The Grand Tour (Pan-Southern Africa)

Forty-three nights in a loop from Cape Town, guided, ten thousand kilometres across eight countries, which makes this the longest tour the operator runs by a wide margin.

The Grand Tour is assembled from the best of everything else in the catalogue and ridden as one circuit, so a rider who would otherwise have to choose between the Cape, the Delta and the Namib gets all three in a single trip.

Cape Town opens it with the peninsula, Cape Point and the penguin colony at Simonstown, then the Western and Eastern Cape, Cape Agulhas at the foot of the continent, the Klein Karoo and the Garden Route. Kruger follows for two nights of safari, then Eswatini, the Mozambican coast at Ponta Malongane and two nights at Victoria Falls. Zambia and Chobe come next, where the elephant population is the densest anywhere, then a chartered flight over the Okavango Delta and a night in a tented camp, the Trans-Kalahari Highway into Namibia and around a thousand kilometres of Namibian gravel before the run back south to Cape Town.

The bike hire is included, with a BMW F800GS as standard and upgrades available; the full inclusions are not itemised on the operator’s page and are worth confirming at booking. Forty-four days is a sabbatical rather than a holiday, and the price is what moving a supported group across eight borders for six weeks costs. No wildlife sighting can be promised on any given drive. The dry season from May to October is the window, and the visas alone are a reason to start the conversation with the operator a long way ahead.