Lonely Planet writer Tom Hall reviews 10:Celebrating Ten Years of the Tour d'Afrique Bicycle Race & Expedition.

You can also read about his experience in getting lost in Botswana on the Tour d'Afrique in 2009 here.

Few modes of transportation connect you with the intimacy of your surroundings with such efficiency as a bicycle. Anyone who has ridden any significant distance can attest to the freedom you feel on a bike.  Of course not all rides are created equal.  Sometimes the location and circumstance of a ride can really transport you to different place and time. As a tour guide for long distance bike tour company Tour d’Afrique I’ve had the good fortune to ride through some amazing places.   Here’s a list of some of my favorites.  



The Pyramids at Giza

Our Cairo to Cape Town Bike tour starts every year at dawn from shadow of the great pyramids.  There has been so much written about them I won’t go into detail here, sufficed to say they are pretty cool.  I’ve ridden up to see the pyramids and I’ve driven one of our support vehilces.  Riding is definitely better. 

The way the pyramids reveal themselves to you as you ride up to see them is unbeatable.  We rode to the pyramids from our hotel about 8 km away. We passed though the crowded and noisy streets of Giza and as we got closer to the pyramids we began to glimpse them through the spaces in between the buildings.  They look like they belong on another planet. 

It’s about a 2km ride from the entrance gate to the Pyramids themselves.  Feeling the cool morning air and squinting into the sun as it rose over the Pyramid of Cheops really gives you the feeling of discovery and wonder.   



The Small and Winding Roads and the Old Cites of Eastern Europe

There really is something special about old cities.  Cities that had to be constructed in a way that allowed them to be easily defended from attack and were built with hard labor and the skill of true craftsmen.  I love the feel of an old castle wall and riding through streets that were built before motorized traffic was even remotely possible. 

In 2010 I rode from St. Petersburg to Venice on our Amber Route Bike Tour.   The route is essentially a tour of old cities.  Tallin, Riga, Vilnius, Krakow, Bratislava, Ljubljana and of course Venice were some of the highlights.  Since the roads that pass though the old cities were not built for cars and truck the scale of them is just right for the bike.  The small streets feel intimate and have the right amount of exotic flavor. 


Everywhere you look is like a scene from a John Wayne Movie!

Monument Valley, Utah

I descended into Monument Valley with the wind at my back and AC/DC blaring in my headphones.  We started the day at the Anasazi cliff dwellings at the Navajo Monument near Shonto, AZ and after 30 km of climbing is was down hill for 50 km to our camp in the valley. 

A 50 km downhill ride with the wild west landscape spread out before you and the wind at your back, are you kidding me!  How could it get any better. 

One piece of advice I would give is make sure you’re riding in the right direction.  Our route took us from west to east which provided mostly tail winds.  The few riders I passed going in the opposite direction had a different opinion of the day then I did. 


Looking Down into the Valley

The Black Sea Mountains

I enjoy climbing when I’m on the bike.  I loved feeling of effort and the reward of reaching the top, not to mention the real pay off... the descent!  The mountains along the Black Sea in Turkey provide plenty of challenging climbs combined with spectacular views. 

The people of Turkey make the experience even more enjoyable – they are friendly and inviting through seemingly every village you cycle through.


Waiting to Cross into Azerbaijan, with a fat stack of freshly exchanged Azeri Manat

Anywhere with Friends

Sometimes even the most mundane of rides is can be amazing when combined with right company.  One of things I look forward to the most after returning from a trip is riding with my friends and catching up.  On a long bike tour you may start the tour with a group of strangers but after weeks and months of riding together great friendships evolve. 

Well the first week of cycling is complete.  It was great exploration of the Lake district in northern Patagonia.  But I must admit that I have been a little spoiled in the past few years of vehicle supported cycle tours working with Tour d’Afrique!  Pushing all that gear up hills is tougher than I remember - or perhaps I am just older and outta shape.



Getting to Barilcohe was a convoluted series of planes and taxis and no one seems to cater to travel with a bike in a box anymore. You try to reduce fuel consumption and people just charge you more money for it. But we made it, even though US homeland security ripped open both bike boxes and did a horrible job of resealing them.  We´re just lucky none of the loose parts fell out.

 

We spent one night in Buenos Aires in transit. I can’t wait to spend more time there on our way home as it is truly an amazing city.  In Bariloche we took a couple days to assemble the bikes, unpack, repack gather supplies and do a little shakedown trip along Lagos Nahuel Huapi.  Our tour started with a series of short rides on really bad roads, but it was broken up with some incredible ferry crossings - snow capped volcanoes looming overhead. There was one section of road where the surface was so soft it was nearly impossible to climb. I was so excited to get to the top of the 4km climb and begin the 8km descent that I let go of the brakes only to blow a my first flat 1km into it.  My turn to buy the beer.
   
 

We have now entered Chile and are bunked out in the town of Puerto Varas. From here we are getting off the saddle and grabbing a paddle. This is where we begin a one week sea kayaking trip through Pumalim Park, paddle across hot springs, around erupting volcanoes and through sea lion colonies. Which all sounds great except for the weather forecast which is calling for rain from tomorrow until next Wednesday. Soggy!

Travel can be intimidating.  You don’t speak the language, you don’t know local customs and you have no idea how much things should cost.  Figuring that stuff out is certainly part of the fun but wouldn’t it be nice if it was just a little easier? 

On a recent trip to China I tested several phone apps that work offline to see how helpful they would be.  I was in China for 3 weeks scouting a new route for our Silk Route Bike Tour.  I travelled from Shanghai to Lanzhou by car and  though urban and rural areas alike. 



Jibbiggo : Free app, $4.99 for each language pack  in the Android Market, also availible for iPhone

Jibbigo is a lot like Google Translate except that it works offline.  The app itself is free but you have to pay for each language pack you download.   The app uses about 14 MB of space on your phone.  The Mandarin language pack I bought used 1.6 MB.  This is the one downside to offline apps, you need to have adequate storage space on your phone. 

Best Use:

Your not going to use this app to have any in depth conversations but if you need to ask for a toilet in a hurry or order at a local restaurant it will do the trick.  Over time you’ll even begin to pick up words so you can rely on the app less and less.  It even has a history function so you don’t have to type in phrases you’ve used before. 

One word of caution is to choose the words you want translated carefully.  For example when I was looking for a bathroom I typed ‘washroom’ in to the app which translated to ‘shower room’ in Mandarin.  When I entered the word ‘toilet’ however I got the right translation.



NavDroyd  $6.93 in the Android Market

NavDroyd uses Open Street Maps (OSM) to help you get around a city or country.  Like Jibbigo you first install the app and then download the maps for the countries you are interested in.   It used about 9 MB for the app itself and 56 MB for my maps of China.   

Best Use:

The most useful feature for me was the ability to attach a ‘pin’ to my location.  This allowed me to pin my hotel on the map then wander aimlessly through cites like Shanghai, Nanjing, Xian etc… without having to worry about how long it would take me to find my way home.   I’d also use it to ‘pin’ items I wanted to return to later like a restaurant that looked good or market stall where I wanted to pick something up on the way back to the hotel.   The level of detail was good enough that helped us to find a route around Lake Tai, something our paper Chinese maps could not do.   






XE Currency Exchange  Free in the Andoid Market

Perhaps not useful for everyone but on our tours we cross a lot of borders at some pretty obsure border crossings.  This often means dealing with some black market currency traders and it pays to know the official exchange rate.  XE Currency allows you to update the rates when you have a wifi connection and then stores them offline for you.



Kindle   Free in the Android Market

There are countless travel apps on the market and I’ve found many of them useful.  But rather that clutter my phone with dozens of individual travel apps I’ve begun simple using the Kindle App.  When Combined with a web service like Readability it really becomes a powerful travel tool. 

Best Use:

An easy use of the app is to download any guidebooks on the places you will be visiting and store them on your phone.  Read them on the plane and use the Kindles notes and highlights feature to save the relevant bit for later reference.  There are not a lot of guidebooks for kindle yet but there are a few. 

With the web service Readability  you can send almost any webpage to your kindle.  You’ll need the paid version of Readability ($5 a month) but it well worth it.  You can then search the web for all the relavent bits of information you’d like to have on your trip and with a few clicks of the mouse send them to your phone to be referenced later.   Brilliant.



Light Box  Free in the Android Market

Light box is currently my favorite photo app.  It works as well as the stock camera app and it has several filters that allow you to alter your photo immediately after taking it. 

Best Use:

My favorite feature is the ability to caption and geolocate each picture immediately after taking it.  After a photo is taken a text box appears, type a quick description and save the photo.  Later, when you have a wifi connection you can upload the photo to Twitter or Facebook using the previously typed caption as the text for the post.  My only gripe is that when I download the photos to my laptop the text does not become the file name, that would be a nice feature. 

So there are five of my favorites, test and approved!  I realize they are all for Android phones but that’s what I use and I hate to recommend something I haven’t tried myself.  What are your favorites?  I’d love to hear about them in the comments. 


Paul McManus designs and guides long distance bike tours for Tour d’Afrique Ltd.  His next trip will be the Silk Tour Bike Tour from Shanghai to Istanbul starting in May 2012.  Find out more at www.tourdafrique.com. 



 

For many years when taking part on one of the Tour d’Afrique bicycling expeditions I wondered why so many of the participants were so content, so enthralled by what they were doing. Of course, I understood that they were seeing some amazing places and experiencing different cultures, still the high level of satisfaction seemed counter intuitive. On the face of it, it did not make any sense. The individuals would cycle day after day often over 60 miles a day, sleep in tents, at times not even being able to take a shower, dealing with winds, heat, discomfort of all kinds, sometime there was limited types of food and yet they would come to me and thank me profusely for organizing these transcontinental expeditions. 



Recently I caught an interview on CBC Radio with a researcher Dr. Ryan T. Howell of San Francisco State University who studies what makes people happy.

Dr. Howell explained that though people continue to believe that having more money and more possessions will make them happy, 35 years of research shows that this is not the case. He thinks that perhaps this is the case, based on one fact. When people spent their money on certain life experiences as compared in buying things, this kind of spending does actually make them happy. 



In a paper he published in 2009, participants in a study indicated that ‘experiential purchases’ represented money better spent as opposed to materialistic purchases. Materialistic purchases make people happy for a very short time, whereas ‘experiential purchases’ increased the sense of well being and brought more happiness to themselves as well as to others and tend to last for a long time. Study indicated that ‘experiential purchases’ have an indirect effect on one’s happiness through two paths: increase vitality and decreased social comparison an element that is always present with materialistic expenditures.



Watching cyclists whether it is in the unrelenting deserts of the Silk Route, or the punishing climbs of the Andes, or the humidity on Lake Malawi, day to day struggles with all the elements an expedition can throw at them, and many years later receive warm greetings from many, I could safely tell Dr. Howell – your research has been authenticated in field conditions.  

"All news out of Africa is bad. It made me want to go there,” Paul Theroux once wrote.

Well, as Bob Dylan also once sang "The times they are a changing".

Check out these stories from Africa in 2011

TDA 2010 rider Tim Thomas weighs in on Canada and the climate crisis...


"Canada was clearly the bad guy during COP17. Why, because they decided early in the conference to leak their impending withdrawal from the Kyoto protocol. This news overshadowed the stale reality that the worlds' biggest emitters have never been part of Kyoto.

So where did that leave us? The conference was a success because everyone agreed to agree to continue negotiations. Oey vey!

Canada's bailout seems to highlight a deeper more important factor that is being overlooked. Canada doesnt really suck because Governments and Corporations will never compromise their clients' needs. We are their clients. So as long as we continue to demand a certain level of economic growth, coupled with the comfort of not having to endure change, our governments and the corporations of the world will never come to an agreement on how to adjust their policy and procedures for the good of the environment.

" We must remember that the real threat to democracy is not radicalism but stagnation, inertia and habit" - Wilmot James. We seem to spend our lives resisting and protecting ourselves from radicals, but fail to see that radicals prey on our fear of change. We also forget that we have comfortable and opportunistic lives because of our forefathers' willingness to change. I think the latter is true of anyone in the world who has the freedom to be able to read this.

Earlier this year I popped in an out of the Occupy Wall Street demonstration. I was proud to stand up to everything that was wrong with capitalism, until I looked down and saw a Venti Latte in my one hand and an IPhone in the other...what I hypocrite I am, I thought, as I slunk out of the demonstration.

I invite those of us who point our fingers at governments and corporations for their lack of environmental responsibility to first closely examine our own habits. The real threat to human economic growth is not those radical tree huggers, and the real threat to our environment is not actions of capitalist pigs...the real threat to both growth and our environment is our unwillingness as individuals to change.

Rather then take the approach of "Why should I change if my neighbor won't change"...rather Be the change and perhaps your neighbor will change."

All of us here at Tour d'Afrique Ltd wish you and yours a happy and safe Holiday Season!!

4 Pieces of Unconventional Travel Advice from an Unconventional Guy:

With the end of the year coming I’ve made a pre-emptive New Years resolution.  I am going to better the world.  How?  By sharing some travel wisdom accrued over the last 20 years as a traveller and as Tour Guide for Tour d'Afrique. 

It pains me to part with this wisdom, but in the end the knowledge is greater than any one person and should be shared. 

On Speaking the Language:



If you don't understand what someone is saying to you in a foreign language, just smile and nod your head as if you do understand, and reply in your own language about whatever you think they may be saying.  Never admit that you don't understand.

On Getting Lost:



If you have arrived somewhere you never planned to go simply pretend that it was always your destination and act relaxed.  Never admit that you don't know where you are.

On Eating:



If you are unsure of cultural norms while sitting to eat with locals, simply say you are not hungry and refuse to eat.  Never admit that you do not know the local customs.

On Meeting other Travelers:



If another foreigner asks you for information, pretend you are a local and that you do not understand them.  Never admit that you are a foreigner.

Some people may think there should be at least 10 tips above, and if you’re one of those people, I suggest you add your own travel tips to the list and re-post this. 

Miles