¶ Getting our new adventure offroad bikes
We come from the pavement touring world and have ridden around Europe and the Nordics for decades.
Now it is time to get off the road.
¶ The story of why we choose the XRV 750 and not another bike
Date: Late August, early September 2025
Over the past decades my brother and I have been touring Europe on our bikes and one day my brother said
I think our trips are boring we go the same places and it is just boring
To which I said
That is because pavement only gives access to about 10% of the world. The rest is offroad.
And then the quest started with messages about him finding and old (very cheap) Super Tènèrè and going to have a look and then we started talking and figuring out what bike to choose.
After a week of ... well several hundred links to bikes, FB Market place, and other sites with cheap bikes, we stumpled over the Honda Africa Twin XRV 750. That took us on a journey that cemented our choice (I think it was "The Warhorse" and other such YT videos that sold us on the XRV 750).
We then started the quest to finding the right bikes for us...
¶ How we found the right bikes for us
In our little Kingdom of Denmark the marked for used bikes is not that great - we kinda only have 2 sites for it (+ all the dealer ships that more or less only use the first site):
- 123mc.dk which is the "official" new and used motorcycle marketplace
- Facebook Market place - which is where people try to sell first or on the side
We filtered by RD07's as RD04 and RD03's are more or less out of stock and the RD03 is "only" 650cc.
All in all when we started searching and found 4, yes you read that right, 4 RD07 XRV 750's in Denmark.
- Two of them were out of our budget.
- One was close enough to go have a look at - great bike, but unfortunately it has been restricted to 48HP aka restricted for A2 license.
- The fourth we got in contact with (of course at the opposite side of the country). It had a kind of metalic scrape/knocking in the video we got from a coldstart which non of the YT videos show or talk about nor in forums, so we skipped that one.
So we were left with the choice to either wait for 2 XRV 750's to appear out of the blue for us to buy or ... find 2 bikes else where in EU and import them...
¶ Finding the bikes ...
Sweden is locked down so unless you have a Swedish citizen identity then you can't login and communicate with people on blocket.se which is kinda understandable. Norway is the same, but the prices there are more expensive (for everything) and we only found 1 bike there. Germany had lots of XRV 750's on [mobile.de][mobile-de which was nice.
We researched the import procedure... oh what a mess of public authority information and forum histories of people with good intensions but no practical insights to the actual procedure. Anyhow we found out that to buy a bike in Germany then you have to
- have the seller deregister the bike
- have both Teil I and II of the registration papers (Teil II indicates that there is no debt in the bike)
- some papers showing TÜV of the kilometers the bike has ridden over time
- A CoC (Certificate of Conformity) for the bike model
So armed with that information we started contacting people on mobile.de... we contacted like 40 or 50 going from the bike we'd like the most to just get a response.
In the week we tried to contact German sellers we started looking else where in EU and ended up in France on www.leboncoin.fr which to say it nicely has better kept bikes (we think it is because of the weather compared to Denmark or Germany). Anyhow in France we contacted the same amount of people.
No response from anyone. We think it is because they thing we are scammers - which is fully understandable since we are not from Germany or France...
I work in a big global company and have a few French collegeages and had a chat with them about how to open dialog with French sellers which helped.
During the French fase we got a reply from one lady in Germany and setup a transaction date where my brother and I would drive to southern Germany with a trailer and pick it up and as the date got closer to the pickup date a week we got a reply from France, a british guy in Franch.
We now had 2 bikes to pick up and we only had to go get the bikes.
¶ The bikes we found
| In the deep south of Germany we found a 1996 Honda Africa Twin RD07A in black with orange stickers. | In the western most of France we found a 1998 Honda Africa Twin RD07A in black with grey stickers. |
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¶ The quest to pick up the bikes
My brother and I chose to rent a MC trailer and drive to pick up the bikes in Germany and France vs the more "obvious" aka fly to the nearest airport, use public transport or taxi to the seller and then drive the bikes back on a 7 day temporary license as it was more expensive than a road trip.
So we ended up renting a MC trailer for 3 bikes, though having used it and seen only one MC trailer with 3 bike stands drive by us, we think our trailer would not be able to handled 3 bikes if they were not small motorcross bikes.
¶ The trip
The trip we ended up riding was just over 4200km
Day 1: We couldn't get the trailer until 12 o'clock on the Friday we left, so after doing the paperwork, finding a few small issues in the pre-check of the trailer we left at 13 o'clock on Friday the 26th of September 2025.
We slept in the car approx 1 hour north of the first destination in Germany (my brother in a tent on the rasthof and me in the car (he says i snore... I don't know what he is talking about).
Day 2: We arrived at the German sellers place at around 9:30-10:00 in the morning and met the seller. We had a talk and a look at the bike and of course heard it spin up. We didn't take it for a test drive as that would be for when we got home. Transaction went without problems. The seller had de-registered the bike at the German KBA and had some TÜV papers (bi-yearly inpsection last done 1½ months before). We loaded the bike on the trailer - on the right side instead of the middle... we should have chosen the middle for the drive to France and just rotated it to the side, but newbies we are and didn't.
The drive to France, some 1200km away, was long, uneventful, though there was a fantastic sunset 
Day 3: We arrived at the seller at around 9:30 and he went through the same process of checking the bike etc. and a lot more paper work. Bureaucracy is French and they love it... Anyhow the transaction went fine, no problems at all and we loaded the bike on the MC trailer and off we went... 1800km home.
Day 4: We arrived home to my place and unloaded the first bike at roughly 11 o'clock, and at 11:30 at his place and cleaned the trailier and returned it to the renting place at 12:30 and then I was back home and went to bed at around 14 o'clock... I didn't wake up until the alarm clock woke me for work 
¶ After arriving home
We started double checking proceures and papers etc. after getting home and that is how the importing process started
...
Trip details: Total trip: 4300km Total time: 55 and 34min
¶ The import process
Anyhow. Searching and reading and searching for the papers for the actual procedure to get the bikes registered so we can pay tax on them is quite an ordeal in Denmark, mostly because most people and information about importing is about cars and cars from the 21'st century that are newer than 2004 aka "new" cars not motorcycles.
The quest started on the Danish Motor Styrelsen which has the official documentation for the process and they state different things depending on what to do and how to do it depending on what page with lots of information in between "to help you" ... which for us was not really helpful.
We are members of FDM in denmark ("Forenede Danske Motorejere" "United Danish Motor owners") to hear if they could help with the paper work - they couldn't and told us to contact Motor Styrelsen...
We started calling the Motor Styrelse, got the ring-around and "they went home already" and "Log on to skat.dk (the Danish Tax department) to send an inquery etc. etc.
We started calling Danish inspection places that do registration and toll inspections for import and finally got 2 things going.
One of the inspecation places said that since the bike is from the 1990'es then we only need the original regitration papers. The other as a call-back from Motor Styrelsen where I had a nice talk and was told that the XRV 750 is a very popular bike and is imported often and the only thing to bring to the registrationsyn and toldsyn was the original registration papers to the inpsection place. The inspection place will then go over the bike and make sure it is legal according to Danish laws and enter the information into Motor Styrelsens IT system.
Once that is done then we can go to skat.dk and ask for evaluation of the bike to pay "Registreringsafgift" (tax) on the bike.
According to the online calculator then the price should be around DKR 9800 and DKR 11500 for the bikes respectively.
Quick note: The XRV 750's bikes are from before June 1st 2004 where the EU introduced the CoC and CO2 requirements etc. etc. but do they tell you that ... noooo.
¶ The first bike: October 2025
We got a date for the first bike for "registreringssyn" and "toldsyn" at a local inspection site and got temporary plates to drive the bike on the road to/from the inspection place.
Not a single issue with the bike.
As of now begining of Oct 2025 we are waiting for Skat to evaluate the bike and send us a the tax bill to pay so we can get the bike registered in Denmark and get plates on it.
¶ Registration tax fee for first bike is in
It took almost 2 and a half weeks for Skat to get the registration fee/price determined for the first bike.
Skat used 3 other bikes on the marked right now to set the current marked price for the bike which ended up being kr 42000. From that they calculated kr 18141 as the fee. It is a bit higher than expected, but then they apparently have "the new price" from back in the '90-ies which they set to kr 150000 which adds 2000 to the fee vs kr 100000 so when you use the calculator "Beregn afgift" then use a higher new price than you think.
That makes the first bikes total cost:
- Purchase price in France €3400 (kr 25.398)
- Registreringsafgift kr 18141
Total: kr 43.539 (+ the trip France to pick it up)
¶ The second bike
The second bike has just been Told- and Registreringssynet today (Oct 29th 2025).
The afgiftsberegning came back on Nov 25th 2025:
- Purchase price in Germany €3900 (kr 29.445)
- Registreringsafgift kr 18470
Total: kr 47.915 (+ the trip Germany to pick it up)
(more to come)