Car Fule

Sonje Gottwald was still sales professional in new technologies five years earlier. Today she became the first woman to have crossed Africa from North to South on an electric motorcycle. It all started when she decided to drop everything to travel nearly 50 countries on a motorcycle. “After working for about ten years in the field of sales, a particularly stressful job, I decided to stop and realize my dream, to take a bag and to leave”, she told FoxNews.

A change of life that lasted for three years, during which she crossed six continents riding a 1994 BMW R100GS. Like many travellers, Sinje Gottwald hadn’t planned to spend so much time on the road. Simply, she had such an intense experience that she had no desire to end her journey. And lately, she came back to the charge with an electric motorcycle tour of Africa !

Sinje Gottwald, the first woman to cross Africa on an electric motorcycle

“I thought to myself, ‘I know how to cross a continent, I know how to cross borders, I know what to be careful of, so why not add a bit of a challenge to it and do something that no one has ever done before? “. And that’s when I thought of an electric motorcycle.she explained. A brave adventure which lasted 124 days and which required meticulous preparation of all the routes.

Electric charging stations not being positioned all along its journey on the African continent, she had to plan all her steps in advance. Even with such extensive planning, finding electricity was not always easy. “Sometimes I had to ask people if they knew of companies (…) where I could use the electricity. Sometimes I had to use generators, when there was only one in a small village. »

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A trip supported by RideCake, a Swedish brand of electric motorcycles

To make his trip through Africa, Sinje Gottwald used a Swedish-designed electric motorcycle, signed RideCake. This young company, founded in 2016, was difficult to convince. Shortly before the Covid-19 pandemic, the adventurer had contacted her to present her project. But its representatives thought that the autonomy of their motorcycle, which is only 90 kilometers, was insufficient.

Meanwhile, Sinje Gottwald, who hadn’t given up on her idea of ​​traveling to Africa, ended up getting a job at RideCake. She was then able to convince her leader, Stefan Ytterborn, who finally supported her. His whole trip didn’t go perfectly due to security, visa and local police issues. Moreover, she is not yet certain that her trip will appear in the Guinness Book of Records: she had to take the boat twice for safety reasons!