Bikes & Birdies (South Africa, Golf + Motorcycle)

Thirteen nights through the Western and Eastern Cape, guided, combining adventure motorcycling with five of South Africa’s top-ranked golf courses.

The combination is unusual enough to be worth stating plainly: riding days and golf days alternate, the clubs travel in the support vehicle, and the two halves of the trip are given equal weight rather than one being a filler for the other.

Cape Town opens it on the waterfront, then Chapman’s Peak Drive, cut into a cliff above the Atlantic and on most lists of the great ocean roads, with Cape Point, the Cape of Good Hope, Clarence Drive and a penguin sanctuary along the way. Arabella at Kleinmond is the first course, ranked fifth in the country, laid out by Peter Matkovich inside a biosphere reserve. Cape Agulhas follows, the southernmost point in Africa and the start of the Garden Route, then a game lodge at Mossel Bay, Pinnacle Point on its clifftop above the Indian Ocean, Pezula at Knysna, and Jeffreys Bay, where the right-hand point break is one of the best known in the world and a 216-metre bridge bungee is optional. Addo closes it with a game drive.

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. Fourteen days is a fortnight’s holiday rather than an expedition, and the riding is the gentler end of the operator’s range. No wildlife sighting can be promised on any given drive. This is the newest thing Renedian sells and, so far as pairings go, a genuinely uncommon one.