A couple of weeks ago I put up a guest post on riding in Africa that was not totally accurate.  So today we’re posting the inside look by someone who’s done it countless times….Paul McManus, a guide for Tour d’Afrique.  Whether you’ve always wanted to do something like this or just want to read about the fantastic adventure of cycling Africa, you’ll want to have a read and check out his pictures.

Crossing a Continent by Bike

by Paul McManus

What’s it like to join a bike tour across a continent?  How do you prepare?  Who does these things?  Are all good questions.  None of them can be answered quickly.  In fact at Tour d’Afrique, where I have worked as a guide for the last 4 years, we have a series of about 22 updates we send to each rider who registers for our tours that answer those questions and a few more.

But let me try to give you the 10,000 foot view here and at the end I’ll throw in a few bits of random advice I’ve learned over the last 4 years of guiding tours for Tour d’Afrique.

One of things you’ll learn to appreciate on a journey like this is the simplicity of life and the daily routine is a part of that.  The distractions of everyday life don’t exist, no facebook notifications or emails.  No phones ringing or tweets pinging etc… It’s always a bit of an adjustment for the type A’s out there but soon everyone adjusts and life becomes quite pleasant.

Here’s how the routine generally goes:

Wake up at dawn:

• Pack your tent, sleeping bag etc… into the support vehicles
• Coffee should be ready when you’re done packing
• Breakfast is ready 30 minutes later

Breakfast:

• Lasts 30 minutes, Usually consists of oatmeal, bread and spreads, fruit and muesli (that’s granola for you non euro types)

Ride your Bike:

• Ride the day at your own pace and stop when you like.
• Depending on the tour we average up to 120 km a day but….

- When we’re climbing the Pamirs in Tajikistan we’ll do more like 60 to 80 km in a day
- When we’re battling the rocks in the Dida Galagu desert we’ll do 80 – 90 kms a day
- When we’re riding through the pan flat Kalahari in Botswana we’ll do up to 203 km in a day
- Of course sometimes you just have to ride naked, regardless of the distance

Coke Stops:

• We encourage you to stop along the ride, chat with locals, have a coke (if you’re lucky it might even be cold).

Lunch:

• At a little past the halfway point of the day
• Usually Consists of sandwiches and fruit

More Riding:

• After lunch continue riding to camp, take your time and enjoy the scenery
• Have another coke stop if you like, or take a few pictures, you never know what you’ll see…

Arrive in Camp:

• At Camp you’ll find your bags waiting for you
• We’ll have tea and soup waiting for you as well
• Every evening we hold a rider meeting to go over the next day’s route

Dinner:

• After 120 kms of cycling your pretty ready for dinner.  Eat lots, since your burning 5000 -
• 8000 calories a day you’ll most likely lose weight no matter how much you eat

After Dinner:

• Relax and enjoy the evening
• Most everyone is asleep by 9 pm (you did get up at dawn after all)
• Every 5 – 6 days we have a rest day. No cycling, quite a bit of beer drinking.

Repeat:

• Depending on the tour, repeat the above 42 – 129 times!

A few other thoughts and words of advice:

You’ll Pack too Much:

Everyone does their first tour.  Try to pack as light as you can.  One of the really nice benefits of being on 4 months tour through rural places is you learn how simple life can be, and how little you actually need to enjoy it.  It’s one of the lessons we hope every rider brings home with them.  Living simply is good everyone.

Don’t bring a $5000 bike.  Bring a $500 bike:

When travelling with your bike you want strong, reliable, easy to fix in the middle of the Kara Kum desert kind of gear.  That means steel, not carbon.  Shimano LX not SRAM Red.  The nice thing is that most of the reliable, durable stuff out there is a lot less expensive.

You’re probably in good enough shape now:

It might surprise you to learn that many of our clients are not cyclists.  Some of them become cyclists after their first tour with us, but they are not when they first sign up. You get in shape on tour.  If you commute 20 minutes a day twice a week you can do this.  Of course you should train for something like this.  I strongly recommend it in fact. But certainly don’t let a lack of fitness be an excuse not to do it.  If the time is right, take the plunge.

You might get married:

I know that sounds crazy. But it’s amazing to me how many people meet their wife / husband or boyfriend / girlfriend on tour.  Social life on tour is a big part of being on tour.  At the very least you’ll make some lifelong friends.

Adventure is not always fun:

To expect that everyday will be fun and carefree is a mistake.  This is an expedition in the truest sense, an adventure.  And like most adventures there will be parts of it that suck.  It’s hard to have an adventure without some real mental, physical or emotional challenges and our tours usually will present you with all three. Your boundaries will be pushed in ways you can not expect or prepare for.  It’s what I like most about our tours but if that’s not your thing well…

So that’s it, a cross continental bike tour in a nutshell.  Each tour is a very different experience. It’s the people on the tour that make it great and I think that’s what really separates a tour from a solo trip.  If you have question or advice of your own I’d love to hear it in the comments section below, or you can email me directly at paul@tourdafrique.com.

This guest post was put together by Tour d’Afrique tour director, Paul McManus.  Paul designs and guides cross continental bike tours for Tour d’Afrique Ltd, best known for their annual Cairo to Cape Town Tour.  Check out their website, www.tourdafrique.com and be sure to contact him with any questions you have.

Have you ever wondered what a cycling adventure in Africa would be like?  Sumreen Azam shares his story of a 1576 km journey known as the Elephant Highway.

After putting this post up and getting a response from Paul who works for Tour d’ Afrique I was about to pull it and take it off the site.  I’ve decided to leave it on there for now because I think the idea of the post will help inspire people to look into cycling in this part of the world…and that’s a good thing.  This post might be mostly made up, but I’ve taken out the parts that Paul mentioned as being false.  I invite you to search out more stories on cycling the Elephant Highway and other parts of Africa, or contact Tour d’ Afrique themselves and get more information on tours and races.  Paul is going to get some great stories from some of their clients and we’ll be posting those African Cycling Adventures in the near future.

Cycling Safari on the Elephant Highway

by Sumreen Azam

From the age of four, I have been in love with anything to do with cycling.  I was the first kid in the area to lose my stabilizers (training wheels) and from that moment I have spent more time on a bike than off it.  Around the same age, I began to develop a fascination for everything African; I was obsessed with exotic sounding places and learning about the magnificent animals that lived there.  Even as a child I was determined that one day I would visit Africa and explore for myself.

Fast forward twenty years or so I was still biking every chance I got, but had not yet realised my dream of travelling to Africa.  I decided the time was right to do something about it, and started researching different options available for tourist visitors.  It was during this research that I had the wild idea I could possibly combine my passions for visiting and exploring Africa and my love of cycling.  It was at this point that I discovered the Tour d’Afrique.

The Tour d’Afrique is an annual event where groups of cyclists ride the 11,800 km from Cairo, Egypt in the North down to Cape Town, in South Africa.  That’s right, the Tour d’Afrique takes riders the entire length of the continent.  As with many endurance events the ride is broken up into 8 different sections, with people joining, and leaving at every stage.  I decided to try my hand at riding one of the most challenging and visually stunning sections, known as the Elephant Highway.

I brought my friend Tim along and both of us flew into Botswana, and as soon as I stepped off the plane I realized that the extreme heat of Africa was nothing like I had ever imagined.  It was obvious immediately that the training we had done in the UK was great for stamina but a million miles away in terms of heat and humidity.  It is one thing to read about it, but even my wildest imagination was no match for the reality of this baking heat.  Tim compared it to roasting in an oven, and even before we mounted our bikes we were both wondering what we had gotten ourselves into.

Later in the afternoon we set up our bikes and rode out of town.  I had attached a trailer to the back of my bicycle to carry the supplies we would need.  During the course of my research about the trip, I realised that out in the vast wilderness that surrounds the Elephant Highway we probably have to travel for a couple of days without being able to resupply.  The trailer was loaded up with tools, spare parts, food and our camping gear.

We had only pedaled a few hours outside of town before we realised that we were already starting to lose the light, which happens very quickly in this part of the world.  We set up camp, and watched the huge African sun sink majestically over the horizon.  I went to sleep that night with a smile from ear to ear.

The next day we pedaled for several hours and took the opportunity to stop in a few villages.  Every village we stopped at the people were very welcoming, no doubt some were a little surprised to see a couple of white guys pedaling into their little African village, but they offered fantastic hospitality to us with plenty of food and drink.  We saw a huge variety of wildlife during that first day, including several of the magnificent elephants from which the highway is named.

Tim and I soon developed a pretty good routine for our cycling safari, we would wake up in the morning and make fresh coffee and eat breakfast.  We would then pack up the camp and start pedaling south.  We would stop during the heat of the day in a village if we found one, if not, then we would take shelter beneath a tree during the heat of the day.  The fierce African sun made seeking shade a necessity.  Even the animals don’t move around on the Elephant

Whenever we passed through a village, we would stop for at short break to chat with the inhabitants, here we would resupply and they would provide us with information about how far we would need to ride to the next village.

There were some days where we failed to see another living soul during the course of the day and at one point we cycled for two days without seeing any humans.

The trip took us two weeks to complete, and we pulled into Windhoek with a real sense of accomplishment.  We had cycled an average of 70 miles a day, which is a pretty good haul through the African heat.

It is important to ensure you have great equipment; fortunately Tim works for one of the leading bike shops in the UK and was able to provide the right bikes for this trip. Our bikes performed brilliantly and other than a few punctures which were easily repaired we did not have any problems at all, on what was the trip of a lifetime.

If you are living in the UK and want to see a fantastic range of bikes and equipment including the Claude Butler and Land Rover Bikes ranges visit www.bikesnbits.co.uk

I would love to hear of other African bike adventures, if you have one then please share your experience.