Beyond the Bike
Siena to Stratford, May 5th – 18th, 1250km
People talk of false starts. I’ve never heard of a ‘false-finish’ but I was searching for the equivalent word on May 18th. On that grey spring day, I found myself unexpectedly cycling an African made bamboo bike with 150 other cyclists within a couple of miles of my old workplace in Canary Wharf, the first time on English soil for exactly 10 months...
Olympia, Greece to Siena, Italy. 1350km April 23rd - May 4th
My beloved Thandie has done herself proud over the last 9 months, managing to carry me & some 150 stokers 11,000 kilometres through Africa & the Middle East. But the prospect of doing more than 1300km, with over 10,000m of climbing in 10 days on a 30kg steel bike didn’t appeal. This made the decision to dump her for a lighter, younger & better looking model all the easier…
Khartoum to Luxor, 1470km & a ferry ride up Lake Nasser. Feb 19th – March 11th
People love to talk about ‘Africa’. Yes it is a single physical continent but its human diversity- nearly 3000 ethnicities have been divided, often arbitrarily, into 48 nation states - makes generalisations difficult. As such, sub-saharan Africa is often what people mean when discussing Africa. For me, there was certainly a step change in culture arriving in Sudan, a change accentuated by the fact that we had arrived by plane, rather than bicycle from the continent’s newest country…