Toms Tale

Hard dirt, harsh sun. North Eastern Namibia, Zambezi Province. Our road is white dust. Flat and straight and 15k’s. The road to Kundu Kwene. Some of us will do this stretch, the 3^rd of 4, in an hour. They’ll be the front runners, but the slowest will be out there for nearly 2.  Slow-roasting. The African sun and its heat are different to the English one. Sweat disappears as it rises, which it does by the bucketload, leaving the sun cream and mosquito repellent to form a sticky seal on a weary body in need of salt and water, fast and plenty.

On our dead-flat road, some of the slowest will be the fastest. They start last and catch up the heavy brigade to lead the peloton of those who never had time to train, who just trusted to their great big hearts to get them through. That and Lee the doctor, and the strongman up front taking the steady headwind out of their equation.

There is a bond that’s developed over these 10 rides: Egypt, Cuba, Morocco, Mexico, Cambodia, India, Vietnam, Scotland in the pandemic, Argentina and now here, 4 countries in 4 days, Zambia, Botswana, Namibia and Zimbabwe.  A bond, a culture, call it what you will, but the fit help the not so, and we all get through it. I’m not sure all the lovely sponsors that have donated more than £6m since 2010 believe the pain they are paying for is real, but it so is, as the bodies sprawled in the shade of a Baobab tree at the end of a 15k section evidence.

We start in Livingstone, Zambia, a tourist town. We ignore one of the world’s great sights: Mosi-oa-Tunya, the smoke that thunders, Victoria Falls. We are saving them for the end of our great circle, so we breakfast before dawn and head out at 0700 on the trucking route to the border and Botswana. We learn on the way that the highlight of our ride, tomorrow’s 60k day (they are all 60k) through the Chobe Game Reserve has now been vetoed by whoever’s in charge there.

Our Zambian guides and ground crew explain that nothing is ever confirmed in Africa. So they’ve swapped our cycle safari highlight for a ride on the old ‘Witpad’, the border road built when all of this was a war-zone. But that’s the locals’ long past and our tomorrow. Today we are going up a ruddy great hill and on down the hard shoulder of the busiest of trucking routes to the border. It’s hot and sometimes scary and frankly a bit shit, but we gotta do what we gotta do.  It’s for the kids.   It’s our in-joke, only funny because it’s true. It gets us through.  That and dreaming of an ice-cold beer on the banks of the Zambesi at the end of the day.

The border crossing used to be a clapped out river-ferry, but now is a brand new sweep of suspension bridge, beautiful and smooth (the latter being what matters to us) and leads to a customs and irrigation hall, where the form filling and stamping, will take us 2 hours – you need an import/export licence for your bicycle you see. 4 queues for forms filled out and stamped by 4 officials. We would have got nowhere ever without Claire our tour boss, a Zambian local, and Naomi her colleague, both rattling off the lingo and talking our way through the endless bureaucracy.

That steals our morning and leave us to cycle the rest in the heat of the day, which is just stupid really, but on we go, 31 Truants plus Henk and Lucy the ride leaders and the Doc, who rides at the back of our long, bedraggled line, in front of the mechanics in the truck. They all fix the broken all the long day 1.

It ends at Chobe Safari Lodge, a 3-star with view of hippo’s and elephants and crocodiles and a pair of fish eagles fighting over a heron one has killed and the other wants. A fractious marriage. It’s a beautiful end to a hard day. It’s the right combination of pain and pleasure in a good cause.

Day 2 is the flat Namibian highway, tar then dirt, deserted except for occasional Toyota bats-out-of-hell. We do 15k. We stop to take on salt and water and shade. We regroup. Too soon for the last to arrive, we go again, 4 times a day. We cramp, we puncture, the trucks come way too close as we go rigid to hold our straight line on the tiny gnawed away hard-shoulder, as the wheels of the artic’s go by. Dogs bark and the beautiful people in their white swept clean compound-like homes, kraals we used to call them, stare at us in amazement and wave friendly greetings, or ask us to give them our bikes, which is tempting at 35° with 50k’s to go and the bus somewhere behind.

We end at a shabby fishing lodge in a stunning location, but the beer is icy and the food surprisingly good, and Paul even catches a fish. But the tents aren’t air-conditioned and the night is hot, so sleep is sweaty and scarce. And the owner is an alcoholic, the aggressive argumentative angry stereotype. We rise at 0530 and are ready to go at 0700, but he refuses to let us leave until the payment clears into his bank account. He doesn’t even get out of bed, his lovely manager has to manage our powerless rage and communicate his edicts.  Our online reviews are going to hurt him plenty. For he has wasted another hour of precious cool, before he lets us tap to pay a second time and go.

We’ll have to fight for the refund later.  For we have more borders to cross, out of Namibia and into Botswana and each of them is two stops at immigration and time wasted, African style.

But we are free and onto day 3, the job 2/3rds done, Victoria falls beckoning 60k of cycling away.  Until that is, we get to the first of 4 customs posts we have to get through to get into Zimbabwe. We queue, we amuse the immigration staff, we escape onto the next one. And then we are off and cycling the next long straight road, undulating through the scrub and bush.  This one we do with 2 AK47-toting guards. For we are in an animal corridor and there are elephant droppings along the way to make the point that we are not entirely safe. One never is in this neck of the woods truth to tell.

But nothing eats any of us, we just sweat and pedal all the way to Victoria Falls, where we gather and cycle, slowest to the front, the last four ‘immortals’ (who have done all 10 rides) at the back. Down the hill to the bridge over the gorge, from where we ogle the vast magnificence of one of the natural wonders of the world. And then pose for team photos, before snack-lunching under a vast tree by the roadside, becoming a tourist attraction in the process.

Then it’s back up the hill to the colonial splendour of our grand last night hotel, our gala dinner and a most-of-the-night session, filled with camaraderie and pride in a £500,000 job well done. The best bit of Truants’ ride is always when it’s over and we can party properly with just a day of tourism and then the flight home to come

No more begging, cramp and saddle sores for 2 years. Hallelujah.