As many moto travelers will tell you, seeing new places on your bike is one of the best ways to travel. That’s just one of many reasons why YouTuber Marc Travels is currently on a round-the-world journey on his Zero SR/F. Another reason, of course, is the perennial draw of doing something that conventional wisdom says either can’t be done, or is super difficult to do—like completing such a journey on an electric motorcycle.
To be safe and also make the trip more fun, he also has Maree, his girlfriend, driving her trusty Suzuki Jimny. Besides having someone to share the adventure with, that should make things more manageable if he and the bike experience difficulties anywhere.
When we last checked in with Marc, he and Maree were experiencing all that Italy has to offer. In the first half of 2023, the European Union has been pushing hard for electric vehicle adoption—and so, the available infrastructure for EVs has been improving. Thus, finding available chargers when and where he needed them wasn’t terribly difficult. What might it be like elsewhere, though? That’s just part of the adventure.
At present, Marc and Maree took a ferry from Spain to northern Africa, and are now traveling through Tunisia. It’s also beautiful, but what is the EV charging infrastructure like? Back in early 2022, French oil company TotalEnergies announced plans to expand EV charging infrastructure in the capital city of Tunis, as well as throughout the country. The eventual goal is to have charging stations available approximately 124 miles (200 kilometers) apart, but of course, no plan like that happens overnight.
In this video, he’s in Tozeur, Tunisia, and rides to an oasis-like hotel in the desert because he’s located a Porsche electric charger at a fancy hotel there. As usual, he’s in his standard riding kit—bright orange helmet, black riding gear, you get the idea—so he wasn’t even sure that they would let him into such a place. PlugShare is where he found this charger listed, but no one had left a review yet and he was nearby, so he decided to check it out and contribute to the crowdsourced charging knowledge base.
The official language of Tunisia is Arabic, but Italian, French, and English are also spoken to some degree by various populations within the country. Of those languages, Marc only seems to speak English, but he still managed to communicate well enough with the guys manning the front gate at the hotel so that he was able to gain access and check out that charger. Best of all, they said, they didn’t even want to charge money for the electricity—he'd just need to go in and buy a coffee at their café if he wanted Eve to ride away with a full complement of electrons on board.
So far, Marc has found plenty of power along the way for Eve, his SR/F. Sometimes he’s charging at public fast charging stations like this, and sometimes he’s doing a slower charge courtesy of whatever accommodations he and Maree have booked for the night. On a few occasions, there have been chargers that haven’t been in good working order—but by and large, things have been working out so far.
