A new start after cycling across Africa

South Africans Simon Alston and Craig Northam have just completed a mammoth journey by bicycle across the African continent to raise funds for charity. Alston shares some of his thoughts and memories of this once-in-a-lifetime experience.

On August 5, Craig Northam and I cycled the last of 12 034 kilometres through Africa, completing a journey that began in Cairo and finished five-and-a-half months later in Cape Town.

I can remember the excitement and anticipation of that first day in Cairo like it was yesterday, and in my mind I can trace the road that started in that chaotic city through 10 countries: Egypt, Sudan, Ethiopia, Kenya, Tanzania, Malawi, Zambia, Botswana, Namibia, South Africa. A whole continent of left and right turns, uphills and downhills, headwinds and tailwinds, gear changes and sweat.

Countless images and faces flicker fast and bright, comfortable in my mind like a favourite old movie, and even memories of tastes and smells compete with the reality of today. The journey is over, yet Africa does not seem shrunken and knowable. Instead it remains as vast and even more magical than when we first looked at our maps with no idea of what was entailed in those contours and borders.

Today you can Google Earth Africa at your leisure, swooping in from your armchair to unimportant towns called Edfu, Abu Hamed, Laisamus and Mafinga. But what you probably won’t know is that the road just before Chalinze sometimes smells of pineapples, crushed as they fall on the hot tarmac from a truck on the way to Saturday market; that sandstorms rage somewhere in the Nubian Desert, reducing visibility to one metre by winds that sing; or that under a tree on the road south from Nairobi sits a boy who should not be trusted to fix your buckled wheel.

Cycling allowed us to experience Africa at a proximity we couldn’t otherwise achieve, and despite our fair share of problems — five rear wheels, 12 weeks of malaria, 48 punctures — we will miss the everyday sense of wonderment in discovery.

I travelled with an article I found in a battered copy of the Times on the ferry between Aswan in Egypt and Wadi Halfa in Sudan. I kept it because in it was a quote by TS Eliot which says much about why people travel, and which I now know to be true: we travel to ”arrive where we started, and know the place for the first time”.

Right now Cape Town, Table Mountain, family and friends are all reassuringly familiar. But because I have changed, they too are different, waiting to be explored as if for the first time. Perhaps that is the best thing to come out of this journey.

One of our goals on this journey was to disprove for us some of the myths and try to understand the realities of Africa today. It is impossible to start without various preconceptions and they form as much a part of one’s baggage as spare tubes and cycling shorts. Of course the biggest concerned our safety and we were constantly warned of the dangers people somewhere out there posed, people who wanted to rob and cheat us.

It is therefore with some relief that we can say that not once did we feel threatened by anyone, and that in general people were overwhelmingly kind and generous.

Cycling from Cairo to Cape Town was the perfect opportunity to raise money for, and promote the work of, two bicycle-related charities we admire: Re-Cycle in the United Kingdom and the Bicycle Empowerment Network (BEN) in South Africa.

Re-Cycle ships second-hand bicycles and parts to Africa where they are distributed by local partners (like BEN) to doctors, nurses and schoolchildren, or used in employment projects. So far, we have raised more than R60 000 but hope to double this through future projects.

If you would like to donate to these charities, visit www.cairo2capetown.org, or contact Andrew Wheeldon on Tel: 021 713 3634

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