I have travelled many, many miles around our country on a motorcycle, but never to the point where I have had to carry 7 days’ worth of life with me and live out of just the top box. So, when I managed to bully my way onto a Zambia Vic Falls trip recently, how the heck was I going to carry everything I needed on the bike?
7 days of jocks, socks, t-shirts, a spare pair of riding pants, swimming trunks, 2 pairs of shorts, toiletries, towel, a pair of takkies to hike The Falls in, some flip flops for the poolside and wandering around town. And that was without all the electronics, adaptors, chargers for the phones and cameras, a 5lt jerry can for just in case. Not a huge amount unless you are a 2-metre tall, 115kg lump shod in size 11’s wearing XXL or XXXL everything else.
Thankfully, the lads at Suzuki Motorcycles SA, who kindly loaned me a Suzuki DL1050DE VStrom for the trip, were one step ahead of me and arranged a GIVI Trekker Outback 42 Lt metal top case for me for this trip from www.dmd.co.za.
I requested that they let me fit it to see how easy or difficult it is.
It arrived. I had never fitted one before and dived in blind. I wouldn’t call myself a mechanic by any measure but I am pretty handy with the tools and in just 35 minutes I had the whole thing fitted. Three things stood out to me while fitting the GIVI Trekker Outback 42 Lt metal top case:
- The quality of the product, my other plastic Givi boxes are great, but this one is just on another level.
- The well laid out instructions and how quick and easy it is to understand.
- The fact that GIVI has realised these boxes are possibly going to be loaded to their limit during an adventure trip and have engineered an extra set of stabilising braces to help support the weight.
Once the box was on it was super user friendly to use. The latching and locking mechanism are idiot proof and you do not need the key to refit it back onto the bike, it just slips into the locator, latching pins and then clicks securely over the locking pin. I loaded, if not overloaded the box and it was easy to remove and lug to my room and even easier to pop the fully laden box back on, especially considering I had affixed my throw over soft saddle bags to the lid as well. Once again, Givi has realised that we would all possibly do something along these lines and have provided a facility for us to safely do so.
Now, I know I am going to get flack about this, and the road to hell is always paved with good intentions, but every time I thought about taking a picture of everything I carried with me crammed into the Trekker Outback box, the battery on my phone and camera were kaput. Suffice to say, I needed the throw over bags, especially once I had procured a few mementos and gifts along the way.
So, how did it perform I hear you ask? Well considering I took a bit of a tumble on night one, negotiating a quite large ditch on a dirt road to our overnight diggs, when my faulty dark tinted visor suddenly dropped closed effectively blinding me, it did exceptionally well. Most top boxes rattle on their base plates, even on tarmac, and this one didn’t, in fact it was disturbingly quiet that I would reach back every so often to make sure it was still there….
We’ve all seen those social media posts of some poor sod asking everyone to be on the lookout for his top box which somehow rattled off and is now lying somewhere between Riviersonderendt and Gatsonderboddem, with his wallet, drivers’ licence, ID and blah, blah, blah in it. Man, this thing was so solid I could easily have hung the VStrom up from it, giving me much peace of mind, especially travelling across the vér verlaate vlaktes and back roads of foreign countries. And to top it all off, it looks flippen lekker as well, quite rugged and manly and ready for Africa.
I do believe I may be acquiring myself one for my old donkey… Once the credit card recovers.
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