Two Wheels, One Dream: Our Epic BMW Adventure Across Europe

From the shores of Lake Victoria to the snow-capped Alps — how a group of Ugandans set Europe ablaze on BMW GS motorcycles

By Amon Gampar  |  Tripcareadventures  |  June 2024

There are dreams that sit quietly in your chest for years — the kind that surface only late at night when the house is still and the world feels wide open. For me, riding a BMW motorcycle across the rooftops of Europe was one of those dreams. And on a warm June morning, standing at Entebbe International Airport with my bags packed, my riding boots tied, and my crew around me grinning like children on Christmas morning, I knew — this was actually happening.

What followed was ten of the most extraordinary days of my life. Days that rewired something deep in my understanding of beauty, freedom, and what it truly means to explore the world.

✈️ Departure: Entebbe International Airport

We gathered early — a tight-knit crew of adventure-seekers, business owners, and restless souls who had somehow convinced ourselves that riding motorcycles across nine European countries was a perfectly reasonable thing to do. There was laughter, a few last-minute luggage reshuffles, and the particular electricity that only exists at the beginning of a great journey.

As the plane lifted off the runway and Lake Victoria stretched out silver and endless beneath us, I felt something shift. Kampala, my furniture business, my phone calls and spreadsheets — all of it shrank away. For the next ten days, the only thing that mattered was the road ahead.

🇮🇹 Italy: The Magic Begins in Milan

We touched down at Malpensa and the Italian air hit us immediately — warm, fragrant with coffee and history. Milan welcomed us with the grandeur she reserves for those who arrive by choice rather than necessity. We rode through the city streets with the Duomo cathedral rising ahead of us like a monument to everything humanity can achieve when it decides to dream big.

Standing in the Piazza del Duomo on our BMW GS bikes — those magnificent blue and white machines that had been waiting for us — I had to take a moment. Right there, with Italian tourists and locals swirling around us, cameras clicking, the cathedral’s Gothic spires reaching for the sky, I thought: we actually did it. Africans. On BMWs. In the heart of Milan. This is what adventure looks like.

The GS bikes were everything we had hoped for. The BMW R 1250 GS Adventure — built for exactly this kind of journey — hummed with quiet authority. Fully loaded with panniers, windshields, and every piece of riding tech you could want, they felt like extensions of ourselves. Trustworthy. Powerful. Ready.

🇫🇷 France: Speed, Style, and Mountain Passes

From Italy we pressed west into France, crossing through the Mediterranean corridor where the light is golden and relentless and the roads curve through vineyards and ancient stone villages. France has a particular relationship with motorcycles — a quiet respect, a nod from other riders, a certain pride in the machine and the journey.

The French Alps began to announce themselves gradually — first as distant purple shapes on the horizon, then as towering walls of rock and snow that made you feel wonderfully, gratefully small. We rode through mountain passes where the air turned cold and thin and the views opened up to valleys so vast they looked like paintings.

🇨🇭 Switzerland: Heaven on Tarmac

If France is a painting, Switzerland is a cathedral. The moment you cross into Swiss territory, everything becomes more precise, more deliberate, more breathtakingly beautiful. The roads are immaculate — a motorcyclist’s dream — and they take you through valleys so green they seem almost unreal, past lakes of impossible blue, beneath peaks still capped white even in June.

We rode in formation through the Swiss Alps, a convoy of BMW GS bikes sweeping through switchbacks and long mountain straights. Other riders came alongside us at fuel stops and viewpoints — Europeans who had been doing this for decades — and even they raised eyebrows when we told them we’d come from Uganda. The looks of surprise quickly became looks of genuine admiration. Some insisted on photos together. That feeling never got old.

Switzerland also gave us our highest-altitude riding of the trip — mountain passes where you could look in any direction and see nothing but rock, snow, and sky. My GS handled every meter of it without complaint, the suspension absorbing the rough sections, the engine pulling strongly even in the thin air.

🇦🇹 Austria: Silence and Speed

Austria surprised us. Perhaps because it is so often overshadowed by its neighbours, but the Austrian Alps are staggering — deep forested valleys, roaring mountain rivers, village churches with onion-dome spires that appear around every bend like something from a fairy tale. We rode through the Tyrolean countryside as the afternoon sun turned everything amber and gold.

The roads through Austria were some of the most rewarding of the entire trip — long, sweeping curves through mountain terrain that demanded your full attention and rewarded it with every kind of riding sensation: the compression of a long descent, the lightness of a ridge crossing, the satisfaction of a perfectly threaded hairpin.

🇱🇮 Liechtenstein: The Smallest, Most Memorable Crossing

Most people would drive through Liechtenstein and barely notice it — a tiny principality tucked between Switzerland and Austria, easily crossed in less than twenty minutes. But we were on motorcycles, and on a motorcycle, every border crossing is an event, every new country a small celebration.

We stopped at the side of the road and took photos with the Liechtenstein border sign — nine grown adults grinning like we’d just climbed Everest. It is one of those moments that sounds silly when you describe it and yet somehow captures everything that is right about motorcycle travel: the freedom to stop anywhere, to celebrate anything, to be present in a way that a car or an airplane never quite allows.

🇩🇪 Germany: Home of the Machine

Riding into Germany on a BMW felt like a pilgrimage returning to its source. These machines were born here — the GS was conceived in the minds of German engineers who believed that a motorcycle could go anywhere in the world and do it in style. Standing in Bavaria with my bike, surrounded by the land where it was made, felt like a quiet kind of gratitude.

We visited the BMW dealerships and showrooms — and if you have any love for motorcycles, a BMW showroom in Germany is something close to a religious experience. Every model, every variant, every machine gleaming under spotless lighting. We spent time with the bikes, asked questions, compared models, and generally behaved like children in the world’s greatest toy shop.

But Germany also gave us the Autobahn — and I will say nothing more about that, except that the GS 1250 has considerably more top-end performance than a responsible man should ever discover about himself.

🇻🇦 Vatican & 🇮🇹 Rome: Where History Lives

Riding back into Italy and down to Rome was like coming full circle. The city swallowed us immediately — ancient and noisy and magnificent, with its layers of civilization visible in every piazza, every ruin, every stretch of old stone road. We parked the bikes and walked — because some places need to be experienced on foot.

The Vatican stopped me completely. Standing in St. Peter’s Square, looking up at Michelangelo’s dome, I thought about the journey it had taken to get here — not just the ten days from Entebbe, but the years of building a business, of dreaming about this trip, of believing that someone from Kampala with a love of motorcycles could one day stand in the centre of Christendom and feel completely, perfectly at home.

Rome gave us gelato, espresso, impossible pasta, and the particular joy of getting slightly lost in streets that have been walked for two thousand years. We would not have had it any other way.

🇳🇴 Oslo: The Grand Finale

From Rome I made my way north — by this point the crew had split into smaller groups following their own routes home, as all great adventures eventually do. Oslo was the final destination, and it felt like the right one: a clean, quiet, beautifully designed Scandinavian city sitting at the edge of a fjord, as far north as this journey would take me.

Oslo has a thoughtful kind of beauty — wide boulevards, world-class museums, a waterfront that makes you want to sit and think for a very long time. After days of mountain passes and ancient ruins and Alpine adrenaline, the calm of Oslo was exactly what I needed. I walked, I ate, I reflected. And I felt — all the way through — the quiet satisfaction of a person who followed through on a dream.

🇶🇦 Homeward Through Qatar

The return journey took me through Doha, Qatar — a brief, gleaming layover in a city that seems to exist in the future while the rest of us are still catching up. Clean, air-conditioned, and filled with the particular international bustle of a major transit hub, Doha gave me time to process everything before the final leg home to Entebbe.

And when the plane descended and I saw Lake Victoria again — wide and silver and familiar — I felt something I had not expected: not relief, exactly, but recognition. Like greeting an old friend after a long time away. Kampala was waiting. The furniture business was waiting. The ordinary, beautiful, demanding life was waiting. And I was ready — changed, expanded, full of something I had not had before.

🏍 What This Trip Taught Me

Ten countries. Thousands of kilometres. More mountain passes than I can count, more coffees than my doctor would approve of, and one extraordinary group of people who made every kilometre worth riding. Here is what I brought home:

Africa is not a limit — it is a launchpad. We took Ugandan pride across nine European countries on motorcycles and every person we met was amazed, inspired, and welcoming. The world responds to audacity.

The BMW GS is everything they say it is. Alpine passes, cobblestone piazzas, mountain highways — these bikes handled everything with grace. If you are considering a long-distance adventure ride, there is no better machine for it.

Slow down enough to actually see the world. A motorcycle forces presence. You feel the temperature change in a valley, smell the pines as you descend a pass, hear the echo off cliff walls. No plane or car gives you that. The journey is the destination — and on two wheels, every second of it is real.