Introduction

Welcome to this introduction of my blog, about me (and some other crazy people that I have not yet met) attempting to cycle the Tour d'Afrique 2019, starting on January 17th in Cairo - Egypt - and ending on May 12th in Cape Town - South Africa.

20/01/13 Tour d'Afrique 2019 Film

So last year around this time I just woke up after my first night in Cairo, ready to start on an insane adventure. I had not yet met the people that I now call friends and I had no clue on how I would cope with the hardship ahead. It's hard to believe that a year has gone by since that day and that this adventure is now behind me, but intrinsically also part of me.

I'm very happy that I kept this blog as a day to day account of this tour, and besides that I am now happy to say that TDA global cycling has also released an 8 part film (25 minutes in total) of our trip, shot by the tour's dedicated filmographer Laundon Peacock.

19/05/17, The Last Day

So unfortunately I’ve spent all of yesterday in bed, not feeling to well. At some point I tried cleaning and disassembling my bike, but I got light in the head and crawled back into bed. On top of that my legs hurt like hell from that stupid climb down the mountain :-) Note to self: just take it easy man.... Such a shame to spend a day in bed while being in Cape Town though. I would have loved to visit Robben Island or the district 6 museum. However things are the way they are. Can’t change anything about that... This morning I felt a lot better though. My final day of this trip! Where has time gone!

19/05/15, Climbing Table Mountain

So riding my bike down to the Cape of Good Hope was one of the things I really wanted to do during my stay in Cape Town. The other thing was hiking up Table Mountain, Cape Town’s most prominent landmark and some 1085 meters high. So climbing up there was my aim for today! However when I made it to breakfast the top of the mountain was covered in clouds. I had a nice easy breakfast with Loraine and Lisa and hoped that the clouds would disappear, but at 930 they still hadn’t, so I figured I would just go downtown instead.

So I went back to my room, fumbled around a bit and once I came downstairs again most clouds had disappeared :-) So I changed my plans back to my original plans and took an uber to the Botanical Garden, from which I would follow the Skeleton Gorge up towards the top of the mountain! Google said it would take me 5 to 6 hours to summit along this route so I was not sure what to expect.