Quad sales in South Africa have boomed in the last decade, from 1202 in 1995 to 15 714 in 2004, representing 52 percent of the motorcycle market.
They're easy to ride, you don't need a licence and the whole family can ride together; that also makes them easy to abuse and quad riders have a poor reputation in some places for irresponsible riding.
Suzuki, alone among South African quad distributors, has taken a step back from promoting its high-performance competition quads and focused on eco-friendly family fun, riding through areas of great natural beauty without damaging them in any way.
Only recently have ecologists become aware that because of its wide, soft tyres a quad has the lowest wheel loading of any form of wheeled transport - in fact the pressure exerted on the ground by a quad is so low one could ride over your foot without hurting it.
This makes them ideal vehicles for eco-touring, either on the riders' own quads or in guided groups.
Suzuki also offers free rider training with every new quad at its official outdoor training centre, the African Outdoor Group, including dynamic handling and getting out of potentially dangerous situations like side slopes or stalling on a steep incline.
Recently Suzuki's genial marketing manager Steve Swanepoel hosted a bunch of journalists - not all motoring scribes either - on a two-day getaway in the mountains of the Mpumalanga gold-mining country to show us how much fun riding at a little less than full blast can be.
He provided eight quads for eight media guys, ranging from the neat little LT-F160 beginner machine to the muscular brand-new LT-A700 4x4 KingQuad, the new flagship of Suzuki's utility quad range
The quads were numbered - and at every stop you moved on to the next number while the guy who'd been tooling along on the Big Daddy (no8) found himself on the 160 (no1!). During the course of a long day's ride everybody rode each quad at least twice.
The eight quads were:
- LT-F160
- LT-F250
Bright and early on the first morning saw us leaving the Oppi Koppi guest house in Barberton behind tour guide and raconteur extraordinary Rassie Schoeman, riding through the back streets of the town to the gate of the Mountainlands Game Reserve - which is closed to the public unless you are accompanied by an accredited tour guide.
We followed an old Provincial gravel road, last graded in the 1970s and now deteriorated to the point where the steeper section were a bit of a challenge for even a 4x4 quad, stopping to check out spectacular views, weird volcanic rock formations (there's even one that looks like a giant onion!) and the tracks left where the steel tyres of the gold-miners' wagons cut into the rock of the mountains.
We stopped for lunch deep in a semi-tropical valley next to a little stream - it's amazing how much the vegetation varies from the top of the mountains to the valleys. Then we made our way up a tortuous wagon trail to the site of a mining town on the top of a mountain.
Eureka City
The predominantly British gold miners of the 1880s found that the cooler mountaintops were free of the malaria, tsetse fly and other health hazards of the tropical lowveld, so they built Eureka City for their wives and families.
At its peak in the last years of the nineteenth century it boasted 700 inhabitants, a church, a hotel, butchers' shop and even a horse-racing track, signs of which can still be seen.
We descended an even steeper trail - which was great fun on the quads but would have been very uncomfortable in a conventional 4x4 vehicle - to the Edwin Bray mine, in its day one of the richest gold mines in the world, yielding up to 250g of gold per ton of ore while the famous mines of the Witwatersrand average around six.
Schoeman led us through a narrow tunnel to a cathedral-sized chamber with tunnels 400m deep branching off in all directions, vividly describing how all of it had been dug out of solid rock entirely with hand tools between 1886 and 1949.
The gold from this mine contained very few impurities, he explained, and was highly prized internationally for upmarket jewellery.
On the way back we stopped at the Alstrom mine, where the bravest (stupidest?) among us swam in a rock pool fed by an icy mountain stream, before following a deep valley, splashing through a dozen shallow river crossings, back to the guest house, having spent nearly eight hours on the quads on pretty rough tracks, taking nothing but photos and leaving nothing but faint, shallow tyre prints.
Game drive
The next morning we fell out of bed at the aptly-named Camp Ozark bush camp and onto the quads at an indecently early hour for a game drive - and the first animals we saw were a pair of white rhino. There's nothing that wakes you up quite like realising that you are sitting completely unprotected 15 metres away from several tons of bad attitude.
It's a whole lot more real than sitting on the back of a Land Cruiser.
We drove past within metres of herds of wildebeest, blesbok and springbok, and saluted a magnificently regal solitary kudu bull silhouetted against the sky atop a ridge.
Anywhere that you can with the aforementioned Land Cruiser you can go on a quad, more quietly, with less pollution and less damage to the environment - and having a whole lot more fun along the way.
- Rassie Schoeman runs eco tours, either on your quad or his, in the Barberton area based at the Oppi Koppi Inni Krater guest house, and game rides from Camp Ozark at Badplaas, a superbly comfortable tented camp with all mod cons and a truly magnificent chef. Find out more on his