Loading a Touring Bike Loading a Touring Bike – during my travels I have met lots of people, comments or questions I hear repeatedly is “How do you fit all that stuff on your bike?” or “You have everything you need in those bags?”. The wonderful thing about touring on a bicycle for an extended…
Arriving back in Mzuzu the air feels cooler, coming back up over 1,000 feet in elevation the temperature difference is very noticeable and welcome. The lower altitude temperature by the lake being much higher, but then there is a lake to jump into if you get too hot. Before travelling to Nkhata Bay and Mayoka…
Malawi and the Lake The Sahara difficult? No it was easy, much easier than I thought it would be. Now parts of Tanzania, er yes parts of Tanzania have been hard. Hot, dry, arid and in some places windy, mostly blowing from the wrong direction oh and hilly. Whilst food and water stops are easy…
My first week in East Africa now completed, and I found circumnavigating Mt. Kenya quite an experience, crossing the equator twice, once back into the Northern Hamisphere on the east side of the mountain and back into the Southern hemisphere on the west side. For most of the route, the mountain is obstructed from view…
Two countries I didn’t envisage seeing when I set out from the UK was Mali and Burkina Faso. Like nearly every other cycle tourist in West Africa, I was going to follow the coastal route through many of the smaller West African countries. Guinea Conakry, Sierria Leone, Liberia, Ivory Coast etc. Ebola and its repercussions…
After riding through most of The Gambia, I thought there wouldn’t be that much more to see in this small country. I continue to be drip fed surprises and new things as the travel continues. It’s always a highlight to see animals in the wild not seen before, like a troop of baboons, a mongoose…
After a lovely week resting at 7 Palava, it was time to get going again. Another cyclist from Belgium Wouter arrived a couple of days before and he was planning on heading further into Africa. Wouter had been in contact for a while after being told by a Moroccan Gendarmerie checkpoint that there were cyclists…
If I were to be asked to sum up Mauritania in five words from my experience up to Nouakchott they would have been: 1. Desert 2. City 3. Iron Ore 4. Railway Line 5. Sand The country is mainly desert. After receiving my Senegalese visa I was able to leave Nouakchott and continue on the…
The Youth Hostel Cloud 9 I stayed in (yes I know I’m not a youth, oldies are allowed as well!) was great. It was my first stay in such a place and I was pleasantly surprised at how good it was. Cloud 9 is situated right in the heart of the Medina, near to everything…
The workaway week in Rabat with Ana and Salah at their school near the Barakas in Rabat was an experience I never thought I’d have in a million years. Only a couple of months ago living in the UK with a comfortable job and taking lots of things that we in the UK take for…
Ive arrived in Morocco, exciting, a new country and a continent I have never been to before, Africa. Its a lot different to Europe. Arriving and entry was easy, buy ferry ticket, pre-register entry to Morocco on the ferry, clear immigration and cycle into Morocco. It was quite an eventful day, I woke up and…
14th June, my Birthday. Woke up on the beach at Calarbardina the night after Spain got beaten in their world cup opening game. Renas gave me a birthday present, one of his cotton shirts that he’d not worn much with long sleeves. I had no shirts with long sleeves to protect my arms from the…
Normally, I don’t do hot weather, however throwing myself into a warmer climate and adding on top cycling, I’m surprising myself at how well I am coping with the heat. Since meeting Norman and Renas, the schedule I was working to seems to have gone out the window a little. I was planning on doing…
This weekend I decided to go wild camping (or at least for one night with the option of staying at a Camp site one night). I’ve been camping loads of times or at least fishing overnight and I’ve been a fisherman or should I say fisherboy to start with since I was 6 and my…