On October 14th last year, Sinje Gottwald took the ferry from Spain to Morocco, and a 124-day-long adventure began. The journey started in the Moroccan sand and took her through Mauritania, Senegal, Gambia, Guinea Bissau, Guinea, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Ivory Coast, Ghana, Togo, Benin, Nigeria, Cameroon, Gabon, Congo, Angola, Namibia, and South Africa.
“My dream is to see the whole world with my own eyes. No matter how much I learn about places, I will always have a better understanding if I see and experience them myself. I feel this especially for Africa. With this adventure, I wanted not only to open up my own and others’ perceptions of this continent but also to set an example of what is possible even if the challenges seem too difficult at first. We are capable of much more than we think,” says Sinje Gottwald.
Normally, Sinje is an account manager at the Swedish company Cake, which makes two-wheeled electric vehicles, including the Kalk AP model that she used to cross Africa. Sinje was sitting at a company dinner next to the founder Stefan Ytterborn and told him about her dream of traveling alone from Spain to South Africa. That’s when they decided that Sinje would switch roles from desk job to field tester.
Sinje is no stranger to this kind of adventure and has completed a solo trip around the world on a motorcycle from 2017 to 2020. The bike she rode through Africa was an electric Kalk AP, and in addition to clothes, she had two extra batteries, two chargers, some spare parts, and a laptop.
Sinje didn’t have too many problems, with only two blown fuses, one missing screw that was found, and a loose cable connection on a charger making the list of issues. However, there were some scary moments, such as when she had to wait at the border to Ghana for over a day.
She posted this on social media: