As I write this on a cold, grey, day with hail showers in Stockport, two of my favourite bikes are being loaded on to a trailer 6,000 miles away in South Africa. I know it’s happening right now, because I’m in contact with Hendrik the transport guy via WhatsApp and he’s having problems.

I decided to ship our Honda Rune and Ducati Sport Classic to the UK for a variety of reasons. First, we spend more of our time in the UK than in South Africa – 100% since the advent of Covid. Secondly, the 1.3km of dirt road that connects our house down there to the nearest tarred road has long been a challenge for both bikes and I’m told is now worse than ever, so even if we were down there the bikes wouldn’t get ridden much. Thirdly, as a person transferring her residence to the UK, my wife (in whose name both bikes are actually registered) can import them here free of duty and VAT.

Finding a company to ship the bikes hasn’t been easy. The first one I tried seemed to be an expert but shipped only by the 20-foot container load, and that was going to work out at £5,400 with insurance. I could have shipped more bikes that way if I’d wanted, and bringing back the Suzuki TL1000S was tempting but didn’t make sense financially. The next company quoted far less (about £750 per bike uncrated) but got itself into a web of confusion when asked to crate the bikes. Their local ZA shipper wanted to know why we wanted them crated, and eventually stopped replying to emails.

A third company seemed competitive but went quiet for weeks at a time. Just as it was all coming together, they asked me to confirm that we had an “exporter’s code”, which opened up a whole new can of worms. It turned out that export rules required all kinds of stuff to be done, including security micro-dotting the bikes, getting police clearance and the necessary export code. The shipper couldn’t do this for me. Finally I found salvation in The Freight Factory, which not only offered a competitive price but could also handle all the local ZA admin.

Yesterday was the designated day for collecting the bikes from our house. Our neighbours kindly disconnected the trickle chargers, replaced the seats, dug out the registration documents, found the keys and agreed to be on standby to let Hendrik in to get the bikes. Only Hendrik didn’t show up. He was wending his way all the way from Durban via East London and Port Elizabeth en route to Cape Town, and arrived about 09:00 local time today instead.

He was towing a 23-foot trailer behind his pick-up truck, already loaded with three other bikes. Our South African house down a steep, 190-metre driveway, and I told him I didn’t rate his chances of turning that ensemble around once down there. Perhaps it might be better to ride each bike up the driveway and load them up on the dirt road? Turned out he reckoned it would be hard to load the bikes on to the trailer up there, so the next I heard he was down by the house and didn’t have the power to reverse uphill to turn the rig around. A call to another neighbour, Aubrey, brought him to the rescue in a more powerful 4×4 pick-up, which did the trick. I breathed a sigh of relief and left them to it – until just now, when Hendrik called via WhatsApp video to say the Rune is too low to load on to the trailer without scaping the underside.

It was good to see both bikes gleaming under the blue skies and bright sunshine, at least, on the video call (gotta love technology). Hendrik’s plan was to bring back Aubrey with few of his guys who would then lift the rear end up in the air to complete the loading. The Rune weights 888 lb, however, and lifting the back might be difficult or might even damage the bike. I’ve remembered that there are a few short pieces of scaffolding plank tucked away in the garage and suggested that they ride the bike on to those to create the ground clearance. That’s how I change the oil, too. So right now that’s what they’re doing. The hail here has stopped and the sun has come out, so things are looking up. Hopefully the Rune is up, too.

Hendrik just sent me this photo to show me both bikes successfully loaded on to the trailer and about to embark on their five-or-six-hour road trip to Cape Town. Turns out the plank trick didn’t work but muscle power did. Next, it’s a few days to get the micro-dotting and other documentation done, and maybe a week or two more while the shipper waits to fill his container, a mere 16 days on the high seas to London, perhaps a day or two in British Customs, and a final day to Stockport. It’s quite a palaver, but air freight was at least twice the cost – and good things are worth waiting for.