing German couple who probably saved his life and almost certainly saved his sight; his spectacles had shattered, filling his eyes with glass and his saviours had rinsed them out with their drinking water. (Sam learned his lesson and got shatter-proof lenses for his replacement eyeglasses). He also discovered that he and his bike had been taken to two other hospitals before he regained consciousness, complete with all his belongings; nothing was pilfered.

Manicom eventually made it to Cape Town and caught a cargo ship from Durban to Sydney (he paid for his passage, but the bike travelled free). He spent a year in Australia during which his drive shaft broke for the first time, at 22,000 miles. While waiting for it to be repaired he spent three months visiting New Zealand where he met a fit young geography graduate from Bremen called Birgit Schueneman, who was touring the country by bicycle. It was the start of a beautiful relationship and a lot of travelling together, but first she had to go home to Germany while he went back to Oz, put his Beemer on a boat to Singapore and explored South East Asia.

After spending a lot of time picking fruit, Sam had serious back problems and Australian doctors had warned him that he wouldn’t be able to ride again for at least six months, if ever, but he was back on the bike in three. After sailing on to India he had another brush with `The Grim Reaper’ when he ‘nearly got mangled’ by three trucks. ‘It was only a single track tarmac road in a canyon, with a bit of dirt on both sides; there was barely room for two trucks, let alone three, and they were all coming towards me. I thought I was dead. Fortunately the canyon opened out a fraction at the vital moment and I just squeezed through – with my eyes closed’ he recalls, with a shudder. What makes the Indians drive like that? ‘They are fate and karma junkies’ he replies succinctly.