Around Africa On My Bicycle

By Riaan Manser

In a world first, almost incredibly, Riaan Manser rode a bicycle right around the continent of Africa. It took him two years, two months and fifteen days. He rode 36 500 kilometres through 34 different countries. In Around Africa on my Bicycle, Manser tells the story of this epic journey. It is a story of blood, sweat, toil and tears. It is a story of triumph and occassional disaster. Of nights out under the stars, of searing heat and rain, of endless miles of Africa and of pressing on and never surrendering whatever the odds. Mostly however it is the story of one man's courage and determination to escape the mundane and see the continent he loves and feels so much a part of. It is a story of the human warmth he encounters, and occasionally human wrath and hostility as he crosses troubled countries and borders.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jonathan Ball
• Release date: Sep 13, 2010
• ISBN: 9781868424016

Riaan Manser

Riaan Manser was born in 1973 in Pretoria. He grew up in Zululand and attended John Ross College in Richards Bay. After studying Human Resource Management he took a job in the medical industry. He has been a lifesaver, a surfer and a rugby player. When he took his bicycle to ride around Africa it was as a commitment to do something entirely extraordinary with his life. He is now an author and motivational speaker – and is looking for his next adventure.

Book preview

Chapter 1

Sunday dread – Monday lies in wait

What must it have been like for the explorers of old to get on a ship and sail into nowhere? The thought of leaving everything you are familiar with and heading for places you know nothing about is nearly inconceivable to most people. I think that in most cases they simply relied on the boat floating and the wind blowing, and took things as they came. I kept telling myself that I was in a way more favourable position because I knew – sort of – where I was going.

It all started with a dream, and dreams are powerful things that can come true, no matter how unlikely they might seem to some people. But it was not easily brought to fruition, and between the first dreaming and the eventual return a great many things happened to tell you about. I had much to learn when I set out from Cape Town, and I learnt all of it the hard way, which is actually the only way.

Why did I do it? Well, it started with a moment of revelation in Newlands Forest outside Cape Town. My girlfriend, Vasti, and I were in the habit of taking our dogs and meeting up there on Sundays with a few close friends, then going for a long walk among the trees and streams of the picture-perfect forest. I am sure anyone seeing us would have taken us at face value, a bunch of young people enjoying themselves in blissful unconcern about the week that lay ahead. If so, it would have been a misreading of what really lay in our minds. Most people I know dread a Sunday because it means that Monday lies in wait, with five days of toil ahead before the liberation of ‘TGIF’ (Thank Goodness It’s Friday).

I was one of them then, and I was about to burst out of the safe but confining straitjacket of the five-day week; I just didn’t realise it till we stopped on the bank of a stream and slumped down to rest while the energetic dogs enjoyed a cool-down in the cold mountain water. Sitting on a large boulder, I drifted into thought while my friends chatted. Although I started by admiring the beauty of the scenery and my good luck in having such friends, quite suddenly I was surprised to find I was bluntly asking myself how happy I really was at this stage of my life. No hippy thoughts here, mind you – just whether I was having a life that I would one day be able to look back on and consider a good one. That was one unspoken and unbidden question. The other was whether I was looking forward to going to work next day.

I was dismayed to discover that I couldn’t answer ‘yes’ to either question. All I could say for sure was that I had every prospect of earning more money. I had worked for the same national primary health-care company for five years, first as an employed manager and then later as an independent consultant, selling their ‘product’ instead of managing it. The money was good and was likely to get even better. But I was not happier than I had been five years ago, just wealthier. And that is when, as I sat on that boulder with my companions’ voices echoing faintly in my ears as though they were far away, I faced up to the crunch questions. Did I want to change this feeling of empty inevitability? Yes! When did I want to do so? Soon! And that was when the decisive moment dawned.

If you make a decision now, it’s up to nobody else but yourself, I thought. You cannot lie to yourself or postpone things. If you take this decision now, Riaan, it will mean that you have to start acting NOW. Your life will have to change, NOW. Not later, NOW! All this was silent, of course, because it was going on strictly inside my head, but I could feel the movement of every cell in my body, I could feel each one of them being converted to thinking this way. I could feel that my life was about to change.

I was already on to the next question: WHAT? What was I going to do to deliver on this radical change in my life-commitment? Simple, I thought, something that my future family and I can look back to one day with huge pride. Something that will make history, that in turn will inspire others to change their lives.

But of course it wasn’t that simple. Having accepted that vision, I had to turn it into reality, into something do-able.

It would have to have something to do with travel. I had always wanted to travel, even as a child, and see exotic places. One of my childhood heroes was Indiana Jones with his whips, temples of doom and lost arks – this scary stuff had instilled a thirst for adventure in me. So next day I bought a world atlas and started studying each corner of our globe for places unventured to. I told no one about this first step on that journey of a thousand leagues that the old Chinese saying talks about: that would come when the time was ripe and I had something substantial to present. So for the moment it was strictly between myself, my new atlas and the tingling feeling that suffused my mind and body, waiting for a bush to start burning or a lightning-bolt to strike.

It took a while, because I wanted to go everywhere. But as time passed and I scratched through my atlas I realised that I kept coming back to Africa. On the face of it this was the worst possible choice, because Africa was in even more of a mess than usual. Media reports were full of things like the truly savage wars in Liberia and Sierra Leone, Jonas Savimbi’s assassination in Angola, the conflict between Ethiopia and Eritrea, the genocidal slaughter in the Great Lakes region. The war in Iraq was unfolding, with all that that implied regarding ripple-effect religious extremism in the North African Maghreb countries. Somalia had no government and seemed to be totally committed to its long process of self-destruction. The killing business was so overwhelming that poverty, famine and disease were way down on the list of calamities, even though malaria alone was wiping out more people every day than HIV/Aids. Even less highlighted were the efforts of President Thabo Mbeki to launch his brainchild, the New Partnership for African Development, or NEPAD, which he had been pushing since his days as Nelson Mandela’s deputy.

So Africa seemed to be poised for another century of degradation, death and dishonesty. And that was my first choice?

But I had come to have a very different view of that sprawling chunk of earth, and every time I thought about it I became more convinced that my adventure could only take place in Africa. The final decision came one morning as I sat at my kitchen table, my third large cup of coffee in one hand, poring over a page in my atlas which showed the contours of the continent in detail, a great stretch of orangey, desert sandy shade which was almost tangible.

I sat there, virtually staring the page into submission. I wanted to do something great for Africa and in Africa, something no other person had ever attempted. I wanted to make history. And then, as if by magic, the way forward opened up. Would it be possible to circumnavigate this continent as the old-time sailors had circumnavigated the globe, travelling through each of its coastal countries till, eventually, I was back where I had started? In principle, yes.

Then the next question: how would I do it? By boat, or on foot? Well, neither. Sailing was old news, walking would take too long.

And then: OK, I’ll go by bicycle!

I took a couple more sips of coffee. They tasted odd, and I realised that I wasn’t thirsty any more, or even hungry. At the same time I was thrumming with sudden energy. Things had to start happening – right away! I called my work colleague, Bernard, and told him I would be very late that day. He said OK, completely ignorant of the pot of adrenalin bubbling away at the other end of the line.

The first thing to be dealt with did not involve dramatic physical action: I had to satisfy myself as to whether anyone else had circumnavigated Africa on land as I intended to do. This entailed spending days on the Internet, riding the Google search engine till it was swaybacked – if someone had pipped me at the post I would surely find a reference to it somewhere!

To my joy and indubitably selfish relief I found nothing. There were accounts of cycling the well-beaten Cape-to-Cairo route and many references to a venturesome girl who had walked from Cape Town to Tunisia. But it looked as if I had a clear run for my world-first essay into the unknown.

It might be hard to believe – and later many of those who heard my story were frankly incredulous – but it never occurred to me to check all 33 countries in detail to see if they were passable by road (in fact they weren’t, as I subsequently discovered, to my cost). But even if I had known that right away it would have made no difference. For better or worse, my main character traits are tenacity and optimism. I take no credit for this – it simply happens to be the way I am hard-wired (which is just as well, because anybody who tackles Africa on a bicycle needs both these qualities in abundance).

Plotting the route would just provide a guideline. Essentially the 36 000 km trip, as I saw it, would take me from one large coastal village or town to the next, through each of the countries touching the sea. The first major segment of the journey would end with the left turn into Nigeria, the second at Africa’s westernmost point, Dakar. I expected the western side of Africa was going to be the most daunting because of the wars and language and road problems, and I wanted to get them out of the way while my spirits were still high … and while the bicycle was still new and in good shape. Once I had emerged from the 21 countries of western Africa and arrived at Tunis, the northernmost point, I would head eastwards along the northern shoreline of the continent till I got to Egypt, and – my motivating vision from day one – the pyramids at Cairo! The Horn of Africa would mark the fifth segment, arriving at the South African border the sixth, and home to Cape Town the seventh. With a decent estimate of distance I could work out roughly how long the journey would take me. My original guesstimate was about a year, and I grandly christened my scheme the Africa365 Project.

It was soon to become clear that this estimate had been very, very ambitious ... but that was exactly what the project needed: unlimited ambition. Though this realisation should have come as a dash of cold water I was getting more excited about the whole thing with every passing moment.

When I plunged into the nitty-gritty of the project I found that I would need every scrap of self-generated excitement. There were three main problem areas: visas, money and sponsors.

The mere thought of applying to almost three dozen different countries for transit visas came close to extinguishing my enthusiasm. Some of them did not even have representatives in South Africa, and I was pretty sure that even those which did have would not necessarily greet my approaches with outstretched arms.

I turned out to be dead right about that. I made innumerable and seemingly endless telephone calls to what felt like – and probably was – more than half of the African diplomatic corps in South Africa, explaining my grand idea, then followed up each call with faxes, deliveries and e-mails. I had never in my life regurgitated one story so frequently and so fervently.

The response was a deafening silence from one and all. So I followed up on each application individually. This elicited various responses, but still with zero results. Some embassies simply told me that my application had been refused. Others said that I would have to have proof of official business which had been sanctioned by the South African government. The most favoured grounds for rejection, however, were that the application was incomplete because I had not given specific dates for my entry and departure. In the end I had to face the facts: I had wasted one whole month of my life. No one had understood what I wanted to do and so no one had been listening to me. After all those endless telephone calls I was now addicted to throat lozenges without having one visa to show for it.

In my chagrin I could imagine my quest becoming a topic of conversation at embassy parties: ‘Did you hear about that white boy who wants to cycle around the continent? Ha ha ha ha … Let’s have another drink on that! Ha ha ha ha! Cheers!’

Right. Lesson number one had been learnt. I had more chance of scooping all the water out of the Atlantic with a teaspoon than of getting visas through the official channels. So I decided on a simpler but more drastic approach. I would simply head northwards. Getting into Namibia would not be a problem, because South African citizens are issued visas at the border. So I would cross over, and when I reached Windhoek I would see about getting further visas along the route.

This sorry episode provided a graphic illustration of the difficulty I was going to have convincing anyone besides myself that the journey was possible.

Then there was the question of money. There were two components to my financial calculations. The first was travelling expenses, including expenditure on visas, accommodation, repairs to my equipment and so on. The second was the cost of the bicycle and various bits of camping and other equipment.

A daily budget of US$15 for food and accommodation seemed reasonable considering my intention was to sleep in a tent as often as possible. This came to $5 500 for the 365 days (I was still working on my original time-line at this stage). Visas per country were budgeted at an average of $150 each, which included possible contingency expenses for such things as accommodation and food in case of any issuing delays. In total this would cost about another $5 000 for the 33 countries through which I would pass.

I also had to make provision for keeping the home fires burning while I was away in the wilds. Vasti would move into my house and make sure my futon, photo albums, cat and two dogs were all there when I returned, but there were insurance policies, personal accounts and staff to be paid regularly while I was abroad, all of which would come to roughly $1 600 per month, or about $19 000 for the year. When I had finished making my sums the grand total of my estimated expenditure came to $31 500; at the exchange rate of that time this equalled about R236 000. Needless to say, this did not take into account the considerable loss of income for the year I would be away and the year leading up to my departure.

As far as I could determine, my personal savings would see me through to the end, or at least to near the end. But the decision to use them for the trip was a painful one. I had been putting money away for my own piece of land, the foundation of a good marriage and a secure family environment. I had set my heart on a lovely piece of mountainside in Gordon’s Bay. It had vast views of False Bay, with the towns of Fish Hoek and Muizenberg visible on the far side on clear days; Table Mountain in winter was an awesome partner to the setting sun in the magical ritual of every day’s end.

I had lived with this dream for so long that in my head I carried around detailed mental blueprints for a small cottage of logs and rocks, with an outside deck for good weather and a fireplace for the cold times of the year. But the blueprints had been drawn by my mental pen before the idea of the great adventure had come into my life. Now they would have to be filed away for the time being.

I also knew that there were likely to be a number of slips betwixt cup and lip, so contingency plans were going to be the order of the day, especially when it came to money. Given the number and variety of possible contingencies, I decided the only reasonable approach was to get a considerable way with what I had, by which time it would not take much to persuade one or other company to assist me for the remainder of the journey. People would be more impressed with physical results than mere verbal commitment and expressed intentions. I sincerely believed that, and I was right … partly.

I calculated that I needed about $1 500 for the bicycle and camping equipment, plus another $500 for probable bicycle repair costs. My tactic here was to approach various sports and outdoors equipment companies for sponsorships; I was convinced that these companies would be keen to supply the necessary – after all, if I completed my trip and made it back in one piece they would have been part of a historic event and would have proof of just how good their equipment was. Considering my modest needs it was not a bad deal, I thought.

Wrong again. For example, about six months before my planned departure date I contacted a Johannesburg-based bicycle company; they seemed interested, and I flew up there at my own expense to see them. My request was nothing earth-shaking – all I wanted was one of their standard bicycles (if that was what they wanted to advertise) and all the spares I would require en route – and they confirmed that they were definitely interested, promising to get back to me before the end of the month.

Well, three months later I was in Johannesburg again, this time to see people from the Palm company, and while I was there I followed up on the bicycle people. They were still adamant that they wanted to be involved, but I needed a clear commitment, so I asked them when I could collect the bike and accessories. They said they would let me know within a week. Almost three years later I am still awaiting their call (perhaps they believe in the scriptural injunction about a day being as a thousand years).

Two months before my planned departure I gave them up as a bad job and went out to see if I could get a suitable bike locally, even if it meant buying one – which I was hesitant about doing, because although I had some spare cash, things were tight and getting tighter. Soon I found myself in the offices of a Cape Town-based bicycle supplier, literally begging the guy in charge for help and explaining how a $150 investment on his part would result in worthwhile returns, since people would know that his product was the only bicycle in the world to have conquered Africa.

It worked, after a fashion. I eventually paid $400 (R2 800) for a bike with computer and helmet that would usually retail for double that amount. Although I would have appreciated more, I was highly relieved and grateful, yet also slightly humiliated. I had prostrated myself in the dust for a couple of thousand rands. Somehow it didn’t feel worth it. I could see so clearly what I was putting into this, what I was risking and what the opportunities were. But other people couldn’t. Like beauty, opportunity is also in the eye of the beholder.

I got good vibes, though, from a company called Trappers Trading, whose people were keen to help me with the camping and survival kit I would need. I walked out of there with a treasure trove, all supplied at no cost and without hesitation: a two-man tent, sleeping mat, sleeping bag, paraffin stove, aluminium paraffin canister, Leatherman WAVE survival knife, carbon fire-lighting stick, 45-litre backpack, headlight, waterproof torch, three pairs of thick woollen socks, two pairs of tough adventure trousers (the ones with the removable legs), balaclava, medical kit and 200 water-purifying tablets. I almost laid in a fancy catapult as well, in case I had to shoot myself some dinner along the way.

All this sounds like a lot of kit, and it certainly amounted to quite a weight for one who wanted – and needed – to travel light. But not one item was a luxury. I expected I would have to really rough it; I would enjoy luxuries on the road if and when they presented themselves. Past experience had taught me that the smallest thing could lift my spirits when the going got tough, and I knew it would be the same this time. Besides, I was the guy who hoped to do 36 000 km on a bicycle, so the lighter the better.

One area in which I did not stint myself was medical supplies. I needed as comprehensive a first-aid kit as I could organise, and would also have to make provision for hospital care in case this became necessary – which meant money and communications.

For the health maintenance and repair side I consulted the experts at the Travel Clinic in Cape Town. For a start they recommended that I get re-inoculated for everything from hepatitis to polio, very sound advice in an area where the continent-wide collapse of health services has given the old pestilences a new lease of life, so that Capetonians embarking on nothing more adventurous than a weekend in the Kruger National Park now routinely take anti-malaria precautions after decades of free to-and-fro movement. They then stocked me up almost to paramedic level with everything I would conceivably need. This included prophylactic tablets for malaria, to be taken weekly (these tablets are notorious for side-effects such as nightmares, headaches and other flu-type symptoms, but the alternative was far worse, so I didn’t complain).

By the time they were done my now-bulging medical kit contained waterproof sticking plasters (singles and rolls); one-inch and two-inch bandages; gauze squares; Steri-Strip; pre-packed wound dressings (good for burns); elasticised tube gauze; vials of Mercurochrome; antiseptic; Betadine gel; plenty of gloves; alcohol swabs; syringes; needles; a drip needle; a suture kit; scissors; tweezers; a CPR mouth valve; Persivate lotion; ophthalmic lotion; re-hydrating powder; aspirin and paracetamol; Diclofenac; Co-Trimoxazole; Metoclopramide; Metronidazole; Hyoscine Butylbromide; Chlorpheniramine; penicillin; an aggressive antibiotic; a five-day immediate anti-malarial treatment course; five malaria test kits; glucose lozenges; and a space blanket. They even gave me a laminated card inscribed with personal details such as my blood type.

Now for the money and communication aspect. In a health scenario which needed more than my well-stocked medical kit my chances of survival would obviously be enhanced by speedy hospital treatment, but I reckoned that without some serious cash in reserve for just such an eventuality I would have little chance of even getting so much as a pat on the back. So I put aside $1 000 to leave at home as an emergency medical reserve, and set about acquiring a satellite telephone for use primarily in times of absolute emergency (which naturally, as any idiot would realise, would also include calls to my Vasti).

Actually acquiring the satphone turned into another forlorn-hope mission. I sent out the usual begging letters, in which I explained as clearly as possible what I planned to do, and Telkom evinced signs of interest. I dug into my ever-shallower pocket and flew to Johannesburg to see the responsible person, which I reckoned would also be proof of my commitment. It was rather fun checking out the different satphone types and even testing them; I had a mental image of myself in a dense jungle, down on one knee, trying to make contact in true ‘Shipwrecked’ or ‘Survivor’ style.

But once again things fizzled out, with promises which turned out to be as empty as I anticipated my pocket would soon be. Sorry, Riaan, I told myself, you’re going to have to rely on the old trusty street map for direction and the local radio stations for chitchat. I was also beginning to accept that I could not take everything I wanted with me. Space and weight were the obvious limiting factors, but I realised now that the personal safety aspect had to be considered as well. The more I had to show off to the baddies, the more popular I – or rather my possessions – would be with them. Considering the numerous pockets of lawlessness I would be traversing, I might well end up losing more than just my goodies.

I had another stroke of good fortune. Ideally I should have had a support team, with one crew back home and one following me along the route. That was out of the question, but a good friend of mine named Mark – who, incidentally, is a stand-up comedian, which some people might say is an apt profession for someone mixed up in as crazy an enterprise as this one – introduced me to a small but energetic IT and marketing company. Initially the company wanted simply to host the trip’s website, but after some subsequent meetings approached me about managing the entire project from start to finish. This was a wonderful offer, because it would relieve me of one of my major burdens.

Probably the most difficult part of the preparation was breaking the news to Vasti. It had been easy enough to explain to her the adventure concept and my interest in it, but the task of conveying the actual level of commitment I had made required a daunting amount of cold guts.

The first time I mentioned the journey to her she nodded and frowned simultaneously, then muttered: ‘That sounds interesting,’ before changing the subject to a considerably more immediate matter; I remember that moment very vividly because it took place at the same spot in the Newlands Forest where I had originally decided that the circumnavigation of Africa was going to be my goal.

Telling her the full story required much more effort. Disappointing or upsetting her was the last thing I wanted. To me, the not-soperfect boyfriend, she was everything I could rely on. Everything I cared for and considered secure was essentially centred on her. The fact that she was extremely beautiful and sexy had some relevance, of course, but it went far beyond that.

Without the luxury of a traditional family support base, I relied on my friends to fill the gap. I knew that while they might be worried about the dangers involved they would generally be extremely positive, among other things because the trip would make me more interesting. But Vasti was a different matter. She was my life, but what I planned to do was certainly not the traditional route into a successful relationship. The stakes on this wager were becoming uncomfortably high.

My trip would also mean a long separation from my two thoroughbred Boxers, Murphy and Jester, and my amazing cat, Jumangi. I reckoned they would deal relatively well with the separation as long as the meals were warm and always on time, but it was going to be tough on me. I had a very close relationship with them, because in my heart I believe that my animals have had a part in moulding me into a better man. That was why my pets had a right to sleep on my bed with me and always had at least the offer of a seat at the dinner table, and why I considered it bizarrely abnormal not to have lengthy conversations with them.

Eventually I bit the bullet and got Vasti and the pets together one evening when the mood was right, and then I let it all hang out, sparing no detail. No one was overly stressed, although I think some debate did hover around who would now sit in my seat while watching TV. Even so, I did take too much for granted, as I was to discover to my shame.

As time went by and I became more and more immersed in my preparations, I found myself mentally digging ever deeper towards the core of my motivation. Was my achievement only going to be about the physical? Was I going to achieve anything for a cause greater than my own? I didn’t want to have people to think of me only as the guy who raised money for something. I wanted to be known as an adventurer whose ability to do something good for humanity would be compounded according to his exposure and success. At the same time I think my negative side was whispering into my subconscious, reminding me that I might suffer ignominious failure. I didn’t want a big hoo-ha about one specific cause, and then to find my quest didn’t work out: better that the whole thing should be just about me and my personal quest. Perhaps I was simply making sure that I would only have to deal with the disappointment of one person – myself.

I am a firm supporter of the ‘African Renaissance’ concept and I wanted to have a link with something that promoted South Africa’s excellence and simultaneously the potential dormant in Africa’s jungles and deserts. This is why the ‘Proudly South African’ campaign was so important to me. It was promoting what all of Africa should be doing naturally. We need to promote our excellence in our own industries and in so doing cultivate loyalty to our own economy. With economic freedom and growth will come education, the key to our continent’s problems. My philosophy is simple.

A child who has a choice will not choose the wrong answer when he has been given a decent education. How do you choose when you have no alternatives? ‘Proudly South African’ reinforces the foundation of our country’s success.

What must it have been like for the explorers of old to get on a ship and sail into nowhere? The thought of leaving everything you are familiar with and heading for places you know nothing about is nearly inconceivable to most people. I think that in most cases they simply relied on the boat floating and the wind blowing, and took things as they came. I kept telling myself that I was in a way more favourable position because I knew – sort of – where I was going.

In the meantime I had to promote my journey in some way. Thanks to the guys at the IT company I would have a functioning website, but it would be more useful during my trip than before it, and so I took every opportunity for a radio or newspaper interview that would point people in the direction of the website where, I hoped, they would follow each episode as it unfolded. It was not as though I had website sponsors to please, so if I made the right moves I would have supporters who were interested in my effort for exactly what it was – a young guy with a huge dream and the enthusiasm to match.

I was convinced that one-on-one interaction was going to be the only way to draw people into my project, to get them hooked on following my travels and travails, and thus more inclined to tell others and persuade them to check out the website. I didn’t want to go to the length of setting up a roadside stall, then hailing passing cars and pedestrians. Instead I contacted the public relations people at various shopping malls and set up appointments to see them. My idea was to have a stand inside each mall, with my tent, camping gear and bicycle set out as I imagined they would be during the journey; while an assistant handed out pamphlets, I would explain what I had planned for the next year of my life.

I chose four major regions – Pretoria, Johannesburg, Durban and Cape Town – as the focus areas, hitting two or three malls in each. Trappers Trading loaned me some extra kit for the stands and local cycle stores in each region let me have the use of a bicycle or two. What really gave the stands an air of professionalism, however, was the huge banners, measuring three metres by two metres, sponsored by USS Graphics in Cape Town. Each banner consisted of a large satellite image of the continent of Africa, together with a blow-up of my ID picture and the website’s address. The best word for these banners is ‘inspirational’: for once I could stand back and actually show people what I was planning to do, and what and where I intended going with only a bicycle.

I never tired of looking at those banners, imagining where I would be and when I would return home, and each time I got the same rush of feeling that had launched me into the project in the first place. Wow! I was going to accomplish something great with my life – I was actually going to pedal my way all around the edges of this huge continent instead of just thinking about it and eating my heart out in frustration.

Eventually I had commitments from the Menlyn, Rosebank, Eastgate, Westgate and Fourway shopping malls in Gauteng, and in Durban the Pavillion, Sanlam Centre in Pinetown and Westville malls bought into my ideas. Now I was ready to hit the show-business trail.

All these preparations had been paid for out of my own pocket, and I decided to approach a few companies with a view to getting them to sponsor some of the major expenses, especially transport and accommodation. I telephoned all the major hotel groups; most said that they would get back to me after they had considered my request. Once again I found it odd that at least some of them did not leap at the chance of being associated with such an amazing project when it landed in their laps. I understood the concept that talking was one thing, and doing it was something else again, but my counter-argument was that supporting a person who has done something remarkable is much more expensive than backing someone who plans to do it.

Having said that, a shining exception was the Protea Hotel group. The group marketing manager was so taken with the originality of my project that he showed immediate enthusiasm and did not hesitate to offer me assistance. As a result I was provided with accommodation in the various cities while I was on tour. That solved the sleeping problem. The transport problem fell away when the Avis car-hire people were kind – or bold – enough to provide me with the necessary wheels.

The road shows were simultaneously exciting and daunting. I had to go and share with people face to face and publicly. My starting point was Gauteng, where I hit three malls in rapid succession. All were busy, with crowds streaming past until 10 pm at Menlyn Centre in Pretoria. Many of the people were interested in my journey and my ideas, while most would chat for a few minutes and then wish me lots of luck before leaving. Not all, though. Some people thought I was raising money and waved me away as I approached to give them a brochure. But I laughed off the occasional rude rebuff; such miserable people damaged themselves and those who had to live around them, not me. I was amazed at how they stood out like sore thumbs among the thousands who passed my stand, positively radiating negativity, and I remember thinking that I didn’t want to be like them – regardless of what they might have had in terms of material wealth, I wanted to be on the other side of the equation as a human being! I became even more convinced that there had to be more to my life than just decades of hitting the nine-to-five circuit.

The highlight of the Gauteng road show was a friendly chat I had with a very senior citizen in one of the malls. He waxed lyrical about his youth and its associated dreams and ideas, and added that in the late 1950s he and a friend had planned to do exactly what I now proposed, almost half a century later. Lucky for me that they had not gone through with it! This pleasant encounter provided me with some new food for thought about the reactions of the various age groups. Young people would come up to me and show amazement at the fact that I was willing to leave everything behind and risk my life for something that they did not consider important. Older people, on the other hand, were envious and keen to share their 40-year-old dreams with me. So you had one generation that knew what it had missed and regretted it, and another that was trying its best to find excuses to miss it.

Durban was next on the list, and here, too, things went smoothly. By this stage of the game I had wised up and recruited two assistants, each manning one table while I handled the third. Warren and Christopher did me proud. They understood what I had set out to accomplish and were determined to do their best to get my story across to every stranger they confronted, handing out pamphlets and chatting so enthusiastically to passers-by that they put me to shame.

I remember Warren’s technique. He would say: ‘See that guy? He’s going to cycle around the whole of Africa with this bicycle in one year.’ He would then pause, gauge the response to this forthright approach and wade right in with the rest of his spiel if it looked as if he had hooked a fish. The people loved him – but, more importantly, they wanted to know how they could follow me on the journey.

Only the Cape Town leg was a disappointment. I could not get exact dates from the shopping malls, and by this time my departure was a week away, which meant I had to focus my attentions on more important things. So in my home city not one banner or one tent was put up in honour of my upcoming adventure.

By this time my mind was racing 24 hours a day as I grew more and more tense, an astronaut counting down to launch date. I found myself trying to analyse my feelings and isolate the main ingredients.

Fear? Well, yes and no. I knew I was planning to go through some undeniably lethal parts of Africa, and only a fool is fearless. I didn’t know how brave I was, but I was willing to face the unknown dangers that lay ahead.

Dread at the inevitability of my departure? That wasn’t it either. I knew that at 6 am on Tuesday, 9 September 2003, I would be cycling out of the Waterfront in Cape Town and heading up the west coast of Africa. I would have a good bicycle to ride, I was strong and healthy, I had some money, I had a tent to sleep in and food to eat, I had people who cared for me. Most of all, I would be setting out on an adventure for which I had been preparing for a long time and which was very important to me.

I concluded that ‘anxious’ would be the best description of what I was feeling. I was impatient to get going; every remaining day at home was another delay before I got back, having made my little bit of history. More planning, more thinking, more preparation would not improve my chances of achieving my goal; what I didn’t know by now I would surely learn along the way.

My closest friends arranged a farewell dinner for me on the Saturday night before my departure, a small but festive affair which gave each of them a final opportunity to confirm whether I knew what I was doing. It felt rather odd, sitting there at the dinner table, constantly reminding myself that this dinner was being held for a guy who was planning to circumnavigate the most dangerous continent on earth on a bicycle … me.

My friends said a few good things to me. None went as far as saying what at least some of them thought, and might never have had the opportunity of saying again. Instead there was concern mingled with admiration. More than one said something like: ‘If anyone on this earth is going to complete something like this, it will be you’ – my good friend Shane (marketing genius Warren’s brother) actually said while toasting me that he would not worry too much because he definitely expected me back, and advised the others to do the same – and I knew he was sincere in what he said.

At the end of the day, the fact is that you need the support of friends and family if you plan to achieve anything of real significance in your life. At times we all do things that sound or look odd to some people. I suspected that some of those around the table didn’t quite agree with the Africa365 project, but because of their friendship with me they had put their doubts aside and come out in full support.

As we went home that evening I thought: four more sleeps and I’m gone. I was filled with a mixture of exhilaration and disbelief.

Vasti was at law school at that stage, attending half-day classes at the University of Cape Town, and thanks to minimum attendance requirements she could only take off the Monday, the day before my departure. We spent a truly awesome couple of days, compounded of sadness and joy and excitement … and last-minute preparation scrambles when she discovered that in the general rush I had neglected to finalise a few small but important things. These included buying my pannier bags, fetching my trail clothing from First Ascent, testing out the bicycle with its full load and, most importantly of all, giving her signing powers on my bank account. Then we found some other small things I had not got around to doing. As any good South African would say: Sjoe!

We did some quick prioritising and put aside acquisition of the less important items, which Vasti would bring with her when she and some of my friends met me along the way on my birthday, a few days away. Then we concentrated on the things that I was going to need from the word go.

At Vasti’s suggestion I baptised the tent by erecting it in the garden, after which we occupied it during a night of pouring rain and howling winds. Part of Vasti’s precious free Monday was spent on going to Cape Town and buying a set of panniers and matching side carry-bags. They looked a bit fragile and were very expensive; since my juices were really flowing by now, I decided to tell the shop-owner what I was about to do and see if I could wheedle a discount out of him. He found my story interesting but not the question of a discount. Oh, well, win a few, lose a few.

I still had to find a carry-bag for the top of the pannier that could also double as a day bag, and we set out on this task as soon as we had been to the bank to sort out the various financial issues. We trekked all around Cape Town but failed to find anything that even remotely resembled what we wanted. We were getting pretty desperate by the time we landed up at the V & A Waterfront and found a shop with a bag that was ideal size-wise but just the reverse money-wise. I consulted the shop-owner about the possibility of getting a sponsor for the bag. This didn’t work, but he got a good laugh out of the situation. Later I realised why: here was someone who planned to cycle 36 000 km around an entire continent, and less than 12 hours before his departure was still short of a crucially important item.

We returned home to find our neighbours milling about in front of our house, apparently bent on a sort of early send-off. They were very supportive and the males among them were quite proud of me. One of them, Robin, a veteran of the Rhodesian bush war, proved to be a source of much practical advice; one piece that particularly struck me was that I give underpants the skip – they served no real purpose, he said, and ventilation would be hugely improved. Robin’s wife, Hazel, went one better by promising to look after Vasti in my absence, which I really appreciated.

With this farewell out of the way, we visited some other friends who lived close by, my friend Mark’s mother, Gwen, and his father, Gary. This was a very practical goodbye visit because it involved all sorts of last-minute preparations. Gwen patiently hand-sewed my sponsors’ logos on to my shirts while Gary and I were trying to find a way of mounting the rear panniers, since my bicycle did not have mountings for the pannier rack. This meant we had to be creative – and when you eventually manage to pull a lot of things together using only cable ties, that’s being creative. Time and distance would tell how well our essay into unconventional creativity would last, but we reckoned it was sufficient unto the day.

To my discredit I had not taken full cognisance of the strain the project had placed on my relationship with Vasti. She had been hugely positive in every respect since I had broken the news to her nearly a year earlier, and had never expressed any doubts or demurrals. But I should have been aware that inevitably tensions would build up that would need to be dissipated. In my selfish preoccupation I had done nothing in this regard, and that final night the storm broke. She started to cry in the middle of a discussion relating to some packing problem, catching me totally by surprise. Was I doing all this just as a stratagem to get away from her and break up our relationship? Feeling both guilty and relieved, I explained slowly and with every atom of sincerity in me that this was not the case, that I was doing it for totally the opposite reason, that she was in my future for keeps, and that the trip was actually part of reaching that future. After a while we were back on the same wave-length, but it saddened me immensely to realise how humans can misunderstand one another, even those who share their lives.

A fair amount of the blame lay at my door. I am always full of ideas of one kind or another, some a bit crazy and others not, and it turned out that when I had first told her of my decision she had gone along with it, believing that it would be played with for a while and then forgotten, like so many other schemes – bright or otherwise – that I was always coming up with. It was only considerably later that she realised I had not been fooling that day in Newlands Forest.

Laughingly she reminded me of another bright (maybe) idea of mine which had gone nowhere. At the time we had known one another for only a few weeks. We were travelling back to her house in Stellenbosch one midwinter’s day when I decided to air my latest idea. It was extremely cold and most people had wood fires going in their houses to keep warm, often going through several bags of firewood a day. Now, you could see people alongside the roads all day long, either buying or selling wood, so there was definitely a market for my idea, which was to get together a number of clients to whom I would regularly deliver enough firewood for their needs.

Vasti’s car was old and fairly noisy, but I explained this whole scheme in some detail. She listened very carefully and smiled periodically, although I could see a rather strange look on her face, and, when I asked her what she thought of it, she replied that she thought it would definitely work. That was good enough for me, although I was still puzzled about those strange looks.

I didn’t find out till a couple of months later, by which time the firewood scheme had been pushed into obscurity by something more interesting, that due to the car noise Vasti had understood me to be talking about fireworks, rather than firewood. She could not have been blamed for considering me completely psycho, with my plan to go from house to house and convince people to buy a certain number of bags of fireworks each month. What made it worse was that in elaborating on the basic concept I had pointed out that winter would be better for business as people could use my product to warm up their houses, and that I personally knew people who used five to six bags in just one night. We could get advertising slogans on the bags to subsidise costs, I happily burbled on – Blitz Fire Lighters might be interested – and with any sort of luck my scheme would soon spread from the Cape right across the country.

Well, could I be surprised at her apparent readiness to believe that I really meant to cycle all around Africa?

What was definitely a bit psycho was that the bike was only properly packed and loaded on that very last night. But that’s how it was, and my one and only test run consisted of cycling a few kilometres around the neighbourhood at two o’clock in the morning, about five hours before my departure. Everything worked all right, but for the record, this is not the way to set off on a circumnavigation of Africa or anywhere else.

But there it was. We left the bike groaning under the weight of its load – a weight which would soon be increased by myself – and crawled off to bed for a couple of hours’ exhausted sleep. Tomorrow and destiny awaited.

Chapter 2

I'm off … up the Cape West Coast!

I was beginning to accumulate a detailed record of my journey, writing a daily report on my Palm handheld computer. No scribbling with a leaky pen or blunt pencil for me! All I had to do was flip open my full-sized keyboard, clip the handheld into it and start typing away – easy as falling off a log. So it was no sweat to note down every day’s adventures and mishaps, descriptions of people, the smells of places, the taste of the food I ate ...

We woke up exhausted after two and a half hours’ sleep and packed my gear into the car in pitch darkness, because we had to be at the V&A Waterfront in Cape Town, a 45-minute drive, by 6 am. This took some doing, since the car was not large and my overloaded bicycle distinctly bulky. Around us our neighbours still slept, but the guinea-fowl were starting to chatter in the trees above and the dogs were excitedly sniffing everything that was going into the car, no doubt convinced that we and they were going somewhere.

Saying goodbye to Murphy, Jester and Jumangi was a very hard part of my departure. I would miss them dreadfully and the worst was that I would not be able to tell them that I was coming back. I would just disappear from their lives, leaving a gaping void that was beyond their understanding. And if worst came to worst they and I might never be reunited – the thought kept intruding, no matter how hard I tried to block it off.

Trying to put the pain of parting behind me, I climbed into my brand-new trail clothes and gelled my hair for the last time, and then with a final greeting to my pets jumped into the car. I did not look back at them as we left, as I normally would have done, but I made them a silent promise: I’ll be back. Vasti and I knew that we would meet again on my birthday in five days’ time, and we kept falling back on that whenever the conversation veered over to how much we would miss each other.

Of the trip through the darkened streets of Cape Town I recall only a vague maelstrom of a million thoughts. The dense mist was rising gently off the ground and the sea as we arrived at my jump-ing-off point, the clock tower at the V&A Waterfront, near the new Nelson Mandela Gateway, which was where my journey would end as well. I committed the scene to memory, because for many months to come it would be my lodestone. There I greeted my friends as they emerged from the mist, among them Colin and his cameraman, who were going to follow and capture the start of my journey on film.

Colin was enthusiastic in spite of the ungodly hour, and this helped to put me at ease. After so many months of ever-increasing responsibility, it felt good to be able to shrug off part of the burden and just focus on myself and the fact of my trip. I felt immensely grateful to him and all the others for coming to show me their support. I wanted to tell them all this, let them know that I considered them part of the entire historic journey, but I don’t think I succeeded: I just could not express my feelings adequately.

Colin interviewed me for a few minutes on-camera while we waited for some late arrivals. Among them should have been the CEO of Proudly South African and an SABC-TV crew, but it seemed that the allure of a warm bed and duvet had held them hostage. Once upon a time their non-appearance would have left me with a feeling of deep disappointment, but now I felt none of that. In the past year my values had altered so much that I was more than content to have with me the people who really mattered in my life.

The interview over, it was finally time to go. I checked, re-checked and re-adjusted every buckle and cable, lifting the bicycle a few times to confirm the weight I was planning to carry for 36 000 km.

It felt very, very heavy; it was almost impossible to lift it with one arm, and a committed dead-lift stance was needed to get the rear wheel an inch off the ground. This didn’t concern me too much. My operating philosophy was ‘each kilometre, each day’, namely, doing what was necessary to see me through each leg of the journey. As long as the bike was moving in the right direction, whether speedily or slowly, I would be on the way to successfully completing the trip. To this end I had decided that when I finally started pedalling I would not stop till I had left the city, no matter the temptation: the first 5 km had to set the tone for me mentally.

I finished hugging and shaking hands twice over with all present, then tied on my helmet, a strange feeling of unreality gripping me. Was I really here, straddling my bike on the threshold of a trip around Africa? Yes, I told myself, you are. This is the great challenge, and without challenge there can be no achievement. There is no turning back now. I took a final mental snapshot of Vasti and my loyal friends standing next to the clock tower in the cold dawn light, with Table Mountain peering down on us through a veil of low-lying cloud. Then I stood on the pedals, nudged the handlebars to put me into a slow 90-degree turn and set off, followed by Colin and his cameraman on their motorbike. Soon the others were out of sight, and I forced my mind into strictly functional mode.

My most immediate task was to get my mental attitude right. I wanted my mind to be prepared for any possibility, because what I feared most was mental vulnerability. Most tangible things can easily be repaired and most problems solved, but any battle is lost or won in the mind. So I gave myself a short, sharp, very intense pep talk. The time for theorising was past. This was the real thing. The journey had begun, and I was going to plug through to the end, no excuses permitted!

Later on many people asked me if I could remember the specific moment when I realised what I had got myself into – presumably early on in the trip. But it didn’t happen that way. At no time did I ever tell myself ‘this is it’ and really understand for the first time what that meant. It was always real to me; the dividing line was between my visualisation of what lay ahead and the moment when visualisation was no longer necessary, because I had actually set off, and nothing lay ahead except the moment when I would cross the ‘finish line’.

During the first 30 km out of Cape Town I attracted plenty of friendly attention from motorists heading to their work as I slogged along with Colin and his cameramen alongside. The commuters hooted and waved as they passed us. I doubt if most of them knew who I was or where I was going; mostly, I think, they just knew that here was a bloke setting off for some obviously distant destination, and somehow it lifted their hearts as they headed in for another eight hours of the same old routine.

I fed off their enthusiasm, using it to create and reinforce permanent positive thoughts for use along the way when I hit rough spots, for when I would feel downhearted, for when there would be no smiling faces, no cold water and no warm food. And, probably most powerful of all, was the mental image of myself returning one whole year later, with throngs of people waving and smiling as I rolled proudly up to the very spot from which I had started. These fabricated pictures warmed and motivated me more than anything I could tell myself; the vigour with which I looked forward to the finish was so strong that sometimes I would actually speed up for a few kilometres without realising it.

My game-plan for the first few days was to get a feel of what energy I could exert continuously over a particular space of time – not hours per day, therefore, but rather the number of days in the week.

Having parted company with Colin, I made it to Malmesbury on that first day and turned in for the night at a bed-and-breakfast, exhausted and a little anxious, my last thought